One Night in Copan Page 10

  The opposite of silence leads quickly to narrative, and the sound of story is the dominant sound of our lives, from the small accounts of our day’s events to the vast incommunicable constructs of psychopaths.

  Reynolds Price (1933-2011)

  What most of us can ever hope to know for certain is second-hand knowledge endlessly retold, recast and misread: the idiosyncratic, hand-me-down robotic indoctrinations of our parents; the expedient reinterpretations of history; the often-slanted pedagogy of our teachers; the fanciful credos of religion; the partisan reflections of the press; and the falsehearted proclamations of our elected officials. What was once learned from instinct and direct personal experience has since been prepackaged into a one-size-fits-all view of the world suitably tinted to accommodate individual preconceptions, partialities and traditions -- not to debunk them. The clarity of truth is being mercilessly dimmed by the tendency to regard it as a doubt-free black-or-white affair lacking grays, devoid of ambiguities, even of improbabilities that would stagger the mind if someone took the time to look, to think, to probe, to doubt.

  We all need to hear stories. But somehow we’re fond only of those that don’t dispute our own accounts of reality, that don’t threaten our ideological or emotional comfort zones. We’ve become so anesthetized by sanctioned reality that we overlook the colossal lies that “official” truths conceal. Worse, we don’t read between the lines; we refuse to extricate fact from cautionary tale. We allow hints of veracity to color our fantasies, to stimulate our adrenal glands -- we’re thrilled by the oblique suggestion of danger, horror or salaciousness so long as these enticements remain abstract, so long as we’re surrogates, vicarious onlookers, not partakers. Other people’s stories help legitimize our voyeurism. The tales we spin betray our narcissism.

  But what is a story? How is it conceived? Is it the product of mental parthenogenesis -- inadvertent, spontaneous reproduction -- like the star-crossed Otto in Past Imperfect (or the ill-fated Jesus of Nazareth?), or is it an artifact, the handiwork of converging processes such as ideation, intuition, imagination and revelation? I can only speak for myself. Whatever my stories might say bluntly or convey subliminally, they undergo frequent, sometimes radical permutations, mid-course corrections and unintended reincarnations. Most of them begin as casual brushstrokes on a blank stretch of canvas eager to be filled. They are left to mature on their own as random colors impart life to tentative outlines. A few are premeditated, like a murder or a terrorist attack. Others materialize spontaneously in my dreams or when I put my mind in neutral. All share a common thread: Incongruity, degeneracy and insanity; the insanity of arrogance; the aberration of absurd beliefs; the folly of conformity; the dementia of greed; the paranoia of hatred; the psychosis of racism; the evil of poverty; the obscenity of hunger; the conceit of anthropomorphism; the lunacy of war; the failure (or unwillingness) to concede that incongruity, degeneracy and insanity are at the core of human existence.

  Be they tale, improvised reality, social commentary or extended metaphor, stories are like trees. Their roots dig so deep in time and stretch so far into the rich loam of imagination, memory, experience and clairvoyance that their genesis, their raison d’être, is not always discernible in the narrative. Likewise, the melancholy fruits their tangled boughs yield often extend beyond the limits of peripheral vision; one simply can’t see the forest for the trees.

  Should they choose to do so, readers can stop here, retire the book to some dusty shelf, burn it or share it with a friend. Should they prefer to take a closer look at the ideas, musings and nightmares that spawned them, the candid elucidations below might address some of their questions, suspicions or forebodings.

  IN DRANOMOS (p. 3).

  When I was a young child I remember drawing two strikingly clashing pictures, one of a cold, gloomy, ashen rainy or snowy day, the other of a dazzling summer scene, complete with smiling sun, undulating rays, frolicking birds, all set against a verdant backdrop that included coconut trees and canary-yellow sandy beaches.

