Religion

At my age, no idea but "God is my neighbor" is of any use.

Now, the world on fire, God and I must strive together to save it, this Kingdom of Heaven: our home.

An Open Letter

I write this letter in response to a text message I received last night from one of the most important people in my life. Of course at some level I'm writing this letter to myself. 

Dear ---,

          Love doesn't condemn, so it has no need to forgive. If you're worried about other people forgiving you—condemning you—then you have already condemned yourself, which is not my responsibility. I mean to say: I'm not to blame if you're worried about condemnation and forgiveness (the Law). It's not my place to condemn you or forgive, and if I imagine that it is, I haven't spent enough time in front of a mirror.

          If you're right about us and it's true that we condemn you, that's not your problem. Don't condemn us for our failure and, as a consequence, become like us.

          The Gospel—life—isn't about forgiveness. Too often we forget that fact and use a perverse obsession with guilt and innocence to justify ourselves. Mostly we do this because we want to control how people feel about us. My advice: don't worry about how we feel about you, and don't bother justifying yourself. You were justified before you were born. Or you never will be. It amounts to the same thing.

          I remind you of what you've taught me: Love doesn't accuse, it doesn't impose, it doesn't demand, it doesn't require. Love is or it is not—either way, with or without it, it  makes us free. Guilt, innocence, condemnation, forgiveness—those words belong to those of us who are enslaved by an attachment to the Law, which has never saved us and never will.

          For my part: I love you. In the freedom of my love for you, we live. Yes: not always, perhaps, to our liking. But our love for each other frees us from transforming our failures into sins.

          Jesus told Mary Magdelene: "Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more." The first clause contains the essence of Christian ethics. The second clause was not a commandment but a compassionate appeal. Jesus didn't forgive Mary: she had no need of forgiveness. She, like you, is beyond forgiveness. Together we all abide in the grace of love, free. Whether we know it or not.

Your ---,

Eric

Avengerology

Weakness is more interesting than strength.

Beauty is always unspent.

To be self-aware is to be other-unaware.

The dominatrix surrenders to her responsibility to dominate.

We respect the hero because he fights our mutual desire to watch the world burn.

A society pays for military progress with its intelligence.

What makes banter funny is its sadness.

A woman's legs render power, wealth, and narrative irrelevant.

When the heavens open, listen to the stars. Preferably one with an Academy Award.

A man in a suit is interesting insofar as he fails to be his suit.

To be violent is to commit suicide.

Lips are a window to the soul.

The common man is a child in need of protection.

Insects embody both the past and the future.

Heroes are slaves of their heroism.

Suffering's recompense is shawarma.

Music is redundant.

Is Nothing Sacred?

Americans understand that to a Muslim the Koran is sacred. What Americans don't understand is that to a Muslim a Koran is sacred.

The West has spent 2500 years desacralizing the world. What matters to the West is not a thing but the idea it represents.

For sentimental reasons a Christian might be upset by someone burning a Bible. But ultimately what matters to a Christian is not a Bible but its ideas. Copies of the Bible come and go. We use them as coasters for a cold can of beer in a Motel 6.

An individual Bible isn't sacred because, to the West, nothing material is sacred. Plato argued that to imagine the material world as sacred is folly—an exercise in futility. Material objects turn to dust. They burn. They cease to be. Better—far wiser—to value ideas, which are not subject to the vagaries of time and circumstance. A soldier with a match cannot destroy the thought in your head.

The history of Western culture can be summarized as the triumph of that idea.

We don't like to see people burn a flag, but we value the idea of freedom of speech more than we value a flag. Anyway, the flag is not America. America is what I think it is. As a material object in the world, there is nothing really, organically sacred about the cloth of a flag.

To a Muslim the physical world continues to be divided between the sacred and the profane. A Koran—every single Koran—is a sacred object. It is a divine manifestation. To burn it and throw it in a pile of trash is to treat God himself as trash. A Koran is important for its ideas, but it's equally important as a sacred object in the world, a persisting physical embodiment of the voice of God.

It's basically impossible for a modern Westerner to think of objects this way. There are no sacred places, no sacred objects. Our churches are tourist destinations. "Antique Roadshow" determines the real value of our family heirlooms. A girl's body sells soda pop.

And an Afghan Muslim can't think as as we do. The world is filled with sacred objects, sacred places. The family Koran, carefully wrapped in the finest silks, is a physical manifestation of God in the home. It is sacred; it pulses with the divine. A mosque isn't a tourist destination but the physical presence of heaven on earth. (A Mormon, with his restricted temples, his blessed undergarments, knows something about this kind of thinking.) A girl's body, like the Greek nymphs that preceded Plato's insurrection, is too sacred for a man to look upon without both the girl and the man being destroyed.

