Looks like the accidental theologist is on her way to becoming the accidental ontologist. Story of what I’ve been up to this past year or two to come, but meanwhile, here’s a hint of where I’m going, just published in The Stranger (yes, The Stranger!) with this great illustration:
(Note to self: got to get a pair of glasses like those.)
“But what’s wrong with dying?” I asked a fan of the ‘end-to-ageing’ movement. And the question led to this TEDxSeattle talk, where I explore what it’d really be like to live forever. I swear it’s the last TED talk I’ll do (too hard on both time and the nerves), but it’s probably the most fun one (the audience laughing so much I began laughing along with them, which is a strict TED no-no).
And now, time to knuckle down and find out if I can write the new book I’m thinking of writing and truly don’t know if I can write, which is why I’m not talking about it yet…
I hated the tears. Hated the helplessness of them. Two weeks after the U.S. election, and they were still coming. And then a friend emailed me saying “I’d love to treat you to a poem just written by a brilliant young woman I know.”
It was signed only with initials: e.c.c. I had no idea who e.c.c. was. But I knew the moment I saw the first lines that this what I needed. Enough with the tears. This spirited slam poem had me cheering. It’s what got me moving again.
REVENGE
Since you mention it, I think I will start that race war.
I could’ve swung either way, but now I’m definitely spending
the next 4 years converting your daughters to lesbianism;
I’m gonna eat all your guns. Swallow them lock stock and barrel
and spit bullet casings onto the dinner table;I’ll give birth to an army of mixed-race babies
with fathers from every continent and genders to outnumber the stars
My legion of multiracial babies will be intersectional as fuck
and your swastikas will not be enough to save you,because real talk, you didn’t stop the future from coming.
You just delayed our coronation.
We have the same deviant haircuts we had yesterday;
we are still getting gay-married like nobody’s business
because it’s still nobody’s business;
there’s a Muslim kid in Kansas who has already written the schematic
for the robot that will steal your job in manufacturing.
And that robot? Will also be gay, so get used to it:we didn’t manifest the mountain by speaking its name,
the buildings here are not on your side just because
you make them spray-painted accomplices.
These walls do not have genders and they all think you suck.
Even the earth found common ground with us in the way
you bootstrap across us both.Oh yeah: there will be signs, and rainbow-colored drum circles,
and folks arguing ideology until even I want to punch them
but I won’t, because they’re my family,
in that blood-of-the-covenant sense.
If you’ve never loved someone like that
you cannot outwaltz us, we have all the good dancers anyway.I’ll confess I don’t know if I’m alive right now;
I haven’t heard my heart beat in days,
I keep holding my breath for the moment the plane goes down
and I have to save enough oxygen to get my friends through.
But I finally found the argument against suicide and it’s us.
We’re the effigies that haunt America’s nights harder
the longer they spend burning us,
we are scaring the shit out of people by spreading,
by refusing to die: what are we but a fire?
We know everything we do is so the kids after us
will be able to follow something towards safety;
what can I call us but lighthouse,Of course I’m terrified. Of course I’m a shroud.
And of course it’s not fair but rest assured,
anxious America, you brought your fists to a glitter fight.
This is a taco truck rally and all you have is cole slaw.
You cannot deport our minds; we won’t
hold funerals for our potential. We have always been
what makes America great.
And who is e.c.c? She’s Elisa Chavez, co-organizer of the Rain City Slam. Three weeks later, she’d bring down the house at Town Hall Seattle with her performance of this poem, doing for 900 others what she did for me. And yes, I post the poem here with her permission, in the hope that it does for you what it did for me as we move into the New Year: with spirit, with resolve, and dammit, with joy. — Lesley
Just posted on YouTube: my TEDSummit talk on what we really talk about when we talk about soul.
This was in Banff, in June, and here it is, unedited. Which I love, because you get to see it raw, gaffes and all:
And yes, of course, if the spirit takes you (as it were), share and pass it on!
What American voters did this week is obscene.
But no, it did not come as a surprise. A shock, yes, to see it actually unfold. But a surprise, no. It’s not as though the short history of democracy has always favored the angels. Or as though the human capacity for resentment, bigotry, and sheer dumbness is any less than it always has been. Or as though people ever tell the truth to pollsters.
But still, we hoped that sanity would prevail. And for now, that hope is shattered.
