Coffee Shop Selves
This morning, I was talking to some internet strangers about my Dad’s office mate at Golden West College, Pierre Grimes.
This is contextually really appropriate. They’re producing a “read through” podcast for Jo Walton’s excellent novels about the Goddess Athene setting up time travel Plato’s Republic, and Pierre was a Philosophy lecturer at the community college. Aside from being the person who first handed me a Socratic dialogue (Meno, age 9?), Pierre also created the Noetic Society and the practice of Philosophical Midwifery. Pierre himself is an incredible human, full of goodness and joy and a real Ralph Abraham energy at the coffee shop.
Pierre Grimes is (98!) exactly the sweetweird Socratic scholar and dream interpreter you would want to meet in a 1970 Huntington Beach latenight coffee shop. If you’re not at OC knowledge level with Annalee Newitz/John Verieve/Stan Robinson, that means he was soft spoken, kind, probably ran a very open communication harem through the 80s, and rocked a full white beard since he was 40.
Pierre was really a vocatour philosopher, who championed the potential for socractic practice as a human regulatory and revelatory practice akin to Buddhism. And he was really nice to kids. The Noetic Society was a formalised coffee shop hangout group. Those groups grow and thrive by being able to escalate up with the issues and concerns of the people who walk through the door.
Which, in our family’s definition, is how you define a church.
This is the swirling background when I found myself in a conversation about church and churches with a Discord-villager who’s living way off their personal circadian rhythm. And instead of getting Pierre’s open face, quiet manner, and patient ear, this unfortunate friend ran into me.
This is a chunk from a larger discussion about faith, the church as a social instrument, and the utility of moral judgement. So while I’m just including my side of this chunk, I believed we had entered into dialogue.
The question just prior was on the logical discontinuity of fundamentalisms: How does an individual resolve multiple conflicting absolutes? Or, in their actual words ” the stored values of my religious upbringing […] are full of infinities and drive me crazy when they contradict each other.”
I’m reposting this here and thinking about Pierre because I think direct, extended text communication has real value as an academci skill, but also as part of a reflective emotional practice.
heiligekuh — Today at 1:04 PM
So the episcopalian / Anglican truism for this is the “three legged stool” where church/human action is guided by scripture, tradition/precedent, and personal human reason/wisdom
That bounds the “infinities” in a way that helps moral reasoning
Discord Dialogue — Today at 1:11 PM
What makes scriptures special?
heiligekuh — Today at 2:20 PM
A valid question.
I think there’s a value to human attention.
(and you will find, that like all good metaphorical frameworks, this one plays very loose with “carpentry”)
One way the stool legs interconnect is that history and tradition means “humans doing things over time”
So, what makes these scriptures special? Well, there the scriptures we’ve been using. Why would we change?
A significant fraction of European artistic output, at the top of the social/economic/power heirarchy, was REQUIRED to be fanfic for this one story.
If we are willing to be open to the “concept” of Buffy without JW interaction, or with the sensible idea that not every superhero is retelling Seigerl/Schuster Superman…
then I had to demonstrate some kind of intellectual rigor, and take that canon, that set of AO3 tags, that scripture at least as seriously Sandman or Jeff Noon’s work or Chip Delany’s.
I apologize for repeating this, but the “raised atheist in evangelical 80s OC” is really relevant here.
I was 13 years old when I went to my first BBS meetup at the Omega Burger off McFadden (down the street from the sysop’s apartment), where we piled into Civics to blare Rush on our way to SoCal RenFaire.
What I’m saying, is that I don’t prescribe whatever YOU might expect from your background as a deeply privileged or inspired/inerrant view of the biblical texts. I have held or professed every variation you might imagine along the way at some point, and I’ve seen all the big surprises lurking.
I am fully comfortable that everything described in scripture is just floating espers of human hope and imagination.
And I will agree with any sf projective hypothetical about what of our cultural detritus will shape the Castatrophe Canticle for our age.
Thanks for your open discussion. These are really important questions to think through.
I remember feeling that exact unbounded-ness. Huge imperatives, unfunded moral mandates,
feeling trapped in these network of Thou Shall/Not Ley Lines, and all the people who taught you to SEE them, just sailed right through and didn’t ever flinch when they moved against them.
Or… as was more of my neighbors, were clearly in some part of “building the Ark.”
Tie And Jeans 