01.21.08
Posted in Mine, Personal, Short Stories/Oddities at 12:22 am by Moody
It should be easier to explain than this.
To touch someone’s hand as you walk together through grass that reaches up past your calves to tickle that spot behind your knees. The smile that’s shared then. Not at all tentative, although you might think that’s what it is you see; boldness, actually, beneath the warm, translucent blue iris sky with its streamers of cloud like the Milky Way.
It should be easier to explain why this matters.
Not merely that, in later hours, alone, holding between both hands a hot mug of Folgers with a splash of milk and three teaspoons of sugar and one of chocolate mix — the mug sitting on your chest, on top of the blanket — you will smile up at the ceiling where the glow of the television brightens and fades across the grain. And that it will be just like the time you placed your hand over your niece’s hand as she petted the big black Lab named Chick, the first dog she’d ever touched, ever petted, in your backyard and she said “Doggy soft!” and nearly squealed with delight in that high little voice of hers, and her hand was soft and warm and animate, and her bright, clear, hazel eyes were wide as the ones you see in all those Japanese cartoons nowadays. And that it will be just like the time you brushed back your mother’s soft, gray-brown hair from her high, smooth brow and she sighed contentedly in her sleep, just before you headed off to bed with the holiday lights twinkling in reds and blues, yellows and greens, behind you, casting a warm glow from the front room and chasing your vague shadow before you toward the dimly inferred door of the room you still think of as yours even now that you’ve not been there for years. If only it was easy to explain this.
Those moments strung together like decorative lights or maybe like a cluster of tea lights on a table or china cabinet or…. Those moments blurring into minutes when there arose this sense of something eternal happening, bleeding through from some other dimension, from some unknown compass point, spilling into the now and uplifting it like an icon of joy. It’s not a matter of returning to innocence or finding love or being remade whole at last. It’s not just some confirmation of life or seal of approval from on high or anything like that. In some ways it’s achingly, stupidly sentimental.
But it’s also not that at all, because it’s like freedom and release. To briefly touch another and know, like a leaping spark of electricity, that you are both alive and there and real. To know that it’s really happening, and that all that came before is something that really happened, and that it will all go on because — look at the starlight! Look. How long did it take for it to get here? And it will be just like that, and like the time you took your first road trip all by yourself and realized that you were this autonomous agent in the world but it only mattered if you devoured as much of it as you could. And now there are all these pictures you have in various yellow and white envelopes, and all the ones in those two big photo books that you took the time to label and occasionally take out to share with someone who will try but never quite get how much the journey meant to who you are today. And it’s all such a jumble because how on earth could you ever say what it is you know it means… you know it means. How could you ever explain?
It should be easier to explain. Explain why you must weep into your pillow when it hits you just how significant it is that you were so fortunate to know that embrace, that kiss, that casual brush of a hand. How you burst! How you break into dust and scatter away like seeds to grow anew in a thousand other ways! And maybe it is that it’s simply not meant to be explained. Maybe there are some things — like rain falling on the window when you’re resting your chin on the chill, damp-feeling sill and watching the leaves just beyond the pane bounce and drip-drop the raindrops from each to each until the water is lost among the roots — that bear only silence as they happen and refuse to be captured when recounted later. Maybe it is that this sweet pain is a reward, a pointer that indicates without numbers or letters or art that you have done all right, and that you should be grateful for it, grateful to it, because it came to you for no reason other than you brought it, sui generis, to you.
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01.18.08
Posted in Atheism, Evolution, Personal, Religion/Spirituality, Science at 10:34 pm by Moody
“You can’t be a rational person six days a week … and on one day of the week, go to a building, and think you’re drinking the blood of a two thousand year old space god.”—Bill Maher
Let’s make one thing clear from the outset: Whatever I might prefer, I shall have no say in whether our boy chooses of his own free will to be an atheist, a monotheist, a polytheist, a pantheist, an animist or a panpsychist. He shall become what he will. What I care about is that he is well-educated and is able to understand the difference between a scientific theory and an unscientific or non-scientific belief. That said, it follows that I want for him, regardless of his chosen belief system or lack thereof, to understand that life evolved and continues to evolve on this little blue-green planet. I want for him to understand that the theory of evolution—as set forth by Charles Darwin and others, and thence, with the gleaning of ever more data, modified by countless scientists over the next hundred-plus years—represents the ongoing efforts of a great many scientists to explain, elucidate, explicate, clarify and interpret how evolution works, and that the theory is not “just an idea” or “belief” maintained by a few dogmatic scientists as they stew in a fancifully conjured but non-existent hotbed of righteous controversy. Put another way, I do not want our boy’s developing mind to be waylaid by the twaddle, bunkum, poppycock, bullshit and ultimate drivel espoused by some very vocal ignorant twits who believe literally, like half-witted naïfs, in what the Bible (or any other so-called sacred text) says. I want the boy to have uncommon sense, the kind that comes with much education taken to heart.
