proxime

Man alive, did Anu Garg have it lined up for me this morning. First his word, which is proxemics, the study and field of closeness, seemingly should be proxemology, but after all, it’s homiletics when it maybe should be homilology, so okay, I like it anyway and’ll come back to it because even closer than his word is his thought:

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:

The doctrine which, from the very first origin of religious dissensions, has been held by bigots of all sects, when condensed into a few words and stripped of rhetorical disguise, is simply this: I am in the right, and you are in the wrong. When you are the stronger, you ought to tolerate me, for it is your duty to tolerate truth; but when I am the stronger, I shall persecute you, for it is my duty to persecute error. -Thomas Babington Macaulay, poet, historian, and politician (25 Oct 1800-1859) 

A truer thought never, and better intellectual base for my yesterday’s careless blogpost castigating both the political rise of the Christian Right that so sickens me, into American politics, where they would gladly and self-righteously police and tyrannize the nation’s morals; and our social, political polarization in which no one wants to find middle ground and move on into the nation’s political, economic and social, military also, wellbeing, but only the self-righteousness of intractable obstinance. Again, this is not where I came in. Or maybe it has always been so and I didn't see it. A professor in a political science class at either Michigan or Florida, I no longer feel obliged to remember which, suggested that the principal role of congress in wartime is to second-guess, hinder and torment the president. Just so. And we are finding out that political bigots and despots are fully as dangerous as religious.

Enough. Monday before blogging Tuesday I’d read an article about politically left inclined surveyors who currently are interviewing Americans across the country about the national political situation (who doesn’t see that we have a“situation” is an idiot), going out expecting their survey to validate their preconception that Americans do not like the current situation of polarization and would prefer to find common ground, a center from which to move on. Instead, they found, are finding to their dismay, that we are not the least interested in compromise or unity or finding the place we can all agree on and going from there, but are entrenched in our certitudes a la Anu’s above Thought for the Day. We do not want to get along, talk, discuss, negotiate, we only want to have our way and in that we cannot, we will obstruct where obstruction is preferable to compromise.

This I saw in politics of the Episcopal Church over the middle ages of my life, where, carelessly perhaps to use the terms left and right, where left was change everything and right was everything is fine just as it is leave it alone, I watched the left lose again and again but by less and less margins as it came back again and again to erode the right until left had victory, at which point left declared the war over and done. Specifically, I remember who was perhaps our first leftist presiding bishop commenting after what appeared to be a final and decisive ballot with the right winning on some social/political/religious issue, the PB saying, “The final decision has not been made on this” and I knew he was correct, because the left wouldn’t let go until victory and then would declare game over, and that's what happened. I suppose this is democracy at work, IDK.

What we have in America is deadlock of certitudes. 

And yet I see even myself changing, moving, evolving in my thoughts, opinions, theologies, views. Maybe it’s throwing up my hands and going home, but a diocese wants a gay, alcoholic, emotionally unstable bishop have at it. A diocese elects a bishop who is then rejected by the churchwide process because of his ZenBuddhist spiritual practices, fine, we are afraid of the damndest things. A diocese elects a bishop who is suspect but is approved anyway based on his assurances that he does not intenD to take his diocese out of the church, then immediately after approval and consecration takes his diocese out of the church, fine. Why do I care? What does all this have to do with me? What business is it of mine who falls in love and wishes heterodoxically to marry, I don't sleep in their bed. How does it happen that my own certainties are concretely as entrenched as opposing views I so contemn, and does it matter so long as I am self-aware?

Back to Anu Garg. Today’s usage examples

USAGE:

“A guy across the aisle on the S-Bahn started staring at me, so I took my proxemics into my own hands and stared back with a feigned harsh, angry vengeful countenance.”

T. Santorius; An American Dad in Hamburg - Germania II; Lulu; 2014.

I know how this is, and have read, perhaps in Heinrich Böll, of a passenger being so frightened by such proxemic invasion as to get off the streetcar at the next stop. And in Playboy once, maybe when I was in college, a cartoon of a man noticing that the man sitting across the aisle from him on the transit bus was holding a cage: its lock had come loose and the cage door swung open and what the man saw from the darkness inside the open cage was claws, bared teeth, and wild eyes glaring at him. 

“‘I can’t wait to get on the boat!’ your mother says to them, pressing forward, defying American proxemics customs.”

Julia Elliott; The Wilds; Tin House Books; 2014.

This I know also: I do not like anyone getting in my space, which is minimum 18 to 24 inches from my face. This is proxemics.

Of this morning’s muse, I’ll look through it before I copy paste and post. It’s not at all what I thought to think on when I started, which was my breakfast of black coffee and a sandwich of prosciutto on lightly buttered extra thin wheat bread out here on 7H porch on an incomparable morning of early autumn on the Florida Gulf Coast. I stay fairly irritated at self, but the blogging does enable me to observe and monitor my devolution. Into what? well, frank and ernest.

DThos+