Sound for Chou

A man came to my door a few minutes ago, a Jehovah's Witness, and I got rid of him as politely as I could, as I typically try to, even though my reaction to religious fanatics is usually framed in disgust and loathing. He started his rap by referencing the recent bombing attempt at JFK airport and attempted bring about his point by framing it in the question of why terror happens; why does evil exist, but I cut him off at that point. "We all have our reasons," I said to him, but I was just divining that he wasn't a politician, or even a political canvasser. I'll listen to anyone on a campaign, having campaigned myself, but I've never had much tolerance for religious zealots, especially when part of their line is that gays are in the morass of sinners, no different than airport bombers. But his arrival got me thinking about why we do the things we do. For a moment I wondered what it was this man hoped to accomplish, going door to door—it's hard work; emotionally draining. After you develop a thicker skin for the work, you find yourself driving for ever-deeper answers for the responses you get at people's doors. For instance, if I canvassed 5,000 people, which is roughly accurate, in the greater Denver area, about 70-80% of those people were against gay marriage gaining legal status. Their argument, by and large, wasn't that they had anything against gays, but that the institution of marriage had to be upheld; they felt that a union between two men, or two women, threatened the sanctity of their own marriages. But when I asked them why a legal domestic partnership, on the other hand, shouldn't gain legal status, they had few qualms. My conclusion was that most of these people were the ignorant victims of rhetorical games—they believed that the institution of marriage would be violated by same-sex marriage because the leaders of their religious institutions had codified it in their minds as such, but strip the same concept from the language of Christian moral codes, and common sense, decency and compassion take over. Few honest Christians really wanted to strip a fellow man or woman of their right to visit a sick or dying loved-one in the hospital; they just couldn't override the contradiction in the lines they took on this end of politics, while it appeared to encroach their moral standards. That, at least, is the perspective I have taken in light of my canvassing experience. But I should be circumspect: I didn't take a canvassing job because I was bent on making a difference, I took it because it paid $10 an hour and I could work part time and without prior skills. I was a student, and worse, broke. If I gained a new appreciation for the horrors of apathy and critical indolence in the meantime, so much the better, but still, on a certain level, a campaign is a campaign; it needs funding and lawyers and management and staff. My goal at the end of the campaign was to have worked for a social change I believed in, but my goal at the end of the day was to put food in my stomach and pay my rent.



Not so for the Jehovah's Witness. He isn't asking for money, or signatures on a petition; he believes he is helping to save souls—the work of Christ; a day-laborer whose paycheck gets deposited into his conscience. He must face refusal and derision, door after door, and content himself with the scant satisfaction that he is helping to rid the world of evil; to defeat Satan. A lovely premise, but one fleeced with bad blood; self-righteousness and exclusivity. We are accustomed to speaking from a majority who ridicules the Witness, in his pompous minority status, but ask yourself if he is really harmful for doing what he believes is right and you will see why "passionate belief" is an unacceptable premise. His real work, if only he knew it, is to displace acute critical capacity with mind-numbing rhetoric and if you think he is harmless, I refer you back to the thousands of far-less fanatical Christians who rejected the legal status of gay partners in Colorado last year… against their own common decency, and so for no real reason at all.



In the midst of this I am here in Iowa, also, some would argue, to do a kind of missionary's work, at least insofar as I am also attempting to purge the world of "evil." And while I struggle with that stance— since even while I consider myself to have great reason to believe in my efforts here it remains foreign to my nature to contend with another kind of Witness's conviction— I have been mulling, somewhat tortuously, over my prospects for the future. My last attempt at school had me set to become a fairly talented interior designer. My grades were good, teachers and students continually sang my praises, and I like the field. But last summer brought out a crisis in my conscience: The Earth is heating up; congress is in the pocket of big business; a monster is shredding the fabric of our nation; and here I sit in central park sketching designer furniture for the Wall St. brokers of tomorrow… after my canvassing days, it was no longer acceptable to waste my talents in a field that can often be reasonably likened to glorified salesmanship… Where in that reality can I find consolation in the flippant relativity of my career and efforts? Follow your dreams, sure, but don't be a damned fool about it.



