Generative Tension

When we speak of generative tension between "God" and "Earth," we need to ask several things about what we even mean in the terms of the statement.

Do we mean God and Earth or do we mean our conceptions of God and Earth, or both? For example, we might, through cultural norms and childhood training, conceive of God as an angry father figure. Then, we can address that conception with thoughts like: "I don't really believe that God is an angry father figure--at least, I don't want to really believe that--but the tendency to feel that way and think that way is deeply ingrained in my consciousness and subconsciousness." In such a case, we hold two separate conceptions of God. One is how we "naturally" conceive of God; and the other is how we would like to believe God is if, to allude to a gospel story, someone would help us with our doubt. This second conception, we could suggest, is what we think is "really" the case. Likewise, in speaking of the tension between God and Earth, we may have multiple conceptions of the relationship between them: We might conceive of God as having created earth and abandoned, of God having created it and then handed over to the devil, of God having created it and actively sustaining it with omnipresent spirit. And we can understand one conception to be "ingrained" in us and another to be "more accurate to reality." So not only do we have tension between God and Earth--for real and in our conceptions--but we have tension between conceptions of the tension.

I am influenced in my thinking about the term "generative tension"--which is actually a mode of thinking--by Joseph Harris. "Intellectual writers usually work not with simple antithesis (either x or not-x) but with positive opposing terms--that is, with words and values that don't contradict each other yet still exist in some real and ongoing tension" (Rewriting 25).

To arrive at a point of identifying a generative tension is to arrive halfway in terms of the intellectual and artistic process. Poets, perhaps, have an advantage in this as they are trained to look for puns and paradoxes, contradictions and connections. For someone with a conservative upbringing like myself (and I am being slightly hyperbolic here), to arrive at this tension means going from an understanding, in a sense, that "God" and "Earth" do contradict each other--whether a philosophical denial of the body in favor of the mind or a theological sense that "this place is fallen and is going to burn! we just got hang on until the rapture and the new earth!"--to a sense that they don't contradict each other and that the earth is indeed sacred. For someone like Oliver who begins with the sacredness of the earth, this may mean going from unproblematically identifying God with the earth to a realization that there is "some real and ongoing tension." Thirst wonderfully and beautifully described the tension and, perhaps, hints at the process Oliver took to arrive at it.

If identifying the generative tension is half of the intellectual (artistic, spiritual) process, the other half is maintaining the tension. We ask questions like: What are the positions each item in the tension have vis-a-vis each other? What does the tension mean? What can we make of it? What can be generated? And we explore answers to these, settling at times on tentative working answers, settling at times on resolutions to the tensions. This work is not ever done in this life. We don't need to work at it frantically but seriously and steadily: this doesn't mean without fun, for the work often proceeds in a certain kind of word play. The point is that the work has to do with living in the point of the tension: both exploring answers and letting questions remain. Thirst can be conceived as such work in that it articulates a sustained statement of the tension between God and Earth--and exploring some resolutions--but not dissolving the tension completely or permanently at any point in the present tense.

The third half, I suppose, is to let the tension go as dissolve into the non-duality of life and death. But there is the important work of living and loving on earth--where the tensions do exist--to be done before we dissolve. We should know about this "third half" so that we will know that the work of exploring the generative tension is not ultimate: we work while we can; on earth, in this world of illusions and disillusionment, we need to continue creating hope. But we can believe, at the same time, in yet another generative tension, that outside of "earth"--that is from "God's" perspective everything is already created. In Thirst we can find hints of this position as well.