1/23/05
The big Northeaster came and went, overnight. The view out the back window is now deep in snow, adding mass and distorting shapes. The ladder that lies behind the shed is just a curvy suggestion of rungs and aluminum. Everything resembles some domestic Ansel Adams, even down to the stark black and white.
Winter hates color, I guess. I don’t know if the reason is scientific or one of subjective perception, but all the colors tint to gray, even on the sunniest of days, as this has turned out to be. Is it simply the loss of all that green? I could have sworn that the neighbor’s patio door was an aggressive firetruck red, back in August. Today, it can barely muster the chroma of an old clay pot.
I can kind of see why mankind moved away from worshipping Earth-Gods to the abstract deities of YHWH, Allah, et al. Demeter was going to give crappy weather seven months out of the year, no matter what sacrifice you made to her. Persephone winters in hell, and there’s nothing a mortal can do about it except break out the snowshovels and rock salt.
The Judeo-Christian God is above piddling things like weather. He’s more interested in foreskins.
Our perception of the divine as an idea seems to be directly connected with our sophistication of language. Early cuneiform writing features a symbol that is directly representational. But, slowly, the symbol changes to a more abstract shape, taking on more meanings as it does. Eventually, the symbol mutates to near-universal meaning, yet represents only the phonetic value that the individual culture - say, Long Island - has imbued it with.
God is the same way. First, he was the animals and land that we needed to survive. Then, our dead ancestors (who had somehow been granted great knowledge that they’d wholly lacked in life*) were kneeled to, and finally, God just became a completely divorced abstract guy-in-the-sky.
He’s like the traffic chopper on the local news. He’ll look down and give some general advice on how to do things, but if you take the Gowanus Bridge against his warnings, you’re the one who’s going to suffer in eternal rubbernecking delays for it.
You can even see God’s slow removal from things over the few thousand years that the Bible takes to tell its story. In the beginning, he’s a real hands on kind of guy. He creates the heavens and the earth, makes some light (and then a couple of days later, gets around to making the sun to go with it) makes some people out of clay, then decides the whole thing was a big mistake and starts to rain fire and frogs on everything.
Pillar of salt! Bam. Make the sun stand still? No problem! Eventually, when even a month-long showing of “Waterworld” doesn’t seem to clean up the mess, God obviously realizes that it’s not worth his time, and hands it over to some yes-men. But they spend a lot of time glowering at people and living naked in caves and seem to generally lack that whole Mr. Fixit go-get-it-iveness, so He just foists us off on God, Jr. and leaves for a very long vacation, mumbling something about ‘free will’.
Meanwhile, back on Earth, it just keeps on keeping on with the whole “our religion is best” No-Holds-Barred-Fight-to-the-Finish-Cagematch thing we’ve got going on now. We’re like a bunch of hopelessly awkward teenagers, helplessly smitten with the pretty girl in the front row, and the only way we can think of to get her attention is to give some poor nerd with asthma an atomic wedgie.
Obviously, this makes for problematic theology.
Alright, so what about the East? They’re not so hung up on our monotheism-or-bust crap. Well, according to Tom Delay, that’s why they get the Earthquake/Tsunami one-two punch.
See, rather than implementing some kind of advance warning network, those stupid brown people should have been spending their free time giving kudos to a carpenter who’s been dead for two thousand years. That way, when the big wave DOES hit, they can all go and hang at his dad’s house for an all-night kegger.
As for me, I think I’m back to the animal-and-earth spirits. And I just did my duty of worship this morning: one hour of “Hail Mary’s” with a snow shovel in the driveway.
And my eternal reward? Hopefully, it’s a day like today: quiet, monochromatic, and simply beautiful.
*Okay, maybe I’ll consider praying to my Dad as a Math-God after he dies, but there’s no way I’m going to be convinced that, even in death, he’ll ever have a clue about how to match sweaters and slacks.
---------
Speaking of Ansel Adams: Go check out the work of the Great American Eyeball on-line. They'll try to sell you something, but if you're one of the twelve people left in the world that doesn't own at least ONE reproduction of the man's work, maybe you should take this opportunity.