​Process theology is theopoetics, that is, a theology of perichoresis (of mutual coinherence of all things) in which the universe represents God’s creative adventure and God the event of creative transformation of the world. It is within the net of interwoveness—the process itself—that God appears as the “poet of the world,” as its surprising creator (the ground of its novelty), its compassionate companion (the ground of its interwoven nature), and its saving radiance (the ground of its harmony)

​-- Roland Faber


Yes, To Dance Beneath the Diamond Sky

Points of Contact between Bob Dylan, Roland Faber,
​and  Alfred North Whitehead
​

Starry-eyed and laughing as I recall when we were caught, trapped by no track of hours for they hanged suspended. As we listened one last time an’ we watched with one last look, spellbound and swallowed ’til the tolling ended.

​- Chimes of Freedom, Bob Dylan
While preachers preach of evil fates, teachers teach that knowledge waits, can lead to hundred-dollar plates,, goodness hides behind its gates. But even the president of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked.

​- It's Alright Ma (I'm only bleeding), Bob Dylan
Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free, silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands, with all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves, let me forget about today until tomorrow.

​- Mr. Tambourine Man, Bob Dylan
A process of awareness; an awareness of awareness, changing with the landscape it touches; like dew at dawn, fragile, always on the brink of disappearing into thin air; always only dense near the ground, always threatened by the heat of the sun;

- Roland Faber
PicturePhoto by Khamkéo Vilaysing on Unsplash
Dancing beneath the Diamond Sky

Whenever I hear Mr. Tambourine Man by Bob Dylan, I think of Roland Faber.  Faber, one of the world's leading interpreters of Alfred North Whitehead and a philosopher in his own right, lives close to a desert in southern California; and, to my mind, his theopoetic manner of thinking is illuminated by a verse from Dylan's song.  Faber's thinking can be imagined an act of:

dancing beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free, silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus stands, with all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves, in which you forget about the trials of today until tomorrow.

Granted, the song is about a beach not a desert, but still there's the sand and the dancing and the diamond sky.  It is, to my mind, very Faberian.

Amid the dancing something important happens that Faber would well understand.  Fixed conceptual abstractions drop away, at least for a moment, and you sense a no-thing-ness: an encompassing horizon, as black as the sky, in which all things, stars and people and plants, are always already included.

I say always already because, in fact, we are always beneath the diamond sky even when we can't see the diamonds or are inattentive to the sky.  Here let the diamond sky represent the All: the ever-new totality of all that is becoming.  Thus understood, the All is never an object among objects we behold from a distance; it is something in which we are always already enfolded.  And it is not itself a noun but rather, as it were, a verb.  The All is all-ing; in Whitehead's words, a creative advance into novelty.

For Faber and for Whitehead, the All is not the all of it. There is the no-thing-ness, which Whitehead calls creativity.  It is not a vacuum or, for that matter, an idea in the head.  It is a creative abyss from which all things continuously emerge, stars included.   Our momentary awareness of this abyss, this creative no-thing-ness is what Faber calls apophatic awareness: an awareness of depths as yet unspoken. 

​Apophatic awareness cannot be willed into existence in a dominating or calculating way.  It is not information obtained by reading a book or a number educed from an algorithm.  Apophatic awareness happens through a negation or a dropping away when, metaphorically if not also literally we dance beneath the diamond sky, with one hand waving free.

This negation and its attendant darkness is not the whole story.  As the negation occurs, a certain kind of light emerges.  The light is, to use Faber's phrase: a singing light, and it offers a certain kind of illumination.  You see something in the darkness, or, perhaps better, you hear something.  Your hear the songs within and without,

And what are the songs of this singing light?  Perhaps one of the songs is a still small voice within us calling us toward creative transformation, toward becoming something new, moment by moment.  This calling is that of what Faber, following Whitehead, calls the Poet of the world.  This Poet is not a thing among things but rather, to use more of Faber's phrases, a compassionate companion and saving radiance.  In hearing the Poet we are ourselves called to be poets, each in our way. 

But our songs are not the only songs. The stars in the sky are also songs, as are the hills and rivers, trees and lakes, animals and plants.  All are, in Faber's words, mutually cohering in a net of interwovenness.  All are, in some deep way, dancing together as parts of one another: Indra's Net.

