In his Patterns in Comparative Religion, Eliade starts out with a chapter on sky gods. He makes the point first that the sky is the place cultures all over the world initially recognize divinity, since by its very nature it dwarfs anything human & is the easiest & most obvious symbol of transcendence. “The sky needs no aid from mythological imagination or conceptual elaboration,” he says, “to be seen as the divine sphere.” (54) But then he points out—& elaborates again & again throughout the book—how, after this initial experience, we began to spread the sky god’s attributes around, to specialize him, to make him more concrete & approachable:

The “specialization” of sky gods into gods of hurricane and of rain, and also the stress on their fertility powers, is largely explained by the passive nature of sky divinities and their tendency to give place to other hierophanies that are more concrete, more clearly personal, more directly involved in the daily life of man. This fate results largely from the transcendence of the sky and man’s ever-increasing “thirst for the concrete.” (82) 

In many cultures, finally, almost all of the sky god’s attributes are given to other deities—sun gods, war gods, or gods of fertility, while the sky god himself is essentially forgotten.

This is an interesting idea, that as humans we initially seek the divine in something that seems divine simply because of how unlike ourselves it is—it engulfs us, its sheer size can’t be comprehended (& in the case of the sky cannot even be given an actual shape); then, however, these supreme gods end up being so remote & indescribable it’s difficult to propitiate or pray to them, to the point that they’re considered indifferent to human affairs, & we end up with gods that seem more & more human, or at least more and more interested in humanity.

We cannot take God in one gulp, as it were, & have to give him our own face to find any sense or comfort from God at all. Mere transcendence only mystifies—mere transcendence only offers the possibility of faith; whereas humanizing the deity brings God closer to ourselves, to reason or “proof.” It’s no longer “revelation” but explanation. This is what Eliade seems to say.

22. [Another thing from Mircea Eliade]

Another thing of Eliade’s I’ve always liked is an anecdote he relates from an archeologist. This comes at the start of his History of Religious Ideas as a kind of immediate humility to his subject:

Reichel-Dolmatoff has given a detailed description of a contemporary (1966) burial of a girl among the Kogi Indians, a tribe speaking the Chibcha language and inhabiting the Sierra Nevada de Santa Maria in Colombia. After choosing the site for the grave, the shaman (máma) performs a series of ritual gestures and declares: “Here is the village of Death; here is the ceremonial house of Death; here is the womb. I will open the house. The house is shut, and I will open it.” After this he announces, “The house is open,” shows the men the place where they are to dig the grave, and withdraws. The dead girl is wrapped in white cloth, and her father sews the shroud. During all this time her mother and grandmother chant a slow, almost wordless song. Small green stones, shells of shellfish, and the shell of a gastropod are placed in the bottom of the grave. Then the shaman tries to lift the body, giving the impression that it is too heavy; he does not succeed until the ninth attempt. The body is laid with its head toward the East, and “the house is closed,” that is, the excavation is filled up. Other ritual movements around the grave follow, and finally all withdraw. The ceremony has continued for two hours.

As Reichel Dolmatoff observes, a future archeologist, excavating the grave, will find only a skeleton with its head toward the East and some stones and shells. The rites, and especially the implied religious ideology, are no longer recoverable on the basis of these remains. (History of Religious Ideas vol. 1, pp. 11-12)

Further down, in #26, I talk about the irrelevance of divine justice, & how it should mean nothing in the face of actual faith. & if more evidence were needed that the world is terribly unfair & unjust, it’s that whole swathes of history are lost, leaving us only the barest sense of how people lived & what they knew. Entire cultures go down, & are only recovered thousands of years later—or not at all. Languages, belief systems, literature, law—all evidence of these disappear, or are found & are indecipherable; or if deciphered, so poorly preserved only fragments remain.

