At some point, I started to wonder if I was the mad-man. This isn’t something that is thrown out as a writer’s clever trick, it’s meant to be taken literally. It was a troubling time, and it took over my life for days.
In those days, I stopped judging everyone except myself. In those days, I opened my mind to a level that I’ve never experienced. I thought of staggering numbers and welcomed the panic inducing weight that they leveled across my lungs. In those days I slept little, and my appetite faded.
I thought of the vast majority of Americans that believed in God. I thought of millions of people that believe in their core that angels are all around us. I felt what they felt, as I listened to preachers plead with people like myself to give up my search for truth. I listened to conservative politicians as they connected the dots between theistic beliefs and their own concepts of political ideology. I think it had been needed for a while, because I don’t think the way they think. I don’t understand, nor do I begin to understand the world around us, in the way that they do. In fact I don’t see the world the way most do, conservative or not. I see it in the form of math when I look at the stars; the temperature of Venus, the element content of Jupiter’s red storm eye. Billions of miles lay between my fingertips and the closest star. I see the world’s order in logical steps. The blade of grass eaten by the insect, the insect that is snatched from the air by the bird, which is eaten by a snake, which burns all of the nutrients only to die and get eaten and disposed of by the tiny waste disposal units of the woods, like ants and maggots and any number of festering insects.
Calling that the circle of life seems to fluff up what it’s like for the snake or insect. It’s a violent battle to eat or be eaten, which rarely ends with a quite death for any of them. It’s a system where hyenas chew the soft underbelly of an antelope as it dies, because it’s more efficient. It’s a system where a wasp lays its eggs in a caterpillar that will have a bleak future of being eaten from within by the larva, before they burst through his skin to leave him to wonder what was happening. In this cycle, I see only a system derived by creatures with cold and calculating instincts, honed only to ignore the pleas of captured prey, and to survive. I see this struggle as I feed rats to my pet snake, and I see desperation in the eyes of the rat, as it gasps for air while the reptile coils tighter.
I can’t understand the opinion that this was a system created out of goodness. I certainly can’t understand the notion that it wasn’t like this, yet became like this, because two humans defied a greater power. I can’t understand that notion in the text of books, or on nature shows or even in front of my face as I feed my snake. All this suffering began because of defiance? Not any of these creatures’s defiance or mine or yours, but some douche and tart that we never knew? I don’t understand that. I don’t understand people that think that way.
So, I emerged myself in their world- or, as close to it as I could. I tried to listen and to understand where they were coming from. In a metaphorical sense, I was trying to figure out of I was a one eyed man in a world of blind people, or if I was the blind man in a world that saw what I couldn’t.
Days later, I came to the conclusion that I was not a one eyed man. In fact, I had vision that went far beyond the comprehension of millions. It’s like looking at a tree, and being the only one that knows about the roots. Then I became sad when I realized that seeing the world as I do should be easy. All that is needed is a little education and just a little courage.
I love this post. I've done a lot of thinking about the story of the fall in Genesis, and there is one mode of interpretation that makes it make sense to me -- if "sin" is doing that which is morally wrong, and if eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil means evolving to a state of self-awareness and hence being able to formulate concepts such as right and wrong, then it makes sense that sin came into the world as a result of that knowledge. Why is your snake not "evil"? Because it doesn't have the self-awareness/consciousness requisite to think about why it does a thing -- it just does. Animals, for the most part, are not capable of evil, and neither were our ancient ancestors. Neither, for that matter, are very young children who don't know the consequences of their actions, and have not had time to develop empathy. It's once we develop a concept of right and wrong that we become capable of evil.
ReplyDeleteSorry, not really about your post, but you made me think of it, and I've never really talked about it anywhere (other than the recesses of my own mind).