A Wasted Life

            An old friend recently mentioned proudly after dinner that he weighs the same today as he did in high school.  It seemed a little less than gracious considering that I am a top-heavy seventy-five pounds more these fifty some-odd years later, but I put aside the insensitive if not insulting comment in favor of a few oohs and aahs to show how impressed I was by his weight.  I would not be as rude to him as he’d been to me.

            What I wanted to say to him, however, was that he had very little to brag about.  I know his metabolism is wired against weight gain and that the only thing he’s done with fifty years of free time is aerobic exercising—road work of one sort or another.  His work life was magnificent, and I am first in line to praise his accomplishments in that area, but for some reason that perhaps only phys ed teachers can follow, he thinks his lifetime of compulsive exercising and fitness is worthy of universal admiration.  It seems to me, however, it is the biggest waste of a life imaginable.

            He has squandered his precious time on earth by stunting  his personal growth in favor of fitness and weight control.  What is he fit for?  As far as I can see, it is merely to insure longevity (a dubious bet at best), but what is the great benefit of a long life unless it is accompanied by intellectual growth?  Fifty years of getting to the gym is an empty life by my reckoning.  He could have done any number of worthwhile things--written books,  studied the great minds of the past, learned what art and history and science can teach us, mastered new fields of research.  But no, his goal was to work out every day.  And brag about his weight.  What a waste.

Teleology vs. Peleology

        

          One chapter of the Believer’s Handbook seeks to prove God’s existence by examining design in the universe, the study known as “teleology.”  According to this argument, order implies the existence of God, but this old argument buckles, perhaps collapses, under the weight of modern science’s Uncertainty Principle (Werner Heisenberg, 1927), which has shown that order, symmetry, and design are more apparent than real.  Much as we all want an orderly universe, one which confirms God’s existence and reaffirms our desperate need to believe we are put on earth for a reason, the universe itself seems to be of another mind.  So to speak.

           Further arguing against a God-implied teleology is the God-denying study of peleology, which posits that no Creator in His right mind would design and build an organism (in his own image) that has to pee out between one and two liters every single day.  It’s a hopeless mess.  Bathrooms have to be everywhere.  Surely the Designer could have come up with a urinary tract system better than the one He settled on.  So why didn’t He?

Of course, the Almighty may have further changes in mind and may decide to implement them at any time.  But that brings up another problem.  Why would God go back every few eons to alter complicated operating systems (like turning fish fins into arms and legs or swim bladders into lungs)?  Why wouldn’t He have just gotten it right the first time? 

No, an under-attack teleology is not as persuasive as the common-sense study of peleology.  God's got some explaining to do. 

Bumper Sticker: Real Men Pray

The older I get the more troubled I become over the idea of prayer.  Apart from the likelihood that we are merely talking to ourselves, there's the question of why people do it at all.  Why does anyone want to have a one-way "conversation" with an all-powerful Creator who apparently has nothing better to do than listen to petitioners?  And what on earth does anyone say--besides the recital of memorized words?  The worst possible excuse for praying is to ask for favors, the supreme gesture of pure selfishness, whether one prays for himself or his friends and relatives--or even large classes and groups of people.  And judging from His total indifference to the prayers for it, God clearly doesn’t think much about world peace.

About the only reason I can think of to pray is to say thank you.  If there's a Creator, He or She will be pleased to hear a thank you once in a while.  That much I'm sure of.  But so many people have such a litany of suffering—chronic diseases, death of children and parents, no jobs, no education, drug dependencies, the list of horrors never ends—that I often wonder what on earth they could be thanking God for.  Sometimes it seems people should be cursing Him for what He’s done to them, which makes more sense than thanking Him for their suffering.  Maybe real men don’t pray:  If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all.

