28 June 2005

Dear ---,

Save for ---, who saves me every day, and one doctor to whom I owe my life, no one's tried to rescue me recently in any fundamental way. Except you, --- - with a copy of Ecclesiastes. Having a pal try to save my soul is a formidable event at any time, but especially now that I've a bad heart and probably not much time. I've nothing anywhere near as precious to offer by way of thanks. But I value words. So then, with eyes and heart and mind wide open, let me tell you what I'm thinking and feeling as a result of reading that little book.

Ecclesiastes seems, at first sight, like a child's book of verse. You know, quaintly picturesque, entirely safe, surely too small to do any harm. Fortunately, awake to your possible intent, I'm alert when I crack it open. To begin with, there's not a single picture, quaint or otherwise, and, commencing with the first five words, the book is an adult's arsenal of cannon blasts fired at point-blank range.

You are going to die.

- it says to start.

Wow! On the surface I'm, intrepid, reckless even in my Godless independence. Actually, I'm increasingly hungry to be delivered from my lifelong atheism, and those first five undeniable words catch me both luxuriating in my unbelief - and unprepared. Well, what do you know, something straight to the chin. Terrific. What could be more inviting? Okay, here I am, ready or not. Any real God around my base is it! Stick around, ___. Here are the goods, truth for truth, on what's been waiting for those five words and the wisdom that follows them.

At best, at rest, at worst, at bottom, aside from --- and my two daughters, who've shared my life and my love, I-am-certain-of-nothing. Because nothing - nothing! - including those three ladies, to be totally honest - ever turned out as originally expected. More - less - better than - thoroughly other - but never as anticipated. Whatever my intentions or theirs, however well I did my best and everybody else did theirs, our various narratives evolved according to unknown rules. As an old actor once said to me, after years of pain and wonder, "Life is what happens to you while you're planning other things." Call it what you like - fate, chaos, comedy - the trip has never corresponded to my sense of direction. Along a long, circuitous route, no matter the place, whatever the weather, the periodic street signs all read the same: S-u-r-p-r-i-s-e!! As for the rest of the universe and its godforsaken maps, nothing, certainly nothing in print, was much of a help. I was and continue to be lost. And just when I think it can't get worse, it does. And the natives are just like the landscape. Regarding our species, I'm with Michel de Ghelderode, the Belgian playwright, who observed that human beings are capable of everything and its opposite.

Remind you of Solomon? Should. Here's the old boy himself -

The race is not to the swift, nor the
Battle to the strong, nor bread to the
Wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor
Favor to the men of skill; but time
And chance happen to them all.

Gone the doctrine of retributive justice. The good king appears instead to supply a pragmatic theology that takes its lead from reality, and he reminds us again and again that any attempt to secure one's fate is "a chasing after the wind". He suggests in no uncertain terms that we enjoy the good things, the righteous things, while we have them. Hell, I can go for this guy -

So there you - and Solomon - have me. If disappointed by the many, I'm still in love with a few. Damned but not about to surrender. If not delivered, not yet defeated. My position after seven decades on what may be a dying planet circling a third-rate star in an obscure corner of the galaxy is best summed up by a character I once wrote for ----. Her name was Violet, Ultra Violet. She was a chorus girl working an ecologically ruined world forty years in the future. She's ended up, she says, "doin' club dates, strip-joints, casinos. Y'know, bad gigs, bad junk, worse luck, less cash." But she's still singing, still dancing. And she ends her monologue by declaring, "If it's too late for hope, it's too soon for despair." I second that, which would seem to make me ripe for Solomon's sermon.

Can more be said? Solomon does, and therein lies the problem. It starts soon enough. Just turn that first page. He says -

I, the Teacher, was kin over Israel in Jerusalem.
I devoted myself to study and to explore by
Wisdom all that is done under heaven.
What a heavy burden God has laid on men!

Well, it's not God but Solomon who lays it on us. Look, there it is, up front. A covenant of belief. That is faith in place of knowledge. Absolutely. On second reading, It's transparent. Solomon's slipping God in, presented without presence, introduced without evidence, not to be questioned, least of all to be personally experienced. Yet nothing's more burdensome than a secondhand God. Of course, secondhand! As is every deity fast-tracked and bequeathed through the shorthand of belief. Solomon, with all his wisdom, has made the mistake of every bad or impatient teacher. He forgets that students really learn only when they learn through their own efforts. Still, there it is. Solomon's God is being imposed at the outset, on trust.

A God worth knowing is best known directly. Any responsible communicant knows that. And any worshipper who says, in effect or actually, that he believes in God, rather than that he knows God, has never seen the Almighty or at least by then has lost sight of him. As well, he may not know how to talk about his God. In any case, poor Solomon should've left the lecture to someone else. Lectures about God are a bad idea in any case. Because it's almost always the lecturers, those driven to convince others of what they believe, who kill us in the end. When we fail to believe the way they do.

By now I'm beginning to sweat. Good King Solomon has begun to alarm me. Paying closer attention, my apprehension increases.

Meaningless! Meaningless!
...Utterly Meaningless!
Everything is meaningless!