Here in Seattle, we’re a deep blue island on the edge of a vast ocean of red. There’s a heavy silence in the air, as though the whole city is in mourning. And indeed that’s the word I keep hearing. Take the time to mourn so that we can recover from the shock, we’re told. Work our way through Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s five stages of grief. “Heal.”
Humbug, more like it. We’re being psycho-babbled into resignation.
Those five stages of grief? They’re denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.
But I am not in denial. I will make no bargains with monstrosity. I totally refuse the luxury of depression or despair. And please just pull the plug on me if I ever accept this vile travesty of a human being as the 45th president of the United States.
That leaves anger. And this is not a comfortable place to be. Anger eats at you; it’s toxic. But then that is the hallmark of the man who is now the president-elect.
I’ve felt that toxicity seeping into me over the past few months. Felt my temper shortening; my tolerance for disagreement diminishing; my language — as a writer! — reduced to spitting, spluttering outrage.
Sounds like I could do with some healing? No. Please don’t even think of telling me that this is the time for that. Try telling it to the people who will now methodically dismantle every step towards progress made over the past eight years. Go ahead, just try. They’re laughing at you already.
Which leaves the option of… leaving. We joked about that. Canada, Costa Rica, Iceland, Malta, New Zealand? We amused ourselves by toying with possibilities in after-dinner conversation, indulged in fantasy, knowing — or thinking we knew — that it would never come to that.
And it hasn’t. Because I’m damned if I’ll leave. Damned if I’ll give up. Damned if I’ll be driven out by bigotry and stupidity.
I will stay. We all will — all the plurality of voters who saw a Democrat win the popular vote but lose the election for the second time in twenty years.
We, the majority, will take this country back again. And if the price to be paid is years of anger, I for one am willing to pay it. Because while anger may be toxic, resignation is far more so.
Resignation only enables foulness. And for those who give in to it, it erodes self-respect, and leads to the paralysis of helplessness, even of despair. We can afford none of that.
The United States has elected bad presidents before, and we have paid the price in what is monstrously called “blood and treasure” — as have others. But never has as god-awful a candidate as this one been elected. So the very least we owe ourselves — and others — is to dig our heels in, do our damnedest to limit the damage, and however long it takes, make sure it never happens again.
The word “psychopath” gets tossed around a lot.
So it occurred to me to check out how it’s defined in psychiatry.
I began with this piece in ‘Psychology Today,’ and went on to check out the Psychopathy Checklist (PCL-R) and the Psychopathic Personality Inventory (PPI).
Here are the chief 15 psychiatric symptoms, every one of which is markedly present in the Republican nominee for president of the United States:
1. Callousness
2. Absence of remorse or shame
3. Externalization of blame
4. Glibness
5. Conning others for personal profit or pleasure
6. Outlandish lying
7. Grandiose sense of self-worth
8. Boastfulness
9. Pathological egocentricity
10. Inability to modulate responses
11. Parasitic lifestyle
12. Low tolerance for frustration
13. High irritability
14. High aggressiveness
15. Indifference to plans
Here is what amazes me: A presidential candidate displays every sign of psychopathy. That is, of a severe and dangerous personality disorder. Every single sign. He is, in fact, a classic case. And yet so far as I know, no psychiatrist has yet said this publicly.
President Obama just called Trump “unfit” to serve as president. That’s a gentle word. “Unfit” could mean simply unsuited, or not a good fit. But what it really means, in this case, is sick.
It’s rather like the emperor’s new clothes, isn’t it? The Republican nominee shows every sign of being in dire need of psychiatric treatment. And yet nobody says so.
Two of my favorite words, ‘mischievous’ and ‘vital,’ side by side in a lovely New York Times review of the agnostic manifesto in this coming Sunday’s Book Review section. It is so good to know you’ve been read so well!
Here it is:
Agnostics have it rough in American culture; their refusal to take a stand has a whiff of cowardice or laziness. But in Hazleton’s mischievous, vital new book, the term represents a positive orientation toward life all its own, one that embraces both science and mystery, and values the immediate joys of life.
Fully aware that a manifesto of a non-creed is a contradiction in terms, Hazleton nevertheless takes on the task with considerable gusto, insisting that “the absence of an ‘ultimate’ meaning of life — a grand, overarching explanation of everything — does not render life empty of relevance.”
She proceeds though a number of the big questions or themes where she finds herself feeling most agnostic: the anthropomorphizing of God, the suspicion of doubt, the conflation of faith and belief, the characterization of ‘a soul’ as something that can be either ‘lost’ or ‘found.’
