From the wide estuary of 100 coevals populating the Plaza Room at the top of the Anderson Center, classmates, perhaps half of them accompanied by still-existing helpmates, dressed casually in
jeans, tennis shoes, long-sleeve blouses, cardigans, and flannel shirts, having at various times during the past hour gone with the flow, fought their way upstream, swirled in a tight eddy, and been pushed into a sparsely populated backwater, having bear-hugged
and pair-hugged and dare-hugged those whom 60-plus years ago they had cliquishly or shyly ne'er-hugged, having patted and gripped and chattered and nodded and frowned and narrowed their eyes and widened their eyes and sympathized and empathized and congratulated
and commiserated and acknowledged and remembered and wondered and expressed great joy and satisfaction that all who were there were there, having been welcomed by Eric Ericson and Olga Thorsdottir, having applauded the delivery by the old man and Zee of "Remember
When?", their scripted reminiscence of childhood and adolescence in Edmonds that concluded with the old man singing his revision of "How About You?", having lifted dinner plates from the catered buffet table and speared tiny paprikaed meatballs and small
squares of teriakied salmon and scooped bow ties of pasta from chafing dishes and covered any empty spaces with a floret of crude broccoli and a ball of watermelon or honeydew, having sat at tables of eight to eat with favorite friends or at least compatible
acquaintances, having stood to sing the alma mater, having lined up to serve themselves slabs of white-frosted chocolate cake bedecked with "EDMONDS TIGERS CLASS OF '57" in cursive purple and gold, a group who had all been members of Jack Foster's
Cultural Heritage class and used to swim together at Martha Lake--Sylvia, Dave, Charlotte, Zee, Monk, Carolyn, the old man--slung pullover ski sweaters or short ski jackets over their left shoulders, stepped outside, and drifted past the huge concrete planter
filled with junipers and a dwarf red Japanese maple and white-blossoming azaleas to the panoramic southwest corner of the open rooftop.
Monk, who had been senior class president and whose chunk of cake contained the "I" of the "TIGERS," waved at the
tattered June sky lidding the Bowl, the Sea, the Olympics. "Awesome," he said. A typical unsettled late spring day, temperatures riding up and down the 60s as the sun, now gibbous, now crescent, waxed and waned behind zephyr-propelled puffs of
lustered cumulo-nimbus and scattered jagged bars of black cirrus. The classmates took turns holding each other's plates and slipped on their sweaters and jackets against the breeze-chill factor that worsened during the waning. "I love the action,
the kaleidoscope, the nacreous glow, the apocalyptic purple haze. Pushes my God spot, opens my doors of perception."
"The safest, healthiest way to do that," Sylvia said.
"Clouds cover more than three-fourths of the sky here 226 days of
the year. Most of the rest are partly-sunny, defined as 40-60 per cent of the sky cloud-covered. We get maybe 30 bright, totally clear cerulean days a year. 'The bluest skies you've ever seen are in Seattle?' No, Perry Como, that's
nonsense. Should be 'The bluest skies you'll rarely see in Seattle.' And you know what? That's okay with me. My stint in the navy after law school at the U-Dub took me all over the world. I saw spectacular Indian Ocean dawns and
Polynesian sunsets, but I was so happy to get back here to the clouds and the drizzle and the hesitant sun, to the coolness, to the moss and the evergreens, to the subtlety, to the modesty, and set up a family law practice in the Bowl. Enjoyed
your little revision of 'How About You?', Wayne, but why is it that there is no good song about Seattle, and no song at all about Edmonds, no 'I left my heart,' no 'Do you know what it means,' no 'Some folks like to get away,' no 'Do you know the way,' no
'A foggy day,' no 'Meet me in St. Louis,' no 'I love Paris,' no 'Chicago, Chicago,' no 'I'm from Big D,' no 'Arrivederci, Roma?' We can't be proud of our modesty?"
"Maybe not--although the Puget Sound area is often referred
to as 'God's Country,' by locals and visitors alike. In the case of Edmonds, it's probably just a numbers game. The town has been in existence for only 130-some years. Not enough people have yet lived or visited here. There's
been no one yet with the inclination and drive to produce a song. Maybe when a few million more have had the Edmonds experience, a bard will emerge."