The West won't re-sanctify the world—at least not any time soon. Capitalism surpasses all previous revolutions in its indifference to the sacred. Love alone—including the body of the beloved—retains some hint of holiness. With the death of love we will complete Plato's assault upon the gods. Eros, it appears, will be the last of them to fall. And fall he will.

The Muslim world has taken another path. A Muslim treasures matter. A woman's hair. A book. An old pillar in the heart of dusty Mecca.

Today, contemplating the violence in Afghanistan, it's difficult to imagine our paths converging.

More than that: I'm not sure we want them to. After all, it's nice to know, if only for the purposes of nostalgia, that someone, somewhere, still thinks that something is sacred.

Libertarians of the World, Unite!

Some of my most interesting friends have been—are—libertarians. Yet many of them belong to fiercely regulated communities—often a religious community. In my life, for example, most of the libertarians I know are Mormon.

And from what I can tell they see no conflict between their distrust of democratic government and their trust in the intensely authoritarian, aggressively communal religions that govern their ethical and social lives.

And maybe there is no conflict.

Regardless, this apparent paradox leads me to believe that no one is a libertarian vis-à-vis the community by which they define themselves. Our primary communities will always feature robust regulation, a hierarchical structure built to maintain the rule of law, and a fierce repudiation of individualism. For just about all of us, our fealty to the community by which we define ourselves precedes our fealty to ourselves—including those of us who call ourselves libertarian.

So it could be that the difference between conservatives and liberals in this country is not political but social: for conservatives (and for libertarians in particular) a community other than the nation is their primary community; for liberals, the nation is their primary community.

This difference explains the radically different attitude toward government that distinguishes conservatives from liberals in this country.

Conservatives experience the nation as oppressive—as another community attempting to displace their primary community. They seek to avoid that displacement by weakening the nation to the point that it no longer represents a threat to the roles played in their lives by their primary community.

Liberals, on the other hand, experience the nation as their primary community and want to strengthen it to the point that it can do what a conservative's primary community already does: function as a viable social world that provides for the safety, health, and stability that all human beings need to flourish.

A Wounded Crow

I'm a boy in Chalmers, Indiana, in my neighbor's tree-house, looking across cornfields at an approaching storm. As I watching, a phalanx of black clouds begins to turn upon itself. The rain, no longer falling, circulates. A tearing sky howls.

Abruptly, the horizon disappears behind a rising wall of earth. With a roar, storm is consuming the world.

~

The Greek gods didn't reflect the Law but the world's wildness. Nature, to the Greek eye, literally embodied the Divine; to be divine was, fundamentally, to be wild.

In response to the mystery of wildness, Greek art invented tragedy and comedy, which turned wildness into an aesthetic principle. Through the alchemy of poetry, wildness became fate—which is to say: it became beautiful.

Surrounded, then, by beautiful gods, humanity occupied a place within the world that was, for many centuries, both dignified and jocular.

~

Over time, however, nature's gods disappeared, driven away—humiliated—by the One God of the Book. Nature no longer embodied divinity but was subject to it. Man (who invents and then mimics his saviors) was not longer natural—no longer wild—but master of nature and servant of God. The purpose of life was not to live beautifully but to live obediently, productively: to save oneself, in other words, from wildness.

The world's transition from a pantheon of wild gods to a single, law-giving God made possible the triumph of metaphysics and the emergence of civilized life, with its hopefulness, its (relative) tranquility, its quests for meaning, its devotion to abstractions. Of course all these ambitions, before the infinite silence of the stars, are absurd: the universe does not hope, or quest, or sprout seeds of goodness. The only invention that could disguise the absurdity of ideas was an even greater absurdity: the omniscient, omnipresent, all-powerful Father of monotheism. God justifies the absurdity of hope (for example) by rendering all existence absurd. God's absurdity displaced Zeus's wildness and made possible the majesty of history.

~

To use the word "absurd"—to call, for instance, the God of the Bible "absurd"—seems like a provocation. But I mean it as a tribute. Absurdity is, after all, the only conceivable response to wildness. Faced with nature's intractable, incontrovertible, non-negotiable wildness, we build the Great Wall of the Absurd, which is every bit as intractable, incontrovertible, and non-negotiable. By this means we survive. Thanks, for instance, to the absurdity of a crucified God, we acquire the immortality that the Greeks once acquired through song.

In this regard, absurdity is compassionate. Absurdity repudiates the amoral, raging, mute cruelty of the natural world with the moral, communicative, attentive compassion of God.

~

Death, not wildness, made God necessary. Death is neither absurd nor wild; it has no value; it abides beyond language, beyond sense. Against its awesome valuelessness both wildness and absurdity come into relief. Death proves that existence is real.

Death is to life what the zero is to mathematics. By standing outside of mathematics, the zero makes mathematics possible. Death does the same for life.