When a child, not yet 10 years old, attempts to tell an “anti-evolutionist” joke but is confused when you state that the theory of evolution does not say that we “came from monkeys”, one can be fairly positive that some irresponsible adult is behind the effort. When that same child then states that “evolution isn’t real” and claims to know this because he is “a Christian”, there can be no doubt whatsoever that some ignorant and twittish adult is behind it. In the case of our boy, it is his ham-fisted biological father who is attempting, with the guidance of a domineering white trash wife, to warp his mind. It’s the sort of thing that can make you throw up a little in your mouth. I mean, his bio-dad and step-mom are the kind who have a giant “Jesus Freak” sticker (in scratchy ‘agitpop’ lettering) on the rear window of their car.
I stand firmly with Dawkins and others who state simply that the religious indoctrination of a child is child abuse. A child, however precocious, is highly unlikely to understand that there is a significant difference between what is called a scientific theory and what is called “God’s revealed [or ‘living’] truth”. When a parent says that something is true, a child is likely to believe it, especially when the parent attributes that truth to an even greater parental figure in the sky who the parent worships. Children are naturally gullible and credulous. They must rely on the experienced comprehension, the seasoned understanding, of their parents. This is not a bad thing, because trust in what a parent tells you may save your life or will at least make your life easier. But for a parent to selfishly mislead a child in the name of a highly questionable fantasy is… wrong, abusive, sick. I expect, of course, to be told that raising a child as a de facto member of this or that religion is normal, natural and good; that it introduces morality, otherwise presumed absent or somehow immanently inferior without it; that it may very well save the child from eternal damnation at the hands of an all-merciful, all-forgiving, all-loving “God”. Personally, I call that supreme, unadulterated, 100% bullshit. I say that that’s exactly the kind of drivel that makes a person puke even through the angry laughter of disbelief.
You may call the process of brainwashing indoctrination normal, but you should remember that it was once considered quite “normal” to beat children (–which, I know, you “spare the rod and spoil the child” types still think it should be so considered), and to keep slaves, and to treat women like chattel and indigenous peoples like plague (often while violently forcing their religious conversion, no less). “Natural and good” are, taken together or apart, suspect from the get-go. When you define nature in creationist terms, positing a supernatural agent as the author of all nature’s laws (which said agent may break on a whim), then I must look askance at anything you might call “natural”. The same goes for your idea of what’s “good” when, according to your beliefs, “good” is whatever “God” says it is. When you can read about “God” ordering the slaughter of men, women, children, babies (born and unborn), and say that it’s “good”, for whatever reason, then I must hold your concept of “good” in contempt.
As for morality, “God” is neither required nor suggested; the word’s Latin root, mor-, simply means ‘custom’. The morality of the Bible is preserved as an historic religious record of a relatively small number of people who lived over 2000 years ago. As a book it is biased toward promoting the view of certain sects of the time while denigrating others, and has a subtle pro-Roman stance. The historicity of many of its books is dubious (where the book in question is not already utterly beyond such consideration; e.g. Genesis), and the preposterous claims liberally sprinkled throughout the pages of the books it comprises are completely undermining of any respectable assertion of Biblical authority a reasonable person might make. I would dare go so far as to say that this is true of most so-called “Holy Books” the world over.
It is, frankly, horrifically despicable to inflict upon a child the notion of damnation, to fill his or her head with images of an all-powerful “God” condemning unbelievers and failed persons to eternal torment. When you consider that one of the people threatened with this endless wailing and gnashing of teeth is one of the child’s parents…. Well, it’s sickening. How could that not be damaging to a child’s developing mind? What a din of cognitive dissonance! How could that not create an unbearable helplessness and thus necessitate a split from the parent ostracized by “God”? How could that not succeed at being isolating in terms of the child’s sense of place in the greater world? A scarring shame should be visited upon any adult so selfishly motivated (by delusion or stratagem) as to poison the healthy development of a mind. And yet it is that a great many people around this country would consider me to be in the wrong.