If the world were fair none of this would happen, & everything from ancient civilizations to the rubble at Ground Zero would yield their secrets easily, & all could conceivably become “known.” Yet even something as illuminating as the Rosetta Stone comes to us in a fragmentary state, & even things as baffling as Egyptian Coffin Texts were left without footnotes for future generations. & even if footnotes had been supplied, Egyptian hieroglyphs have only been deciphered for the modern world for about two-hundred years.

(Perhaps this isn’t unjust at all, though; perhaps the chronology of history is largely an irrelevance; perhaps the comfort it affords is ephemeral—& perhaps the greatest spiritual moments, regardless of the arbitrary “year” we attach to them, will always remain timeless & unfettered.)

& it should say something too that the burial of the Kogi indian girl was no less efficacious or important because somebody able to communicate it to the outside world did communicate it. This rite of the dead was inherently important, even though to the wider world it remains a fairly unknown & anonymous act. I have to remind myself that the most meaningful things are rarely thought up or achieved with consideration as to what the world far distant will make of it. The prying eyes of the rest of the world—& this is tough to say for someone who wants so deeply to know & pry into these things—are entirely irrelevant.

The opening of the Book of Genesis (among other creation stories) has God organizing the waters & making sense in the world—but we’re still swimming in those waters, & whatever knowledge or wisdom or facts we can gather are at best glimmers, & little else. To be sure many of these glimmers are great, but never so great as to grant us arrogance about anything.

Something I always try to keep in mind is how antiquated & backward even the 1950s appear, when old TV clips are shown; or life near the turn of the twentieth century. & then I remind myself that 2075 will look back at 2007 with the same bizarre arrogance, the same funny eye.

There is very little in the world that shouldn’t be faced with humility & awe, & faith.

23. [A Homeless Man & a Famous Actress]

I’m wondering how to treat people anymore. On the same morning recently, less than twenty minutes apart, I saw two things. At one subway stop was a circle of policeman looking down at something on the ground near the tracks parallel to mine. As the train continued I saw it was some homeless guy on his back, a horrible look on his face. I couldn’t tell what he was doing—crying, yelling, angry, or just in some kind of daze, & he was rolling around there on the ground with his eyes closed & his face looking awful.

& then, as I got off at my stop I saw an ad for a new sitcom on the wall. Against a background of white, the star of the show wore a white dress & sat on a platform, her impossibly red hair perfect & curled, & she was leaning forward in laughter with one of those impossibly white smiles actresses are capable of. Except, someone had blacked out a few of her teeth & put a bubble next to her head, making her say something ridiculous or vulgar.

Now, what should I think about these two people? There’s the homeless man, who looked about as pathetic & sad & hopeless as I’ve ever seen anyone. Even worse were the policeman around him, who didn’t seem concerned so much as bewildered, even amused, by the guy. They seemed to say (& no doubt it’s true) that it was just another one. But what’s the use of my only feeling sorry for him? What’s the use of my sympathy since I barely saw him for a second, from then on went about my day, & only found time to even write about him months later? What’s the use of one’s sympathy for human pain & suffering & humiliation if it only yields a painful memory for the observer, & a few paragraphs on a blog? What does it mean that I felt badly for the man? As I don’t even know who he was, or remember which stop I saw him at, or what day the whole thing took place—what does it matter how I felt about him? What good does my sympathy do? How does my sympathy help him? What difference would it have made had I just laughed him off as pathetic, someone who made horrible choices & was living the result of those horrible choices, & didn’t deserve any better?

& for the actress—I laughed when I saw the poster. But why? Part of me is confident in knowing that most sitcoms are garbage. But what does it do to a person to step off a train every morning & see some ad for some stupid show, & see the dumb actress’ face advertising her stupid show, & to be happy & laugh that someone blacked-out the stupid woman’s teeth, & made the stupid actress say something horrible?

I listen to people sometimes, who talk about celebrities (athletes, actors, musicians) & pile literal & actual hatred on them. What does this mean for us to be given such easy targets as celebrities to ridicule & hate & mock—& not even because we feel we could act or sing better than them, but simply because they’re there, they’re the famous people right now, so shit on them? & the fact that they’re famous makes it all the more easy to shit on them, since everyone knows who they are—you don’t have to supply a backstory when talking to somebody about it, all you have to do is say the person’s name, or mention the newspaper that morning, or a magazine.