This net is not suffocating.  It does not obviate the creativity of the stars or our own. The stars in the sky and we on the ground are spontaneously self-creative amid our connections with one another.  There is an event-like spontaneity to it all.  Nothing is fixed.  The All is itself a dancing, emerging out of the creativity in its fecund multiplicity, beckoned and enlivened and companioned by the singing light. 

Yes, this is what I hear when I hear the lines "yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky, with one hand waving free."  I hear the voice of Roland Faber.

The Darkness and the Singing Light

I ask Roland Faber's forgiveness if I miss the mark completely.  But what makes me imagine things this way is the following account he offers of his early life:
It is in thinking that I found myself—one day at a young age. It just happened. I remember the awakening, a sudden, intense consciousness of being-in-the-universe, in the face of its speaking to me, raising the questions of its why and whence. How can anything exist? Is it itself or empty or potentially divine? Is the All all there is? Yet, how could Reality be of and, if at all, beyond itself? And can it (and I in it) act in or on itself? I remember vividly having a metaphysical episode in which such a line of questioning led me to an intense apophatic awareness. Stripping everything away from existence, this experimental awareness left me, in the end, with—not darkness, but singing light. I wanted to become a thinker, from early age on; and I have never stopped striving, at one time, to become one.

​Faber is inclined to think of the darkness and the light, the no-thing-ness and the singing, as divine.  I am, too.  But I cite him here, not because I want to press a case for proper names, but because Faber and Dylan point us toward a kind of theopoetics that is important and perhaps salvific.  We live in a time when people cling to their own language as if it were divine, forgetting that we find truth, we find an un-veiling of illusion, in a dropping away of fixed concepts. We live in a time of too much conviction and not enough humility in the presence of a star studded night sky.
​
​Don't we all need metaphysical episodes like this?   Don't we need moments when we are freed from the predictable and routinized habits of thought that too often constrain our imaginations, so that we can become aware of a wider expanse, within and beyond, in which we live and move and have our being.  And don't we need things -- the conceptual apparatus of Whitehead's conceptual language, for example, or a richly lyrical Bob Dylan song -- that precipitate the dropping away?  Isn't that what philosophy is, or should be, about?  Shouldn't it be mystical?

Whitehead, Dylan, and the Imagination

Faber is one of the very best articulators of what might best be called the mystical side of Whitehead.  Of Whitehead Faber writes:
​
“Instead of making us kings of reality and gods of the mystery of existence in mastering fixed conceptual abstractions, the complex apparatus of Whitehead’s conceptual language presents itself as a gift—a method of unknowing, if you will—forcing us always to reenter the process of thinking again.” (Roland Faber)

​These lines could have also been written about many of Dylan's lyrics. So often Dylan's lyrics do not make us kings of reality or gods of the mystery of existence.  Instead, they pitch us into a poetic modes that defy formulaic enclosures.  For the listener otherwise addicted to cliches, Dylan's lyrics function as a gift -- a method of unknowing -- forcing the listener to enter the process of thinking again.  Indeed, philosophical thinking.
​
For Faber a moment of thinking is also a moment of grace.  As we enter into what he calls "thinking" we enter into wonder and imagination, for thinking itself is an act of exploring realms of possibility.  In The Aims of Education Whitehead writes:
​
 "Imagination cannot be acquired once and for all, and then kept indefinitely in an ice box to be produced periodically in stated quantities. The learned and imaginative life is a way of living, and is not an article of commerce." 

Genuine thinking is philosophical in nature.  It avoids the illusion that its object is mere' information' to be produced in stated quantities for commercial appeal.  And it cannot be kept in ice boxes.  You can participate in thinking, but you cannot keep it.

Ice Boxes

Which takes me back to Dylan.  He is resistant to ice boxes.  He refuses to let his individual songs be reduced to ice cubes and presented the same way each time.  Of Blowing in the Wind he says, "it used to sound this way but not it sounds this way.  It's melody has changed."  He refuses to limit himself to one type of music: country, folk, rock, blues, gospel, or hymns.  He refuses to limit his songs to a single cluster of narrative voices.  He refuses to let his own personality be contained in a single image that can be frozen by an interview.  He is instead always on his way into something new, even if the newness is remembering the past in a novel way.

Make no mistake.  Dylan is a classicist in some ways.  He cares deeply about, and feels indebted to, his forebears.  He often talks about the history of American music with appreciation: Chuck Berry, Steven Foster, Little Richard, Leadbelly, Woody Guthrie.  He knows that he would be nothing without them. But he is, and always has been, restless, like a rolling stone.  Like Faber, he trusts in novelty.