"Nah, I think it's got to come from someone who lived in Edmonds during the middle decades of
the 20th century. Someone autochthonous, a native son or daughter who knows the town's soul. So you'll work on it, Wayne? Edmonds as God's Country?"
"Ha! I'm the wrong guy to go soul-searching. And, unlike my dad, there's
no way I could write a tune. I think we're going to have to settle for Bing Crosby's 'Black Ball Ferry Line Up in Seattle' with the vague views and the chuggin' and the bells and whistles and the local-color Native American names. It's catchy,
it's kitschy, it's probably the best we're ever going to get about Seattle or Edmonds."
"And what about celebrities? Has any kid from Edmonds ever gone on to light up the firmament? Besides Rick Steves?"
"As far as sheer name recognition
goes, Rick has got to be our brightest light. He's known worldwide. Handsome Americans follow his guidebooks everywhere. But we also claim Ken Jennings, the 'Jeopardy' genius, and Jay Park, the singer-dancer. Jerry Gay won a Pulitzer
in photography, and Dave Hamilton pitched a lot of games for the Oakland A's in the '70s."
"And, don't forget the women," Sylvia said. "Rosalind Summers starred in the Winter Olympics, Bridget Hanley had a key role in 'Here Come the Brides,'
and Anna Faris is very well-known for her acting and comedy."
"Oh yeah, there's Jason Miller, too," Monk said. "Trump's former political strategist."
"Oh my God, please spare me!" Charlotte said.
"In any case," Monk said, grinning
and swallowing a last mouthful of cake, "it's not a very big constellation, is it? Modesty rules there, too."
Though none of his classmates was famous, the old man had noticed at reunions over the years that several of them had come to resemble
facially someone who was. Monk was Larry of the Stooges; Zee, Pierce Brosnan; Sylvia, Marie Osmond. And though they weren't doppelgangers, spit and images of, Susie Richards, with her chipmunk cheeks, dark eyes, and toothsome smile, was Mary Tyler
Moore, satchel-mouthed Margie Bennett, with her quick, clever smirk, was Carol Burnett, narrow-eyed Charlie Richardson, with his prominent cheekbones, tiny ears, and ironic smile, was Richard Gere, Lloyd Cross, with his long face, hollow cheeks, and brutally
large lips, was Lee Marvin, and Brian Tucker, with his wire-rimmed glasses, thinning hair parted on the left and combed to the sides, and his aquiline nose, was Harry S. Truman.
Monk set his empty plate on the edge of a concrete planter.
Tugging his phone out of a front pocket of his blue jeans, he said "Hey, let's commemorate the occasion with a group-selfie for Facebook and Instagram. 'Old Tygers Still Burning Bright!'"
"Good idea," Dave said. "Everybody huddle tight in
some semblance of fearful symmetry."
"Yeah, show our cameraderie," the old man said.
They clumped together. Monk extended his long right arm and triggered two shots in landscape with his thumb, then checked his work. "Looks great!
The smiles will pass for genuine. I'll post when I get home and email everyone copies, too."
They gave themselves some elbow room.
"So," said Charlotte, who, with her plum lipstick, nose that delved so steeply that her nostrils were
scarcely visible, onyx eyes, high forehead, and gray spiky butch hair wasn't anybody's ghost--or, wait a minute: was she an aged Amy Walter?--"do you people ever wonder, looking at all this gorgeosity, what might happen in the event of a serious earthquake?
What if the North American plate and the Juan de Fuca plate that run along the Pacific shore from northern California to Vancouver Island were suddenly to clash and the ensuing subduction produce 'The Big One,' the 9+ on the Richter scale that many seismologists
are promising us?"
"Remember the 6.5 of '49?" Zee said. "5th grade? We were all right here in this building. In the cafeteria, having lunch. The linoleum floor rippled right under my feet. The tables jumped. The food
trays glided. The milk cartons sloshed. I held my breath. It must have lasted at least 30 seconds."
"I screamed," Sylvia said.
"But a 9+, Char?" Monk said. "That would be quite a show! Too bad none of us are
technologically competent enough to produce an augmented Virtual Reality version, a synesthetic fusion incorporating 3D and Brave New World feelies and Li'l Abner smellovision. Imagine the immersion! The rooftop we're
on now dropping down a floor as the foundations of the old Anderson Center crack and crumble, us toppling and tumbling and shrieking."
