Via Negativa

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With a title like that, who really needs to write the rest of the essay?

Ann Coulter once memorably opined that “Liberals don’t care about the environment. The core of environmentalism is a hatred for mankind. They want mass infanticide, zero population growth, reduced standards of living and vegetarianism. Most crucially, they want Americans to stop with their infernal deodorant use.”

You see? Nasty liberals smell funny. Just like those peace-mongering, dissolute French. It all fits.

Just because an idea is old doesn’t mean there isn’t a little life left in it. The idea of a Book of Life evokes for me not some everlasting tome in which angels inscribe the names of the elect on pages of illuminated vellum. On the other hand, such a book could never be just another fancy collection of commonplaces. It suggests to me a kind of secularized gospel, a word that is good because it is exceptionally well formed and (naturally) alive. Like the shell-bead tapestries called wampum, which European colonists confused with money. When the orator speaks, he neither recites nor extemporizes, nor – in the ordinary sense – does he read. He looks at the wampum draped across his outstretched arms, and then he translates. The Indians understood what the Whites did not: that all speech is action, and all communication is an act of translation. Otherwise unbridgeable gulfs can be overleaped. Strangers become kin.

And yes, sometimes I like the idea of a Book of Nature. To think that I might, for example, learn something about persistence from this indigo bunting hammering away at his reflection in the window. The world is more than metaphor, I remember, when I see things like the empty translucent brown larval cases of 17-year cicadas. I have from time to time permitted myself the delusion that listening intently to a catbird would make me a better poet, and that learning the secret names of orchids would help preserve certain moments which are really no less fleeting than any of the others. And on absolutely clear days in June, about which an old poet rhetorically asked if anything else could be so rare – meaning rare like a gem, I suppose, and not rare like a steak – on days like this my heart aches for no good reason I can think of. The world simply isn’t supposed to be this beautiful, and when it is, you want to weep. One drink, and I will be ready to embrace the mosquito as my sister and the porcupine as my best friend. (Well, hey, it is Midsummer!)

One thing one doesn’t expect is that the Book of Life will come to end. But today, Denny posted his final entry and gave notice that his blog, Book of Life, will be taken offline on June 30th. I’ll miss his crystal-clear prose and generous spirit. Hell, I may even miss the embarrassingly complimentary comments he was wont to leave here. Denny tells his readers that a “real” book calls. I can certainly understand the impulse to make something more permanent and structurally coherent. The real (albeit fictional) Book of Life reminds us, however, that nothing lasts. Sic transit. All beauty is fleeting, and no glimmer of truth can hold its aura forever.

Or so they say. I’m willing to bet that shell bead tapestries come pretty darn close.

Last night when I got up around 2:00 to go to the john, walking through my silent house I found myself thinking, I wish I had one of those clocks that goes tick tock and chimes (softly!) on the hour.

It would be practical. We get a lot of power outages here, on the order of half a dozen a year. Until this Christmas, when my father gave me a watch, the only way I could find out what time it was when the power returned would be to turn on the computer and go to the website of the National Atomic Clock (my computer’s own clock is unreliably slow).

Beyond that, there’s just something inherently cool about a machine that can run without batteries and without any external power supply beyond its weekly winding. Despite what I said yesterday about machines, I’m not immune to their attraction. In fact, there’s definitely something attractive, even charismatic about more self-contained and alternatively powered machines such as wind-up clocks and water wheels. They remind me of the cybernetic systems (as we choose to parse them) within Nature herself. As a poet, how could I help but be fascinated by the capacity of natural systems to self-regulate and self-perpetuate, known nowadays as autopoiesis?

Most pre-modern, oral cultures attributed life – spiritual existence, autopoiesis – to any charismatic object, but especially to anything that could generate sound. I believe that this reflects a deeply ingrained intuition, and may be responsible for our modern near-worship of the internal combustion engine. We are all, in a sense, cargo cultists. In fact, I’ve been thinking of getting out the epoxy and balsa wood and building me a little toy jeep to place in my shrine. I sure could use a set of wheels.

Often while working by myself on fairly mindless tasks, I have silent conversations with invisible friends. This morning, it was an evangelical Christian, challenging me to describe my religious beliefs. I was shoveling out the cross drains on our mile-and-a-half-long driveway.

I started out strong, saying that my current doing without overt religious belief is really a spiritual exercise, just as one may fast or go without sex. I assured my imaginary double that I’d like nothing more than to become a believer. In fact, I find many forms of religious practice quite attractive, from the ritualism of the Eastern Orthodox to the enthusiasms of Pentecostals and the quietism of Quakers. But it seems to me that if we are truly to give ourselves over into the power of a divinity who is beyond our imagining, the very first thing we should get rid of is any notion that we know what is best for ourselves.

“But what about salvation?” asked my imaginary interlocutor. “Scripture says we must believe if we are to escape damnation.” I replied that “scripture” says many things, some of which contradict each other on their face. But if one message comes through loud and clear, it is that the worst sin of all is to worship false gods, followed closely by attempting to construct images of the divine and invoking divinity for self-serving purposes. Bibliolatry thus constitutes an offence of the highest order.

We are commanded to love divinity and to love our neighbor – the two commandments are apparently closely linked. Nowhere are we commanded to love ourselves. Therefore, to pursue a form of salvation that does not include every one of our neighbors – which ultimately must mean every sentient being in the universe – would be to damn oneself. As long as a single soul still burns, we have a moral obligation to share in its torment.

At some point, my paper tiger of a debating partner accused me of believing in the heresy of deus abscondus, tantamount to the Nietzschean Death of God. I ventured that this might not look like such a heresy if one happened to be Jewish, Armenian, Rwandan, etc. But be that as it may, I said, I think what we are faced with now is homo abscondus. Forget about God – the entire dimension of the sacred has become invisible to most modern humans. We have become like the walking dead, ghosts in the machines. Some quite serious thinkers now look forward to the day when every bit of individual memory can be transferred to computers. When that happens, they say, we will have no further need for physical bodies. The machines will set us free; we’ll become immortal. I say, to hell with that!

Well, naturally my evangelical friend agreed heartily on that point. But a little later I began to needle him about the Christian predilection for making a virtue out of unpleasant work. “The only real excuse for hard work,” I said, “Is to remind ourselves of how delicious ordinary water can taste!”

I can’t remember any of the other points I made this morning, but you can be sure they were all pretty devastating.