Mysticism

There is something mystical about this trust.  On the one hand it leads us up and out; we can dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free.  And at the same time it takes unto depths as yet unspoken.  Whitehead writes:
​
The use of philosophy is to maintain an active novelty of fundamental ideas illuminating the social system. It reverses the slow descent of accepted thought toward the inactive commonplace. If you like to phrase it so, philosophy is mystical. For mysticism is direct insight into depths as yet unspoken. But the purpose of philosophy is to rationalize mysticism: not by explaining it away, but by the introduction of novel verbal characterizations, rationally coordinated.

Dylan's voyages into depths unspoken is through, in Whitehead's words, "novel verbal constructions," philosophical or lyrical or both.  Faber's lyrics are always both.  As Dylan's songs and Faber's writings evoke our own thinking, we, too, are invited to loosen our own tongues a bit.  Yes, we might use conventional syntax from time to time.  We might put our periods in the right place.  But our language can be creative, too.  At least one of our hands -- right or left, it doesn't matter -- can be waving free.

Winds

Dylan's trust in novelty reminds me of another Jewish storyteller, albeit from the Middle East not Minnesota.  Jesus invites us to be open to the winds of the spirit and reminds us that they blow wherever they will.  These winds cannot be trapped in a box of human making or,in Whitehead's words, "produced periodically in stated quantities."  It is as if the winds are an activity, a process, an animating activity, closely connected with an imagination.  As an artist Dylan seeks to be receptive to the blowing of these winds, somehow sensing that the answer (my friend) is in the movement, in the process.  The answer is unanswerable.  That is to say, it is never reducible to any of its articulations. 

​In Dylan's case these articulations are the multiplicity of  voices he presents in his music. There’s the tender Dylan (To Make You Feel My Love), the angry Dylan (Like a Rolling Stone), the apocalyptic Dylan (A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall), the parental Dylan (Forever Young), the socially engaged Dylan (Blowin’ in the Wind), the retrospective Dylan (My Back Pages), the existential, being-toward-death Dylan (Not Dark Yet), the precursor-to-rap Dylan (Subterranean Homesick Blues), the lovesick Dylan (I Threw It All Away), the anti-middle-class Dylan (Ballad of a Thin Man), the furious Dylan (Pay in Blood), the storytelling Dylan (Simple Twist of Fate), the devoted Dylan (If Not for You), the dystopian Dylan (Desperation Row), and, throughout, the poetic Dylan who won the Nobel Prize for literature.   But none of these answers are the answer. 

Substraction

I am reminded of Faber's notion of subtractive affirmation.  It is an affirmation which subtracts itself from its own articulation.  Andrew Davis, the editor of Depths as Yet Unspoken, puts it this way:
​
Substractive affirmation​ is used by Faber to express both the divine affirmation of multiplicity, but also the divine subtraction from any identification with multiplicity. Instead of such identifications, which have often undergirded divine power-games and coercive theologies, God’s poetic self-subtraction is an affirmation of the worth and integrity of the world process.

Dylan, too, subtractively affirms.  He affirms the multiplicity but subtracts himself from any identification with it, often through irony.  Why the subtraction?  Some might say that he wants to stand aloof. (They say this of God, too.)  But I suspect that he senses, along with Faber, that there are depths as yet unspoken, and that none of the multiplicities exhaust this depth.  Life is a process, a flux, a flow, a creative advance into novelty. 

Life

One of the advances Whitehead makes in the history of philosophy is to take "novelty" as a dimension of being.  Hegel and Heidegger anticipated this; Heidegger's well known Being and Time takes "time" itself (flux and flow) as part of being.  But Whitehead adds that novelty, newness, surprise, is itself part of time.  You can almost imagine Whitehead (and Faber) writing a book called Being and Surprise.

Faber explains that novelty is the mystical in Whitehead.  Not all of the mystical, but part of it.  Mysticism is not only about plumbing the depths, it is also about exploring open horizons and being surprised by what appears.

​The function of the mystical in Whiteheads Modes of Thought...is the introduction of novelty in such a way that it becomes the sole source instilling communication with life—no communication can do without it. (Roland Faber)

​And what is this "life" with which we can communicate? It is each life and all lives as carriers of their own subjectivity and as interwoven one with all others.  Whitehead proposes that subjectivity or something like it goes all the down into the depths of submicroscopic matter and all the way out into far reaches of the cosmos.  Of course our most intimate access to this subjectivity is our own immediate experience, here-and-now, with its many moods and voices, its multiplicity.  As Walt Whitman put it, and Whitehead and Faber and Dylan agree, we contain multitudes.

