Bliss

From my initial bedazzled infatuation with the miracle-manifesting wisdom of the East and eager transactions with its purveyors, to angry, despondent disillusionment then on to my arrival, after decades of spiritual practice and earnest re-evaluation, at a place of peaceful gratitude for the good of the Gurus, the good that with humble wonder we may call God, I reproduce here selections from accounts over the years of my evolving, healing attitude toward these divine yet human messengers, teachers and exemplars. In these pages are the essential landmarks and vistas of my peculiar path. From the trackless swamps through which I slogged, seething, thinking of Gurus as grrr-ooze, I ascended at times to bright-aired heights from which I saw those very bogs and bayous to be the source of life-giving streams and cloud-seeding mists that refracted sunlight into celebratory rainbows. These moments of appreciation have increased in frequency and duration and have expanded to include quotidian things so that they no longer seem quotidian at all, which makes quotidian an apt word to describe such things and eventually everything — quotidian, after all, being an unusual word for everyday, ordinary — and the ordinary everyday anything and everything is simply a marvel, the Something that somehow exists, with all of us and all things inseparable parts of that Whole. And that is wholly Love.

Although largely neglected in Schelling scholarship, the concept of bliss (Seligkeit) assumes central importance throughout Schelling’s oeuvre. Focusing on his 1810-11 texts, the Stuttgart Seminars and the beginning of the Ages of the World, this paper traces the logic of bliss, in its connection with other key concepts such as indifference, the world or the system, at a crucial point in Schelling’s thinking. Bliss is shown, at once, to mark the zero point of the developmental narrative that Schelling constructs here (from God before creation, via the natural, historical, and spiritual world, to the fully actualized, ‘true pantheism’) and to interrupt it at every step. As a result, bliss emerges here in its real utopian force but also its all-too-real ambivalence, indifference, and even violence, despite Schelling’s best efforts to theorize it as ‘love’; and Schelling himself emerges, in these texts, as one of modernity’s foremost thinkers not just of nature or freedom, but also of bliss in its modern afterlives. At stake in Schelling’s conception of bliss, I argue, is the very relationship between history and eternity, the not-yet and the already-here, the present and the eschatological - as well as between Spinozian immanence and the Christian temporality of salvation, so important for modernity (with what is often called its process of ‘secularization’) - not to mention the complex entanglement of indifference, violence, and love or the ideas of totality, nonproductivity, and nonrelation that Schellingian bliss involves.

Understanding vaccine hesitancy has become increasingly important during the COVID-19 pandemic as governments around the globe have been struggling to convince portions of their populations to participate in vaccination protocols. Here we report on a nationally representative survey of the United Kingdom in which data revealed that individuals showed more willingness to take fictitious vaccines (putatively produced by the US government Medicare program and the now defunct healthcare company Theranos) than to take the Sputnik and Sinovac vaccines (developed by the Russian and Chinese governments respectively). The data indicate that the critical factor in vaccine hesitancy among the respondents was anxiety rather than familiarity with vaccines.

The idea of the ‘total work of art’ appealed to modernists of the early twentieth century as a opportunity to refresh aesthetic experience and overcome its compartmentalization by nineteenth-century institutions of culture. H.G. Wells hoped to realize a version of the Gesamtkunstwerk, which he called ‘spectacle-music-drama’, in the film Things to Come (1936), directed, under his supervision, by William Cameron Menzies and produced by Alexander Korda. Wells aimed to challenge commercial movies with something higher: a grand vision to awaken human beings from complacency, warn them of the dangers of impending war, and urge them to place their trust in modern science. Music usually played a subsidiary function in film production at the time, the images being cut and finalized before music was added. Wells insisted that a composer should play a formative role in his project. He wanted images to be matched to sounds rather than vice versa, and engaged Arthur Bliss to compose a score on these terms. Bliss wrote and recorded most of his music before shooting began.