In each of her wide-ranging reflections, Hazleton nimbly avoids the “danger… of entering chicken-soup-for-the-soul territory” and the pitfalls of being ‘spiritual’: “The tag feels too nebulous and at the same time too self-congratulatory.” Instead, she remains intimately grounded and engaged in our human, day-to-day life.
———
And here I am being grounded and engaged last week with a great audience at Creative Mornings Seattle:
“Sitting still is our workplace, sometimes our battlefield.” That’s a quote from Pico Iyer, and I was asked to respond to it any way I wanted. Here’s what came out:
I envy cormorants. I live on a houseboat — a shack on a raft, floating on a lake just north of downtown Seattle — and watch them from my office window as they hunt for fish. And I play a kind of one-sided game with them, trying to predict when they’ll dive.
I’d do far better playing the lottery.
They’re not like cats. There’s no staring fixedly at a succulent piece of prey. No tensed, quivering muscles crouched in preparation for the pounce. Cormorants are craftier than that. They feign absolute indifference.
They’re so still that I don’t even see them appear. I look up from the keyboard and there one is, settled in the water as though it’s always been there and I just never happened to notice before. It’s not looking around; in fact it’s not moving at all. I look closely, waiting for a sign. Anything that could tell me it’s spotted prey. But no, nothing.
I know that at some point, at some split second, it’ll dive, but try as I might, I can never predict exactly when. There’s not so much as a twitch, not even a barely detectable swivel of the curved neck or shiver of the feathers. Not the slightest sign. Yet one moment it’s there, and then faster than I can blink, it’s gone: an elegant head-first dive, as fluid as the water itself, so quick that I’m never quite sure if I actually saw it or just re-created it in my mind. There’s hardly even a ripple to indicate where it went under.
I wait, holding my breath as I search the water, trying to predict when and where it’ll surface. I never succeed. A radius of forty feet, maybe, and some thirty seconds at a time — that’s as close as I can get. I focus on one spot, convinced that this time I have it, only for something to register in my peripheral vision and see it already surfaced, a fish in its beak. A quick upward toss of the head and the fish is gone. And then once more, that calm, almost eerily patient stillness, and me at my desk, watching, as still as the bird.
And then comes the dive with no surface that I can see. The cormorant’s moved on. The water seems oddly empty, and I feel very alone.
I wrote that maybe a month ago, and have only just realized that I haven’t seen a single cormorant since then…
————————————————-
A few years back, I was returning to Jerusalem from Ramallah via the Qalandia checkpoint. “Checkpoint” is a euphemism. This isn’t merely a couple of Israeli soldiers checking your ID. Instead, you pass through a series of turnstiles, concrete barriers, barbed-wire tunnels that act as elongated cages, two-way mirrors, and of course X-ray machines. You are surveilled, re-surveilled, and surveilled again. No words are used. You are waved on not by hand, but by gun — a semi-automatic at groin level, indicating this way or that.
Halfway along the barbed-wire tunnel, I heard a gun being cocked close by, to my right. Startled, I looked over.
The gun was in the arms of a female soldier, flushed and giggling as a male soldier embraced her suggestively from behind, his arms around both her and the gun. She caught my glance and held it. “Look all you like,” she seemed to be saying. “We could strip down and have sex right here in front of you, and there’s not a damn thing you could do about it.”
And she was right.
This was, I knew, the most trivial of events. It was nothing compared to what I’d already seen, and not even worth noting to Palestinians, who have to put up with far worse. Yet it stays with me because I cannot forget that look. I might as well have been a dog.
“The humiliation machine,” Ben Ehrenreich calls it in his new book, The Way To The Spring: Life And Death In Palestine. And it indeed works with machinelike effectiveness. “How do Palestinians stand it?” I kept asking later. “How do you stay human in the face of those who see you as inhuman?”
These are the very questions Ehrenreich answers in this rare book of reportage from inside the Palestinian experience of occupation. And he does so with truly amazing grace and control.
There’s a hint of how he does it when he mentions a European solidarity activist newly arrived in Palestine and “still sparkling with outrage; it would mellow, I knew, into a sustained, wounded simmer.” Ehrenreich opts for calm instead of outrage, the simmer instead of the boil. And that makes his writing all the more powerful. He doesn’t indulge in his own righteousness — or in anyone else’s, for that matter. “My concern is with what keeps people going when everything appears to be lost,” he says in the preface, “what it means to hold on, to decline to consent to one’s own eradication, to fight actively or through deceptively simple acts of refusal against powers far stronger than oneself.”
