Navigation: current directory home
30 August 2024
When looking at life, there are some things that matter, and some that don't. Part of maturity is learning to sort out which are which. Some things are signal, and more attention should be paid to them, and some things are noise, and less attention should be paid to them.
Noise is where signal comes from, so you can't focus 100% on signal.
(Noise is characterized by fluctuation, and signal by relative steadiness.)
I listened to a podcast episode about how Elizabeth Fraser was summoned by Tim Buckley's "Song to the Siren" into the life of Buckley's son Jeff Buckley (who admired her singing, and she sang "Song to the Siren"), and then Jeff died the way a siren would kill him, pulled under the river in Memphis, Tennessee. Perhaps some kind of evil spirit spoke through Tim, then through Fraser, then killed Jeff, a spirit rendered resonant and eternal through its connection to the imaginal world, where the various siren myths constantly replay their story, whether you think of them or not. The episode's guest, the expert as it were on the siren theory of Jeff Buckley's death, seemed to be frightened of the spiritual world, and the world of conspiracies, the conspiracies that spiritual beings were seeming to perpetrate on the land of humans.
There are conspiracies that speak of the political world, that political figures are figures in the spiritual world of interconnected myth. Even if you are not a conspiratorially-minded person, you might start to feel the pull of the spirit world when you watch politics, the dark spirits that work through people, with politics as the occasion. Politics is a drama.
And then even more mundane are all the ways that the secular world is depressingly messed-up, and how we have to fix it. The day in and day out of seeking reforms, or better technologies.
All these things have some bearing on eternal life, but often, not much. They tend to be noise. At the end of the Millennium, the horrible things happening in the temporal world will only matter a little bit. But your heart, whether it is the heart of God or not, matters a lot.
--
From about the age of 15 to sometime in my early 30s, I listened to Elizabeth Fraser a lot (in Cocteau Twins, and also collaborating and solo). From 27 to 31, I wrote books where I wrote very quickly, not deliberately. Perhaps I was channeling a spirit? (A lot of the content of the books can be traced to thoughts already stored up in my mind, through hours spent thinking.) At the end of that period, I was concerned that I was channeling something, so I turned against the practice.
But looking back now, I don't think I was doing anything really bad. It's possible to channel God or spirits aligned with him, as well as bad ones. Or to channel a mixture of good and bad spirits. Trees aren't automatically good or bad. It matters what kind of fruit they bear.
The Biblical prophets spoke God's words (through a process I would guess at least analogous to artistic channeling), and King Saul was possessed by both good and bad spirits. In another life, Fraser could have been part of the people group of prophets who lived in Israel.
What counts as signal versus noise has a lot to do with background assumptions. If God does not exist, or his existence can't be relied on, then there may be no guarantee of the eternal. The temporal could kill you right now. So you have to watch for every threat. But if God exists, at least as in MSL and VMH, then the temporal threats become powerful energetic noise. In a sense, you can tune them out, although they can still affect you in the moment.
What you think of as threat is affected by whether it could be from God in some weird way. Many things are negotiations between God and Satan, so what is intended for bad in one way is intended for good in another. God himself is somewhat weird, and does wholly good things in a weird way. With God, a bad thing can be deliberately turned into a good thing over time. If you know that God exists, then things that would otherwise seem like serious threats might seem to be less threatening. Then they can drop out of your register of concern, and you can focus on signal. The signal being, do you have the heart of God?