Divided I Stand

Divided I Stand, Part I

          I often feel I must be some variation of schizophrenic.  Outwardly—in my relationship with the world-at-large—I can’t resist being humorous, even bitterly, blackly comical.  At worst, the remarks I pass are smart-alecky, snide, and even mean, but I always aim higher, for some combination of wit, sarcasm, and vulgarity (which always amuses me).  And I like a straight-faced delivery that often confuses people who aren’t completely sure what they heard was a joke.  Sometimes they are sure it isn’t—and that I’m a total jerk.  I’m sorry when a joke or witticism falls flat, but I can’t resist them.  I just fire away and hope I can bring it off; I do have a lifetime of delivery practice.  This drive to see the humorous hidden away in every day events and conversation is hard-wired into my DNA. It’s who I am, for better and worse.  

          Mind you, I am aware that this is not the sort of personality feature anyone should be proud of, and I know that my life would have gone differently, better no doubt, if I could have controlled myself more often, but I’ve never been able to do much about it.  I’ve tried to root out the nastiness, of course, but my sense of humor, for better or worse, is what it is, and I feel powerless against it, the way a person learns to live with a debilitating physical affliction.

          However, I have spent most of my adult life being serious too—mostly as a late bloomer trying to become a better student, and eventually as a scholar who has strung together a long bibliography of serious writing.  That man never looks for the cheap joke or the pointed gibe.  He is always on message and carefully in control of his words.  It hardly seems possible that I can be both these people at the same time.  But I am, it seems, that particular variety of schizophrenic.

Divided I Stand, Part II

You Don’t Say. . .Monday, September 5, 2011

I was born and raised in an Italian ghetto of parents born in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, and of grandparents born in south-central Italy. In my blood there is a hot-headedness that drives me to outbursts that flash for a moment and then go out forever.  But I am also an American, the product of a cool-headed, Anglo-influenced school system: my excitability is thus neutralized by patient, even-tempered  problem solving.  And so it is that, in another sense, I stand divided.

Divided I Stand, Part III

You Don’t Say. . .Monday, September 5, 2011

I am so thoroughly conditioned by my Puritan work ethic that a friend once observed that I must have descended from John Milton when he lived in Italy.  The remark passed as a cleverness because I spent many years studying American Puritanism and because Italians, he thought, were incapable of such dedicated, Milton-like study.  Putting the defamation in the second part of the equation aside, it is thus, in a related (though perhaps disputed) sense, that I stand divided.

Divided I Stand, Part IV

You Don’t Say. . .Monday, September 5, 2011

I am a Catholic non-believer, an atheist for all practical purposes, but one who is nonetheless committed to the calming qualities of silent prayer.  I can sometimes talk myself into believing in a Creator, but one  who has nothing to do with the Bible or with Jesus or with any church or faith.  I think of myself as a cultural Catholic (akin to those who comfortably refer to themselves as cultural Jews)--that is, I am one born to the faith but educated to know better.  I like the machinery of the Church, the hierarchy, the pomp and ceremony, the smells of incense and candles, the Stations of the Cross, the sacraments, and so on—but I like it all for cultural reasons that tie me to my Italian-American roots, not spiritual ones that I long ago outgrew.  And yet I often return to the calming quality of prayers like the silent Hail Mary, even the Act of Contrition.  And nothing settles my nerves like the Twenty-third Psalm, “The Lord is my shepherd, / I shall not want,” empty words I’m certain, but ones that nonetheless add a quieting benefit to my days.  I’m a non-believing man of prayer—once again, a man divided.

That's why I write.

          It’s pretty common, after all, for grieving survivors to imagine what their dearly departed would have wanted.  “Dad would have wanted me to play in the big game,” we hear young athletes say.  Sometimes, to go on despite their loss, the grieving survivor dedicates his performance to his or her dead father—or mother or grandparent.   Maybe an entire team will wear a black armband, a remembrance and a motivator.  It’s all very touching.  And insincere.

