2005-03-05 - 7:02 p.m.
a friend (i hope i am not being presumptuous) recently made the statement that we tell stories because we imagine that we have something unique to say. we read stories because they reassure us we are not alone. he took the latter part from shadowlands, and while i had initially thought that was right, and perhaps it is, it is not complete. i've recently started reading (again), to my infinite joy and satisfaction. i stayed up all night last week reading "the inn at the end of the world". i cannot remember the last time i read an entire book in a day, nor can i remember the last time i stayed up all night just because i was so entralled with the story that my sleep seemed trivial. but it occurred to me when i had turned the last page that while we do read in part to to know we are not alone - to feel that we have put out our hand in the dark and found another that understands - i think it is more than that; we read for the meta-narrative. we read because someone had made the leap of faith into meaning. they've told us a story that puts random events, conversations, decisions, and unintelligible happenings into a context that sorts and sifts and pounds and sculpts the raw material of daily existence into a recognizable shape. perhaps a propos, i began reading operation wandering soul this week and came across this:
and she has only this, this cobbled, worn ministration, to show any of those stubborn enough to remember how they have been dropped down in the middle of a plot that is only waiting for them to follow the lead. you are going somewhere. you are going somewhere. sound it out, exercise the phonetics, the rhyme, the muscular spasm, the shape of the storied curve - beginning, development, complication, end. it is the point of being, the thing bones were built for, broken for, the land at which all leaps aim at, the link, the hovering conclusion, her whole body therapy, the reading cure...
this is the same leap of faith i (try to) make every sunday. i believe that physical things have meaning beyond themselves, that a thing that happened epochs ago has some direct correspondence and intersection with the thing going on in front of me. i insist that this series of events called my life is a story that will someday be worth telling
i've been having a reoccurring nightmarish conversation with a friend of mine about the question of meaning. he (among other awful things) wishes that actions and life in general didn't mean so much. he's been listening to the nw local, pedro the lion, and the end of a very disturbing album says this:
"wouldn't it be wonderful if everything were meaningless.he's trying to sort through the question of human heartache and sin and inherited damnable tendancies as it pertains to a God that anyone would want to have commerce with. and he's coming at it from all the usual angles... authority of scripture (given apparent inconsistencies), the church as a political or sociological entity, the question of free will, etc. the thing that i have realized in the course of our conversations is that, given the alternatives that exist out there in the world of pantheism, monisms, self-help, nihilism, even the pop-culture-garden-variety existentialism, i chose the faith-path i've chosen because #1) (in the words of j.patrick ph.d.) it has the most explanitory power. it doesn't answer all questions and it does not wipe away all ambiguity. but what is does do is meet, in reality, with what i know of the world. and where it gives lofty and esoteric answers that require faith, such as in the case of the incarnation of the God, it does so in such a way that it HAS to be the answer to the nearly unutterable question. it is the kiss to the grand inquisitor; we do not know why that answer is "the one", we only know that nothing else would suffice. and #2) if it were not true, i would quit this world. i could not live in a world were everything were meaningless. i could not live if i knew that all of my experience of beauty, love, transcendence were a self-made construct, a mindgame i were playing with my self. so i choose life.
but everything is so meaningful and most everything turns to shit."