- insists the Teacher. If so, then we're all spiritually free. By definition. No imperative precedes us. The Teacher lies, of course. If we take him at his word, his fearful, judgmental God precedes and pursues us -

Fear God and keep his commandments,
for this is the whole duty of man.
For God will bring every deed into
judgment,
including every hidden thing,
whether it is good or evil.

- is how Solomon the Teacher has ended the lecture.

Damn it, the man wants us to follow his God out of fear of his judgment. Tremble, infidel, this is a vengeful God! Gone the righteous life, of doing good things for their own good sake. Lost, too, is the sense of simple justice as a force in divine and human affairs. Instead of doing to others as we'd have them do to us, Solomon expects us to behave ourselves, courtesy of the punishment-and-reward system. Hellfire? You bet. Fear for the fearful. Judgment for the Guilty. Soul-candy for the Children!

Solomon is fast losing me. But if, as the sun of Bathsheba insists -

Everything is meaningless

- then nothing divine of demonic governs us. We're spiritually free. By definition. Free to remain without meaning. Or free to create our meanings, our persuasions, our Gods, affirmative or destructive. Free to alternate between convictions, when it suits the moment or our interests. Solomon, after all, has a time for everything -

A time to kill...
A time to hate...
A time for war...

But if it's okay sometimes to kill and hate and make war, since we're so many there'll always be a time for all three. I'm with the Dalai Lama. We've come too far, gone too far, to indulge in any additional self -slaughter. If humanity's heart needs instruction, time now only for compassion.

The book's forword claims that Solomon shows us what's meaningless in order to point out the one thing that does have meaning, namely obedience to God. However, I find myself resistant to such a petition when I discover that everything that Solomon's God does, he -

Does so that men will revere him.

But can God be God and purchase out limited adoration with his enduring gifts? Worse, would God be God and need our veneration to begin with? Yes, to both questions, if God were vainglorious, insecure, ambitions. The list of pejoratives grows the moment God is willing to bribe his way into our hearts.

I found one upright man among a
thousand,
But not one upright woman among
them all.

Excusing the above misogyny because of its antiquity won't work. Lysistrata, the Song of Songs, Trojan Women, Medea and numerous other works almost as old as the Ecclesiastes celebrate - champion! women.

By now Solomon and I are in constant disagreement. Where the son of the conquering David, greatest of the Kings of Israel, says -

You are going to die.

- I say, No, I'm going to live! When the royal savant says -

There is nothing new under the sun.

- I reply, not true. Not in his time, not in ours. I'm new! So are you! So's everybody else! Like snowflakes or stones or people on a beach, when examined up close, each individual one of us is a singularity. Unprecedented. Unmatchable. New! To be cherished, for nothing exactly like us will come again once we disappear.

Laughter (continues Solomon in his transcendent
wisdom) is foolish.
For what does pleasure accomplish?

"Much," say I, laughing at Solomon's sudden asceticism. Not only does laughter strengthen our immune systems, now a proven medical fact, but comedy is the triumph of life's disorder over that ultimate despot of predictability - Death - and, by extension, every tyranny. Check it out. For every laugh, some rule, some law, some regularity is overthrown, transgressed, disrupted, and life's final dictator, who rules against each one of us in the end, is momentarily, implicitly, vanquished. For every snort of Irony, for every howl, yowl, wail, bellow, snicker, yelp, squeal of derision, for every quiet smile, and expectation has been frustrated, a pattern broken. Look at it. Why do we groan and grin at a pun? The habituality of words has been subverted, reconfigured. Why laugh at a clown's somersault over an unworthy object? Or at his sitting on an missing an absented seat? Why do we laugh when a guest chokes on his dinner or a friend gags on a drink? Because the familiar routine of walking, sitting, staying upright and the commonplace order of chewing, eating and swallowing has been interrupted, overturned, obliterated. Why do we giggle at a misprint? Because the tedium, the rigidity of type has been ousted for an instant. Whenever our lips curl up and we flash our teeth, the raw animal life force in us is exulting - because, for one surprising moment, a law, an edict, an order, a civilizing paradigm has been upset and, inferentially, life has won out over death, however briefly. No wonder the worldly wise King Solomon would not countenance laughter at the royal table. He knew an insurgency before it crossed him.

Is there any question why we don't find the court's Fool on the king's chessboard (everyone else is there). His moves would be too lawless, disordering, anarchic, emancipating for a game that plays by the rules. Similarly, I must absent myself from the confines of Solomon's Ecclesiastes. For reasons of fun mostly. I'm having too much fun. I love this life. I'm having a hell of a time chasing after its winds. Its breezes rouse me. Its storms enliven me. Its blasts exhilarate me. Its tempests electrify me. I will not deny life's horrors or its disappointments. But its mysteries entice me. Its laughter cheers me. There are so many dazzling, breath taking wonders, including all kinds of people, whose brilliance, talent and fraternity inspire and elevate those around them. Their grace, their splendor, their radiance, the magnificence of their beauty and courage, often against the odds, are all we need of meaning - alongside which Solomon's cries of "meaninglessness" are a wasteful wailing in the wind. Sure, life's inconsistency and brevity are heartbreaking. Never mind! Be quick! Every second is a give!

Deepest thanks!
And love,

Eugene