~

If you appreciate justice, equality, hope, compassion, pity, order, the idea of evil—in short, if you are a meta-physician—then you are a disciple of the absurd. Absurdity is humanity's great triumph, its highest invention.

But it's human, all too human, and despite its momentous consolations, absurdity does not attract us. We find it repellent. We appreciate its significance; we depend upon its stability to counter the world's ongoing wildness; but fundamentally we do not desire it. We desire wildness.

Thoreau understood the essence of desire when he wrote, "In literature, it is only the wild that attracts us."

What's true of literature is true of everything. Only wildness attracts, ever.

Thoreau is properly understood as the father of modern environmentalism; "Walking" is the modern era's first yearning for the wild gods' return to the world.

~

The God of the Book has never truly been worshiped. Monotheism requires violent coercion because it demands that we desire the undesirable, that we worship the absurd. An executed God asks us to sacrifice what we most love—wildness—in order to live forever.

As we approach death—real, valueless death—this sacrifice appears to make sense. In this regard, monotheism is the revenge of death upon life.

~

Now, after 2000 years, we are crushed by the Law. We're tired of monotheism's coercions. We're tired of the tamed world's ugliness. We miss the gods—with Thoreau, we yearn for their wildness. We want god-embodying nature back.

Kafka saw this yearning before anyone else: Absurdity, once our Great Wall, has become our prison. Absurdity's immortality is no longer worth its cost; immortality without wildness isn't salvation but murder.

~

Yesterday, driving along Homestead Ave in Sunnyvale, I saw a wounded crow bouncing its way across the road. It could no longer fly. Two cars passed over it without killing it. Flailing its wings, it hopped up onto the sidewalk and into the grass. Quickly it disappeared into some bushes under a tree.

Again, Thoreau: "In Wildness is the preservation of the world."

The best way to summon the gods back to the world is to love what embodies them. A worshipful attitude toward our planet must be, upon pain of extinction, the essence of our religious lives.

Yes, absurdity rescued us from the banality of death. But we now must rescue ourselves from our rescuer, replacing the good with the beautiful, the law with a song.

Thorology

The gods want to be human; we want to be gods. Coming together, we comprehend that we are indistinguishable.

The artist's hammer belongs to those who no longer seek it. Creativity belongs to those who release themselves to fate. The hammer doesn't exist prior to its use.

Like us, the gods don't distinguish between the beautiful and the divine.

To live beautifully is to forget the illusion of the self.

To live beautifully is to hear, "She's waiting for you"—and turn towards the abyss.

The art is in what the artifact wasn't supposed to be.

Women embody the tragic helplessness of wisdom. In this regard both women and wisdom are god-like. To be divine is to be helpless.

Beauty doesn't exist that's not helplessly beautiful.

We want to be helpless before the spectacle. To the artist we say: "Render me helpless, like you."

To be grateful is to dissolve.

Welcome to Brutalism

It was one of those tossed-off comments that made François Camoin such a great teacher: "The next phase of the novel is going to be post-Romanticism, if you want to give it a name."

We'd been talking in class about postmodernism, its relation to Robbe-Grillet and the nouveau roman, to earlier modernism—all of that. But we, the young writers, didn't want to know where we'd been (modernism) or where we were (postmodernism); we wanted to know where we were going. We wanted to take the novel to its destiny.

That was thirteen years ago, and we now know that François was right. Welcome to the post-Romantic era. Welcome to the Age of Brutalism.

~

It's one of the ironies of history that Romanticism arose from Voltaire, the scientific method, and the Industrial Revolution.

Voltaire incinerated Enlightenment optimism and, in Candide, left us one of literature's great portraits of the meaninglessness of life.

Science materialized the planet and our bodies in a manner unknown to the West since the pre-Socratic era.

And the Industrial Revolution introduced into our aesthetic lives the metaphor of the machine. (We know from history that we become our metaphors.)

No one foresaw the dangerous implications of these revolutions as dramatically as Sade, who carried them to their logical conclusion: life is nothing; systematically steal from it what pleasure you can, by any means necessary.

Sade constituted a kind of endgame for the novel at the end of the eighteenth century (despite being a supremely tedious writer). He created, for other artists, a genuine dilemma: How does one respond to the logical case for sodomizing children for fun?

It was necessary, in other words, to imagine a way out of Philosophy in the Bedroom. That way, cleared first by the Germans, came to be called Romanticism.

But—to paraphrase John Barth—Romanticism is exhausted. We once again stand with Voltaire in the ruins of Lisbon. To that horror we add Oppenheimer in the ashes of Hiroshima and Robert Downey Jr. in his Ironman suit.

To put it another way: we're back in Sade's bedroom.

