Late-Night Metaphysics

Remember those chain letters that appeared in email boxes almost as soon as email existed?  The ones that threatened misfortune, death, or eternal loneliness if you didn’t send them on to ten people in the next hour?  Don’t worry, they still exist, just in less vicious forms.  I was recently pulled into one on facebook, and so here I am, responding to a friend of mine who was ranting about a comment from an article which was ranting about the ranting response of many Christians to the suspension of Phil Robertson from his show “Duck Dynasty”. 

Go ahead and take a moment to digest the syntax of that last sentence.  I’ll wait.

Confusing, right?  I admit that I got lost in most of the wandering of the chain.  Both pieces I read—the last two “links”, if you will—were enjoyable and had some excellent points, and both had some lines that I skipped over, because it’s been a long day and I don’t have much energy for theology and metaphysics.  But the one that has me hooking myself onto the end came from my friend’s rant via facebook.  She wrote (originally in all caps, but I don’t want to scream at you):

            Words are life.  Or death.  And your heart speaks that life.  Or death.  Words kill.  Words                 bring things into being.  Scripture says God made the world that way.  He created us in his 

            own  image; He gave us all languages, and the ability to communicate our thoughts and 

            feelings to each other.  Therefore, words are important.  They can move the very heart of 

            God through prayer.  They can change the world.

As a writer, I’m inclined to agree with her—words are my business, my daily bread.  But there’s more to it than that.  I would argue that it’s not necessarily words that have the power she speaks of, the power to “move the very heart of God.”  I myself hardly ever pray in words.  My prayer is either music, or it is a wordless reaching out, trying to connect myself emotionally to a greater presence.  That is the power that we possess, the power that comes from human consciousness; words are simply a near-physical manifestation of it.

That being said, I agree with her wholeheartedly.  Our ability to communicate—to speak, to sing, to argue, to rant—is what sets us apart from the rest of the world.  It is what makes it possible for us to build our own tiny worlds in our heads, worlds that we call “selves.”  It is what makes it possible for us to reach out from those tiny worlds and get a glimpse of what someone else’s microcosm identity looks like.  That is the true power of words—to connect us to one another and to the greater meaning in the universe around us. 

Again, a bit much for me to digest at 11:42 PM.  But it’s thinking about this kind of thing that leaves me with a sense of wonder at being alive, and that’s never a bad thing.  Honestly, I don’t think we human beings don’t spend enough time doing that: not only being grateful to be alive, but grateful that we know that we’re alive.

I Have No Answer

The other day, I was running late for work.  It was one of those mornings when you just feel very slow and dull, when you don’t want to do anything at all.  So I was running behind, and I went out to see a mover’s truck blocking my usual exit from the apartment.  Unwilling to wait for the truck to move, I went out the farther exit, only to see that traffic was being held up there, too.  I remember how I groaned; What now? I thought.  And then I saw.

There was a deer in the center of the road, half on, half off its feet.  At first, I couldn’t see why it didn’t just get up and run away, but as it struggled to get onto its front legs, it turned around and I could see that its back legs were both broken.  One of them dragged across the pavement at an impossible angle.

I don’t know how long I sat motionless in my car, watching the poor thing’s futile struggle.  Even when I did drive away, I watched in my rearview mirror, seeing the cars edging round the poor dying thing on their way to work. 

I thought about it on and off all day.  It must have been in so much pain, and so afraid.  There was absolutely nothing I could have done to help it, either to fix what had been done or even to end its misery.  Even if there had been, I’m not sure I would have done it, as it would have involved stopping my car in the middle of a busy intersection.  People are usually not very understanding of that sort of thing.