What he is not doing, he emphasizes, is trying to “explain” Palestinians, or to speak for them. Instead, living on and off in Ramallah and Hebron from 2011 to 2014 — from just after the “Arab spring” through to the devastating bombardment of Gaza — he allows people and events to speak for themselves, and the Palestinians he lives with are striking not for their anger, but for their determination; not for their despair, but for their resilience.
“People in Hebron use the word ‘normal’ a lot,” he reports. What counts as normal there? Being shot at; the screaming of someone being beaten by soldiers; having settlers throw Molotov cocktails at your house; schoolchildren being tear-gassed; “administrative detention” (no charge, no trial); having your ID taken by a soldier at a checkpoint who keeps it for hours just because he can; having urine and feces thrown at you by settlers. Day in, day out — indeed hour in, hour out — a ceaseless barrage of harassment at best, outright violence at worst.
The details are all here. It’s worth knowing, for instance, that “rubber bullets” are in fact rubber-coated steel bullets, each one the size of a marble, capable of breaking bones and gouging flesh (and increasingly replaced by live bullets anyway). Or that a tear-gas canister fired in your face will kill you. But these are only part of “the almost infinitely complex system of control” exercised by Israel over the West Bank — ” the entire vast mechanism of uncertainty, dispossession, and humiliation which… has sustained Israeli rule by curtailing the possibilities, and frequently the duration, of Palestinian lives.”
In punitive raids, random doors are burst open in the middle of the night, belongings ransacked, the contents of the pantry poured out on the floor, anyone offering so much as a word of protest beaten and arrested. The purpose? A clear message: this house is not yours, this land is not yours, your person is not yours.
As a community-center volunteer held (and tortured) for three months put it: “If they could take the air from us, they would.”
The statistics are here too if you need them. Forty percent of Palestinian males have been in Israeli prison at least once, and even those sent to trial were at the mercy of a military court system with a 99.74% conviction rate. The same military has an indictment rate of 1.4% against soldiers accused of misconduct. And all the while, “settlements” — huge suburbs and townships — have been expanded; construction more than doubled in 2014, and jumped another 40% last year.
Palestinians have now been pushed from nearly 60% of the West Bank. With effective leadership systematically broken up, assassinated, or imprisoned, leaving only the venally corrupt Palestinian Authority, that percentage seems destined only to increase as Israel asserts “complete and irrevocable” control. And yet, as Ehrenreich shows, “ordinary” people stubbornly refuse to submit.
There’s no pontificating in this book — no offering of blandly confident “solutions.” I have none to put forward either, especially in this US election season when even Bernie Sanders’ mealy-mouthed statement that ” we need to be able to say that Netanyahu is not always right” is regarded as a daring political stance, a marvel of honesty and insight.
What I can say is this: if you really do want honesty and insight, read The Way to the Spring.
———–
“Some people get queasy,” I’d been warned. Hah, not me! I put on the headset, hopped on the stationary bike, and was delighted to find myself back on a racetrack (even if only on two wheels instead of four): a good road track, winding up and down and around sharp corners, with high desert mountains to either side. The harder I pedaled, the faster I went. And to steer, all I had to do was lean this way or that, much like in a kayak.
I went fast — whoopin’ and hollerin’, freed of all responsibility by the knowledge that none of this was real. And yet I couldn’t help acting as though it was. So much so that when I realized I was about to crash into a mountainside, I braked as hard as I could, and tried to dismount.
I guess I stepped off a bit too soon, because as soon as my foot touched the ground, I suddenly, deliriously, had zero sense of balance. I was halfway to the ground when I found out that there’s much to be said for being caught in real arms when your brain’s been deceived into unreality.
It was my friend Susie Lee’s fault (that’s her here on the bike, about to get queasy). A leading art-and-tech maven, she’d whisked me off to SIFFx, the new VR offshoot of the Seattle International Film Festival. We’d wandered in to Vulcan Technology’s ad hoc lab, where they were working on test displays in situ — a playful defiance of perfectibility that I hadn’t expected, and found quite admirable.
“This is creepy,” I said as I generously offered myself up as a test subject for their “hover-chair” (move your body around in it, and you find yourself moving around a dilapidated old house). “Looks like it could use a couple of chainsaws on the wall.”
“Great idea,” said the guy at the keyboard, and started working on importing a chainsaw or two. (And of course, at right, I’m telling him exactly where to put them.)