~

Roberto Bolaño's 2666 inaugurates a new era in literary art. I'm calling that era the Age of Brutalism.

Unlike modernist and postmodernist novels, which are, in essence, romantic, 2666 doesn't deny the reality of Sade's bedroom. (Exhibit A: Bolaño's novel within his novel: 'The Part About the Crimes.") But it's Sade's bedroom seen without Romanticism's delusions. We see Sade through the clarity of mourning, and with sad relief.

What gives Brutalism its pathos—what makes Brutalism art—is its awareness that all our songs (they still echo across the canyons of memory), all our political exercises, all our romantic odes to love and the human spirit failed to save those sodomized little girls. Sade still stands over them with a shrug. And it's his shrug—the sense of its inevitability, exacerbated by the philosophical failures of the last 200 years—that sends us back to language.

Brutalism is the representation and the contemplation of the Sadean shrug. That shrug, according to Bolaño, is "the secret of the world." Literature must rise to its challenge.

Brutalism recognizes that the rhetoric and the philosophical content of Romanticism have failed to rid of the world of Sade's shrug. Romanticism—after the Holocaust, after Cuidad Juarez—is an evasion. Religion? Ni hablar. Science? Sade is nothing if not a scientist.

Confronted by Romanticism's failure, Brutalism takes a new path—I'm not just thinking of Bolaño but also of Michel Houellebecq—employing the rhetoric of Sade against itself. Brutalist art is characterized by its emphasis on explicit sex and extreme violence, Voltairian cynicism, scientific and academic discourse, misogyny disguised as adoration, satire, and a cold delight in insult, which it constructs as a mode of honesty.

Brutalism's ambition seems to be, at least in part, to undermine Sade by appropriating his discourse. To defuse the bomb by blowing it up.

It's an open question if this will work. The great risk, of course, is that one becomes what one hopes to destroy. Another problem is that we're no longer sure what we're rescuing. The idea of love? Human dignity? Promethean hope?

Regardless, there's something in Bolaño, and perhaps even in Houellebecq, that's not in Sade, yet not Romantic. For all their brutalism, there's something other than a shrug at the sight of a sodomized child; and there's something other than a Blue Flower.

That new thing might be our future. It might be what fills the void left by the end of the soul.

The Storm of Life

August in Indiana—we're on Hwy 43, heading north from Lafayette, through cornfields, toward Chalmers. I'm eight years old and I've just been baptized. My hair is wet on the collar of my white Sunday shirt.

In the back seat I'm thinking, I'm completely pure.

That night, as on most nights, I fight with my brother. As soon as I surface from the mild hysteria of our brawling, I realize, That was my first sin!

And I  rush to my bedroom and kneel next to my bed. Speaking aloud, my arms folded across my chest, my eyes closed, I tell God, "Please forgive me for fighting with Jared."

I end the prayer and stand up. But I don't feel quite the same.

Really, since that day, I've never felt quite the same.

~

But I've always—even now—yearned to. I've yearned for the same all-encompassing whiteness of that August afternoon: the white jumpsuit I wore; Dad in white, in the water, waiting, and taking my hand, and receiving me into his arms; and then announcing the baptismal oath above me; and my brother and sisters kneeling beside the font, watching; and Mom, so proud, her tears—a young woman, not yet thirty—as she looked with joy at her son, at me.

Under I went. The water received me, closed over me. I clutched my dad's arms and he drew me up into air. And I could feel my purity: I was—for the first and last time—indisputably pure. In other words, at that instant, for that moment, I was, I thought, what I'm supposed to be.

~

The thing that most white people imagine that they can salvage from the storm of life is, really, in sum, their innocence. . . . I am afraid that most of the white people I have ever known impressed me as being in the grip of a weird nostalgia, dreaming of a vanished state of security and order, against which dream, unfailingly and unconsciously, they tested and very often lost their lives.

— James Baldwin, "The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy"

If I remember correctly, I was actually baptized on my eighth birthday: August 2, 1975. I share that birthday with James Baldwin, who was born in Harlem on August 2, 1924. There are additional similarities: we are both first sons of large families; we both grew up in intensely religious homes; we both had—have, in my case—bewilderingly powerful fathers; we both decided as adolescents that we wanted to be writers; and not long after we'd entered adulthood we wandered from the faiths of our families.

I care about all of this because no single author has shocked me with insight as consistently as Baldwin. Very rarely, in all my years of reading, has a sentence changed my life—changed, I mean to say, my orientation toward my own behavior. Baldwin's sentences have done that not once but many times.

So during the past few months I've gone back to him the manner that my dad might turn to his Bible. By dumb luck I came across what Baldwin has to say about white America's attachment to innocence.

~

I tell her: But this! And you, this!

The children have fled to their bedrooms.

No! she says, this! And not this! That!