I’ve probably never owned the music or seen the movies of most celebrities that appear on the cover of People, but I know which ones were just in rehab, which one’s movie is coming out, which one just got a divorce, etc. & what does this mean, that I’m given the opportunity to laugh at people as fragile as me, people that’re faring probably just as horribly as I would in their situation (given fame & money & attention at probably a young age); what does it mean to have examples of living train-wrecks put before you every day, & to feel glee at the dumb decisions & obviously wrong paths they’re going down?

Or to mention someone else entirely. A woman came into my work a week or so ago & obviously had something wrong with her, telling us someone was following her, that people keep asking her how to use the copiers, & that we needed to destroy the passport photos we’d just taken, as she was sure part of her face had gotten into them. The woman was obviously sick—but why was my only recourse to stand in the back & laugh quietly & shake my head? Why was her situation funny at all? Why was that my reaction, while when I told someone else about it her reaction was, “My God, that’s sad.” Why didn’t I think it was sad too?

24. [Another Famous Actress]

Another time I saw a tiny article in the paper about another actress & her husband, & how they like to live a quiet life together in the Hampton’s. Why was my first thought to wonder how silly the concept of a “quiet life” must be for someone who’s all over television & billboards & magazines & everything else? What do I know about that life other than I don’t envy them one bit? For all I know both her & her husband could be decent people who happen to be actors, & don’t much enjoy all the celebrity & crap that goes along with it? Why is my first assumption to judge them despicable somehow, or frauds (“celebrities” who want to live “quietly”!)? Or to also remember a conversation a few years ago where a friend & I admitted that the actress in question was, despite her popularity & the kind of show she was in, actually kind of ugly to both of us? What does my personal judgment about the physical appearance of someone I will likely never meet have to do with my life or well-being (or her’s or anyone else’s)? What do my assumptions about her motives & easy judgments about her private life have to do with anything?

It’s true that I’m amazed & bewildered about why any one would want to be a celebrity at all. It’s true that, if there’s anything I think poisons the world it’s the constant & perpetual need for attention, & how nothing that’s private, or quiet, or unnoticed, is of any validity whatsoever, & that from the moment we wake up to just before sleep we’re bombarded with other people & companies trying to get our attention—or we’re trying to get others’ attention ourselves.

It’s true that nothing boggles my mind more than the celebrity who just got out of rehab who sees that the next logical step is to appear half-naked on the cover of a magazine to describe their “struggle.”

But why should these things breed hatred & scorn? Granted celebrities don’t usually attract empathy—but if you can only give empathy to those it’s easy to give empathy to, what does that say? For myself, why can’t I, at the very least, just shake my head sadly at whatever situation it is, & leave it at that? Why this train of ugly thoughts?

In a strange way too it seems that if gossip about famous people & their faults & follies were for one day not allowed—in print, online, on TV, or talking between people—there would be very little for most people to actually talk about.

25. [Product of Our Time]

Yet I know that too many of these thoughts—whether on popular culture or religion—aren’t yet pure or refined enough, & are too much products of the present moment, & the time I’m living in, & my own biases.

In condemning the cult of celebrity & all the rest—this is only a reaction to just how overwhelmingly prominent these things are nowadays. There technically isn’t anything wrong with “being known” or recognized, & the majority of writers or whoever I see interviewed aren’t (I don’t think) poisoning themselves with the process of book-tours or concerts. Celebrity itself isn’t so bad, & I have to be sure all the time that my own conscious avoidance of it—even in the smallest sense as an almost completely unknown writer—& refusal to seek it isn’t just the equivalent of some “rebel” refusing to shop somewhere (or listen to some band, or read some author) just because “everyone else” is. The reverse pull of a fad or trend is just as hard, & those who consciously avoid something simply for its “popularity” or prominence is just as much under its sway as those who dive right in.

