When I think seriously about either of these examples, I am forced to conclude that all of us are like small motes of dust being carried along on a huge tidal wave. We are all busily watching television, or complaining about our loneliness, or bitching about office politics, while all the while a great symphony of Being, a massive edifice of political lies, and an asymptotically accelerating collision course with the Earth's carrying capacity are rising all around us.
Think of what mattered to you today. As for me, I spent time at my software company's office, creating marketing materials, drafting press releases, negotiating contracts, the usual. I sent a lot of emails to friends and associates. I booked a music gig, made plans for the record label, thought of someone I care about who's far away right now. All the ordinary ephemera.
In Ecclesiastes, the word hevel, often translated "vanity" really means "emptiness." "Lightness" in the Kundera sense. It's related to a sort of sigh, a breath of air. Everything, Kohelet says, is hevel; all empty, light, of no consequence. The only thing non-ephemeral is that which is most ephemeral: not human achievement or wealth or love, but the color of a flower or the sound of a breeze. Phenomena which circle.
It's not that I am particularly obsessed with the wool being pulled over America's eyes, or the vast suicide of the human race. Certainly to only engage with macro-problems while supposedly ignoring "less important" micro ones would lead me only to duplicate my own personal problems on a larger stage. And fear, doubt, violence – these are some of the factors to which Moore himself wants to wake us up. I am not planning to move to a cave.
But I wonder if the reason irony is so tempting to people of my generation is that the truth is so irresolvably absurd. Like Brando's Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, whose only way to survive was to go insane, we need some mechanism to separate us from the truth that has been forced upon us by greedy and egotistical malefactors, people who have already made up their minds that their own comfort is more important than the suffering of others or the survival of the planet itself.
So we shut down, either into fear or cynicism or irony -- or into ordinary, comfortable ignorance. It is clearly human to want to anesthetize ourselves in some way, to rest our feet on the coffee table and amuse our minds or bodies with one diversion or another. I won't pretend that my meditation practice, which takes me out of the temporal world and into something trans-temporal or transcendent, is really so different in this regard. Few really have the guts to stay in the trenches with their eyes fully open. And yet I sometimes wonder: in terms of what makes us most matter as humans, is our shut-eyed slumber really so different from death?
Talk Back to Zeek!
More of Jay's Head:
Top Ten Lessons for New Homosexuals
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Summer days, summer nights are gone...
September, 2002
Why is it easier to see God in nature than in the city?
August, 2002
Being at one with Being
July, 2002
New York, full of life, a cure for loneliness.
June, 2002
If the desert feeds the spirit, and Paris delights the senses, what does
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May, 2002
Am I an environmentalist for the same reasons I don't like to spend money?
April, 2002
With stories today about space aliens and the power of prayer, what are
the limits of your enlightened skepticism?
March, 2002
Remembering a car accident one year later. Does anything matter?
February, 2002
When is it cool to like what the uncool people like?
January, 2002
A guy at a concert shouts "Whoo hoo!" at the wrong time. What can he tell
us about life well lived?
November, 2001
If crass capitalism stops us from killing each other, is it such a bad thing after all?
October, 2001
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