I’m reminded of a Hemingway quote, “All stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you.”
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By “these things” I mean last things, as eschatology would call them.
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But that is ok, this diary is all of one piece. Even when I do not describe these things directly, I describe them by implication, by the color and tone and shape that I give to whatever I’ve chosen as a subject.
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Some might argue, for example, that our creator is ill-intentioned, or indifferent; that even if reason suggests we have a creator, how is that something to cheer, or be happy about? I do not agree, and I should examine this argument, and defend against it. But I feel flooded, and overwhelmed.
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These things have been said before, by philosophers and theologians. I am only restating them. And it is difficult to state them all in their interconnectedness. It is like trying to juggle. And I’m not a practiced juggler, although the items I am juggling are beautiful and interesting to look at.
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But, anyway, that is why I say the direction of matter toward entropy, or chaos, is not cause for mourning. Because regardless of the state of matter, the very fact of matter should suggest to us that there is a creator outside the realm in which time and matter persist.
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When I say “non-existence,” I don’t mean that which follows death, or precedes birth. I’m not convinced there is any non-existence, where the soul is concerned. Although it may be true that a soul comes out of non-existence when it is given life. That is generally the Christian view, and particularly a Catholic view. So that, while one might speak of an afterlife, one cannot in the same way speak of a previous life. Those who believe in the transmigration of souls would disagree.
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Not that I look for that which appeals to me, when I try to articulate what is true. The truth is appealing in and of itself, because of what it is.
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Yes, I am saying that existence is better than non-existence; that somethingness is better than nothingness. I am implying as much when I say that the chaos of primordial matter, from which our bodies come and to which our bodies return, “should not cause us to mourn,” because it indicates that at least there is something, rather than nothing. I know it is a premise that some disagree with. I can sort of understand the appeal of the viewpoint that runs counter to mine, if appeal is the right word. But only insofar as one might imagine non-existence as a sort of gigantic cosmic sleep, though of course I would then be making an analogy where none can be made. Non-existence is not like sleep, because sleep is an event, an experience. Sleep already belongs to the conditions of existence. There is nothing to non-existence, not even nothing. For, again, nothing is a concept, and concepts are something.
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It makes me feel kindly toward humans, when I think of us all, putting our houses in order, trying to arrange our furniture, to put away our clothes or our books, to minimize the dust for a while, by sweeping it away, or vacuuming it. Chaos wins in the end. For the direction of things that exist is toward entropy, or decay. Which is what chaos is in its basic or primary form. But even this fact should not cause us to mourn. For chaos means that there is something, rather than nothing; that there is some thing that is behaving chaotically, that can be described as such. And that thing presupposes a maker. And that maker is what we can call God.
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I do not think he meant order in the sense of ‘law and order’, but rather in its theological or creative sense, wherein order is employed to keep chaos at bay, and to bring meaning into relief; or to bring form out of the formlessness of the void, as God is said to have done, in the opening verses of the Book of Genesis.
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I will always remember this thing that Kerouac said, later in his life, when he was once a guest on a political talk show, clearly drunk, but self-possessed in the moment that he said it: “I believe in order, tenderness and piety.”
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I have favorite Buddhists the way that, in my youth, I once had favorite baseball players. They are like athletes of the soul, to my mind. Which may well be a frivolous way of thinking of them, I don’t know. One of my favorite Buddhists is Japhy Ryder, the fictionalized version of the poet Gary Snyder, in Jack Kerouac’s novel The Dharma Bums. I have a great love for Kerouac himself, who remained Catholic throughout his life, but who valued Buddhism so highly that he would combine the very practice of it with his own faith, as is evident in his writings.
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Zen Buddhists understand this, and try to illustrate it through the use of koans.
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This is not existence playing a trick on you. It is evidence of the fact that a certain kind of surrender must occur in the life of every soul that wants to know joy.
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By mystery, I do not mean a ‘whodunit’. I mean mystery in the sense that the most pressing questions have no answer, or have answers that disappear as soon as you try to look at them.
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What an artist must do is deepen mystery without sacrificing clarity. Hitchcock was an artist.
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I remember seeing The Birds when I was a child, and recognizing that the final scene, where the family that has been sheltering in the house near the bay decides to leave, at dawn, and hurry across the lawn toward their car, though silently, so as not to disturb the birds that have gathered there, and cause them to attack, would stay in my mind indelibly, though I could not then have described that recognition, for I did not have the words.
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That is a movie by Alfred Hitchcock, whose films have influenced my work.
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I’m reminded of the movie Vertigo, the plot of which involves a private investigator who has been hired to follow the movements of the wife of a successful businessman as she passes the days in the city of San Francisco, and who one afternoon discovers that she, this woman, has been visiting a museum to look at a painting of a person who indeed does resemble her, although that is only the beginning of the plot, and not the story in its entirety.