Alas, the informal Vulcan lab was one of the few places where I could do more than simply look. Too much else was dismayingly passive, and the “content” too often made me feel like I was being lowest-common-denominatored, Hollywood-style. I mean, why in the name of all that’s environmentally holy would anyone in Seattle want to create an animated cartoon rain forest when magnificent real rain forests are just a couple of hours’ drive away?
But back to that passivity. Just how passive? At another location, I watched others don headsets and earphones to view short movies I’d watched earlier, including that “rain-forest” one. These were movies whose rewards, meager as they were, came from moving your head — looking high up and around and way behind you. But nearly everyone stood stock still, like they were frozen.
“Plato’s cave,” I thought. “The VR origin story.”
Remember, in The Republic, when prisoners chained to the wall of a cave see shadows cast by a fire and mistake the shadows for reality? Like those prisoners, most of my fellow head-setters seemed unable to move, passively accepting shadow life. Faced with blatantly fake virtual environments, they swallowed them whole.
Could it be, I wonder, that two and a half thousand years after Plato, technology is merely trying to emulate him? And with zero sense of irony?
I can see lots of great medical and educational uses for VR. I can see lots of not-so-great uses too, including military ones. But above all, I can see huge profits for the Entertainment Industry. Forget being a couch potato — make that a cave potato.
But still, there’s that Wow factor. And in that, mea culpa. I’d love to go paragliding, for instance, and ski-jumping: two things I know I’ll never have the guts to do IRL, and would eagerly do in unreal life. And then…
If you’re philosophically minded, you might remember the famous paper “What Is It Like To Be A Bat?” by Thomas Nagel, a leading philosopher of consciousness. Impossible to know, he said. We may know a lot about bats — how they fly, their wing structure, and so on — but we’ll never know what it’s like to actually be one. Or could VR change that? Not with pretty 3D pictures of bats, but by getting as close as a human can get to what it feels like to fly like one (or more accurately, what it feels like to be a human thinking she’s flying like a bat).
That intrigues me, far more than crashing bikes into mountains or hanging chainsaws on walls. Could we use VR to actually enter someone else’ experience? Or something else’s? To feel what they feel? Could we use it to expand our minds? To do something more than watch shadows?
Or will we just settle for wowing out?
Here’s a book I’m looking forward to reading. I think. It’s a book I know will excite me, infuriate me, challenge me, provoke me, and have me scrawling an enthusiastic ‘yes!’ or a bad-tempered ‘no!’ in the margins of practically every page. And very often both on the same page.
It’s a book, that is, on free speech.
I can think of few people more qualified to write such a book than Timothy Garton Ash, whose dispatches and commentary on political repression appear regularly in The New York Review of Books and The Guardian. And I love the idea of him drawing up ten free-speech commandments — or rather, per his subtitle, “his ten principles for a connected world.”
Here they are:
1. We — all human beings — must be free and able to express ourselves, and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas, regardless of frontiers.
2. We neither make threats of violence nor accept violent intimidation.
3. We allow no taboos against and seize every chance for the spread of knowledge.
4. We require uncensored, diverse, trustworthy media so we can make well-informed decisions and participate fully in political life.
5. We express ourselves openly and with robust civility about all kinds of human difference.
6. We respect the believer but not necessarily the content of the belief.
7. We must be able to protect our privacy and to counter slurs on our reputations, but not prevent scrutiny that is in the public interest.
8. We must be empowered to challenge all limits to freedom of information justified on such grounds as national security.
9. We defend the Internet and other systems of communication against illegitimate encroachments by both public and private powers.
10. We decide for ourselves and face the consequences.
That all sounded great until I read it through a second time. And realized that the one that stumps me is #6. Really? Respect anti-Semites and Islamophobes and racists and sexists and pry-my-gun-from-my-cold-dead-hands shmucks of all stripes? I can understand them — that is, I can put myself in their shoes and figure out why and how they came to be such shmucks. But understanding, at least for me, does not necessarily entail respect.
Perhaps Garton Ash will persuade me otherwise (I have the book on order, so am only working off this New York Times article), but as with most people, it takes quite a bit for me to be persuaded to change a treasured stance.