  In the first picture, as precipitation engulfs the top of the page, the stick figure behind the window is frowning. His arms hang dejectedly by his sides. His narrow crescent moon-shaped head stoops to one side. In the other, the stick boy is smiling. His head is round and beaming. Holding a bouquet of colorful flowers in his hands, his arms reach for the sky. Even his pet stick dog and cat wear an ear-to-ear grin. As I grew up, my drawing skills improved but I never outgrew my aversion to cold and inclement weather. Ironically, I spent most of my adult life in places that have what meteorologists wryly describe as a “continental” climate. While I understood that emotions are not hostage to weather, I often experienced protracted periods of depression during the long, bleak, windy, frigid winters of the northeast where I lived.

  That was to change soon after I moved to the desert. At first, the unbroken landscape, the desolation, the immense dome of sky above the pitted greys and mottled browns of distant escarpments, the grotesque Joshua trees, the roving tumbleweeds, the smell of sage, the rolling mirages levitating on the wings of super-heated air, the deafening stillness -- all stirred a sense of awe heightened by the novelty of it all. The newness soon lost its originality, its allure. And the depression returned, this time accompanied every blazing summer by the longing for a passing snow shower, for the perpetual-motion vitality and the glittering lights of the Great White Way, for the fluid choreography of commuters scurrying in Grand Central Station’s main concourse, for the quaint book stores, the museums and the concert halls, for the prospect of intelligent dialogue. The desert is a suffocating, banal, bleak and dreary place that turns men into savages or hermits or lunatics. Its barren soil is fertile ground for the extremist views of xenophobes and racists who believe that the poor are either stupid and unimaginative, or unmotivated and lazy.

  TIME FLIES (p. 13).

  Immortality (or eternal life) is a concept that being, physically or spiritually, can be extended beyond death for an infinite length of time. Eternal life can also be construed as timeless existence, not known to be achievable according to cutting-edge physics, nor even definable despite millennia of arguments for “endless life” by some religions.

  Biochemically, there is no such thing as death, only decay and transition to a different environment, followed by biochemical re-transformation. Fear of death is a built-in and essential part of the survival instinct. The belief in “rebirth” or in successive lives lies in the fear of being “terminated,” thereby asserting the continuance of the self as a hedge against non-being. We all seek immortality -- physical, transcendental. We seek refuge in the notion of a self-replenishing future.

  Some scientists, futurists and philosophers claim that human physical immortality will be achievable in the latter part of the 21st century. I have my doubts. Biological forms have inherent limitations that medicine and bio-engineering might not overcome. Meanwhile, I support Wittgenstein’s interpretation of eternal life: “If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.”

  DEATH & TRANSFIGURATION (p. 17).

  According to the Coalition for the Homeless, the down-and-out population of New York rose to an all-time high in 2011. More than 114,000 people slept in the city’s emergency shelters, including 40,000 children. An undetermined number never made it to a shelter or were denied sanctuary for the flimsiest reasons. Thousands of formerly-homeless children and families that had been placed in subsidized housing have since been forced back into homelessness due to state and city budgetary cuts. There are two million homeless children in America. About seven hundred people die every year from exposure to cold in the U.S.

  Meanwhile, the rich are getting richer and illegal, immoral and unwinnable wars are still being heavily bankrolled.

  PAST IMPERFECT (p. 19).

  Astropaleobiology is a new discipline whose primary objective is to find and interpret evidence of former life on other plane
ts and their moons. At some time in the future, astropaleobiology will widen its focus on the origins of life in the Universe. If successful, it could find evidence of intelligent civilizations from the past, perhaps even from billions of years ago. Space exploration will continue to provide science with a means to understand life’s origin, evolution and the ultimate fate of the Universe. Sooner or later, it will answer some crucial questions: Are we alone? Is life on, say, Mars, independent of life on Earth? Is life on Earth the result of immutable physical laws and serendipitous biochemical reactions? Or did life travel piggy-back between the planets on errant chunks of rock, ice and streaming clouds of cosmic dust? Answers will eventually include the “when” and “how” of life. What can never be elucidated is “why.” Venturing an explanation would take meaninglessness to the heights of absurdity.

  IN HIS OWN IMAGE (p. 23).