"When we manage to get to our feet," the old man said, "we look out to see condos quivering. Cars falling into
sinkholes on 5th. Wires snapping everywhere, gas mains exploding. And now here comes a tsunami racing up the Strait, hurling the ferryboat over the dock, waterfront-visitors suddenly double-taking and running up Main only to get swamped by a roiling
flotsam-jetsam stew of yachts and sailboats and logs and pilings and buoys and cars and sidings and broken windows and garbage cans and directional signs, then bum-rushing the Center here, taking our legs out from under us, icily swamping us, before hurling
us gasping into the maelstrom as it surges on, its saline residue burning our eyes, puckering our lips, until finally being tamed by the elevation, beaching us at 9th and lodging the ferry in a new dry dock there."
"So we're dead? Concussed or
drowned? I'm not seeing the humor in that," Charlotte said, scraping up a last bit of frosting with her fork.
"'Fraid so. But we're immortalized on VR. The only other place we're immortalized in literature, to my knowledge, is in On
The Beach, when the submarine on its reconnaissance mission surfaces in front of Edmonds and finds all the streets empty. I felt a warm glow when I read that section years ago--an affirmation of the Bowl's existence."
"But," Charlotte resumed,
"we're not really concerned about possible ecological disasters? We're taking it lightly? Que sera? Nobody's mentioned politics tonight, yet three of us classmates are running for Position 8 on the City Council. We're the elephants
on the rooftop. Everyone is being scrupulously silent, but I feel compelled to speak out. I think we need to get on top of this and so many other issues. I want to see Edmonds do more planning--stronger building codes, buried power lines,
designated escape routes, bulkheads against high tides, water collection basins, designated upland refugee shelters at the Driftwood Theater and Edmonds-Maplewood High School. We may not get a tsunami worthy of augmented VR, but we certainly might
get flooding and cracking and crumbling and fires and panic."
"I'm with you, Char," Sylvia said. "And certainly, with or without an earthquake, climate change is going to affect our waterfront. We've got to prepare for rising sea levels.
By 2100, Sound waves may very well be lapping at the feet of Starbucks on 5th. Gary, is that something you'll take seriously if you're elected to the City Council?'
"Of course. I don't feel a sense of desperation, but I think we need a plan."
"Monk?"
"Apocalyptic earthquake? No. I'll take my chances. In fact I'll take my great-grandkids' chances. Climate change? Climates have always changed. Sea levels have always changed. The tropics
have migrated. Glaciers have come and gone."
"So you're a climate change-denier? What else? You're an anti-vaxxer, too?"
"Ha. No, I'm neither. I just think that there may be multiple causes of climate change, the
sins of industrialization being only one of them, and that, regardless of the causes, the consequences may not be as dire as predicted, but even if they are, human ingenuity will come up with workarounds either to combat them or to adjust to them when and
where necessary. I love nature. I was an Eagle Scout and an avid hiker and backpacker. I've trekked in the Andes and the Himalayas. Until about 10 years ago I was all over the Olympics and the Cascades every summer. I found beauty
and awe there, felt to a certain extent the kinship of all living things. But I don't have a romantic view of the natural world as once a paradise now despoiled by greedy, capitalistic humans. I love the whole complex web of civilization, our internal
combustion engines, our cars and jet planes, our freedom, our mobility."
"But this freedom comes at the cost of life!" Charlotte said. "We're making the planet uninhabitable. We've got melting icecaps, disappearing shorelines, loss
of habitat, dying ecosystems, a million species at risk of extinction, searing heat, droughts, wildfires, hurricanes, floods. People need to be reminded at all times that they are ruining the earth. Read Bill McKibben and Elizabeth Kolbert."
"I have. They are hyperbolic Jeremiahs."
"No, they are spot-on. I could imagine Wayne using their work to teach rhetoric. Their writing is factual and logical, it is full of passion, and it fairly bristles with ethical character."
The old man grinned, shrugged, and wiggled temporizing fingers.
"We in the industrialized west created this mess for the rest of the world," Charlotte said, "and it's up to us to make reparations. And we do that by starting locally.
But environmental concerns are only one among a myriad of issues, all of which fall under the rubric of 'Equality, Fairness, Justice' that headlines my campaign. You know, Wayne's not the only one who rewrites songs. When I found out that he was
messing around with 'How About You?' it occurred to me that I could create a campaign song for myself based on John Lennon's 'Imagine.' Would it be all right if I debuted it for you now?"
