Finding Religion
Another hateful lesson from my childhood was that religion was something social. In the fist of many instances where exploring the yawning chasm between theory and practice led to disillusionment with an institution, realizing at age 13 that nobody at my (quintessentially Canadian) church took the Bible or God's green Earth half as seriously as myself led to a declaration of atheism and refusal to continue attending at age 14. In some ways this might be considered the defining event marking the end of my childhood and set the tone for the subsequent Decade of Cynicism.
As is usually the way, separating myself from something was a precondition to obtaining a sane perspective on it, but this came only fitfully and with great pains. Cutting loose from that mooring at the start of the protracted storm that my high school years subsequently became might not have been a prudent strategic move in hindsight, but the upshot was that it freed my need to make sense of a senseless world to push down more fulfilling intellectual corridors. My first exposure to philosophy came soon after my apostasy, and could not have come in a more appropriate form: while browsing through the public library, my eyes happened to light on a copy of The Tao is Silent by Raymond Smullyan.
For those to whom the book and its author are familiar, no further explanation is necessary. For everyone else, Smullyan is Lewis Carroll's intellectual heir: a logician with a rare art for tantalizing young minds by dressing up deep paradox in beguilingly breezy prose -- someone for whom logic wasn't a subject matter but a religious practice, and who was never more serious than when he was being humorous (and vice versa). What made this book unique was that it was the rambling thoughts of someone with rigorous logical training inspired by a mystical philosophy -- not a combination you see every day.
Re-reading it now is not half as impressive as my recollection of the first time, but even so there are some subtle gems (delivered, as always, with a buffoonish nudge and wink) which my younger mind probably overlooked. On the other hand, it's shocking to come across a passage here and there which closely resembles my more recent thoughts -- enough to evoke wonder at the possibility that this is where they actually came from, and that what seemed like new understanding was really recollection of the long forgotten. But this is a digression for another time.
* * * * *
While we were hunting rabbits
I came upon a clear
The sky, its stars like fortune, drilled me
Until now I was a soldier
Until now I dealt in fear
These years of cloak and dagger
Have left us disappeared
-- Matthew Good, "While We Were Hunting Rabbits"
Having all the faith beaten out of one is not an experience that anyone who's gone through it can recommend. It sucks. It's painful. It makes you sad. It makes you paranoid and capricious. It makes you develop thick armor and a fast pistol hand. It makes you a jerk. Yes, it makes you stronger -- or perhaps more accurately, it forces you to decide how strong you want to be, among other informative things about yourself -- but it doesn't teach you how to use that strength. When you realize that you've developed the habit of of involuntarily pulverizing everything that gets too close too fast, that you've gotten used to fear being your default emotional interface with the world and its absence as exceptional, that the path between your thoughts and your actions has grown so convoluted that even you have a hard time connecting the dots between them, that you're going through life like a dog that's been kicked too many times -- well, what? What then?
Apparently you sit here staring at a blinking cursor for twenty minutes while all of this unintentional confession sinks in, not crying and knowing that not crying is yet another symptom. It's not emotional numbness; it's paralysis.
* * * * *
"For the atheist and sceptic, alas, all experience, however Biblical, is quite unreligious."
-- Conrad H. Roth
One of the few pieces of concrete, positive advice that Nassim Taleb doles out is that being a skeptic is psychically demanding, and so skepticism is best reserved for the things that make a big difference. He still goes to church now and then for aesthetic reasons -- he finds the smell of candles pleasantly calming -- without fussing over the doctrines. He has a point.
About a month ago, a performance of Rachmaninoff's All Night Vigil guided my steps into a church for the first time in several years -- and voluntarily into Church for the first time in my life. Sanctuary for an hour where the chaos was silenced by sublime genius, then once more unto the breach, but carrying something back out, too: the conviction that this is how it's supposed to be. When your mind is stuffed with facile jingles and bad poetry your thoughts will resemble them, and your life will limp right along after. The church music of my childhood consisted of, with a few exceptions, jingles disguised as hymns -- it was always the most loathsome part to endure, and that concert illuminated the reason.
* * * * *
"If the emperor adopts you, no one will be able to put up with your pretension; but knowing that you are the son of God, shouldn't your pride be that much greater?"
-- Epictetus, Discourses
In a phone conversation with regohemia a few weeks back, we were discussing Bruce-ness, and he shared a joke that served as an anchor for his conception of the phenomenon -- apologies if you've heard this one before.
A man goes hunting, and while he's out in the woods a bear sneaks up behind him. Before he can take a shot at the bear, it knocks the hunting rifle out of his hand, knocks him to the ground, then pins him down, tears off his pants and violates him, then leaves. After the shock wears off a bit, the guy goes back into town in a rage and purchases a pistol and an automatic rifle. He goes back out to the woods the next day and starts looking for the bear. Having no luck, he pauses for a while wondering what to do next -- and suddenly the bear comes out of the bushes, knocking the rifle away again. The man reaches for his pistol and takes a shot at the bear, but only hits it in the shoulder and just pisses it off. Before he can squeeze off another round the bear's already knocked him down, and once again tears off his pants, sodomizes him and leaves.
The dude, who is pretty much going apeshit at this point, manages to procure a goddamned grenade launcher and some body armor. Not only that, but he builds a bear-proof bunker out in the forest, complete with rations so that he can stay there until the damn thing is dead or he is. After being out there for a few days with no luck finding it, he returns to the bunker on the third night and is about to turn in for the evening when he hears a creaking sound behind him -- he'd forgotten to lock the door -- and before he can even turn around he's pinned down by enormous paws. He's bracing himself as he feels the familiar hot breath on the back of his neck again, when suddenly a voice in his ear growls, bemusedly: "You're not really in this for the hunting, are you?"
The world buzzes with the business -- that is, the pretensions -- of people who aren't in it for the hunting. Obvious forms of self-sabotage are only the tip of a very large iceberg: church mostly isn't about faith, medicine mostly isn't about health, politics mostly isn't about government, schooling mostly isn't about learning, work mostly isn't about making wealth, talking mostly isn't about communicating, and on and on. Reminding people that they have only one life isn't even strong enough to cut through the layers upon layers of soothing rationalization for not taking it by the balls. For that, Nietzsche's thought experiment is more potent: what if you had to live this life -- even this *moment* -- over and over again for eternity? Would you scream "no!" at the vision, or grin and say "yes!"? Or Nozick's thought in The Examined Life: what if, when you died, a universe were made in your image? What would it look like?
There are rudraksha beads around my neck, purchased not long after the aforementioned concert. There's nothing quite like a talisman. Still figuring out what this one means to me, but if nothing else holding it in my hand and running my fingers over the beads one by one is a focusing agent -- a reminder that there are only so many clicks on the odometer before you hit the end and have to go back around again. Eadem mutata resurgo. Again? Yes, again.
* * * * *
"I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things:-then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love from henceforth!"
-- Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (§276)
Self-respect is, in itself, futile. Respect for the world, including your place in it, is harder. The openness it requires is terrifying, but if you can feel the fear pass through you and just do it anyway, "where the fear has gone there will be nothing" -- only you'll still be there, changed but the same.
There's a terrible resistance in the space between faith and doubt, and how you close that gap determines the course of your life. There's always a war on, but you can't fight every battle at once; some things need to be held fixed so that others may vary. The battles that have to be fought next are not the ones of the past; to win them, your ideas about what's constant and what's variable need to be open to revision. Knowing when to let go is important, but so is knowing when to hang on, and what to hang onto.
Refactoring and recompiling. Finding my religion.