Dr. God

I worked at the Bozeman Chronicle mailroom for a summer about three years ago where I shuffled papers, stacked crates, and taped boxes shut alongside some of the most ignorant and under-read folk a person can meet. Less concerned with poeticism than the color of their own shit, they seemed hellbent on smoking, chewing, cussing, and coffeeing their way into oblivion. This stood in stark contrast to my time searching and discussing meaning in the words of poets. When I first met them, just as I was entering the world of academic rigour (mortis?), I thought myself as a student of the erudite, a literary artist in a desert. But as I spent time with the "common people", I realized that their lives were filled with a poeticism that I could perceive only if I ditched my pretentions, start smoking, drinking folgers, and appreciating the little things. There was a different kind of sensitivity there, the kind that literary critic Declan Kilberd called,"the sacrament of everyday life." Now, I find the autopsy of Whitman and Dickenson and Thoureau in a stuffy, windowless room to be the most hilarious act of silliness I have ever participated.

I am experiencing this feeling again as I sit and try and read the Bible with my pretentions to civility and critical analysis and electricity. Once again, I am thinking that I have been approaching this text with blinders on- from sunday school to the sanctuary.

Like many American kids I spent many an afternoon watching Disney and hearing bastardized versions of old folktales, folktales that had been milked for whatever moral that Mom, Dad, and Michael Eisner could sell to me. Storytelling became a simple tool to teach me things such as "love your brother", "don't steal", and "save the princess". Abandoning all webs and imagery and meat in the texts, I was trained to distill the "moral of the story" at a very young age. Later, in High School, this process became the act of "formalist criticism" and "style analysis" and under the firm post-structural eye of one of my Uni professors, Lisa Eckhart, I learned a new name for it: "bullshit". Granted, there is value in it, that's undeniable, however, there are limits to the search for moral meaning in textual analysis, and having been raised in this way for almost two decades, it has become cataracts to my reader's eye.

//quick gear change, sorry about this, but I wanna make a metahpor.//

Though my friends in the Computational Sciences would slap me for this, I think of software as technology. A new piece of software changes the way I interface with my computer and, at times, the way I view and interact with the world around me. These are extentions of my senses and limbs which goes to the heart of what a technology is (once again I can feel the sting of my tech savy friend's hands as they beat me into understanding).

There's a problem with the operating system known as Windows (you know, the one manufactured by Microsoft) where one piece of software will conflict with another because they are trying to use the same resource as another piece of software or something like that. I don't know the technical term for it, but it exists and it is the bane of my career in the use of word processors.

So, in a more relevent sense, since moralities and analysis are augmentations to my natural, unbiased senses (they are the bias methinks, but whatever) they are technologies just like my shitty Windows Vista, and my newfound appreciation of the bare sensory awareness of things and "simplistic" modes of living are the conflicting pieces of technology.

Since those moralities have basically become totally ingrained in me, they act as an almost base hardware and possibly cannot be removed. So I can only hope to become aware of them right? I don't really know what I'm talking about. These are feelings pointing in a certain direction.

But, coming a little bit closer to relevancy, I have found myself becoming more aware of this conflict as I read the Bible for this class.

The professor told us that the writer "J" of the bible wrote beautiful prose and that the Bible is a magnificent example of storytelling. I took his word for it in class. I try not to disagree with people with "Dr." at the head of their names. So I guess it's beautiful, that's cool, what's the value of beauty anyway when you have the raptures of the common beating at your heart everyday? I didn't find it all that great, I mean there's very little scene setting, half of the book seems to be expository, which- wait, I was doing it again. I was consigning my expectations of a civilized reader to the text. So I need/needed (it's an organic process) to start appreciating it for its poetry, that common people mode of thinking, the mythological mind thing.

Going through Genesis this way was really hard. I felt myself looking at these people as heroes, archetypes again, the circuitry of my moral -finding-beagle was sniffing away and I started to feel that odd sense of detachment as Lots daughters raped their father that some find when their moral-finding-beagle connects with their presumptions-about-the-text-poodle and they get thrown into the pool of what-is-actually-there. This was a 404 error on my part. This text can't be read with my psudo-progressive leanings and moral attitude that the world needs to be fluffy and comfortable. I mean Aaron was a jackass, Moses was a pedo, and God is a bi-polar megalomaniac under these rules. Just as I needed to ditch my impulse (my technology) of moral hunting, I needed to embrace that ohm thing where I let what is there just settle and enjoy the ride.

Still havent done this.

Also, quick aside, the people from the beginning are my friends now. And I'm not saying that they are noble savages who are at peace with the world. I'm just saying that they do a pretty good job of looking at the stars and seeing beauty or shaking a hand and feeling kinship. They are just as capable of moral delusions and petty squable as anyone else. They are just as contradictory as I am in this blag post. It's just that they are cool with their contradicitons, and that seems kind of indicative of the whole mythological mind stuff we are discussing in class.

(like usual, this is not a finished blog post, my mind is spaghetting like mad right now, and I want to get something up before class).