Can we have private, personal encounter just with freshness? Does it have the power to comfort and encourage, to inform and provoke us, and to make things happen regarding things we care about? Will such converse be available and worthwhile even in extremis? Is encounter with freshness similar to what is traditionally known as prayer?
There’s one crucial distinction: a personal, private encounter with freshness, like every other encounter, is based on a principle of parity. Within the encounter, there’s no pulling rank, each acknowledging the legitimacy of the other as other, and each making common cause with the livingness of the other addressed as you–and this despite the obvious ontological differences between we mundane mortals (we might call ourselves collectively fragility), and transcendent freshness.
The otherness gap between us, fragility and freshness, is so much wider than between any two mundane entities.
We, the fragility, inhabitants of the mundane, constrained by time, space and number, live in a world of limited resources and limited time, driven by concerns of survival (or safety), comfort and dignity, and their enabling agendas, and doomed to suffer failure, loss and death. Yet we have what transcendent freshness does not: concrete particularity; and we are able to do what freshness does not: act directly in the material world.
By contrast, transcendent freshness is able to be in the presence of many people in many places simultaneously. It is limited, as we are, by scarcity or mortality, but it is constrained by considerations of hospitality, friendship and exploration. However, even though its concerns are global, indeed cosmic, for each and all, freshness cannot be directly perceived and does not directly make things happen in the mundane.
Whereas we act in the mundane directly, freshness acts indirectly. We have presence where we are, but freshness has presence at once everywhere. We both move forward in time, but whereas for us, our past disappears, for freshness, whatever it was ever present to, or participant in, accompanies it into the future.
What we and freshness do have in common, a vast commonality, is an inherent appetite for encounters, that is, livingness. The livingness of freshness is in its potentiality, and ours, in our particularity, but each livingness is a tendency to otherness and appetite, and each livingness defines us as other, yet lover.
Encounters are where our livingnesses meet and play, and the occasion of creation of a new and good thing. Encounters happen when fragility meets freshness, the mundane meets the transcendent.
For freshness, the love of livingness is constant and indiscriminate so freshness seeks encounters everywhere with all others all the time. For us, our love of livingness waxes and wanes, competes with other motives, and limited by practical considerations, so our appetite may be for encounters with this or that other, with more or less intensely, for longer or shorter times, now or later, or maybe, if we choose so, never.
[What follows may seem much ado about nothing, but it is designed to nail down a flapping piece in an authorization argument.]
Fields
How can freshness communicate at all with fragility, given their vast differences: through disturbances discerned in livingness fields.
A field is a ‘region or space in which a given effect exists,’ for instance, a magnetic or gravitational field. The presence of mass in space changes the shape of the space around the mass which in turn affects the movements of all other masses in the vicinity. We can think, then, of a field as a space of potentiality capable of sensitive response to the presence and activity of potent items in or near it such that they interact with each other, even if they don’t make direct contact.
Gravity and electromagnetism are, of course, the forces most prominently responsible for the character of the physical world we live in, so we live in a kind of space sensitive to both mass and charge. But we can think of other kinds of fields which are not directly material but, for instance, social. In the field of desire, objects of attraction or repulsion interact to create and move in response to the creation of hills or valleys, slopes and gradients, we respond to in making our decisions. Or the field of, say, matrimony in a given society, where the coming or going of eligibles shapes the landscape of potential partners. The aim of such a field, of course, includes generativity, the creation of new potent players for the future, to keep the game going.
We know any field exists by observing how particular things respond to nearby others, accelerating or intensifying what they do, even when not in direct contact. And we know items have some kind of potency in a field when what they do affects what nearby others do.
The theremin is a musical instrument played by movements of two variable capacitors, the hands, in an electromagnetic field created by two perpendicular antennas, one linked to pitch and the other volume. Disturbances in the field caused by the presence and minute movements of the fingers, say, are translated to sounds, but without touch. The instrument is said to be extraordinarily difficult to learn to play. The score is gestured, but the music is heard.
If the sound were muted, the field would still be disturbed by the hands of the musician, but the audience would have no idea that any field existed between the two antennas. They might imagine the concert consisted of perhaps a sign language recitation. If we had direct perception of electromagnetic waves other than light so that we were aware of the dynamics of such a field, that is if we were radios (and turned to the right channel), we might enjoy the music, but we aren’t, so we don’t.
We can imagine livingness as a field much like that the theremin creates between its antennae using its power supply. The livingness field is a potentiality space manifesting the cosmic livingness of transcendent freshness, and wherever freshness is, its livingness field is present as well.
This field is how freshness engages with the mundane world, rather than through direct material intervention. We might also call this The Otherness Field because only those sensitive to others as others, not just objects, can tune into it. This field is where and how we experience freshness in its transcendence; where and how freshness speaks to us; where and how we meet our mundane others and othernesses when encountering.
We and and our others, each of us with our various, particular and dynamic livingnesses, our appetites for encounter, are like hands in the theremin field, which modify the shape of the livingness field through our interactions with others and othernesses.
The field I’m talking about is, yes, the all-encompassing livingness of transcendent freshness, but it’s also the case that, in (or even before) each ongoing encounter that freshness actively manages its own field, making local adjustments, proactively and responsively, to its geometry. Why? To make common cause with our livingness, to promote the open-ended generation of new and good things, and ultimately to bring into being a new and lively cosmos of unbounded hospitality, friendship and exploration.
Our awareness, then, of the dynamics of our livingness–of its reconfigurations and recompositions, of its insistences and resistances, of its sloggings and soarings–within the context of the dynamic livingness field we inhabit serves as a special sense, like sight and hearing and touch, by which we directly experience the presence of transcendent freshness in our lives.
So in answer to the question of how we communicate with freshness though we can’t see it or talk to it, or it to us: it’s through disturbances in the livingness field which we perceive as subtle developments in our general or specific appetites for encounter. Like the movements of the fingers of the theremist, they are language in the most intimate register.
In encounters, we and freshness are full colloquy. Our livingness and the livingness of freshness, always our encountermate, are responsive to each other, open to action. We act directly here and there in the mundane, and freshness acts indirectly through encounters everywhere. This is how and why we can confidence in the efficacy of traditional prayer. Freshness makes common cause with our livingness, and we with freshness’.