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.