"Please do," the old man said.
Charlotte smiled,
took a breath, gathered herself, clasped her fingers at her abdomen, and sang softly, sweetly, shyly:
Imagine Edmonds heaven
Allow yourself to see
No hell around us
Only harmony.
Imagine all the people living equally.
Imagine there's no homeless
It isn't hard to do
No racism or sexism
No homophobia too
Imagine all the people sharing equally.
Imagine no elitists
No corporation speech
No patriarchs
to defeat us
Respect for all we teach.
Some may say that I am dreaming
But I know I'm not alone
I hope you find my views redeeming
And will seek with me to atone.
There was a brief silence,
then Monk said, "Char, that was lovely."
"It was indeed," Zee said. "Are you going to sing it at your campaign appearances?"
"I think so."
"Then, Monk, we've got a problem. Its pathos is likely to appeal to both Boomers and
Millennials."
"The arrangement of notes does indeed kill us softly," Monk acknowledged. "Give Lennon credit for that. The appeal to the ideals of the superego is pure Char. I think the only way I can combat that is to appeal to the
ravenous id. She goes high, I go low. No offense, Char, but I must seek to attract the votes of those who are looking for a cure for the common scold."
Charlotte faked a smile. "Monk, I'm proud to be a scold. What this world
needs is more common scolds."
"What this world needs," Zee said, "is more common sense and compromise."
"And what I think our little colloquy needs," said Dave Williams, a contact-loving, hard-nosed football lineman who went on to play at Whitworth
and then to study at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena and eventually become a professor of psychology at Big Sur Theological Seminary and whose father once pastored the Edmonds Baptist Church, his brows lifting above his black horn rim glasses, "is
to let the campaign go and return to Monk's reference to his genetic God spot, which I take to mean an intuitive religious sense that enables us to cope with our instinctive fear of death. As Ernest Becker in The Denial of Death makes clear,
we are desperately trying to deny not only that Jonathan Swift's Celia, but Cecil and all the rest of us shit, for the shameful anus and its smelly product symbolize the fate of all that is physical: decay and death."
"Now just a darn minute here,"
the old man, waggling an index finger, nasally jimmystewarted. "I completely agree that thanatophobia is universal and instinctive, but I'd like to put in a good word for shit. Though often rotten-egg foul, sulfuric, its smell is sometimes bracingly
acerbic, with hints of broccoli or Brussels sprouts or menthol or eucalyptus, and once in a while even pleasantly rose-petally sweet, its colors run a mini-spectrum from light mocha to sepia to taupe to black, and its forms a wide variety ranging from marbles
to French fries to bananas to logs to Starry Night coils to field-plopped cow pies to the chunky vegetable beef soups or scarcely viscous consommés of diarrhea. Salvador Dali in fact used to make proud note of those days on which
he turned out what to him was a structurally perfect stool. Such beauty needs no excuse for being."
"Yes, yes, Wayne, a terrible beauty is born, we get it, but for our purposes the emphasis is on 'terrible,' because our shit means that we are
mortal. When I look at this gorgeosity and fear someday losing it, I don't think Apocalypse, I think of its aftermath, heaven. I take an idealist approach to the eschatology of 'Revelation.' Mere anarchy being loosed upon the world
and the ceremony of innocence being drowned provide a bracing allegory of hope. It's about warring within yourself to discover and define what heaven is for you. The Beast can be, variously, your raw, demanding, unrepentant ego, or social injustice,
or the State. The Second Coming is your recognition and acceptance of Christ and all that he stands for. The Final Judgment we impose on ourselves in so far as we do or do not choose to dwell in a spirit of atonement with him. All of
this before us, much as I love it, is just the tease of a greater beauty to come, a mere imitation of what will eventually be a realized ideal."
"So there's no Lake of Fire? No being 'Left Behind?' Sylvia said.