Which means that #4 is not exactly a non-stumper either. In an ideal world, maybe. But “trustworthy” is a matter of preexisting opinion. There are hordes of people who consider Fox News trustworthy. Others, like me, consider the NYT trustworthy (for the most part, and with significant exceptions such as its coverage of Palestine). A terrifying number of people once considered Pravda and Der Sturmer to be trustworthy. The news sources you trust are likely more a reflection of your preexisting opinions than of any objective measure of reliability or — that ever-elusive ideal — “truth.”
And then, now I think on it, #5 also stumps me somewhat. I’m assuming that the book will define “robust civility” — I like the concept, since civility too often has an aura of mild-manneredness, and the idea needs some guts. In fact I’d like to see Garton Ash write a manifesto just on that.
Of course his new book is already attracting detractors. Some of them are quoted in the NYT piece , which, since flames always lead, begins with his idea that other newspapers should have united to reprint the Charlie Hebdo cartoons of Muhammad. I get the idea — solidarity in the face of intimidation and terrorism — but wouldn’t it have been a perfect example of the tail wagging the dog? Of otherwise respectable media giving in to what Glenn Greenwald calls emotional blackmail?
Despite such caveats, I generally admire Garton Ash’s writing. But I’m more stumped by his ten commandments than I thought I would be. The more I look at them, the more vaguely idealistic they seem.
But then Garton Ash is no vague idealist. And of course, I haven’t read the book yet. And since it’s not due out until tomorrow, and is a somewhat daunting 491 pages long, I’m assuming that neither have the detractors cited in the NYT.
Could it be that criticizing a book you haven’t yet read is precisely part of the problem?
———–
[Update to come when I’ve read it!]
Publishing a book is, in effect, going public. You spend years shut away inside four walls, and then suddenly, with publication, what was between you and your keyboard is out there for everyone to see. You take a deep breath — a very deep breath — and cross fingers, toes, and whatever else can be crossed (mashup of religious metaphors be damned).
But what happens then can be quite wonderful. Like when I spoke a couple of weeks back at the Yale Humanist Community. I started off more or less like this:
“Someone asked me not long ago what I thought of the huge rise in the population of nuns. The question utterly confused me, since so far as I knew, the convent population was in steep decline. He actually had to spell his question out for me: What he meant was not nuns as in sisters, but n.o.n.e.s.
It turns out that this oddly ungrammatical usage is the invention of opinion pollsters. It includes what they call “the religiously unaffiliated” and “the spiritual but not religious.” And I find it quite striking that all of these are negative terms – that is, they define people by what they are not. I mean, there’s nothing quite like insulting nearly 40% of the population by categorizing them in the negative.”
This is the point where it occurred to me ask whom I, in turn, might be insulting. “Are there any opinion pollsters here this evening?” I asked. No hands were raised. I wasn’t sure whether I was relieved or disappointed at that, but ramped up the point anyway:
“If you wonder why polls so often get it wrong, this might be an excellent example. Because like so much else to do with the vast and varied universe of all things shunted under the umbrella heading of ‘religion,’ it comes loaded with assumptions. And the main assumption behind the ‘none’ classification is that you ‘have’ or you ‘own’ a belief, whether religious or irreligious, theist or atheist.
I think of this as the capitalist approach to belief: belief as a possession. Or a matter of a spiritual haves and have-nots.
Now, pollsters believe in categories – that’s their religion – which is why they so often design their surveys in order to force the issue, leaving respondents no option but to lean this way or to lean that way. There’s rarely any room to stand up straight in pollster-land.
But what’s been happening recently is that more and more of us are refusing to go through life leaning in order to oblige the pollsters. Refusing to be categorized. Refusing to be squished under the heading of ‘religion’, whether pro or con. And totally refusing to accept being shoved ‘in between.’”
That, I continued, is why I wrote the agnostic manifesto. And then I went on to lay out the case for the agnostic stance as a fresh and honest way of being in the world and of thinking about being in the world – one of intellectual and emotional integrity.
It was a great audience. Many were leaning forward in their seats, smiling, their eyes alive with interest and excitement. Like the neatly bearded guy in the check shirt five rows up, on the aisle, who was all but bouncing in his seat with excitement. He came up to me afterwards, thanked me profusely, and then said:
“I have a confession to make. You asked early on if there were any pollsters in the hall. Well, I’m not one any more, but I used to be one, and I have to tell you that you totally hit the nail on the head in everything you said about opinion polls. It was just so good to hear it said out loud.”
And so good to hear it said out loud back to me.
I’ve been to New York City many times since September 11, 2001. And each time, avoided going anywhere near Ground Zero, now formally known as the National September 11 Memorial. I didn’t want to make a pilgrimage to disaster. Didn’t want to take part in what felt like an act of national piety. And yet I felt oddly guilty about not going.