I have to make sure I do this as little as possible. I realize whatever I say about faith or religion could be construed as “radical” or “extreme” by believers & nonbelievers alike, & that I can make it seem as if the world would finally be better “if only everyone agreed with me”—when in fact this is the last thing I would ever want. & as I happily collect books with titles like Everyday Life in Mesopotamia, I have to remember that someday someone might write a similar book about our own time—something like Everyday Life at the Dawn of the Internet. I have to constantly remind myself that the pottery or bits of bureaucratic minutiae or random everyday letters from normal people that have survived from four-thousand years ago will someday have their equivalents for 2007. I have to always remember that as silly or useless or obviously tainted by economic or popular concerns so much of the outside world is, much of it very well may survive & be a great clue as to where people were in our day & age. 

A friend of mine wrote to say that it’s nice being a writer & not wanting to be involved in the business-end of it at all—there’s the freedom to ignore trends, ignore criticism, & to simply work in a manner that seems as pure as possible. For example: the other day I read a negative review of a biography, then followed the trail further & saw that the authors of the biography wrote to the newspaper to respond to the negative review, & said once they saw who the reviewer was they knew exactly what was going to be said, & that furthermore they’d met the reviewer at a conference & she presented a paper that wasn’t met with well by those others at the conference; & this was followed by the reviewer’s rebuttal, saying that no, it was the biographers who weren’t met with well at the conference—a conference that had nothing to do with the biography, but was just more detail to be snippy about. This squabble probably still persists to this day, & I don’t see a point in identifying the book in question or the authors behind the feud, & as a result the whole situation might seem muddy, but I assure you the it’s even more muddy & useless to me knowing just who was involved. So that it’s wonderful to be on the outside of all this, to never have to review anything, to never have a camp to support, to never have the biography of some dead person to denigrate (or praise), to never have to attend a conference & give three damns about your reception there—to not be involved at all in the general run of the academic or publishing world.

...Yet for others this is a great thing, & is their careers—& they should be granted this, shouldn’t they? I have to always realize that they should, & that all the things I want to rid my mind & heart of, all the preconceptions & prejudgments & all the things I’m sure would taint my work & mind & heart if I allowed them in (political, economic, even practical concerns)—I have to realize that these things do matter, & that whether I like it or not they affect the world & the run of history just as much as the quiet work of others.

I have to always remember that Van Gogh’s paintings—the very materials used to make them, the time he was given to make them, the space he lived in while making them—would simply not have existed without his brother essentially subsidizing his entire life, & that his brother wouldn’t have been able to do this had he not been an art dealer in Paris, had he not had to deal with all those “messy” things I want to avoid with all my energy—the buying public, the traditionalist snobs who can’t accept anything new, the avant-garde snobs who can’t accept anything old, & the rivalries between everybody.

The world is a mess, & we all get on our way as best we can. The only barometer I can use is to see if the person is really happy. Is the Fundamentalist of whatever religion actually happy, or the academic, the surgeon, the poet, the reviewer, the grad student, the baseball player, the politician, the mother or father or whoever—are they happy, do they seem fulfilled, does their life (for them) signify? I have to always remember that it isn’t fame I’m leery of, or ambition, or the drive for power or money (or for books or religion or anonymity) but what people do with these things. Even though fame & the rest receive so much more attention than a more quiet decency, I can’t ever forget that fame & decency are only ways that might lead to happiness.

26. [Divine Justice]

One of the things about religion I’ve never understood is when the success of its believers is always countered by the punishment & humiliation of those who don’t believe. This has always seemed a bit too easy, & even kind of silly. (The opposite version of this, which explains all horrible things that do happen to believers as being the result of their transgressions—of, apparently, not being real believers at all—seems just as silly.) The entire notion is wrapped up, again, in the importance of how one appears to others, & to society, rather than the pure & nearly always private experience of God that has nothing to do with this.

