Touching the Divine

 

This is less a reflection and more a running commentary.

“When we die, loved ones swaddle us in heavily padded coffins, making us infants again, lying in our mother’s arms before returning to the womb of the earth, ceremonially unborn” (Ackerman 71). Holy shit. The experiment with the rats is fascinating: after less than an hour without physical affection (from a mother or a substitute), the rats actually stopped releasing growth hormone (75), and, uh, humans do that too, which explains a lot. I hear (or heard, whatever) the phrase “God’s embrace” tossed around a lot in discussions about religion (typically Christianity), and going back to what I said in my last post about religion being seen as a form of love, or a form of bondage, both of those require touch: you either try to avoid the feeling of chains and obligations, or understand the reasoning behind the ‘bindings’ and lean into them, but regardless of what you do, you’re touching the divine (even if only to shove it away from you). It’s the most intimate sense, except maybe taste: it’s much easier to avoid touching someone than it is to avoid seeing, hearing, or smelling them.

Temperature is interesting, mostly because of ideas of Hell: typically depicted as fire and brimstone, a burning lake, and an impossible thing can only happen ‘when hell freezes over.’ Temperature is rarely every neutral: its either good or bad, depending on context and what we want it to be.

Ah, tattoos. Always wanted some: my mother calls them ‘permanent mutilations’ and has quite literally threatened to disown me if I get one. C’est la vie. Like religions, it’s about love versus pain: is something so important to you that it demands a permanent recognition of it? Is it so important that you’d bleed for it?

(Attached is a video I found interesting, about the psychology of tattoos, and 10 reasons why people get them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMHKwQcPc1o )

In that vein, the self-inflicted pain of martyrdom or flagellation (or for a less religious example, extreme exercise and dieting) is alluring in a macabre sort of way: what’s worth torturing yourself for? An awful lot, as it turns out. “The luxury of suffering,” can’t pain be its own sort of indulgence? When it comes down to it, what's the line between martyrdom and fanaticism when it comes to suffering for a cause? At what point does it stop being holy and become religiously flavored BDSM?

Kiss of Death, Hand of God: intimate names for sometimes cruel (subjectively, anyways) events. Reminds me of the demiurge, molding reality like clay, using nothing but the hands to make something out of nothing, or nudging things into a more pleasing or proper state. The Moirai, Norns, Fata, Weird Sisters, whatever you want to call them, weave, measure, and cut the strings of life through tactile manipulation of thread. Makes you wonder how people recognized touch was connected to life and death.