A Lesson in Alchemy

I was asked a question last week about why I was unimpressed with Dillard's focus on the creator, and I think I know why now. In her afterword she writes how the first half of her book was the via positiva, or the expression of God through positive terminology; and the second half is the via negativa, or the expression of God through negative terminology, as in, “we can never know God, so he must be what everything is not.” Both views present complications, just as romantic and classical thinking does, and while I admire Dillard for taking the long way to do both, I don't think she really ever got there (for me) in terms of finding the middle ground. Granted, she does say, “Of the two ridiculous alternatives, I rather favor the second,” (181) [which I've also found myself favoring] but she thinks of those alternatives as the only two alternatives, and that is what drives me crazy, after the past two novels have offered us a third alternative; then I find myself asking, but is she really only giving us two? Her whole novel suggests a unity with nature and the world that I can see her perception as being a part of it, rather than in it from either side. It's a young book, and like me, we see over things.

She comes to the conclusion during the second half that the reason the world is filled with awful and horrible things is not because of the world but because of human consciousness and emotion. “So much is amiss that I must consider the second fork in the road, that creation itself is blamelessly, benevolently askew by its very free nature, and that is it only human feeling that is freakishly amiss” (180). This is such a classical assumption. Our emotions are in the way of us comprehending the world – therefore we must needs to be a fly on the wall and completely forego our consciousness in able to experience “the real world.” Now I'm just being harsh. I don't know what to make of human emotion, and like Dillard, it is breathtaking that we've evolved with them, and it's always easy to just avoid answering the question of what's it all about, while Dillard at least makes an attempt about morality and life but all I do is just sit here and watch it struggle on the bank. And I don't think I want an answer, not yet, anyway.

For that reason, I think I side more with the via negativa. I don't necessarily agree that God cannot be expressed in positive terms, but I believe in those glimpses, the parts and pieces of the whole. So maybe after all I do agree with Dillard, in that sense.

But what I really wanted to talk about today was Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood. If you haven't seen this yet, the dubbed version is just as good as the Japanese. Go and watch it. Dillard writes a line that goes, “The terms are clear: if you want to live, you have to die” (183) and I giggled to myself and thought of the many times the law of equivalent exchange is said. “People cannot gain something without losing something. You must present something of equal value to gain something.”

“For what could equal the value of a human soul?”

And I especially love draping this concept on top of Dillard's quote – I love the equalizing effect that it has on life and on death. We, all of us here, have been granted emotion and consciousness and thought for this short time that we're on Earth. Are we possibly so blessed as to have eternal life, or must we suffer something for it, must we suffer a removal from what we've known and move on to the next stage, the afterlife, death, limbo, etc; what must we give up to have a human experience? Our very lives. Death is so difficult for us, even to understand, because we love, emotion is at the very core of it, we love our lives and the people around us, we love this crazy, aw(e)ful world, and we don't know how to let go. Maybe, Dillard says, at the end we will. And we will be saying “Thank you.”

Now, the world says to us, as we reach our (first) death in education, Go and Live. How do we live? Dillard says unconsciously, I say consciously, very, very consciously, but not so cautiously.