It’s hard for me to see many of the Psalms as great works of devotion, for instance, since they’re mostly about wanting protection from slander or some kind of attack from one’s neighbor, & the desire for the punishment of the slanderers, & being assured some kind of divine justice in the world. Yet the reward factor of God seems entirely secondary (or even thirdly or further down on the list) matter when it comes to religious faith, or experience, or its ability to sustain & nurture someone in their life. Ideas like this abound in religious texts, but here are only two describing the virtuous:

Favour affects them not,
Nor disfavour,
Neither advantage
No injury,
Neither honour
Nor dishonour.
Thus those who know are honoured in the world.

(Dao De Jing #56, Moss Roberts tr.)

or this:

Here is a Parable

Of the Garden which

The righteous are promised:

In it are rivers

Of water incorruptible;

Rivers of milk

Of which the taste

Never changes; rivers

Of Wine, a joy

To those who drink;

And rivers of honey

Pure and clear. In it

There are for them

All kinds of fruits;

And Grace from their Lord.

Can those in such Bliss

Be compared to such as

Shall dwell forever

In the Fire, and be given,

To drink, boiling water,

So that it cuts up

Their bowels to pieces?

(Quran, 47:15, Abdullah Yusuf Ali tr.)

Why can’t the stanza from the Dao De Jing simply sit without that last line? Worldly or any other kind of honor shouldn’t be the goal of religious life. Why are we so weak that we need this reassurance, or the guarantee from Allah that all the people who scoff at us now will be below us at the Resurrection? Why do we need to be told we will be “honored in the world” in order to be decent, or grounded, or at peace? Why is faith in the supreme being of all the world, why is the reality of Allah, why is the realization or reality of a good human life—why are these predicated on the guarantee of justice & the warm feeling that we are being taken care of, & that the people who make fun of us (or worse) will “get what they deserve”? What kind of faith demands this kind of proof, & these kinds of signs?

I realize though that this goes against the beliefs of most organized religion, so many of which have a creation story where Chaos is defeated & Order is made from it. Yet where is this ordered & just world, & where can it be, except in our own minds, & in our own faith? Outwardly, in the world itself, the waters of chaos are still assisting in the general mess of everyday life, & this hasn’t changed & I doubt ever will; but inwardly a kind of peace & order can be found; or on the level of marriage or friendship or family.

It’s been pointed out that the earliest gods of the Sumerians (& so, we can then imagine, some of the earliest signs of religion developed in the world at all) were based entirely around economics, & in simply providing what the people needed to stay alive, so that gods related to marsh life were found in areas that specialized in fishing & hunting; & so on for cities of shepherds, or cities of farmers, etc. But just because religion began this way, just because the impulse to believe in God or gods began simply because of one’s empty stomach & fears from the outside, doesn’t mean that it has to remain this way. God, I like to think, is more like a spouse than a parent—I don’t expect “protection” from my wife, I don’t expect her to rid me of all my fears & provide me with some impenetrable shell that will keep me safe from the awful world; rather I expect—have faith—in her consistent presence, in her consistent companionship, in always knowing that she is there. & the same from God.

This is something along the lines of what I thought when rereading the Book of Genesis awhile back. Why couldn’t Genesis be more clear about some things, why is it written the way it is, demanding commentary, or why couldn’t the Bhagavad-Gita present its philosophy in a more straightforward way—why are religious texts meant to instruct people in very hard & logical things so mysterious, so hard to crack, & at times not straightforward at all? Why aren’t they like other instructions—why aren’t we given a numbered list instead of this tough poetry?

& it seems that that too is a childish wish. If we want to live in a world surrounded by chaos, & want to construct & find meaning in any of it, it won’t come about easily, directly, or even clearly. Faith in oneself or in God cannot be graphed the same way a marketing strategy can. We may be able to study the history of religion or myth, & come close to a “science” of that history, but there can be no “science” of actually experiencing God, of living day-to-day surrounded by God. There is only that wonderful & flimsy & tough & doubtful & reassuring faith.