  “I think, therefore I doubt,” I’d exclaimed one day as I awoke from a long slumber and shed the last vestiges of forbearance for senseless beliefs. Nine-tenths of my family had perished in Hitler’s gas chambers and the “inscrutability” of God’s designs, at best an offensive rationale, had since acquired a loathsome aftertaste.

  I rejected the notion that man is born sullied by some “primal offense,” that pain ennobles the soul and that sentient beings need to be ruled by an arbitrary system of faith-based values and protocols. In religion’s imaginary goodness, I discovered not a path to enlightenment but an instrument of deceit and spiritual enslavement. The makeover from compliant fence-straddler to outspoken mutineer was gradual, filled with misgivings. At first, I found religion’s mystique inscrutable. I had meandered through its occluded allegories and bizarre canons like an explorer in a strange, uncharted wasteland. I had glimpsed the very faint light that religion claims to shed but found only vast and gloomy shadows. It is in the shadows that my senses, now accustomed to the darkness, caught sight of a glow, a radiant luminosity that rinsed my pupils free of the gritty debris of credulity. I now understood that absurd beliefs (not glaring truths), prejudice and groundless fear (not common sense), threaten humankind and condemn it to eternal bondage.

  Like others before me, I had absent-mindedly tolerated sundry propositions and viewpoints along the way, some of which I even peddled, parrot-like, out of stupidity or intellectual sloth. No more.

  Who is this “maker” who inflicts (or tolerates) atrocities for the “good that comes from them”? What cunning and irreducible absolute engineers and orchestrates without apparent aim -- or turns a blind eye to -- the paroxysms that convulse his realm? What “intelligent designer” remains stone-silent while the sobs of his creation are never heard? What “ineffable” entity is this, whose ear is inattentive and whose heart is unfaithful to the throngs who grovel at his feet and seek his succor? What cruel despot decrees that his subjects will mutter words not their own, that they will uncritically obey the injunctions of his self-anointed emissaries, tremble at their threats and admonitions, beg and weep and recite guilt-ridden prayers of indebtedness and veneration, all repeated ad nauseam, day after day, to a God who never shows his face, never bares his soul, never sheds a tear, never says he’s sorry, a God who grants life and, with it, the fear of death?

  Eventually, I concluded that “God” is a useless and costly illusion with which I could dispense. And crypto-agnosticism blossomed into overt and liberating atheism.

  THE LONGEST NIGHT (p. 27).

  Hitler, Stalin, Mao, the Shah of Persia, the ayatollahs of Iran, Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gadhafi, Jim Jones, David Koresh -- all practiced a form of mass hypnosis designed to achieve complementary objectives: unconditional obedience, political or religious chauvinism and hair-trigger reflexes against any real or perceived threat sparked by extraordinary zeal and violence.

  People scoff at the notion of mass-hypnosis because most have already been deadened by their parents at home, teachers in school, “spiritual advisers” in houses of worship, by circus-tent Elmer Gantries, by politicians, by glorious slogans and exalted mantras, by national symbols, propaganda, misinformation, disinformation, historical revisionism and outlandish lies.

  Subliminal mind control (brainwashing, coercive persuasion) is also commonly used in marketing. Say it loud enough, often enough, with the solemn conviction that only a shyster can simulate, and you can sell anything from a hare-brained concept to a product that is obsolete the instant it is unveiled. The subconscious power of advertising is such that cleverly scripted commercials can turn a healthy person into a self-diagnosing neurotic suffering from imaginary incontinence, heartburn, flatulence, impotence, psoriasis, bursitis, constipation, depression and dementia. It’s all rectal ventriloquism artfully vocalized by corporate swindlers who laugh all the way to the bank.

  The vilest use of mass-hypnosis takes place in politics and from the pulpit. Since the dawn of history despots and benevolent rulers alike have recognized that control of their subjects is essential to their governance. Until recently, the capacity to twist and subdue the mind was crude and haphazard. Today, mind manipulation is science fact, not fiction. No longer a rare or arcane form of warfare to be used against the enemy, it has been widespread and practiced openly on hundreds of thousands of people -- men, women, children, minorities, the elderly, prison inmates and mental patients. We’re all potential candidates for -- or the slumbering victims of -- some form of brainwashing. When routine indoctrination fails to produce desired results, lobotomy, psycho-surgery, castration, behavior modification, aversion therapy, electro-convulsive shock and direct brain stimulation are at hand.