I understand myself. We always understand ourselves.

The door, the sky, the ocean air.

Later, alone, in exile, I write: Don't forget this.

I'm in pursuit of my innocence. Again I'm that boy—lustrously blond, wearing his embarrassing glasses, his teeth misshapen by years of sucking his thumb—running to his bedroom to retrieve what belongs to him, what he's been promised. 

~

A man who was once my prophet, Brigham Young, claimed that Africans are descendants of the murderer Cain: “Cain slew his brother . . . and the Lord put a mark upon him, which is the flat nose and black skin."

Thirty years ago, I found that idea reasonable. After all, I read The Book of Mormon before I was seven, in preparation for my baptism, and, time and again, it had linked righteousness—by which it meant innocence—to fair skin. To be dark was—is—a de facto sign of guilt in God's eyes.

I see now that in this regard Mormonism is merely American. This country has always connected, at the level of essence, skin color and soul.

But Baldwin didn't need a prophet or a book to tell him he was guilty. He had the policeman's stare, the boss's disdain, the banker's fear, the librarian's condescension, and his father's relentless bitterness. Guilt, James Baldwin knew, was his birthright. No one tells us more poignantly how this myth of inherent guilt is black America's curse.

White America's curse is its opposite: the myth of our congenital innocence.

~

I can't remember a time in my life when I haven't spent a tremendous amount of energy maintaining—for myself, most of all—the myth of my innocence. Eric the Good; Eric the Well-intentioned; Eric, Guardian of Star-crossed Memories and What-Should-Have-Been, But for This World. Eric the Misunderstood.

Over the years, I've had no better proof of my innocence than my failures.

I've built my life upon this poetic contradiction, simply because it's allowed me to imagine that, fundamentally, I don't fail. The world fails. Other people fail. And my faultless heart is stymied by their practical, coldhearted cynicism.

Or: confronted by the reality of their pain, my contrition, forgiveness, cleansing, and justification occur with the arrival of my first tear. To weep is my moment of truth—proof of my return to innocence.

~

Now, maybe too late, I see that what Baldwin calls the "dream" of my innocence is destroying me. I'm breaking myself to pieces against it. There's no forgiveness, no cleansing, no renewal; there's the storm of life. The rain, the wind, the nostalgic shafts of sunlight—everything comes and goes, unceasingly. Nothing is ever—can ever be—undone.

~

I'm not the only white American to wonder why black Americans often seem so free. Lawlessly free, really—so lawless that their freedom seems to reinforce our belief in their guilt.

It hadn't occurred to me until reading Baldwin that they're free because they don't care about being innocent. By declaring them innately guilty, we freed them from the burden of devoting their lives to a myth of purity. Their freedom from innocence is what we mean—what they mean, too—when we say, They don't give a fuck.

Of course it's true that a good many of them—perhaps a majority of them, including Baldwin's father—destroy themselves raging against the myth of their guilt. Baldwin spent his adult life warning against the bitter futility of that fight. It's futile, of course, because it's a fight with a lie.

But the African-Americans who have succeeded in rejecting the myth of black guilt have given this country it's richest glimpse, up to now, of real freedom. Mournful freedom, yes—freedom in the key of the blues. But real freedom. I shiver to think of this country without it.

~

Which brings me, as always, back to myself.

Looking at my own life, and listening to Baldwin talk about his, has led me, over the past few weeks, to this conclusion: the myth of white innocence and the myth of black guilt are equally lethal. They end in delusion, in cruelty, in bitter despair.

I'm neither innocent nor guilty; I'm a man soaked—baptized—and windblown by the storm of life. I have no reason to repent because I've never been innocent. There's no holiness I can hope to return to. There's no guilt that I need to purge.

Through the maelstrom, I can hear singing. It's the free singing of people who don't believe in their innocence, don't care about guilt. It's the free singing of people who understand love.

~

Freeze that wet-haired boy in the back of his father's car. Sit next to him, put your arm around his shoulders, and tell him: "Kid, it's like this."

He'll listen. He's curious and he has, like every eight year old, an honest heart. And he knows about storms. He sees them coming all the time across the fields of high corn. Sometimes he receives them with laughter, arms up, soaked to the skin.

"This Is This"

At Sam's basketball practice last night, standing next to the bleachers and doing all I could to avoid being drawn into a conversation with another parent, I read, "The Science of Why We Don't Believe Science."

And finally I was freed of my soapbox.

The article makes it clear—as if I needed proof—that human beings don't care about facts.

Instead, we care about values.

It's what we value, not what we know, that constitutes our identity. Our values shape our ideas of community, our purpose in life, our search for the admiration of those we love, our physical safety, the means by which we exercise power in the world.