I don’t know what happened to the deer—by the end of the day, I had forgotten to look for any sign of it by the road, and there was nothing left the following morning.  And honestly, what I want to say about this.  Am I angry at being a species which has come so far from our natures that we pretend this kind of thing doesn’t happen, that we turn our eyes away?  Do I admire the creature that had so much desperation to live that it continued to fight, even at that helpless, hopeless moment?  Or am I simply made sad by the pointlessness of it all?  All of the above, but the last most of all, I think.  I like to believe that there is meaning and significance to life, and I spend a lot of my time looking for it.  But there is nothing I can do to give purpose to a young creature’s lonely suffering and slow death.  Why does this happen?

This Is a Test

All people deal in metaphors.  It is a unique capacity of human brains to make connections between disparate things.  We use them to make sense of the world, the people in it, and ourselves.  Writers are particularly good at this.  I know I spend a lot of my time considering the connections of the world, and my current position in life makes life itself one of the objects I try to compare to other things.  Life is a pain in my heel which comes and goes.  My hair doesn’t listen to me, wanders in every direction, and takes lots of work without much return, but sometimes it just falls neatly into place—like life.  And life is a test.  That last one has been on my mind all week.  It makes me think of myself sitting at a desk, pencil tapping, my feet swinging—and yes, my feet did swing occasionally into high school and even college.  They still do, and I’m still laboring over the test.

When you’re a kid, that test is true-false.  You’re given a question that is the answer, and you just have to say whether it’s right or not.  Join the soccer team?  Yes.  Go out for the musical?  No.  Camp again this summer, or take a trip instead?  The choices you make are simple, with low-risk, and often you’re told what the answer is or what is should be.

As you grow older, getting into college and beyond, those questions become multiple choice.  Do you major in A) chemistry, B) theatre, or C) education?  Will you go to A) Chicago, B) New York, C) Tokyo, or D) back home to live with your parents?  Should I A) stay at my minimum-wage job where I’m relatively happy, B) look for a better-paying, perhaps higher-stress job, or C) start trying to freelance in what I really want to do (throwing myself out there with no net—how’s that for a metaphor)?  At this point, you know the choices, and maybe all of them are right in some way.  But as every obnoxious test directs us to do, you have to choose the one that is most right.  Good luck on figuring that one out.

So what happens later in life?  When the earth stops shifting under your feet—if it ever does—and your choices are no longer life-changing?  Well, I can only guess, as I haven’t been there yet, but I like to think that at that point, life becomes an essay question.  Most of my peers hated essay questions, growing up.  They were the ones that required the most work, the greatest knowledge.  But I always liked them.  They gave me a chance to fully explain my position, the best chance for me to say what I thought and why I thought that was right.   At that point, if you explain your position well and use a strong argument, you can get points even for an answer that isn’t the best. 

That is what I want for the life I’m going to build.  Even if it isn’t everything I hope it will be, even if I struggle and have to give an answer I may not have expected, I hope that I will always have the eloquence and the wisdom to pass the test.  

In the Eye of the Beholder

Driving around on my errands today, I was looking in my rearview mirror, and I saw the mist curling over the mountains, putting out tendrils like hands and shrouding the gray-blue slopes with white.  I thought, I am so lucky to live in a place where, even on a day like this, where the rain is indecisive and the air is thick with moisture, there is still beauty.

But then I started to think about it.  Really, is there any place on earth that does not have beauty of its own?  

The desert, where earth is stripped bare and its essential colors shown, and life is rare and precious. The ocean, where the water becomes white foam on the shore and darkens the sand to a silvery gleam.  The forest, where the sunlight turns the trees into emeralds and gold, and the leaves coat the ground in a carpet of renewing life.  Even the city, with its lights and colors, and the sunlight on the glass and steel.

It really is true, that beauty is in the eye of the beholder.  The trick of seeing beauty around us is to be a beholder, to be someone who is looking for beauty.  If you don’t ever look up, if you always keep your eyes on the ground, you will see nothing but mud, nothing but concrete, nothing but the scuffs on your toes.  But if you look up, then the sky is always there, and the world is beautiful, and we are all lucky to live here.