Wednesday 10 August 2005

Pic of the day: I have from reliable sources that not even King Solomon was dressed as beautifully as the wild flowers. Even so, I am pretty sure I would rather be like Solomon than the flowers. Your mileage may vary, not least after reading this entry.

David, Solomon and I

I am not sure I hit the right color for this entry. I think it is more psychology than religion or biography, but if not, I apologize. To me, all things are a continuum, and indeed that is part of what I'm writing about.

My thoughts continued to work after I had watched the DVD movie about King Solomon. I already mentioned how great his mental wingspan was, stretching from romance to cynicism, from the mundane to the divine. Of course this is all so long ago that no scientist can tell how much is truth and how much is legend. The less religious the researcher, the more legend he finds. But that's beside the point today. I am talking about these people as archetypes. I am talking about how people regarded them in the centuries before the dawn of the Christian Era, when the Old Testament took its final, written form. I am talking about how they appear in the mind of those who read this later. Including me.

***

I thought about the far-reaching mind of Solomon, and then I remembered that David also ranged far. He was a warrior king and a poet, a devout worshiper of his God and also of female flesh. But there was one difference between him and Solomon, or so it appeared to me. And it was a pretty big difference, one that sets David apart from Solomon and me.

David moved from one extreme to another. Whether he killed or mourned, whether he worshiped, sinned or repented, he did it with all his heart. He gave everything he was into whatever he was doing at the moment. When he was a poet, he was completely a poet. When he was a warrior, he was it with all his heart. He was a man who lost himself in what he did. And in this there is a great purity which his son lacked.

Solomon held all these different sides of himself in his mind at all times. Such is the nature of wisdom, it seeks balance in all things. In his proverbs, he ranges from topic to topic effortlessly. His rule of the land was filled with compromise: For the good of his nation, he married heaps of foreign princesses and allowed them all to worship their own gods. Unlike David, he did not forget his own God for a while, but instead he gradually diluted what he had been in his youth. And while David could repent with all his heart and be done with it, Solomon had not this luxury. To repent would for him be just as painstakingly long a process as the dilution of his faith was in the first instance.

Perhaps we are all a David or a Solomon, or perhaps there are any number of in-between stages. I am very much Solomon: I forget only gradually, and all the sides of my life are connected in one large dome of knowledge that surrounds me on all sides. I could not lose myself in anything or anyone if my life depended on it. My awareness is always spread, a part of me always relating everything to everything else. Whether in pain or pleasure, only a part of me is actively participating; the rest is still hovering above on huge wings, seeing everything in perspective, detached.

***

Is one better than the other? Possibly. What is sure is that they are different. The two types of humans, David-type and Solomon-type, will not approach life in the same way, not see it in the same way. Solomon may understand David, but in a remote and clinically detached manner: He can never experience his vivid and intense life. David cannot understand Solomon at all, although he may be able to feel his heart.

There is surely more to say about this, but whether I shall say it in the future, or someone else, I do not know. I leave it here for you to think about, or let it lie. The choice is, as always, your own.