"Well, there is and
there isn't. In my view, the Lake of Fire exists within one's soul. As Milton's Satan discovered, you yourself are heaven or hell. As for being 'Left Behind,' I think one is left behind in the same sense that I was left behind in calculus
class by Monk and Zee and Char and some of the other class brains. There were some subtle appreciations, some sublimities if you will, that I just didn't get. I suspect that there'll always be a Bell curve of salvation. One's allotment of grace
is whimsically acquired. As particles that interact more strongly with the Higgs field experience more resistance and behave as if they have larger masses, and those that interact less strongly experience less resistance and have less mass, and those
that don't interact at all, like photons, have no mass, so it is with grace. There's no accounting for the interactions."
"So heaven's not a place?" Sylvia asked. "I could certainly subscribe to that. And why is it me stacking
the dirty plates and forks to return to the caterers and not one of you men?"
"Well, it is and it isn't. I think holistically. I believe that science and theology can be integrated. It's not because we are irrational that we
accept what can seem on the surface to be incredible religious doctrines. Wayne's man Chomsky, pace John Locke and the tabula rasa, posits the innate existence in humans of a language organ that can access the deep structure of a universal
grammar. Similarly, I posit that humans have a religion organ that can access inborn cognitive templates that run deeper than mere cultural conditioning. Just as we have an intuitive linguistic sense of transformations, recursions, and embedding,
so we likely have an intuitive religious sense of the supernatural. Monk spoke of having his God spot pushed, and I think that's very accurate. Anyway, Christianity is not necessarily in conflict with science. The Bible is not outdated
and unscientific but its exegesis must include a careful study of its historical context, its overall shape and design, and its use of literary techniques like symbolism and allegory. In 'Genesis,' for example, one can find gender fluidity. God
first created an ungendered human in God's image. The first creation comprises both male and female, and only later splits into two separate genders, with the rib being a metonymy or a synecdoche. Male-dominated Christian sects co-opted and weaponized
the story to aid them in the subjugation of women--good point about picking up the plates, Syl. You must bring that kind of thing to bear to show that the Bible can be used as a guide to political participation, ecological conservation, and
cultural correction, and that it also has room for science--for the Big Bang, entropy, evolution, quantum mechanics, even for the possible validity of string theory."
"Amen!" Charlotte said.
"Wouldn't that be eisegesis?" the old man said.
"Bringing in a preconceived idea of its meanings? Like believing that the U.S. is a Christian nation and then looking for references in the Constitution or the Federalist Papers that could support that interpretation?"
"Well,
yes and no. I think it's more a matter of being open--open to the possibility of non-literal meanings. I think a reader must bring all possible resources to bear. Isn't that what Kenneth Burke said in regard to the job of the critic
of literature?"
"Yes, it is," the old man said. "I guess I'm just quibbling over what it means to be open. Being open to a deconstruction of the Bible that harmonizes it with modern science is a little different from looking for ways to
harmonize the two. It seems to me that a kind of confirmation bias is at work in the latter, like a Supreme Court justice viscerally in favor of the right to abortion scouring the Constitution to find a right to privacy or one in favor of allowing unlimited
corporate campaign contributions digging for a way to consider corporations as persons."
"Or like a non-believer scouring the Bible to find scientific improbabilities or historical inaccuracies?"
"Sure, okay. Like that."
"And is
this the sort of thing you teach--besides the fact that women shit!--at Big Sur?" asked Carolyn, a former Director of Human Resources at Blue Cross.
"Well, remember that I'm 80 and Professor Emeritus now, and I never did teach theology directly, but
it is the sort of thing that informs my teaching in the one class in clinical psychology that I conduct each semester. Right now I'm especially into teaching mindful meditation as a way to develop empathy and compassion. Empathy and compassion
are intuitive states that can be cultivated and strengthened through practice."
"Brain rewiring," the old man said. "I work on that a lot. Concentration, repetition. Trying to improve my softball swing, my reactions to ground balls,
my balance."
"Mm, more like brain emptying or flushing. You take a chunk of each day and just live in the present. I give each student a mantra and ask them to repeat it in their heads for 20 minutes, allowing thoughts to pass through like
birds across the sky, and fall into a deep state of rest. It's like an ocean--there is brain wave activity at the top but silence at the depths. The mind is alert but in a non-directed way. You have thoughts but not at any level of meaning.
Concentration here is counter-productive, over-controlling, anal. You nourish the mind so that you don't have so much struggle and stress in life. It can be done anywhere, even in the midst of activity and distractions, and it energizes you,
makes you more resilient, while it also quiets you, clears your mind, frees you to develop perspective. You sleep better, you let small things go. You develop your sense of compassion, which leads to a better understanding of others and improves
your ability to counsel or minister to them."