Around our values we construct whatever system of "knowledge" we need to assure their survival. The legitimacy of that system isn't a consequence of how factual it is but of how effectively it reinforces what we hold dear.

In the Age of Science, it's likely religion that gives us the best example of the conflict between values and facts.

Most people of faith sense, however vaguely, that if they were to spend ten minutes objectively researching the history of their religion, they'd run up against facts that they can't reconcile with their values. So, instead of doing the research, they devote a lifetime—yes, a lifetime!—to a system of knowledge that can be eviscerated by ten minutes of scientific or historical research.

But they don't shun the research because they're afraid of the facts. They shun the research because they don't care about facts. Really, they don't—bottom line—believe in facts. They believe in what they value; they believe in safeguarding, by any means necessary, the structure, immanently fragile, of their identity.

Their identity is real. It's not a fact: it's alive.

So it doesn't matter if this or that prophet was, speaking factually, a philandering scam-artist. What matters are friends, family, community, connectedness, personal charisma, prestige, one's personae. The "fact" that the prophet wasn't a philandering scam-artist makes all of that possible.

In the end, you know, calling him a philandering scam-artist won't help anyone through the valley of the shadow of death.

So back to my comment on the soapbox.

I've just spent a few days revising my blog. Rereading it, I was struck, more than anything, by its futility. It's changed no one's mind, and never will. People—this is a scientific fact—don't really listen, unless they need to, unless they already believe what you're saying.

Better that I share how much I like eating a tangerine while I'm sitting in the sun, it's thin skin peeled and stacked in a little pile next to my chair, ready for ants.

The breeze comes and goes according to a wilderness of facts that I can't begin to understand. The air smells of traffic.

And I'm thinking of how much I've lost, and of the facts I've needed to explain those losses, if only to myself.

A mallard pair, duck and drake, fly over head, their long necks extended, symbols of grace. They drop into the aqueduct behind my uncle's house.

Passing clouds intermittently dull the sun's brilliance.

The planet is warming. That's a fact. The church is not true. That's a fact. Our nation's wealth is consolidating into the hands of a tiny minority. That's a fact. It's a beautiful morning; this tangerine is delicious; and I wait in brutal, exquisite solitude. All facts. Which of them matters to you?

If You're Painting, You're Not a Painter

I am determined, even when I shall be much more master of my brush than I am now — to go on telling people methodically that I cannot paint.

— Vincent Van Gogh

Absence of Mind, by Marilynne Robinson

On a wire outside my window a hawk scans the wet fields. The rain is gone and the storm's last winds ruffle the feathers on its chest. Its head clicks left. Time dilates. It's not wrong to say that the hawk is as large as what it sees.

At some point, according to an inclination that I take some pleasure in imagining, it will fall into the sky with the same leisurely ferocity that humanity has envied in the hawk since we first encountered one another. It will open into metaphysics.

Show me a scientific understanding of that hawk and I'll show you a travesty of reductionism. Of course it's accurate that its eyes are made of molecules; that its breath heats the air just so; that its wings move the vortices of the wind. Its vision, if your curious, = x.

But science has no equation for the hawk's experience of itself. Less yet does it have language for our encounter, this Saturday afternoon.

The modern error is to address that absence, that insufficiency, by supposing that anything science can't measure doesn't, in the end, exist. Both the hawk and my thoughts are molecules, fundamentally identical to the wire upon which the hawk stands, the air on which it floats, the chair—all atoms—that I'm sitting on. The hawk's flesh is an arrangement of atoms warmed by other atoms, which I perceive as extraordinary hair.

In Absence of Mind, Marilynne Robinson writes: "Whoever controls the definition of mind controls the definition of humankind itself, and culture, and history." Through much of this book she laments our current willingness to hand over that definition to science, which promptly defines it as mind = brain.

If you don't respond to mind = brain with sadness, with skepticism, even—better yet—with terror, then you might not be interested in this book. But if you feel, as I do, that "the advance of science has impoverished modern experience," and that the insufficiency of science in the face of life's most compelling questions is, paradoxically, part of what makes science worthwhile, then I suggest you read Robinson.

But start with her novels. They swirl with hawks.

Capitalism

I only wanted one bag of Ranch-flavored Corn Nuts. But when the first bag didn't fall, I was forced to either lose my dollar or buy a second bag.

My bug is someone's feature.

Notes on Virginia Woolf

White ashes on my brown corduroys. The sun strikes my bare chest.

A bee on the white picnic table appears to be dying. Maybe it's drinking the paint. Its abdomen in the sunlight is the color of my Newcastle.

The bee falls, or flies, into the grass.

Behind me, my old neighbors attend to their garden. By way of its bounty they continue to live. Their hope resides in the vegetables' tenacity, in the general relentlessness of life, as certain after its fashion as death.

Tomorrow, I will transform. I will arrive at a new self by attempting a hopeless return to youth.