Last Friday, I was in New York again. It was horrible weather: the whole city in complaint about the bitter cold, the biting wind, the snow flurries. “And in April!” people kept saying, as though the season only added to the insult.
I had an early afternoon appointment way downtown. And when I checked the map, realized it was just two blocks from Ground Zero. It had taken me fifteen years, but the time had clearly come.
I’d seen photographs of the memorial, of course — and much admired the concept of it. Not the conventional obelisk or spire lifting the eyes skyward, nor even the black marble wall built into the landscape of Maya Lin’s Vietnam War memorial in DC. No. This one, by comparison, was unutterably spare. It didn’t lift off the ground or nest into it. Instead, it went deep down into it. Where the two towers had been, two giant squares had been dug, and filled partway with water. Each almost an acre in size, they covered the footprints of the twin towers. And at the center of each pool was a far deeper one, a sharp descent into what seemed to be a bottomless black square — a void within a void.
So why did I need to see this “in the flesh,” as it were? I kept asking myself that question as I followed the thin stream of tourists who’d braved the weather, wool caps pulled low, scarves multiply wound, collars and shoulders hunched against the wind. Were their eyes streaming in the wind like mine? They had to be. There is something about the iciness of a wintry Manhattan wind as it funnels through the high-rise canyons that seems to suck tears out of your eyes.
As we entered the plaza — past three guys handing out pamphlets for the memorial museum, each of them incongruously sporting green plastic Statue of Liberty headgear — I was wondering if there wasn’t something kind of ghoulish about this. All these people going to see where all these other people had died? The site of nearly three thousand horrific deaths becoming an item to be ticked off the tourist checklist? What was I doing here?
Yet I resisted the urge to turn back. As everyone else headed straight for the shelter of the museum building, I went the other way to the North Pool, the one where the North Tower had been. I leaned over the waist-high parapet, its bronze surface etched with names of those who’d died, and the moment I did so, all my questions faded into very small, graceless quibbles.
What I saw was grey on grey on grey. Concrete on concrete. A square within a square, so sparse as to be brutalistic. And this brutalism moved me — deeply and unexpectedly — because surely, it was what was needed.
I made my way to the south edge so as to get my back to the wind, but still it seemed to knife right through me — through the leather motorcycle jacket, through the fleece ski leggings, through the wool beret. My eyes streamed more than ever — was it only the wind? — and as the tears threatened to freeze on my cheeks, I realized how utterly different this was from the photos I’d seen.
They’d showed placid water calmly spilling over from the upper square into the lower one — less my idea of a waterfall than of a large-scale ornamental water feature. But the water this afternoon was anything but placid. It was angry, roiled up by the wind dipping into it and howling over it, raising whitecaps and sending giant silvery curtains of wind-drift over the surface. The water didn’t merely fall into the deep center square: it fell over itself, boiling in icy tumult, tumbling and cascading into the void.
I stood. Still. Shivering. For I don’t know how long. In sadness, in awe, in admiration at how the designer, Michael Arad, had created what felt like sacred space out of public place. Not the kind of sacred space that elevates you, but the kind that fills you with dread, and with the biting awareness of how fragile life can be.
“You should have taken a photograph,” a friend said that evening. But I had no need to. That time I spent leaning over the parapet is unforgettable, and what I saw is etched in my mind as indelibly as the terrible images from fifteen years ago. “There’ll be lots of photos online,” I said. And indeed there are. But all seem to be with the water calm. It seems nobody pauses to takes photographs when an icy wind is blowing. And many of the photographers had clearly waited for dusk, when the walls are lit up for dramatic effect, though all the lighting did, to my eye, was prettify what should never be prettified. After a half-hour of online scrolling, I found not one photo that came anywhere near expressing the forlorn quality of the place last Friday afternoon — the terrible, abandoned greyness of it.
And maybe that’s as it should be. How, after all, do you photograph absence? How do you photograph a void?
–
Two days to go to the release of the agnostic manifesto, and as I leaf through it, I keep coming across passages that seem to say what I’m thinking better than I can, even though it was me who wrote them. Like this one, almost at random:
It’s often assumed that because I study and write about religion (and politics, and existence), I harbor a deep longing for belief. “Ah, you’re a seeker,” I’m told, which invariably sounds to me like I’m part of a ’60s pop group or some new religious order.
