361. I was thinking yesterday of how these thoughts have circled around the sun, since they have circled around a year. That invisible ring -- ellipse though it is -- struck me as a metaphor for commitment. Tracing the commitment, trying it on for size, or --better-- trying to articulate it.
I believe commitment's the place love grows, not in eros, nor in charity. Eros is arbitrary, and charity is judgmental. Both are ocular -- ways of seeing. The lover in Diotima's speech sees the beautiful in the other, falls in love (or out of love). Christ sees everyone pass in front of Him on the day of judgment, and has charity. The neighbor overlooks the sins of his fellow. Even Augustine, who heard love inside him, wrestled with vision, which overtook in his mind the reality of his experience, which is that love appeared in his conscience inside him, testament of a relationship that is invisible and born and grown of commitment. if you doubt this, listen to Kierkegaard, for whom love (in Either / Or, v. II) becomes the kind of thing it is only after one has committed oneself to the relationship.
In our "globalized" (awful sounding word -- so rushed and manufactured!) culture of speed -- info-bytes and short-term clocks on everyone from the statesman to the street activist -- commitment's a thing that makes little sense in the texture of the public symbols of everyday life. Of course, it is there, relatively incognito both behind those who manage a perfected success in some zone of scarce status and behind normal folks: every couple, every hard working person of a cause, or just of a job waged for some basic good for oneself or for family. It's there, of course, because if it weren't, our world would fall apart much more than it already is doing. (An interesting reflection: how commitment also leads to the destruction of our world -- for instance, when managers are committed to their private gain and so shut out and then overrun the common good, outstripping or depleting our global environmental commons. For the most part, though, all this kind of example shows is how we need to work seriously on the right kinds of commitments -- or on articulating new ones that are healthier in terms of the common good.)
How to develop commitment in new areas, or to work out a commitment when we don't yet know the practice that would allow us to know the commitment --- these are difficult things. Things for spiritual exercise. They are worth trying out through experiments in living over the course of a year. (Tarkovski was a funny -- but clever-- fellow (cf. 66). For the insignificant repetition forges an incognito meaning through commitment, and this steadies the structure of our worlds against the rush of disconnected ephemera -- provides clarity which cannot but affect our judgment and our action.)