In the mean-time I release the top button of my corduroys, to give this man's belly some room.

The dog, Maggie, will be dead in a matter of weeks. Her eyes, looking up from her little face, which she rests on her paws, say: "I am dying." This expression I translate as: Help.

I pour her some water and for a while she drinks greedily. In the same action one can see hope and hopelessness.

Conundrums

Must all the good things in life do battle between themselves?

• Love with Peace
• Memory with Time
• Abundance with Simplicity
• Joy with Rest
• Freedom with Stability
• Youth with Innocence
• Exuberance with Wisdom
• Secrecy with Knowledge
• Privacy with Integrity
• Passion with Tranquility
• Sophistication with Purity
• Beauty with Reason
• Desire with Contentedness
• Inquiry with Faith
• Curiosity with Tradition
• Comedy with Elegance
• Lust with Composure
• Action with Idea
• Strength with Compassion
• Bravery with Humility
• Decisiveness with Patience

And on and on, the irreconcilable dilemmas of life, which are not struggles between good and evil but, to paraphrase an idea from Isaiah Berlin, between two goods. That's where life is lived—or lost.

Pale Blue Dot

My father sent this to me today. It's his kind of wisdom—of a genre that I've been inestimably lucky to have in my life.

True Religion

In my experience, most religious practice is self-idolatrous. By this I mean to say that most actively religious people don't worship God but themselves.

This self-idolatry takes many forms, not least among them the invention of a God who is a essentially a grandiose version of oneself: warm, loving eyes; a wise beard; a dulcet voice, etc.

But self-idolatry takes far more destructive forms than God as Wonderful Man. Its most awful consequence is that it turns a person away from others and toward the self. Self-idolatry encourages us to worry about our salvation, to focus on our progress along the narrow path to God. This self-involvement, sanctified and promoted by our esteemed religious leaders (case in point: Joel Osteen), leads us to think that we are, in effect, the source of our own salvation—that our religious destiny is not primarily the salvation of others but the perfection of ourselves.

The most obvious symptom of this anti-religious self-involvement is the link that American Christianity (in basically all its iterations) makes between one's material prosperity and one's status in the eyes of God. If one is self-idolatrous, it makes perfect sense to obsess about one's own perfection. And in America, there is no perfection—perhaps there's no person—without money. We've become convinced that the way to become more god-like is to be prosperous: riches are proof of personal excellence. Thus one's religious life becomes, in effect, an ongoing act of self-promotion. Most religion today, at least in America, is nothing more than a life of material and spiritual onanism.

I know the onanism well. I practiced it through my adolescence and well into adulthood. No doubt I continue to practice it. The greatest benefit I received for my years of practice is that I know how to spot it, if not avoid it.

So the question presents itself: What's the fix to this pervasive self-idolatry, which goes (wrongly) by the name of "religion"?

Since writing "The Religious Catastrophe," I've enjoyed an email exchange with some family members, and they've asked me about my current idea of a truly religious life. By responding to them here, as I've promised to do, I'll likely give the impression that I actually have an answer that's fixed, or fully reasoned, or by which I live. That impression would be false. I don't know what I think. At most I know just what I've said, that self-idolatry is not religion.

Nevertheless, I will suggest a few tentative principles that strike me as reasonable. They arise primarily from the problematic but transcendent ideas set forth in Matthew 25, when Jesus takes the first great commandant—to love God—and the second great commandment—to love one's neighbor—and says, in effect: They are the same commandment. The only way that we have to love God is to love each other. More succinctly: Your neighbor IS GOD.

That principle—and all that it implies ethically, politically, spiritually, materially—is my religion. Experiencing that principle as a true description of who God is and how God exists is my idea of true religion.

So understanding what Jesus means by our "neighbor" becomes our most pressing religious problem. In my view, one's neighbors would include, of course, the illegal residents of Arizona. I'll restrain myself from yet another diatribe against contemporary American right-wing hate-mongering. It's enough to note that the attitude toward those unlike oneself that permeates this country is absolutely a symptom of self-idolatry. If we take Jesus at his word in Matthew 25, our present treatment of illegal aliens is not just unconstitutional but unethical—particularly if one claims to be Christian.

I'd like to see the bumper sticker: Illegal Aliens Are Jesus.

I'll close by recommending a book. I recently finished reading Saving God: Religion after Idolatry, by Mark Johnson, having bought it because I thought by it's title that I detected a kindred spirit. I was proved right. Saving God is sometimes painfully dense—by which I mean overburdened by highly specialized jargon—but reading it is worth the work. It very nicely describes our ongoing struggle with self-idolatry, the ways that ritualized and dogmatic religious attitudes prevent us from approaching God, and the ultimate truth of all religious searching, which is: You live among God; be kind.

