How slippery the paths on which you set them; you make them slide to destruction. How suddenly they come to their ruin, wiped out, destroyed by terrors. Like a dream one wakes from, O Lord, when you wake you dismiss them as phantoms.
— Psalm (72)73: 18-20 (Inclusive Grail translation)
Those set on such slippery paths and sliding down to destruction are all those who lay claim to power. They are those who posture pompously as though they were powerful, so posing themselves to others but also and above all to themselves. Despite all their posturing and posing, however, they are the very weakest of the weak, if truth be told. Could they but be honest, they would be forced to admit that they do not even succeed in fooling themselves with all their grand costumes and customs.
In contrast, whoever intones the above lines of Psalm (72)73 with full understanding and appreciation has awakened from dreams along with “the Lord,” and accordingly dismisses all such foolish posers, such pompously posturing impostors, as no more than phantoms of dreams—nightmare figures at worst.
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author (n.): mid-14c., auctor, autour, autor "father, creator, one who brings about, one who makes or creates" someone or something, from Old French auctor, acteor "author, originator, creator, instigator" (12c., Modern French auteur) and directly from Latin auctor "promoter, producer, father, progenitor; builder, founder; trustworthy writer, authority; historian; performer, doer; responsible person, teacher," literally "one who causes to grow," agent noun from auctus, past participle of augere "to increase," from PIE root *aug (1) "to increase.”
— Online Etymology Dictionary
Those who truly have authority feel no need to claim it. Only those who lack authority feel any need to claim it.
Genuine authority speaks for itself. It does not need to be propped up with any certificates, degrees, or other credentials. It justifies itself by speaking justly, proves its truth by speaking truly. In its humble honesty, it resounds loudly in all ears that have been opened to hear it.
There’s the rub!
The rub is that to hear the voice of genuine authority, as opposed to the voice of what falsely lays claim to authority, one’s ears must have been opened.
However, there, too, is the healing of the very same rub.
In all our distraction, there comes to us from time to time a call from the very margins of all our preoccupations. It is a call to stop all our busy-ness and just to listen, no more.
When we do just that, nothing more—just listen, free and apart from all distractions by our own apparently all-important central interests and concerns—then suddenly, in “the still, small voice” to which Elijah finally attends, we hear genuine authority speaking. That is the quiet, undemanding voice of an authority that always and only speaks our liberation from all the chains with which those who lay claim to authority would distract and bind us.
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Beyond all this, there was a vivid conviction regarding the importance of the world’s margins for the development of alternative ideas at the moment of universal revolution. [. . .]
— Claudio Lomnitz, Neustra América: My Family in the Vertigo of Translation
The impotence of all those who lay claim to authority reveals itself in their ever-ongoing efforts to concentrate their forces. Such concentration incapacitates whatever comes under its sway. Far from inviting and inducing growth, as all genuine authority does, such self-concentrating pseudo-authority uproots whatever grows. It strangles growth.
It is never in what claim to be centers of power that true power — which always em-powers, always creates, always “causes to grow” rather than strangling all growth — lies. Never in such presumptuous centralization can one find any of the authority that always accompanies true power. It is always and only in the margins of such centralization that one can find genuine power and authority. It is always and only there, in the margins of all centralized systems, that the freedom to grow becomes central. Only from the margins does the still, small voice call to us all.
That is the centrality of the margins.
Life is there.
Nuclear power-plant cooling towers (Wikipedia)
NOTE TO READERS: After this post I will be taking my regular holiday break. My next post is planned for January 10 of next year (2022).