Bend in the Undergrowth

Here's another two that tear me: experiencing life as it is and experiencing life as it is presented to be. What I mean by the latter will clarify the former-- that is, so much of the way we think about life is shaped by the various forms of mediation that we use to give us a picture of that elusive "it". For instance, if I had never read a newspaper, watched television or movies, or listened to the radio, would I be as scared as I am every time I see a black guy with a gangster gait walking toward me?

I don't imagine that there ever was a time without some such mediation. Humans tells stories to make sense of the world, they must make patterns, unity-- everything must have its place. The old cliche about gods and lightning might fit nicely here. But it seems there are still ways of getting to the bottom of things, or better, to the essence of things. That's the idea behind phenomenology: the question, "what is being?" And, as Heidegger notices, it seems the ancients had better, or at least clearer day-to-day experiential answers to that question. They couldn't hide themselves from the frailty of their bodies or their immanent mortality or their dependence on the sun and rain and lightning. We moderns ignore these realities or are oblivious to them, because we can control them. Wasn't there a story some years back about the Chinese creating rain clouds?

And the modern answers to the question of being are just as, if not more fantastical than those of the old myths. Everything I do and experience is the product of selfish genes. I looked around at my English class today and tried to imagine each person as a big conglomerate of microscopic worker ants chaotically carrying out the agenda of life. But the professor's shallow mutterings about Frederick Douglass's depiction of a world turned upside-down distracted me. Suffice it to say, genes are certainly less experiential than soul.

And, for whatever reason, I want to live less unmediated-- more existentially. Hence, Judaism. My return to the ancients, my attempt to get to the essence of things, to become sensitive to life's wonders-- intelligence comes as a gift from nowhere, the heart just keeps pumping, the eyes have built-in focus adjustment, and on.

Of course, with Judaism comes all of its radical mediation. The world through the lens of the Torah quickly becomes an illusion, a means to an end, a platform for rote ritual rather than a realm where flesh and spirit might actually meet. But, at their core, these stories have more existence to them: you face God through the bugbites you get while sleeping in a booth with a thatched roof; you experience the eternal by wrapping cow skin painted black on your arm, and you bend your achy knees and bow and feel the vertebrae of your spine against your shirt, and recognize that you can stand upright and you have a mind and a heart that's still not plugged in anywhere and that those things are absurd-- and then you've stood before your Creator.