Communion

            It’s the unreasoned responses that tell us most about ourselves, and incite us to introspection. 

            I mean “unreasoned” in two senses: first, we do not think before we act, and second, there is, at first blush, no explanation for why we did precisely what we did. 

            And I think those experiences are a window on the soul for manifold reasons: we don’t see them coming, and so we have no chance to grab honesty by the collar and talk loudly over our embarrassing inner child, hushing him with harsh hands all the while.  Reflection really is that surprised parent, not realizing the child’s absence until he’s off making trouble, and when it catches up it has to make sense of things.  And that breathless mix of shame and confusion is where self-knowledge is synthesized.

            I know this because I just had one of the most relieving experiences of my life—at least of this new period of my life, where reason and emotions reel anew each day in the newness of the physical and intellectual space, and where the mind sees as much distance ahead as the eye in this beautiful, haunting, daunting moonscape.  The past few months of my life have been a background of creative starvation punctuated by the dry rancor of loneliness, shot through from all directions with intellectual rigor that demands one’s soul on a platter with near nothing in return.  I am growing though, so let’s not dally on the way to enigma.

            Today I went to church—to a Catholic church, though I’m not Catholic—after a weekend with family and girlfriend, a brief pause in the bleached onslaught of reading after reading.  I think my mind shut off this weekend—just refused to work.  Like the well-published and respected philosopher they found drunk off his ass in his office one night, and toted off to jail, and his disgusted philosopher-wife refused to bail him out, and they got a divorce.  Like the countless intellectuals, burning bright at beginnings, that either check out in time and spend quiet lives washing windows of inner wealth, or burn out into the oblivion of near-mental illness, only to keep inflicting hollow masterpieces on the ever-more-apathetic graduate students of the world. 

(Ah, the grotesque gorging of the self-deceived creative spirit.)

            The end of the service is communion, and as I sat waiting for the Catholics to commune and be done with it, I glanced to my right and saw a professor from my department, a red-blooded Kantian to the core, walking back up the aisle, head slightly bowed, lips straight, hands pressed into prayer at his chest, like a child with a firefly, and then out the doors, skipping out early—the devil—and he was gone. 

            I can’t quite formulate why this had such a stirring effect on me—as it did, as I inwardly cheered, fist-pumping, for nothing, for nothing, for the three-quarters-fabricated feeling of camaraderie I felt sitting alone on a pew.  Was I merely reassured that true devotion is possible in the upper echelons of a discipline sometimes hostile to an ad hoc-delineated definition of irrationality?  That, of course, plays a part.  More, though: anxiety over whether my dream-laden goals can come true—to actually care about my students, to believe that academia can be salvaged from irrelevance, that the university has not found and eradicated the last corner of purity, of the ideal, of true learning and growth—that anxiety has been eating me upwards, spurred on by cynical professors and the malice (laced with despair) of ambition at every turn.

            Yet I get the same feeling when a quiet colleague sneaks a beer into the office, when the error-immune academic admits with a grin that he doesn't know something, when a professor just-too-fondly shows me pictures of his dogs—in short, when the human spirit moves, and I infer life amid death.  Then I know that self-centered ambition and the impersonators of meaning have not crushed that scintillating, sometimes-silent thing that makes us laugh, that makes us laugh and laugh, laugh so hard at the absurdity of life that our cheeks cramp and we fall on the ground or stumble down a maze of streets under the orange glow of streetlamps, not giving a damn for direction.  

Grace

            The authentic religious impulse has just been validated for me, after a month or more of whitewashed inner withering, the soul’s incessant second guessing.  I still never see it coming—vindication of scientific theories and God’s possession of personality. 

            Here’s the deal: I’ve been stoking the compassionate impulse for months now—a new city, beautiful apostasy from the old self’s defaulted accrual, that autumnal feeling of urgency with one’s novelty in the world—and it simply hasn’t worked.  I’ve consistently ended every day feeling as if my mark has been lost on the world—or worse, that the mark was made in someone else’s name.  For there’s a sour side to the urgency of alienation from one’s surroundings, predecessor to the weary relinquishment of one’s presence in the world: discouragement seeps from every smallest crack made in one’s attempt at change, whether of oneself or others. 

            But today something slipped into place: God is deeply active, and surprisingly so.  The intersection of 1 John and a million of life’s grinning contradictions—I was riding my bike home from school when it hit me: there can be no love without knowledge of love.  (Surely it is best put simply, but the modern in me wants to slap the blunt apostle.)  We cannot convey life if we are not actively experiencing life, for we cannot give what we do not have. 

            And on and on I go, turning the sharp little thing in my mind, ultimately never figuring it out.  But surely this makes sense—surely we would not be calculating the distance between our lover’s lips as our hearts beat blisters for the next brush of skin on skin.   

 

Ramble-Tamble

            The natural response to an environment hostile to one’s creativity is to create—and yet, the creation is strained, limited to bemoaning the wasted remains of one’s subject matter, one’s spirit and drive.  Bad times make us narcissists. 

            And there is a certain tragedy to that; one of the few instances where a call from youth’s cloud kingdoms of idealization seems the only move to make, and a healthy reconciliation with a necessary reality.  Yet the fact seems to be that there is a point of suffering where we are unable to transcend ourselves.   And that is…what?  Sad? 

            Yet there are gems in the jam.  How about this: the fact that suffering impedes transcendence of one’s concrete situation, of one’s very self, implies that if transcendence follows upon normal, healthy conditions, then transcendence is part of the proper functioning of the human being.  And of course this is no necessary conclusion, folks, but as long as I’m preaching to an empty auditorium, I can relinquish academic neuroticism. 

            And here we have Exhibit A versus Exhibit B, optimism versus pessimism: for to many embittered brow-beaters out there, a concentration camp entails the negation of faith, grounds for eternal expulsion of optimism or hope.  That’s a plausible inference—more of an emotional reaction, though.  The problem of evil in this guise means for many that if there is any situation that temporarily precludes faith, then faith can never be.  It’s a delusion, a wet dream, a perfect example of someone who is more clever than himself. 

            But why, the writer begs, is this a necessary conclusion?  What is so wrong with saying that we live in a tragic world, deal with it? 

            Well, perhaps God, if he existed, could have made a non-tragic world.  I have never been fully affected (relative to the normal reaction) by this argument.  And why?  Because hope endures all things, my friends, and after all these considerations the question remains the same: do you choose to believe even still that God is?  Because come on, folks, this little argument from evil couldn’t have been your first bitch-fit with the world—and if it means your fall from faith, I smell a little intellectual pretense. 

            To recognize the human condition at its most basic is to realize that we know almost nothing, and that things are not always as they seem.  If this does not allow faith in the presence of evil, then I’m out of suggestions. 

            And by the very bootstrap act of creativity here performed, I have proved myself wrong.  Thank you.