Greek to Me
(A Rant By the Cough-Addled Moi, 14 Hours Into My Workday)
For the sake of laziness (not simplicity which has far too many practicalities to its credit because simple and practical are not the same damn thing) I’m going to adopt some terminology to keep my two jobs straight. I will from now on refer to my front desk job as “working Upstairs” and to the homeless women’s center as “working Downstairs”.
OK, so this morning I was Downstairs and feeling very tired, sick, and just generally lackadaisical. So instead of socializing or rearranging inventory between stuff-to-do times I read from one of our many Binders of Interesting Stuff (one is all about common health issues in the shelter environment, one is a comprehensive, although out-of-date, compilation of every social service you can imagine in the Puget Sound area–you get the idea). Unlike the others its content wasn’t informative, but intended only to keep us poor “Servers” from getting too disheartened. It was full of probably a few years worth of those Weekly Reflections I wrote about before.
Anyways, the disturbing thing that I learned and wanted for whatever reason to declare on this here interweb is that, apparently, “God”–as a word, as it is practiced–doesn’t mean anything to me. I read the quotes, poems and stories at a fairly stable rate and with a fairly stable level of interest in understanding what I was reading, and then whenever I saw the word “God” or “Lord” I quickened my pace or skipped over that section entirely. It’s like when you’re reading a story that really has your attention and you come across a long foreign name, or maybe some French or Latin phrase that supposedly all haughty intellectuals are supposed to know, but you don’t, or any group of words that to you just looks like a string of irrelevant letters. If it’s French or Latin maybe you’ll search for a root you recognize, but if it’s a name in something that looks like a click language and you can’t fathom how to pronounce it you probably skip right over it. (Example: when I was reading Anna Karenina there were so many goddamn characters and all of them had Russian names, a language I know diddly about, that when I read names I basically scanned it for a series of letters and that’s what I knew the characters by. Prince Stepan Arkadyevitch Oblonsky? That was Stiva Arkd-Obsky, and so on). It’s as simple as tihs tnhig ebevyrdoy kowns auobt tkhnas to teh ietrnnet. We don’t really read, generally. We scan for things we recognize; we search for what we already understand to gain a larger/deeper understanding.
Well, I don’t understand the word “God”:
PROBLEM PROBLEM PROBLEM.
It has too many conflicting meanings, too wide a range of perceptions, for it to mean anything at all. I read it and I see an abyss of generalizations. I try to find meaning in the context, like I would with any word I don’t understand, and all I see is the author’s laziness. They assume I know what they mean by “god’s will,” “god’s love,” they think I know who their audience is when they lament, “Lord, grant me ___” and “thank you, Lord.” I guess my gauge is this: if you erase each sentence that contains “Lord” and “God” is there any weight left to the work? Absolutely sometimes, but in my experience the answer is more often, “No, not a lot.” And that’s lazy and irritating and utterly unmoving. My newly discovered problem that maybe I shouldn’t allow to be a problem is that I feel even more ridiculously isolated from the world’s gigantic population of Folk Who Believe In “God.” I want to understand SO BADLY, but we seem to be stupidly unable to communicate because of a lame vocab discrepancy.
This is one of many reasons why I like old-timey gospel music. I can tell what they mean because the music more than makes up for language’s ambiguity.
Ugh! I want to run away to somewhere warm and sunny where everyone eats fruit every day and there is no violence or hatred because we all love each other and sing together and fuck and the essence of life and wisdom fills the air like a honey-scented smog of fulfillment.
Er. . .that’s all for now.
December 24th, 2006 at 3:42 pm
Tara Tara Tara! BRAAAAAAAAAAAAINS… on a blog.
December 26th, 2006 at 3:41 pm
I think you answered your own question in an essay I think you wrote comparing Kayla’s magical story to Genisis. “God” is a name in a story told to explain the unexplainable. People get together in “clubs” and decide on what this unexplainable stuff will be called so when they say things like “the will of God” everyone nods sagely having agreed on what that is. They won’t stop to examine how tiny human brains could ever know the will of God because that would break the greement not to think about it, just repeat what everyone else says. If everyone agrees how could it not be true? Once this is decided you can go on with your everyday things because that question ihas been resolved and now you can focus on football or romance or mowing the lawn.
If someone says “I have the authority to make up the God code” a lot of people will accept that person’s bizarre reasoning so that there will be someone who will spare them the strain of thinking about God themselves. In Kayla’s case (and in the case of most children) they don’t wait around for someone to define things for them, they use their own creative forces and powerful imagination to bravely create their own stories and make their relationship to Reality personal.
As Sperry’s experiments showed us the “splt brain” reveals a collaboration between the left the right brain spheres to make up a reason for things to be in Reality, to give order to chaos. The important questions the people in the “God Clubs” avoid really deserve a lot more attention than they get.
Perhaps in your own story of why things are the way they are you can make up your own mind and create your own myths to give reason to chaos? As Kayla demonstrates so well and you point out in your essay you can tell the same story about Creation with Ogres and Princes and it will serve the exact same purpose. It just gets examined a little closer than it might in a “God Club” perhaps. And the characters will have more meaning and make more sense…because you created your own creatures to explain it.
January 24th, 2007 at 2:43 pm
Word, sister-friend.
January 24th, 2007 at 3:03 pm
RE: Jim’s comment
I know what I mean when I say “god”–it varies widely depending on the context–I just have no idea when someone else (who I don’t know well enough to have discussed such matters with) uses the term. Since people tend to save those topics for at least kind of intimate relationships (friends, family, sometimes classmates or like-minded co-workers), that leaves the whole rest of the world a giant, scary question mark.