  History and current events demonstrate how the world’s major monotheistic religions have attempted to suppress knowledge, science, pleasure, and desire, often condemning nonbelievers to death for defying their canons. Nietzsche prematurely proclaimed the “Death of God.” Not only is God still very much alive, but increasingly manipulated by fundamentalists who pose a danger to the human race by demanding faith, belief, obedience and submission, and by promising a non-existent “afterlife” at the expense of the here and now.

  THE LONGEST NIGHT is counter-intuitive and deliberately satirical. In the worst of all possible worlds, one in which, say, “Libertarians” are in control, it is not smokers who would suffer persecution but non-smokers against whom a perverse reading of the First Amendment would be applied. Because it tolerates the existence and proliferation of undemocratic thought and institutions that promote faith over science, conformism over iconoclasm, conservatism over heterodoxy, traditionalism over progressivism, and religious rigidity over scholarship, “democracy” has a way of creating underdogs: free thinkers, eccentrics, progressives, activists, liberals, the learned, the enlightened.

  NEITHER APE NOR ANGEL (p. 31).

  In the 1980s, unable to shore up the absurd claims of creation “science” with empirical evidence, anti-Darwinists raring to inject creationism into America’s science curriculum devised a new slogan: “Intelligent Design.”

  At best a pseudo-science, Intelligent Design (ID) is the untested assertion that the universe, the living things that populate it and the ceaseless upheavals they endure are the result of an all-knowing, albeit paranormal, cause or agent, not a freehand process such as natural selection (evolution) or randomness.

  Most ID advocates assert that they are searching for evidence of sentient intent in nature without regard to whom or what the designer might be. In private, however, all unambiguously proclaim that the designer is the Christian God. [Note the accent on Christian. Forget the Yahweh the Jews invented nearly 6,000 years before the Christian era or the Judeo-Christian deity the Muslims adopted and renamed Allah in the 8th century C.E].

  Taken to its incongruous extreme, ID could one day be called on to explain that things fall not because gravity acts upon them, but because a higher intelligence consciously and deliberately pushes them down. Planes crash, they will argue, and buildings collapse and empires rise and fall because these events are preordained by some inscrutable
force of “irreducible complexity,” with the more vicious among them insisting that these disasters are in fact the consequence of wrathful divine retribution. A large array of phenomena are already similarly attributed to ID -- from wars waged in “God’s” name to hunger and loathsome diseases to earthquakes, cyclones and tsunamis -- damned be the laws of science.

  Intelligence is variously defined as “mental acuteness,” “the skilled use of reason and application of knowledge” and “the ability to think abstractly” (including the capacity to envision the consequences of one’s own actions). Thus, ID presupposes two reciprocal attributes: The existence of a gifted (if unknowable) draftsman and an exceptional blueprint from which a useful and efficient prototype can be rendered.

  Such inquiry-stifling premise unavoidably raises questions that, so far, ID has been unable to answer:

  What is “intelligent” about a creature that kills for pleasure and breeds itself to extinction? What mental acuteness is displayed by corruptible beings who cling to rival and inflexible doctrines? What common sense is at play among mortals corrupted by greed and addicted to violence? Why are living creatures susceptible to pain? Why are they defenseless against the fury of cataclysms that ID insists are wrought against us “for mysterious reasons” by some capricious supernatural force? What knowledge is skillfully harnessed by entities powerless or brutishly unwilling to learn from their mistakes?

  - What measure of intelligence can be ascribed to a “maker” who inflicts or tolerates atrocities for “the good that comes from them”?

  - What cunning and irreducible creator orchestrates without apparent aim -- or turns a blind eye to -- the paroxysms that convulse his realm?