The inference strikes me as odd. If I studied crime, for instance, I doubt if many people (with the exception perhaps of strict Freudians) would then assume that I harbor a deep longing to be a criminal. Instead, you might say that scholars are the Sherlock Holmeses of religion.
Like Sherlock, they notice, investigate, probe, take nothing for granted. They’re intellectually engaged observers, and if they are to observe well, a certain detachment is required, as it is with psychotherapists. Yet many people seem to think that the study of religion leaves little room for detachment. Thus the insistence that there has to be a personal search on my part. Without that, it seems, what excites me or moves me to action or simply gets me out of bed in the morning — what makes me not merely accepting of life, but eager to live it — is somehow lacking a ‘higher’ dimension.
Not only am I thought to be lost (“you’ll find your way,” I’m assured), but my being lost is understood as distressing. I find myself standing in front of some lost-and-found department of the soul, where wariness of certainty is interpreted as a pathetic lack of it, and appreciation of unknowability as a sign of ignorance.
But if I am to be considered lost, at least let me be considered happily so. Certainly, as Walter Benjamin noted, “not to find one’s way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal; it requires ignorance, nothing more. But to lose oneself in a city as one loses oneself in a forest — that calls for quite a different schooling.”
Rebecca Solnit took this further in A Field Guide to Getting Lost (a title I envied from the moment I saw it): “To be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery.” It becomes the paradoxical art of “being at home in the unknown,” when “the world has become larger than your knowledge of it.”
You become conscious, whether with excitement or with fear, that the world does not revolve around you.
I once spent a summer as an apprentice to an auto mechanic because I wanted to know how cars worked. Harvey was a high-school dropout and a delight to work with, a curly-bearded and effervescent guide to what I’d seen as the mysteries of mechanics. He was under no illusion that a car was anything but an assembly of component parts, or that it had any resemblance at all to a human being. He worked on autos; he didn’t identify with them. And he saw nothing hard about the jumble of multi-colored wires snaking throughout the engine compartment and the chassis. “Just follow the spaghetti,” he said, and he was right: it was usually just a matter of a loose connection.
Yet the idea of humans as being “hard-wired” persists. A headline in today’s Huffington Post reads “Experts say liberal and conservative brains are wired differently.” It could have said “think differently,” but then of course we’d see that it was merely stating the obvious. In fact a dismaying amount of psychological research appears to do just that, “proving” what we already know. So to make it feel “new” and “modern,” the HuffPo editors fell back on the “wired” meme, as though human minds were merely a network of automatic connections. Flip the switch, and off they go.
But what’s so new or modern about the wired meme? It’s downright odd that one of the leading tech magazines in this wireless age is still called Wired. Can they not come up with a better name?
As linguist George Lakoff pointed out in his book Metaphors We Live By, metaphors aren’t just for poets: they’re built into the language we use daily, and thus shape the way we think. So if you think of humans as wired, you’re more likely to assume that we’re just a bunch of reflexes. Press a certain point on the knee, and presto: it jerks.
The knee-jerk reflex works on many levels, but especially that of jerk. The “hard-wired” argument has been used by sociobiologists to explain a lot about men in particular, from sleeping around (“spreading their genes”) to fighting to “protect” their genes in the form of women and children. This argument, made by men, apparently sees men as Iron-Age remnants. Presumably those who then murder women and children, let alone other men, simply have faulty wiring, which goes no way at all to understanding the astounding nihilism of terrorists (uppermost in my mind today in the wake of the Brussels attacks). And besides, what does all this make women? Soft-wired?
It’s an easy fallacy (most fallacies are, which is why they’re so common). Think of humans as matters of cause and effect, and you imagine you can indeed just follow the spaghetti of wiring in order to fix whatever’s wrong. Such reductive materialism takes no account of the complex of personal, educational, social, economic, and political experiences that enable some people to tolerate uncertainty and doubt (or, like me, to revel in it), while others flee into the steely arms of certainty and conviction.
I’m certainly no fan of Jeffrey Goldberg (okay, I think he’s a pompous ass), but once you get past his inflated sense of self-importance, his long profile of Obama in the April issue of The Atlantic reveals a presidential mind wary of seemingly easy solutions, and fully conscious of the complexities of unintended consequences and of the limitations of brute power. Whoever the next president will be, I will miss Obama’s subtlety. One way or another, I’m afraid we all will.
Because as Harvey taught me, there’s nothing subtle about wiring.
