There is a fundamental cruelty that frames our lives as human beings -- a cruelty born in the benign but dishonest genesis of consciousness. We don’t appear here in a naked heap of full grown human flesh, sucking wet breath through our panic as the sun stabs our eyes and the unfiltered noises of an agitated world batter our newly-formed skulls. The human creature doesn’t arrive in the honest blink of an eye, but is slow-birthed to its place. Although a brain seems to pop from the ether and into the uterus like a little magical walnut, it then develops in maddeningly small increments, moving from incoherent jelly of grey to self-aware neurological capsule in a process so slow, the inching of the continents almost exhilarates by comparison. (Just ask any friend who has lumbered and staggered through the third trimester of human pregnancy).
The assemblage of consciousness is meant to be gentle, because the alternative would be too cruel: suddenly coming-to on the wet earth, weakly shielded in its eggshell atmosphere as it careens through a dead universe, air rasping through stuttering lungs while gravity pins us to the crust and stone. We would be incoherent, frightened by the animated human legions and their bead stares, terrified by their articulating limbs and spasms of intent. It is for this reason we inch into self-awareness -- the languid scaling of our consciousness saves us from the disorienting trauma of sudden corporealization. But the slow ascent of intellect also predisposes us to delusion, leading us to believe a constellation of existential lies. Such as that there is nothing impertinent in a universe that suddenly yanked us into being from the bottom of its cold black hat. Or that our viscous motion through dimension and time is normal and self-evident. Because of the slow arrival of awareness, we are continuously immersed in an incessantly refreshed hypnosis of normalcy. In a tragedy more compelling than any other, the process of our slow awakening prevents us from ever really awakening at all.
Denial of the fundamental absurdity of human experience is ubiquitious in the west. The persistent apathy in culture towards the begging question of living is supremely agitative to me...there is something malevolent in an hallucination of normalcy so jealously maintained by the apparatus of our politic. Being here, attached to a planet spinning through a solar system hurtling through a cosmos, three-dimensional and self-propelled, is solidly absurd. But it is an absurdity painfully minimized and dismissed in the culture at large.
But there have been in the history of our race others who have plumbed the same agitation, others hidden mostly in the margins who have sifted through the smoke of our dystopia and turned the mirrors askew. One feels it in the bones: somewhere in the frontiers of this place lie illumined and sinewed philosophies, and no seeker of truth can settle the restless inquisition until he’s shaken every last intellectual bush to find them.
I wasn’t always so dissatisfied with the paradigm. I started out like everyone else, fully complicit in it. Sparkling but illusory trinkets of materialism and religion held me spellbound. Like everyone else, I poured out obeisance to a prevailing cosmology, pretended that professing belief in God was equivalent to actually believing in God, and that believing in God was actually enough. I plodded through the days in this haze – until at some point my nose caught a sliver of wet stink, and I turned to see an elephant standing knock-kneed and self-consciousness in the middle of the room. Organized religion could only tell me why I was here, it didn’t even pretend to divine why here was here. And while it possessed incredible power to answer the yearning in my heart for meaning, it failed to answer the equivalent yearning in my mind – that for understanding.
Tracing my intellectual path since those days is like chasing the shifts in a quantum particle – it’s impossible to fix both its position and momentum simultaneously. Like most sweeps of the human imagination, Heisenberg’s epiphany plumbed more truth than he originally imagined. It turns out what is true for individual particles (as illuminated in the uncertainty principle) is jtrue for the collection of particles forming mind as well. It’s impossible to parse the growth of human intellect as discreet coordinates of revelation and movement. Too much information is lost in the trying. Like an electron passing through space, my mind’s been threaded into multitudinous of paths by a combination of forces that are impossible to untangle.
Still, there is always retrospection – that mystical operant of the limbic system that staggers clumsy and sticky-fingered into memory. Its loosely wielded auger can stab out samples of our past and lay them out in the flourescence of our scrutiny. But there is a danger embedded in the illusion this gives of understanding. Evoked memory is discourse untethered from context – meanings appear obvious that are often complete inversions of the originals. But you can’t know a man unless you know where he’s been. And though awkward, the evocations of memory are todo que habemos.