27. [More on Faith]

So I want to talk about faith some more (as in #11-13). The more I read & hear people talk about religion, the more I wonder just what people really consider faith to be. For me, faith is believing in something without needing any proof to support it. I don’t have faith in God because I believe in the Bible or anything else. Simply, I have faith in God because I have faith in God.

I’ll tend to pick on American Christianity a lot in this regard, but only because it’s the nearest example at hand. I’m baffled, for instance, at their need to scientifically prove anything about God at all, or Creation. I’m baffled & wonder what kind of flimsy faith these most devout people must have, if a theory or statement by a scientist can shake them at all, or make them worried if their children learn about it in school. Or the uproar by Fundamentalists over the Harry Potter books, or The Da Vinci Code. Again, what kind of flimsy faith in God—& presumably in the risen reality of Jesus Christ—can one have if a series of novels about magicians, or some badly-written detective story—what need is there for the banning of Harry Potter books, or the entire slew of Da Vinci Code-debunking books that want everyone be clear that Jesus never got married & had kids?

I’m perfectly willing to accept the fear a Christian has in their God, but isn’t it just a waste of time—time that could be spent in prayer & devotion, I would think—fearing novels like these? Or whatever music they’re detracting now? Or in desperately trying to prove the Creation story in the Book of Genesis is true, or even that Christ rose from the dead? Why isn’t it enough to simply have faith in the literal validity of the Genesis story, or the Resurrection of Jesus, or in the Revelation of the Quran given to Mohammad, or the authorship by Moses of the Torah? Why do any of these things have to be proven, why does any devout religious person feel threatened at all by “attacks” made on their faith? How can you “attack” something that has no business being given such a strong logical & scientific foundation that is can be attacked in the first place?

The answer, of course, is that faith simply isn’t enough for the worried mind. In a very real way, just as I think everybody would be saved a lot of wasted time & energy if they stopped babbling about & deriding celebrities—think too how many debates would never even be started, how many technical & theological & specialized religious books would never be written, & how many worried minds would be at ease simply praying or doing some actual good, if the notion of faith were taken seriously, & its impracticality & weakness & inability to be proven or supported were embraced?

Someone saw me reading at work recently, which prompted them to ask another coworker if she went to church. The girl shook her said no & said, “It doesn’t add up.” I smiled when I heard it & had no argument to make. She was right! It doesn’t add up. & why should it? What would the use be, worshipping a math problem, or having faith in an equation?

How wonderful a thing it is to realize, as I pray, or write poems, or as I wonder aloud in this blog about God, that no historic discovery from the Ancient Near East or India or China, that no book written for or against the religions that came from there since then or now, that no person or novel or poem or movie or anything that might “prove this” or “criticize that”—how wonderful to realize that none of it can have one ounce of bearing on my faith in God.

28. [No Need to Write Anymore]

Sometimes, in the middle of reading a religious text or poem that’s really tremendous, I think what a waste & distraction my own writing probably is, & that I could just as well read & re-read these few things for the rest of my life—& this would be enough. No need for me to spill more words about them, or my reactions to them, or my retellings of them. No need for my own words at all, except the silent ones that come up as I read or remember the lines. No need to write anymore.

& the immediate thought after this affirms that this is maybe what I should do, or will at some point—my next thought is always to wonder what everyone who’s ever known me (& who inevitably knew me as “a writer”) will think. From my classmates in seventh & eighth grade, all the way through high school & the bit of college I’ve done; all my friends from then till now; all my relatives; all the people who may have read something of mine at some point; every person I’ve ever worked with—what would they think, that this person they knew however many years ago, & who wanted to be a writer—wouldn’t they say, What ever happened to him? He stopped writing? Where is he? Isn’t that sad.

This is the strangest train of thought for so many reasons. Why is it that, given the choice that people will or won’t ever wonder “what happened” to me—why do I always assume they will? & what does it matter if they do or not? This perpetual quest for the attention & approval of others is so all-pervading even I can’t get away from it as I write about it. I’ve come a long way from being the sadly defiant fellow who had to blast Beethoven or Dead Can Dance from his car while driving through his college campus ten years ago—but I haven’t gone nearly far enough.

