Comments on: mary’zine random redux: #4 May 2000 http://editorite.com/2009/03/14/mary%e2%80%99zine-random-redux-4-may-2000/ It all started when I deluded myself into thinking my opinions mattered--Dilbert Mon, 12 Mar 2012 16:44:19 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ By: editorite http://editorite.com/2009/03/14/mary%e2%80%99zine-random-redux-4-may-2000/#comment-10 Sat, 14 Mar 2009 20:42:37 +0000 http://editorite.wordpress.com/?p=5#comment-10 I’ve received a couple of e-mails about this issue of the mary’zine (May 2000) that raise interesting questions. So here’s a tricky way of keeping the commenters’ anonymity while still addressing their comments for the sake of a broader audience.

Commenter #1 asks if my “spiritual experience” in the hospital could have been caused by the drugs I was being given.

Me: You may be right. The reason I suspect it went deeper than that is that I’ve had many such drug experiences and felt nothing of the kind. I think part of it is that I was primed, in those days, for seeing everything as terribly significant in the “spiritual” sense. I’m not sure about that anymore. Instead of labeling it “spiritual,” my epiphany about the parsley could just as easily be attributed to my awe at the vast confluence of human effort that created hospitals and people willing to work in them. A cynic could see this as just “human nature” doing its practical, necessary things. So what it all comes down to, I think, is one’s perspective… i.e., everything objective in my story (parsley, birds, etc.) could be interpreted in lots of different ways, or not interpreted/noticed at all.

Commenter #2 wonders “how all that (nicely expressed) spirituality sits with the recent discussions we’ve had about God and all his forms being dead?”

Me: This is harder to answer. It’s true that I feel a deep resistance to even hearing the word “spiritual” these days. I don’t know what it means anymore–well, it means whatever the purveyor of the term wants it to mean–and I’m afraid that what I was meaning by it, back then, was a kind of self-aggrandizing sentimentality, a compensation for being a tiny speck in this great big world of ours. I was always saying, “The universe wants me to do this… or that…,” and everything that happened (that I liked) was not coincidence but synchronicity, that is, proof of some greater force that was snapping my life together like a giant jigsaw puzzle. I guess what I think now is that I DON’T KNOW, and I’m fine with that. I love the Mystery of painting; why not treat my life the same way?

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