It is for this reason I offer up two events in my life that have helped bring me here. If I could take an axe and hew my head in two bloody halves, the pieces would be vaguely recognizable stumps of spirit and intellect. And when I raid roughly into the sleep of my cortex, the following two ghosts are what bubble up, each a faint representation of these halves:
When I was eight years old I was baptized a member of my church. My father packed me in his rough veined hands and pinned me to the shallows of a white-tiled pool. Though Christians stress the process of rebirth that emerging from water signifies, my epiphany lay equally in those moments beneath the surface...lay equally in the seconds of counterfeit death that ticked away as I lay feebly vised to the watery floor. There’s no way I’d have lived had my father decided to keep me there...no way I could have ripped my monkey frame from his stone grip and fought my way to the surface. A few collections of a few seconds were all that separated me from turning pale, than blue, than irretrievably dead. But there I was – submerging thick terror of death for something as nebulous as the concept of God.
In a public place, instinct was servile to mind, brainstem yielded to cerebration. It didn’t matter if I was yielding to faith in God or simply to faith in my father. In either case, the deep organs of my brain should’ve shotgunned fear into my vessels, driving my organism to flee. But the reflexes for survival remained eerily mute. I simply lay there, squeezed by the flat weight of water, heart tapping lazy beats, until my father twisted the fold of my shirt and heaved me to the surface.
No animal on the planet possesses a shadow of this power...this mad gift for yielding instinct to idea. It is what defines us fundamentally as human, and is the only aspect of character capable of redeeming us from base nature. I’ve understood the power of intellect for a long time, and have always been frantic to expand it. It alone can dissolve the tyranny of our animal fundament, paroling us from the linear predictability of evolution and the hell imposed on conscious beings by the despotic caprice of natural programming.
Whereas a religious event invigorated my concept of the intellect, an intellectual event refined my concept of the spiritual. According to the tenets of Taoism, the force of Yang is balanced by the force of Yin. In the broad swirl of my mind, the spiritual not so much balances intellect as teases and persecutes it. It knows full well the limits of mind, and makes no bones about driving the shortcomings home. In a dynamic and vigorous cycle, intellect and spirit vie to surpass each other in illuminating dark corners of the room, and each have become equally important in the doing.
The universe is expanding. It’s difficult to find any statement in the human realm less controversial than this – including the elegantly incontrovertible claims that Liberace was gay or Elvis had supple hips. The thing is, at one point in my life I would’ve insisted the fact belonged to science, coldly separated from the heat and passion of the spiritual. The world was neatly bifurcated into things of the spirit and things of the mind, the universe halved and inelegantly shoved into one or the other realm. But the tension created by this division couldn’t last, and eventually led to the second epiphany that drives my interest in humanities – namely, the knowledge that the division of truth into spiritual and material categories is absurd.
Like most revelations, this one came on “little cat feet,” sneaking through a side door before slithering through the gap at my ankles. The moment itself was prosaic – indistinguishable to an outside observer from the millions of mundane moments that fill a life. Just another minute in another hour, sitting yet again in a lecture hall during another undergraduate year. A sentence had been formulated and sent into the room, packaged adroitly by the professor for easy digestion and commitment to memory: “The universe is expanding. It is a fact, proven in Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and in the ubiquitous electromagnetic red shift for every object in space.” I like to think my mind is as disciplined as any other, but at times it chomps at its tether and bolts free to fetch a marvelous little thing from my memory. And what it brought me this time, dripping with adhesions of slobber, dropped happily at my feet, suddenly froze me in my chair. “He who stretchest out the heavens like a curtain.” Something from my catechism, Isaiah I think. A twenty-five hundred year old spiritual text belying knowledge of the 20th century scientific truth that our cosmos is racing for its own peripheries. My mind whirled with the realization of the interconnectedness of things, and of the unity of spirit and mind. Of the possibility, no, the truth, that things of the spirit and things of the mind are neither. That these divisions are arbitrary. That truth is exactly what it pretends to be. That, in the words of a high school friend of mine, waxing philosophical in the haze of a marijuana fugue: “Everything just is what it is.”
And so here I stand, knocking at the door of the humanities program at Cal State Dominguez Hills – hat in hand, knock-kneed like the elephant in the room, self-consciously kicking at the dirt with the tip of my shoe. A man, a corporeal manifestation of spirit and intellect, seeking to expand both provinces under the aegis of your university. I admit to a little concern. I look back on what I have spilled out here and find much that is wrong -- a stream of thought often awkward, poorly worded, and inordinately complex. But in the end I’ve decided to leave it as it is, because as such it is mirror representation of its author. Who, after all, just is what he is.
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