Here is but one of many worthwhile passages from the book:

Idolatry [meaning, for instance, the display and worship of idols, the rituals and demands of the priesthood, promises of an after-life, and the threat of the Apocalypse] is, then, invariably the attempt to evade or ignore the demanding core of true religion: radical self-abandonment to the Divine as manifested in the turn toward others and toward objective reality. (24, my emphasis)

I provide that quote as a hint of what's to be found in this fascinating and carefully argued book.

It's also a hint of where I am these days, at least intellectually, still a follower myself, I'm sorry to say, of the religion of self-idolatry. But I'm a follower who hopes to turn from his foolish ways. And hope, as Prometheus knew, is what keeps us going.

Idiots, Continued

In The Big Short, Michael Lewis paraphrases Charlie Munger, a former partner of Warren Buffet: If you want to predict how people will behave, look at their incentives.

So the stupidity of Wall Street can be explained by the stupidity of its incentives. In effect, the employees of Bear Stearns were paid to not know what they were doing. What should have been plainly obvious was precisely what they refused to see.

In the short term, their stupidity made sense: it was making them rich. But in the long term, it destroyed their company, and a lot of other companies, and deeply wounded the economies and the stability of world civilization.

Idiots?

Yes. But idiots like all of us.

Idiots like the ideologues on the right and on the left who simply refuse to listen to anyone they might disagree with. They have sacrificed their curiosity in pursuit of incentives which, as they see it, their ideology protects.

Idiots like the religious folks—including the atheists—who won't listen to a scientist or an historian or a theologian who might challenge their own convictions, for fear of what they might learn.

Idiots like all of us, sacrificing our curiosity on the altar of our incentives.

This type of sacrifice is easy to explain. I lived it, and live it still. Like the millionaires on Wall Street, I've guarded my incentives by refusing to learn anything that might threaten them. For more than half my life, for example, I didn't want to learn the truth about Mormon history. I was aggressively incurious about it.

But consider my incentives! Love and acceptance by family and friends, membership in a (now) global community, intensive schooling, the years of my youth given to the cause . . . those incentives were my identity. Together they made up a concept of myself that discouraged me, even forbade me, from learning things that might threaten it. Then who would I be?

For the first 25 years of my life, those incentives were decisive. I clung to my incuriosity—the same kind of incuriosity Lewis discovered on Wall Street—and I enjoyed formidable benefits. Only now, too late, can I see that I suffered uncounted losses.

In my late twenties, when the incentives changed, I changed with them, and I changed what I learned to justify the pursuit of my new incentives.

Voilà: a fews hours with some original Mormon documents (now available in seconds online) showed me that much of what I'd learned about early Mormon history was either an outright or radically distorted. A few months studying evolution and physics transformed my ideas about my body and the universe. A few years spent reading history's great theologians (and not a collection of goodhearted provincial businessmen) reconstructed my understanding of religion, ethics, and the nature of faith.

The point's made easily enough. Friends and family members don't read this blog because it says things they don't want to hear. They have, as they see it, no incentive to listen, and many incentives not to listen. I'm guilty of the same incuriosity. I have no interest in their religious literature, their political emails, in the accounts of their children's baptisms.

In the end, the idiocy of Wall Street is our idiocy. The only way to overcome it is to ask ourselves: Are the incentives we're pursuing worth the death of our curiosity?

For the gamblers on Wall Street, the cost is now easy to assess. For us? Perhaps more difficult.

The Value of Secrecy

In a man's life, there are moments of which he can speak and moments of which he cannot speak.

The world will try to draw from him especially those moments of which he cannot speak. And ultimately his idea of himself—his actual self-esteem—will depend upon his ability to give to the world what belongs to the world and to keep for himself what belongs to him.

The Religious Catastrophe

The non-believer doesn't object to belief; he objects to certainty.

When a child is told that he knows what he doesn't know, the child bypasses an essential stage in the development of his humanity. Substituting the security of knowledge for the authenticity of experience, the child never learns confusion, wonder, curiosity, doubt. He never enjoys an awareness of his own stupidity. That awareness softens a person, humbles him, and gives him the sense of humor that will permit him the kinds of recklessness (intellectual, physical, emotional) from which he can acquire wisdom.

From that recklessness he might also acquire a religious sensibility grounded in humility, which is a prerequisite for kindness, the stated goal of all religions, everywhere. (The Dalai Lama: "My religion is very simple. My religion is kindness.")

The religious catastrophe—a catastrophe, too, for religion—is that men learn to think they know what they don't know. So they don't know how it feels to actually know something, how it feels to love knowledge.

As a result, they see knowledge as a source of power instead of a source of delight, and they turn on the world, intent upon making everyone else into mirrors of themselves, crusading slaves of certainty.