Weaving Meaning
This furtive age, this age endowed with power
To wake the moon with footsteps, fit an oar
Into the rowlocks of the wind, and find
What swims before his prow, what swirls behind —
Upon this gifted age, in its dark hour,
Falls from the sky a meteoric shower
Of facts . . . they lie unquestioned, uncombined.
Wisdom enough to leech us of our ill
Is daily spun; but there exists no loom
To weave it into fabric; undefiled
Proceeds pure Science, and has her say; but still
Upon this world from the collective womb
Is spewed all day the red triumphant child.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
This is from a book of poetry published in 1939. In 1934 the first man went into space and it wasn't until 1969 that man was able to "wake the moon with footsteps." The talk must have been very alive and real then. But here is the profound questions of the artist ... who can combine the "meteoric shower of facts"? Where is there a loom to weave all this discovery into fabric? Or is this to be a still-born age "spewed all day."
The image of a loom must have been in the air to. Pioneering neurologist Charles Sherrington wrote of the brain as an "enchanted loom" in his book On Man and His Nature published in 1942. The quote is beautiful and shows that scientists can be every bit as poetic as poets. He is describing what happens in the brain as we wake from sleep:
The great topmost sheet of the mass, that where hardly a light had twinkled or moved, becomes now a sparkling field of rhythmic flashing points with trains of traveling sparks hurrying hither and thither. The brain is waking and with it the mind is returning. It is as if the Milky Way entered upon some cosmic dance. Swiftly the head mass becomes an enchanted loom where millions of flashing shuttles weave a dissolving pattern, always a meaningful pattern though never an abiding one; a shifting harmony of subpatterns.
I still remember once interviewing a new Christian for an article I was going to write to encourage others to attend ALPHA (a set of dinners and classes about Christianity). He said that on one hand, he wanted control of his life. He came from a single mom, who was sometimes homeless and had climbed to the pinnacle of being a wealthy Emory emergency room doctor. On the other hand, he had a desire for meaning. He said he felt like he was always careening back and forth between the two. To admit bigger meaning meant letting go of control. To take control left him feeling small and without meaning.
I may not be capturing his words very well, but I found what he said to be profound. We know so much and learn so much, but what combines it? Cormac McCarthy wrote a play that Tommy Lee Jones and Samuel Jackson performed called Sunset Limited. The characters are simply White and Black. White's great struggle is that the great tradition and culture that used to give him meaning was gone ... the edifice had fallen and there was nothing to live for.
I came across that poem by Millay in the latest Neil Postman book I was reading, his last one before he died. The last chapter is on education and he gives five suggestions and prefaces his fifth as "easily the most controversial." He suggests that public schools need to teach about religion. "Ignoring religion is a serious mistake"
Although many religious narratives provide answers to the questions of how and when we came to be, they are all largely concerned with answering the question, Why? Is it possible to be an educated person without having considered questions of why we are here and what is expected of us? And is it possible to consider these questions by ignoring the answers provided by religion? I think not, since religion may be defined as our attempt to give a total, integrated response to questions about the meaning of existence. (172)He proposes beginning late in elementary school and straight through high school courses on comparative religion.
The words of Abraham Heschel in his book Who Is Man? come to mind:
In giving up the anxiety for meaning, man would cease to be human....Humanity is more than an intellectual structure; it is personal reality. The cry for meaning is a cry for ultimate relationship, for ultimate belonging. It is a cry in which all pretensions are abandoned. Are we alone in the wilderness of time, alone in the dreadfully marvelous universe, of which we are a part and where we feel forever like strangers? Is there a Presence to live by? A Presence worth living for, worth dying for? Is there a way of living in that Presence? Is there a way of living with the Presence? (71)
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