CHEMISTRY WAS A BUNCH OF BALLS, but god’s still goo.

God stuff.

Read it again, okay, that was thick. Short threads float in goo, every color fading to buff. I read it more slowly, trying to cull the debris from the real thing, the 3-D diagram that I can turn over in my mind and pick and push and squeeze to understand it admittedly incompletely.

It’s not working. I catch a floater and get out my best loupe. Blurry.

 

 

 

When the process works, I feel the shapes forming, overlapping concepts with color-coded meanings; I line them up and turn them into whole ideas. Visualization looks like playing with blocks and blobs that are really symbols of big, sturdy real-world Things. You should see the stockroom full of fantastic, thrumming combinations of concepts. The pantry of raw ingredients makes for some good browsing, too.

 

Theology is a mystical, amorphous blob that flows in every direction. God and the assorted volumes claiming to be His Word are fairy tales and parables, faded wisps of dyed fabric and wind-blown deserts.

I accept the truth of the existence of the ideas described in the abstracts. I understand most of the discussion. In between, though, is the mess of what connects the topic to what has been learned of it by the author. If the topic left out the God bits, would I glide through it more smoothly? Would I find the right designs?

Linen and sand, and I’m stuck.