The Deity is Immanent and Transcendent

I still ponder that childish question about the universe being infinite and expanding - and if it is both infinite and expanding, where is it expanding into? I recently sat in on a Meister Eckhardt conference in which one of the speakers (M. Ali Lakhani, KC) distinguished between pantheism and panentheism, the first instance being the thought that god is everything and in everything, and panentheism being the thought that god is everything and in everything, but also encompasses everything.

This leads me to think  the universe is expanding into God. A pretty thought.  

Anything could happen. It already has.

What is three fifths of a person?  What does it mean for the values of a nation when the personhood of a corporate entity (Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward , US Supreme Court 1818) is recognized before the personhood of black people, and then only up to 3/5ths of that black person (Missouri compromise, ratified 1820)?  

What does it mean when it takes constitutional amendments and a civil war to force acceptance of the full personhood of those defended from enslaved black African abductees?  The Dred Scott decision in 1857 in which Dred Scott and Harriet Robinson Scott sued for their freedom and lost at the Supreme Court, includes this language:  

A free negro of the African race, whose ancestors were brought to this country and sold as slaves, is not a "citizen" within the meaning of the Constitution of the United States.

The jurist who wrote the opinion bolstered his legal ruling using originalist reasoning:

When the Constitution was adopted, they were not regarded in any of the States as members of the community which constituted the State, and were nut numbered among its "people or citizen." Consequently, the special rights and immunities guarantied to citizens do not apply to them. And not being "citizens" within the meaning of the Constitution, they are not entitled to sue in that character in a court of the United States, and the Circuit Court has not jurisdiction in such a suit.

The only two clauses in the Constitution which point to this race, treat them as persons whom it was morally lawful to deal in as articles of property and to hold as slaves.

This case actually extinguished the minimal status afforded under the Missouri Compromise, status which merely resulted in greater representation for the white voting population of the effected territories.

Ultimately, the 13^th Amendment adopted in 1868 three years after the 4 year long Civil War resulted in the Scotts and their daughters escaping the status of enslaved persons, 22 years after the Scotts originally filed their suit in Missouri in 1846, although the Scotts were emancipated by a subsequent “owner” in 1857 and lived free from that time forward, apart from the not inconsiderable civil, commercial and personal consequences of being of African descent in the United States.

The Dred Scott decision is commonly held to be the worst case ever to come out of the United States Supreme Court. It’s craven logic was intended to put to rest the issue of enslavement in the country. Instead it stood as fodder for the incipient Civil War that followed four years later. 

It is interesting to consider that the Supreme Court has frequently sided with the worst of racism and bias in the US. Korematsu v. United States supported the forced internment citizens of Japanese descent and Japanese immigrants (never overturned) .  Plessy v. Ferguson advanced the separate but equal justification for segregation (overturned in Brown v Board of Education).  Forced sterilization of those perceived as intellectually disabled was endorsed in Buck v Bell, and presaged the popularity of eugenics in the United States and Nazi Germany (never explicitly overturned).

There are more examples of poorly reasoned Supreme Court cases throughout its history, some of which were overturned, some of which still stand. What is provocative about many of them is how the jurists stretched precedent, ignored it, or reached outside of the law altogether to justify a preferred result.  Bowers v Hardwick upholding an anti sodomy law was one such case, in which according to the dissent by Blackmun the majority opinion displayed an almost obsessive focus on homosexual activity. (overturned 17 years later in Lawrence v Texas).

Why am I thinking about these cases? Freud thought of nightmares as preparation for possible waking adversity. Maybe I am bracing for what may come out of the supreme court in for my remaining years.  Maybe taking comfort in what course corrections can occur.  

Although I imagine that followers of Roe v Wade and Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization; and Regents of California v Bakke and Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College and Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. University of North Carolina feel the same about those reversals as I do about the ones listed above. 

Anything could happen. It already has.

What are you doing tonight, Virgil Ortiz?

 I'm a little bit obsessed with a Cochiti Pueblo artist named Virgil Ortiz. There's a Vergil Ortiz out there too, but that's not my guy. He's a boxer. My guy spells his name differently, and he doesn't physically fight for a living.  My guy fights a battle using art.  His objectives are to illustrate and emphasize that his people are still present in modern times, not erased or subsumed in modernity, and also to preserve traditional Puebloan pottery techniques of shaping, ornamenting and processing clay.  Virgil is a sculptor, potter, film maker, photographer, textile designer and composer. He's written screenplays and  narratives for his many museum exhibitions. He has created masks, costumes, and weaponry. He works in clay, glass, plastic, metal, fabric and bytes of light.  He is a prolific creator and collaborator with other artists and artisans.

Virgil, a fervent science fiction fan, has created a world in which Cochiti Pueblo people from 2180 slip through time back to Cochiti Pueblo of 1680. In that year, in 1680, the Puebloan peoples united across many pueblos and with Navajo and Apache forces to expel the Spanish from their territories. It was a decisive and purgative revolt that returned those territories to the cultural, religious, military and political control of the original inhabitants.  

Virgil imagines an alliance through time of the 2180 and 1680 Puebloans both fighting to regain and secure their autonomy.  A character from his world named Tahu, the leader of a unit of blind archers most intrigues me. These women take part in Ortiz' reimagined 1680 Revolt, and ride the slipstream to 2180 to renew the battle in support of their descendants. 

So this early morning, call it tonight, I'm awake, holding my cat on my chest, listening to her purr, wheeze and ultimately fall asleep on my chest, and Ortiz floats up into my thoughts, as he does several times a year. He's like a classmate from long ago that I may wonder about from time to time, and times being what they are now, I go on-line to see what he's up to.  I land on a site for a Florida museum and learn he has had an exhibition there since October. It ends the day I fly into Fort Myers, Florida.  I begin to imagine changing my flight to one day earlier, landing 2.5 hours away from nowhere In a few weeks we will begin our winter vacation.  I want to spend hours immersed in his world, a world where colonialism has been beaten back, where the defeat weakens the colonial powers and they scurry back to their tiny European turfs, where they retract from their expansionist tendencies and humbly beg forgiveness of those in that hemisphere they have invaded and oppressed.  Fantasy.