Survivors, after all, have no alternative but to press on, but assuming the dead person would have happily and forgivingly given his blessing about your decision to suck up your grief and go on your camping trip anyway has always seemed bad form to me.  I wince when I hear the familiar refrain:  “Dad would have wanted me to go.”  Have the decency to admit that you are acting selfishly, I want to tell them, that your father’s death matters less to you than losing a chance to do something you have been looking forward to.  And don’t forgive yourself by imagining, in the most self-serving sort of way, that your dead dad would have wanted it that way.  If he still had feelings, they would be hurt.    

The truth of the matter is that at the moment of death, no one has a voice in anything ever again.  Survivors can imagine whatever they want the dead person to have thought or said, but the reality is that survivors from that point forward are safe from the reproaches of the dearly departed, who can no longer manage their own finances, state their most deeply felt opinions, defend themselves against enemies and misunderstanding, explain what they really meant, or ask humbly for forgiveness.  They have entered their time of eternal silence.

            That’s why I write. 

Substance Over Style?

          Or is it the other way around?  Everyone always wants to believe that what they have to say counts more than the way they say it.  That what they write is more important than their spelling.  But the simple and observable truth of the matter is, that if a person writes badly, or perhaps merely blandly, his writing will be lost forever.  No one will be engaged by the ideas if he can’t get by the sentences, which is exactly what Oscar Wilde meant when he wrote:  "The truth is entirely and absolutely a matter of style."

            I used to ask poetry students if the poem gives the theme its force, or if the theme gives the poem its force?  It’s the same question, after all, substance vs. style—and it has the same answer.  It is the poem, with its charged language and rhythmic backbone, that gives the theme its force.  No poem is ever remembered for its message if that message happens to be clouded in sloppy, sappy verse.  In other words, it doesn’t matter if the poem is about God, motherhood, or Superman’s crusade against evil—if the poem is so badly put together that readers uniformly hate it, the poem will not be read.  And there goes the message—the substance—right down the drain.

            And so in that sense, what you have to say is less important than how you say it.  And those who figure out how to phrase their ideas will get them into print, while those who never figure it out, are fated to wonder all through their lives why their superior ideas never can find a publisher (except of course in the world of blogs and self-publishing).  It’s really not that complicated:  it’s style over substance every time.

Divided I Stand, Part I

          I often feel I must be some variation of schizophrenic.  Outwardly—in my relationship with the world-at-large—I can’t resist being humorous, even bitterly, blackly comical.  At worst, the remarks I pass are smart-alecky, snide, and even mean, but most of the time they are on target and either wittily or sarcastically or vulgarly perfect.  At least I believe they are.  Furthermore, because I apparently need to be recklessly and ruthlessly funny, I long ago concluded that the condition is hard-wired into my DNA.  

          Mind you, I am aware that this is not the sort of personality feature anyone should be proud of, and I know that my life would have gone differently, better no doubt, if I could have controlled myself more often, but I’ve never been able to do much about it.  I’ve tried to root out the nastiness, of course, but my sense of humor, for better or worse, is what it is, and I feel powerless against it, the way a person learns to live with a debilitating physical affliction.

          However, I have spent most of my adult life being serious too—mostly as a late bloomer trying to become a better student, and eventually as a scholar who has strung together a long bibliography of serious writing.  That man never looks for the cheap joke or the pointed gibe.  He is always on message and carefully in control of his words.  It hardly seems possible that I can be both these people at the same time.  But I am, it seems, that variety of schizophrenic.

Pairs of Opposites

         So much in life runs in pairs of opposites, or seems to, like good and evil, matter and anti-matter, love and hate.  I've been thinking that this phenomenon runs right to God, who both is and isn't at the same time.  He seems to exist when we pray to Him and ask His forgiveness, but then He seems not to exist when we observe so-called "natural disasters," like the tsunami that killed some 300,000 on the day after Christmas, 2004.  Or are there perhaps two Gods, a good one and a bad one?  A pair of opposites.
         This line of thought, when applied to the axiom that "nothing is permanent--everything changes" leads to the conclusion, using the Theory of Opposites, that something must therefore be permanent, that not everything changes.
          Maybe, if we look hard enough, we can find God hiding somewhere in this construction.