29. [Keeping It Real]

So much of my early writing, & the theorizing done with friends, was centered around creating things with words as they actually are. We were sure some kind of literary experimentation was much more “real” than other kinds of writing—but what is this need to be real anyway? Nowadays nothing that isn’t crass or sarcastic in its honesty, that isn’t as ugly as possible in its stab at honesty, that isn’t as vulgar as possible in some need to “keep it real”—these are rejected as false, disingenuous, ridiculous, fake. Once someone told me how “refreshing” it was to hear a guy say that most of the time masturbation was better than actual sex—especially if he hadn’t had sex in a few days. For whatever reason this was lauded as some paragon of integrity, & by & large, one way or another, so many ads or music or movies are made along the same lines.

I wonder where ritual is anymore. Ritual has nothing to do with reality, it doesn’t need to be “real” at all, yet it’s more true than reality somehow. It transforms the real into something significant, realizing that the ritual of transforming the mess of reality is more important that wallowing in the informal & unformed nature of reality itself. By being a lie, technically, & by technically being something made up & constructed, an actual ritual makes reality itself mean more. It makes life mean more.

Commenting on a story of mine many years ago a friend told me bluntly that a character “wouldn’t actually say that,” & at the time I took the advice & changed what I’d written since what mattered more wasn’t what I was trying to say, but whether the story I’d couched it in was “realistic.” & the fantastic thing about reading literature older than a few hundred years is that there’s next to no regard given to what we would consider “realistic” today. When we’re told that Abraham heard the voice of God telling him to go to Canaan, & he simply went; or that Krishna & Arjuna were able to freeze time & sit between two armies ready to fight one another, & simply talk; or that Dante was able to wander himself lost into some woods & thereafter find the entrance to hell, & find his way to purgatory & then to heaven itself; or to read discourses of the Buddha, or bits from the Upanishads or Rig Veda that see no reason to be grounded in something “realistic”—how wonderful this is! How wonderful to read something that is completely “unrealistic” & not fleshed-out—& how wonderful to find more direct statements of truth, more deeply expressed emotion, & more sublime expressions of life & death & reality in them.

& in a way these stories are like rituals themselves. But as there’s no ultimate & final truth to grasp, the best we can do is hint, is play, is ritualize one way or another, one kind of meaning or another, & these stories—never final in themselves & always demanding more thought & meditation from us—are always incomplete. Whereas for movies or TV or commercials, the idea of “playing” can only go so far—it isn’t long before somebody winks at somebody else, & we realize this is only a movie, or a commercial. It seems that for a person ritually alive, this wink never happens. There is the conscious realization that while this ritual—a marriage ceremony, say—is something unreal, that has been “made up,” there is the equally strong faith that this “unreal” thing nevertheless has the ability to say more, to sum up more, to suggest more, to mean more, than anything simple “reality” can offer.

Joseph Campbell says something very nice about all of this: “The imagery of myth, therefore, can never be a direct representation of the total secret of the human species, but only the function of an attitude, the reflex of a stance, a life pose, a way of playing the game. And where the rules or forms of such play are abandoned, mythology dissolves—and, with mythology, life.” (Primitive Mythology, 131) & this suggests something else, too—that those who want to “keep it real” & keep it ironic, keep it ugly & chaotic & messy for its own sake—these folks assume they know it all, that what they’re presenting is a direct & total representation of the human species. There is nothing but this direct reportage, there is no “secret” of the human species. There is only this body & this earth & the runaround for whatever we can get while here, & to pretend otherwise, to “pretend” in a ritual sense, is only to be ridiculous.

But to believe in—& consciously act in, & create—ritual, suggests otherwise; it says that there is obvious & lofty meaning out there, & that it is enough to simply play at it, to live consciously in a play or a prayer of our own (or some religion’s) making, & that the meaning derived from this kind of intentionally “unrealistic” & “false” life, is actually more real & true than anything the mere world has to offer. It says that by losing our self & our ego—something our celebrity culture can’t possibly imagine doing—we come to a deeper meaning of who we actually are.