Polyphilia and Polypoetics

Back again to Dylan.  I have no idea whether or not Bob Dylan has ever read Alfred North Whitehead.  And I doubt that he's read Roland Faber, a gifted and challenging interpreter of Whitehead who emphasizes Whitehead's mystical side.  But I do know that Dylan thinks in a Whiteheadian-Faberian mode or, perhaps more accurately, song-writes in a Whiteheadian-Faberian mode.   And I know that Faber gives me language for appreciating this side of Dylan's musical life.  Dylan is polyphilic and polypoetic. 
​
​Polyphilia​ is a term Faber uses for the divine “love of multiplicity” which insists in and on the multiplicity of the world in every moment. It is this divine polyphilic activity that loves to sustain, infuse, receive, and transform all reality. In contrast to the abstractions of other “pluralistic” positions, Faber’s polyphilic pluralism indicates the divine insistence on, and love for, multiplicity such that religions are apophatic affirmations of Reality/Truth/God within and beyond the diversity of their experiences and organizations. 
​Polypoetics in Faber’s usage refers to the manifold of symbolic expressions which evoke traces of the divine among the layered multiplicities of world processes. Here, Faber speaks of the diffusion of the divine in multiplicity, not however in terms of divine disappearance, but as that which symbolizes the mysterious dignity and inexhaustibility of the infinite foldings of becoming reality. 

​If we want to understand what inspires Dylan to write so many different kinds of songs, I suggest that it is an insatiable polyphilia, a love of multiplicity.  And if we want to identify a genre for this corpus that includes all the sub-subgenres of Dylan's corpus, I suggest polypoetics.  Not that Dylan understands his songs as evoking traces of the divine - or perhaps he does.  But we can think of them that way, if we wish.  And if we do so, we are learning still one more thing from Faber.  We are learning to think for ourselves, in our own way, beneath the diamond sky.

​- Jay McDaniel, September 14, 2020


​Dylan's Fifty Best Songs
​

The London based Guardian offers a thoughtful proposal, listing them in rank order from last to first, offering a paragraph on each.  You can hear them on Spotify by clicking here.  Don’t have time to listen but would like to see the list of fifty?  Here they are:

50. Changing of the Guards (1978)
49. This Wheel’s on Fire (1967)
48. Pay in Blood (2012)
47. My Back Pages (1964)
46. Make You Feel My Love (1997)
45. Went to See the Gypsy (1970)
44. Blowin’ in the Wind (1963)
43. Ain’t Talkin’ (2006)
42. One Too Many Mornings (1964)
41. Forever Young (1974)
40. Jokerman (1983)
39. The Times They Are A-Changin’ (1964)
38. Love Minus Zero/No Limit (1965)
37. If Not For You (1970)
36. Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door (1973)
35. Slow Train (1979)
34. Brownsville Girl (1986)
33. Murder Most Foul (2020)
32. It’s All Over Now Baby Blue (1965)
31. Isis (1976)
30. High Water (For Charlie Patton) (2001)
29. Don’t Think Twice It’s Alright (1963)
28. All Along the Watchtower (1964)
27. Most of the Time (1989)
26. I Want You (1966)
25. Simple Twist of Fate (1975)
24. Hurricane (1976)
23. I Shall Be Released (1967)
22. Chimes of Freedom (1964)
21. I Threw It All Away (1969_
20. A Hard Rain’s A Gonna Fall (1963)
19. The Groom’s Still Waiting at the Altar (1981)
18. Mr Tambourine Man (1965)
17. Ballad of a Thin Man (1965)
16. One of Us Must Know (Sooner Or Later) (1966)
15. It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding) (1965)
14. Things Have Changed (1997)
13. The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll (1964)
12. Tangled Up in Blue (1975)
11. Girl From the North Country (1963)
10. It Ain’t Me Babe (1964)
9. Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands (1966)
8. Not Dark Yet (1997)
7. Positively Fourth Street (1965)
6. Blind Willie McTell (1983)
5. Desolation Row (1965)
4. Subterranean Homesick Blues (1965)
3. Idiot Wind (1975)
2 Visions of Johanna (1966)
1. Like a Rolling Stone (1965)
 
Open Horizons