Light is Constant

ISSUE #9

This week is better. Remember when I said it would be, last week? I called my shot. Chalk one up for me, I'm the Babe Ruth of my own mood. I'd just like the record to show that I was right.

I'm trying to take a trip through all the Pulitzer Prize winning novels, so I just finished reading Gilead by Marilynne Robinson. Far too late, of course, considering her importance to the Writer's Workshop and how it should be a requirement for every Iowan to read her. I'm glad I waited, though. I needed it more where I am now, missing Iowa and the light of those prairie dawns spilling over the hills and pastures.

Gilead is an epistolary story narrated by the elderly preacher John Ames, and in the course of his letters written to his young son I think he (and, by proxy, Robinson) lays out the single greatest religious treatise that's not an actual holy text. The book is full of moments of reconciling God's grace with rational thought. For example, on those dawns I was referring to, he observes:

"[...] a sunlight grandly announced, proclaimed throughout heaven - one more of the very finite number of days that this old prairie has been called Kansas, or Iowa. But it has all been one day, that first day. Light is constant, we just turn over in it. So every day is in fact the selfsame evening and morning."

I ended up making this playlist for him. You can think of it as a soundtrack to Gilead, but it's probably more apt to think of them as worship songs for non-believers. Not that you are all non-believers, but I find it's safer to assume a lack of faith than a preponderance of it. People get a little touchy about the subject.

One recurring thought experiment of mine is imagining what jobs I would have wanted if I'd lived before industrialization, how my passions would've been shaped living in a pre-modern world. I usually land on being a preacher. It fits my type of writing, which has been about trying to piece together and verbalize life's mysterious happenings, and there's something I like about writing to converse, and writing to perform, which is why I tried stand-up. I tend to struggle with the artifice of plot and story. I'm no good at thinking of compelling ones, first of all, but also I have this compulsion to speak directly to the theme at hand rather than cloak it in action and character. You might say this forgoes entertaining the audience at all. Which is a good point. You roasted me.

I wouldn't consider myself a Christian - though I always strive to be Christlike, right down to my enormous martyr complex - but I am a believer in something, and I'm always looking for a church, a place to safely express ecstasy and ponder grace. I also don't know if I can say I explicitly believe in God. Socially, he was a bit harsh in the old days. I don't like what he's done with sexual guilt, plus the historic persecution done in his name. But I do like what he's done with the place. I'm glad I'm here.

I've been brazen about belief in the past, proclaiming loudly how I believe in ghosts and all that. But words are tools, of course, and if words can be different tools, then the word "ghost," for me, is a hammer. It's not very precise, but it's useful in many situations. When I say I believe in ghosts, I mean, "I believe that you may never find an explanation for what was scratching at your wall last night. Let's call it a ghost." It's an term for unexplained scares, which happen all around us, every day. Here's what I mean when I say "ghost": "I believe you that you saw a weird shadow and it was scary as hell." That kind of stuff. "Don't walk through the kitchen, there's a dead person in there." You know?

All this is to say that "God" is a hammer, too. I use it to describe how my heart beats faster when I see the one I love. I know it's coordination between all these systems, cardio-vascular and nervous and muscular, and essentially could be no more than an animal response to stimuli, but in the end those are also just technical terms for physical objects, necessary so we can build airplanes and perform surgery. In conversation, they're graceless words that tend to bend the nail that I'm trying to put into this wall of communication. Sometimes what I need is a hammer, to save some time.

It's impossible to articulate. Behold the following, straight from the book:

"In the matter of belief, I have always found that defenses have the same irrelevance about them as the criticisms they are meant to answer. I think the attempt to defend belief can unsettle it, in fact, because there is always an inadequacy in argument about ultimate things. We participate in Being without remainder. No breath, no thought, no wart or whisker, is not as sunk in Being as it could be. And yet no one can say what Being is. If you describe what a thought and a whisker have in common, and a typhoon and a rise in the stock market, excluding "existence," which merely restates the fact that they have a place on our list of known and nameable things (and which would yield as insight: being equals existence!), you would have accomplished a wonderful thing, still too partial in an infinite degree to have any meaning, however."

Of course, I'm rendering myself irrelevant by spending all this time defending my beliefs. I'd like to stand aside and let some of the songs do the talking. I'll see you next week.