"I'm a big believer in meditation," Sylvia said, "but Wayne calls it the mindlessness of mindfulness."
Dave laughed. "So I've read! That's Wayne, all right, enthusiastically pooh-poohing
enthusiasm. But much madness is divinest sense to a discerning eye, no, Wayne?"
The old man smiled. "That's what she said."
"Mindfulness is only a tool, a means to free yourself for something greater."
"Like the contemplation
of truth and beauty?"
"Certainly that's one possible outcome of becoming mindful. The holy spirit of joy can proceed from the contemplation of truth and beauty. When you smelt out your impurities in the cauldron of becoming, a plenitude
of possibilities opens up for you."
"I certainly feel that way," Zee said. "Science and spirituality are complementary, not conflicting. Our contemplations of the cosmos stir us. We don't so much worship because we believe as we believe
because we worship. We tingle as we approach the grand mystery, as we gaze at the material and find the ethereal. Wayne and Monk and I used to lie out at night in our sleeping bags, and I would feel myself letting go, disappearing into that ocean
of stars, falling into infinity, merging with the absolute."
"That was my experience, too," Monk said. "Call it our bright night of the soul."
"Not mine," the old man said. "The Whitmanic pressing close of bare-bosomed night, mad
naked summer night, night of white hot stars, chilled me. Apparently lacking that genetic urge to become part of something bigger, I became hyper-conscious of being apart from something bigger."
"Whatever your experience might have been,
Wayne," Dave said, "I reiterate that religion is not just bad science masquerading as good. The 'irrationality' of religion is, paradoxically, a rational reaction to the mystery of the universe because it has evolutionary value. It has room
for science but it transcends science. Science seeks to describe the laws of the universe, religion seeks to give them meaning. Religion seeks profundity, delves deeper, beneath the material, and discovers the unseen moral order that imbues everything
with significance. Even if it's wrong, it's right. It's what enables us to survive."
"And I," the old man said, "would deem your effort to make science and religion compatible not so much rational as rationalization--what my wife Diane
might have called squishy, washy-wishy. You take science and...and--"
"Culture-appropriate it?" Dave said.
"Weaponize it?" Charlotte said.
"Gaslight you with it?" Sylvia said.
"Yes, yes, and yes," the old man laughed.
"I love it when we get all argy-bargy on each other! What I was getting at is that Diane always fearlessly excluded the middle. At those points where science clashes with the Bible, only one can be right, and for her it was the Bible. One
of her favorite quotes was 'Blessed are those who have not seen, and yet have believed.' She was an acolyte of Francis Schaefer, a believer in the literal inerrancy of scripture, an originalist, a strict constructionalist made of Calvinized steel. She
didn't meditate, she prayed to a literal God Who was physically there ready to reward or rebuke her. She believed in total depravity, predestination, limited atonement, irresistible grace, and the perseverance of the saints."
Dave smiled.
"Certainly Diane's literal approach, eliminating ambiguity, is a legitimate, if restrictive, way to transcend and find meaning and spiritual fulfillment, as indeed is that of religious sects who speak their fiction to power, like the Hassids, Wahabis,
Amish, Jehovah's Witnesses, Seventh-Day Adventists, and on and on. You can find purpose, and with it peace and joy, within the confinement of such microcosms. Actually, though, if we include the middle, as I think we should, Diane's belief in irresistible
grace can be seen to fit in quite nicely with my Higgs field analogy. And the Calvinist insistence on predestination can be seen to harmonize with one current theory about free will--namely, that 'you' don't have any. Certain studies involving
the pushing of buttons seem to show that choices and decisions are already made before 'you' are aware of them. 'You' do not decide the next thought that 'you' will think. 'You' are not the boss of your brain. The conscious mind has its origins
in the unconscious. 'You' no more initiate events in your prefrontal cortex than 'you' cause your heart to beat. The feeling of having free will arises from your moment-to-moment ignorance of the prior causes of your thoughts. Our choices
seem free only because we do not understand how they emerge from antecedent causes funneled through the laws of physics. There's just a whole lot of intriguing, intertwining possibilities when it comes to psychology and the varieties of religious experience.