Some would suggest that they would only teach “God’s love”, charity and kindness, honesty and good will. They would say that those other people are simply misled. But I say bollocks to that! It’s a cop out. Unless you’ve revised your own Bible (or Koran or whatever) or otherwise bowdlerized it–which, so far as I am aware, would make you a heretic or blasphemer–then you are copping out when it comes to a) the truth of what’s in your so-called “Holy Book” and b) dealing with what it is your fellow adherents believe that book to mean. If those other people are wrong, then isn’t it up to you to prove it to them, to enlighten them, to shun them if they will not see reason? If you allow fanatics to scream their misunderstanding as if it represented your religion, as if it were the “gospel truth”, then are you not tacitly allowing that they are merely more vociferous members of your congregation who say what you will not? Are you afraid of schism? Are you afraid of drawing attention? Are you afraid… or just indolent or cowardly? If your “Holy Book” says some rotten things, shouldn’t you deal with that? If the banner of your religion stretches over twisted trolls whose sickness you deplore, shouldn’t you expel them rather than accept the degradation of your fine beliefs? Shouldn’t you be most vocal about it?
As for me, I see no saving grace in religion. I don’t care what goodness it supposedly inspires, because goodness does not come from it; from what I’ve seen, real goodness comes despite it. Real goodness may sometimes ride on the back of religion, as one might ride a mule, but it is more honorable when it walks on its own two feet, under its own power. In the case of our boy’s bio-dad and step-mom, they’d let the mule of religion trample him while they waved to “God” and whispered surreptitiously to each other about how pleasing it would be to watch their enemies burn forever. Sick delusions often have real consequences.
In the boy’s name I will fight their influence, and I will do so with my love for him.
Listening to: Leonard Bernstein & London Symphony Orchestra - The Rite of Spring: V. Games of the Rival Tribes
via FoxyTunes
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01.07.08
Posted in Out in the World, Personal at 7:35 pm by Moody
And the sky tonight as the sun went down was breathtaking. Deeper and lighter purples shading into ruby and blood orange, gold spending itself in smudged powder coral, cerulean steeped in lilac and bruised rose, iron out of focus behind a damp and gossamer veil of baby’s breath. Naturally, I spent an inordinate amount of time looking into my rear view mirror, trying to take as much in as possible, as I traveled northeastward home, sometimes, surreptitiously, craning my head around to glance at the sky. Dangerous, I don’t doubt, but I didn’t really care too much if it was. The sky seemed to respond, becoming more blood and fire, more lead and ocean depth, more cruel in its beauty. I wondered if there was a volcano spewing ash somewhere, lofting ash into the sky. (In fact, Tungurahua, in Ecuador, recently erupted, but I still have no idea if that’s why the sky was so spectacular.) The light seemed to capture a still life fraught with kinetic portent.
Ahead of me the mountains lay like monstrous blue-black waves, foam capped, with fairy lights irregularly spangling their flanks. The distant view of home. I flew along in my little cockpit, the car a machine toned by its inertia, an inhabited bubble with thoughts like psychological bacteria swimming in that living space curved upon itself. The sunlight faded steadily, unstoppable in its gradual disappearance, silent as silence itself, superimposed upon by the constant whoosh-rush of my heartbeat pushing past my inner ear, upon which, superimposed, the drone of the seemingly endless conversation on NPR, to which I no longer had any attention to pay.
Imagine me, you reader, if you care to. This falling night, here in my particular hemisphere, alone in my car, fairly floating along the inmost lane of the freeway like a blood cell caring not whither I would go, yet arriving almost certainly there. Imagine that within me there is that sunset exploding and diffusing itself across the vast plain of my heartland. And in that place are no freeways nor destinations, and light itself is called breath and wind emotion. And if you can so imagine this, then you may catch a glimpse of history unfolded like the night across the bed of the unfathomable sea of being. Nor does it matter aught, save insofar as you know it in yourself and prise the meaning from the nonce.
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