The Chinese philosopher Xunzi has this to say about ritual:

The gentleman utlizes bells and drums to guide his will, and lutes and zithers to gladden his heart. In the movements of the war dance he uses shields and battle-axes; as decorations in the peace dance he uses feather ornaments and yak tails; and he sets the rhythm with sounding stones and woodwinds. Therefore, the purity of his music is modeled after Heaven, its breadth is modeled after the earth, and its posturings and turnings imitate the four seasons. Hence, through the performance of music the will is made pure, and through the practice or rites the conduct is brought to perfection, the eyes and ears become keen, the temper becomes harmonious and calm, and customs and manners are easily reformed. All the world becomes peaceful and joins together in the joy of beauty and goodness. Therefore I say that music is joy.

It is joy. & it can be the simplest thing—because what is more “false,” technically, than still being roused & made emotional by a song or movie or poem or play you’ve read a thousand times & nearly memorized, & whose end you can see from the first word or note?

What is more “false” than an actor playing the same role for fifty nights—or a lifetime—& every night making it seem as if this weren’t so, as if it were happening for the first time, here & now?

What is more “false” than this, than going to whatever house of worship one goes to every week, & doing the same thing, praying different but similar prayers, singing different but similar songs at the same time?

What is more “false” than ritual? Yet what’s more true, what other than this kind of repetition, than this kind of willful repetition of things that have been shown to have real meaning (a song or prayer or film or book), what is more true than consciously repeating the experience of these things, these things that in the repetition, in the “play” of experiencing them again as if we never had before, or recognizing them as constant & revivifying experiences that happen all the time—what is more true than these things that give order, that prop up, that sound more real than real, that give us faith?

&, even more, what isn’t a ritual? If we need it bad enough everything can be a ritual, every breath. At a museum over the weekend my friend said passing by paintings was a ritual, leaning in to the canvas, checking the name, or seeing some ancient pottery fragment, or statue—this was a ritual for him, seeing the past & nodding to it & knowing that it’s still there, that the meaning these things were created with—some more than seven thousand years ago—are still there.

30. [Should I Be Laughing At This?]

It isn’t hard to see people everyday who are pissed off, who are late & so who are angry & rushing around, & irritated. It isn’t hard to find the people at work, or customers, who are so easily agitated & annoyed you can set your watch to them blowing up at any moment, running around, swearing, frantically dialing on their cellphone, deliriously waving for a cab, or running from a train, or totally visibly flustered & beside themselves at having missed the train, or done something wrong, or whatever it is. Or it’s simply the customer who’s dissatisfied, & starts a scene at the cash register, the voice slowly rising.

& there’s always someone like me behind the counter, or behind that person in line, smiling, & even snickering inside at this person who’s lost it. But should I be laughing at this? Should the ease with which so many people lose their tempers, & the frequency with which they begin raging around high-strung & pissed-off—is this really all that amusing? It isn’t hard to hear awful stories about how selfish & rude people are, & how they invariably end up swearing, yelling, screaming racial crap, whatever.

One story had somebody working behind the counter, while the customer in front of them was babbling away on their cellphone, at times mentioning how poor the service was. The person who told this story did it very well, imitating the woman on the phone & her gestures, imitating herself as she stood there listening, the two of them becoming more & more annoyed. But even as I was listening & laughing I still thought, “Is this really all that funny?” What’s funny about someone so self-absorbed they can’t get off their phone when it’s their turn in line? What’s funny about rude people? What’s funny about millions of self-absorbed people doing whatever they can to get noticed, using whatever chance they have for some power-trip to complain, or to plan poorly & to be rushing around frustrated? What’s funny about the employee who has nothing else to talk about except how they told somebody off, & don’t they deserve it? What’s funny about the general run of human frustration & unhappiness?