In the meantime, I read an article about college graduates in Iraq. Students and professors are being blown to smithereens. Days before graduation, the son of a politician is targeted by a bomb planted in a locker—it kills another student, and rips the other boy's foot apart and no one knows if he'll be able to complete his diploma. The last vestiges of Iraq's middle class are abandoning their homes and families with bitter tears in their eyes—I complain about student loans while they try not to remember that just four years ago they dreamt of opening practices and raising families… blown to smithereens. But leave them for a moment.



A friend of mine studying perma-culture here has just been relieved of active duty where he served dual tours in Iraq. He told me that with the memory of mutilated bodies in the streets; of humans ripping each other apart, that he has taken a romantic vigilante's position in life. He tells me that he can't allow it to matter to him if there is an absolute nature to the world— it's too much to ask of him that he bear the possibility in mind and try to live accordingly. Truth, to my soldier friend, will from now on take a back seat to will. His interest in sustainability is more selfish than altruistic—he sees himself as a future protector of his family and friends when the impending fuel crisis tears the world a new asshole. I could never find fault with him on this point, but he has made the decision and recognizes, intelligently, that it was a decision to ground his life in this way. There is not much room left over for light and peace—if it is truth, it can't matter to him. He has rejected the possibility of a sunny disposition; even though he is surrounded by a community of practitioners who can claim to find that sunny disposition the inevitable and unalterable findings of deep research in consciousness: An absolute nature to the world, for which he believes he doesn't have the capacity to care and to him, his faith is as good as the researcher's faith, since to him it must remain faith even though his happier detractors are tacking along quite a different line. It is my only qualm with him—the Romantic viewpoint can in some regards be summed up by Kierkegaard's "passionate belief;" from what I remember of it, that it's not as relevant to have truth under your belt as it is to have passion. This still rings in many of our ears, if not pleasantly, then with a kind of bitter chord of self-righteousness… and it will always be easier to take for granted that life is a mysterious and unknowable commodity which we can arrange like flowers in a vase accordingly, each to his own taste.



And then there's my brilliant friend in Virginia, who maintains such a rigorous denial of all but the most solid of provable circumstances that I wonder if it isn't driving him partly insane with grief at the disparate conditions of life as he wades through; alternately sensible and absurd… and always contradictory. Perhaps he's simply clever enough to play with his tools so roughly that I fail to see his real structure in life, but I know enough people like him to validate my critique of the life led in pursuit of such intense truth that misery is the bulkiest byproduct…



What now? What do all these characters and musings have to do with each other? Is it for a point of transcendence of life in itself that I lay all this out? I'm stuck wondering still. But my conviction still errs on the side of a whimsical notion which I believe will serve us better in time if only we can find the strengths in its resolve—No more should you lose sight of the pursuit of truth in the world than you should seclude yourself from an ethos of options of spirit. No more a spiritual eclectic than method fanatic be… and while you recognize the high degree of arbitrariness in the signs and symbols you utilize, which make your days worth living, remember that you catch more flies with honey than vinegar. If you are one of the lucky torch-bearers alive at this time who is great enough to recognize your choices in belief, don't be a coward: choose lightness of being; playfulness; innocence! Because if our Witness can't do it, and Denverites don't know how, and our soldier flatly refuses, and our logician insists on its being untenable, and Iraqi graduates can't help it if they fail to, then who will? Who will remind us of how lovely life must be again? How beautiful your smirk when I send you too much affection; how much more important it was to discover the box of rusty treasure you brought me than the headlines of the New York Times; what a joy it is to know you all; what a supreme gift which I don't even deserve! If I lose that light and that beauty I am a failure; a disgrace to my own name and to my generation and to humanity, whom I love no matter how many pieces it breaks itself into. You, who are so beautiful, able, willing and strong, I will wait for you here in the heart of matters until my bones become the property of worms.



I say all this because a missionary banged on my door and set me off in a rage of contempt… for what? My soldier would throw up his hands; "You see?? Existence is absurd!!"



I don't quite see it.