Too bad Jack Foster is gone now. It would be fun to have him here participating in our little discussion. My conservative Baptist dad was the first to model religion for me, of course, but Jack's openness and wide-ranging sympathy for the world's
major religions are what I have most tried to imitate."
"I think we all were influenced by him," Charlotte said. "One calm August evening after graduation, in the midst of the Pacific high pressure system that sets in for a few weeks each summer,
when Monk and I were going together, long before I realized that I was gay, Jack invited us to sail with him on the boat he kept at the Yacht Club. He spoke about being able to sense and find a wind that I certainly could not feel. He was sort
of a boat-whisperer, able to make minute adjustments in the sails to overcome or exploit inertia. The doldrums did not exist for him."
"He was quite the oarsman, too," Monk said. "He was the stroke on the Harvard varsity eight, you know.
I still remember Wayne's story about him in the Wireless. He talked almost mystically about rowers with strokes free of all excessive motion, perfectly at ease with themselves in the midst of intense effort and synchronized with each other,
their whole greater than the sum of their parts, experiencing the ultimate rush, a kind of emergence, when the cox upped the stroke count and the boat took off."
"Yeah," the old man said. "He detested the noise and smell of motor boats and the
self-indulgence of their operators, but he loved the magic of moving himself on water by shell or sailboat. That's when he had his Zen moments. And, Dave, I concede that often I do not decide the next thought that I will think. I have no
control over my nocturnal dreams, a bit of control over my daytime reveries (I can sometimes squelch them or give them a direction or, as I often do, just welcome them and wallow in them), somewhat more control over specific memories that I wish to call forth.
If you ask me to form a syllogism, I believe I can direct my mind to produce an 'All A is B, C is A, therefore C is B' scaffolding, although it's true that whatever terms I use to flesh out the premises will have come to me mysteriously. I don't know
what my memory will say, but I can, unless I have severe dementia (and at that point I am indeed not the boss of me) command it to speak, as old anagramming Bokanov did. 'It just occurred to me' is an expression that could well precede most of the clauses
and phrases that I think or that I utter. But my executive self, a necessary fiction, I believe, can choose to accept them, reject them, or modify them. It just occurred to me to say that I'm the decider, the buck stops here. And my executive editor,
having started to cross out the line, thinks the better (or worse, depending on your opinion of George W.!) of it and writes stet. I suspect Jack would agree with me that if we conclude that, contrary to appearances, we actually lack free will,
owing no doubt to some personal algorithm of genetic inheritance and acquired experience, then we must also conclude that we are not responsible for anything that we do. We can be neither praised nor condemned for our behavior. Either we're depraved
on account of being deprived, like a Shark or a Jet, or we are in thrall to the disease of affluenza, like Ethan Couch. Cultural norms and statutory laws become irrelevant. If I am not the boss of me, I should never be subject to prosecution, punishment,
or even shaming. And I don't have to admit that I am a sinner in need of Christ's sacrifice. Christianity has no meaning without free will."
"But," Dave said, "is it not generally assumed in Christianity that we are all sinners because of
the original sin of Adam and Eve? We are held accountable for that. And do we not often say, after some kind of personal success, 'All glory to God?', thereby demonstrating that our achievement was God's doing, not our own? In religion as
in life, puissant paradoxes abound. The proponents of this no-free-will theory, like Sam Harris, claim that it is actually liberating. They say that the fact that nature and nurture determine whether you will choose vanilla ice cream rather than
chocolate leads not, as one might expect, to fatalism and a sense of either futility or irresponsibility, but to a sense of hope and possibility. Your moment-to-moment ignorance of the prior causes of your thoughts provides a sense of freedom. You are
more free because you recognize that you are less free. Everything about you seems less personal and indelible. Acknowledging that there are background causes for your thoughts and feelings allows for greater creative control over your life.
Realizing that you are being steered by, shall we say, a greater--or at least an unknown--power can allow you to choose a more intelligent course. There's no telling how much you might change in the future. Learning new skills and forming new relationships
may radically transform your life."
"So we are more free because we recognize that we are less free?" the old man said. "Squishy, very squishy. I'd give such chop-logic a 90 on the HSQ."
Dave smiled. "Anyway, by a magic that
we don't yet fully understand, billions of electrical signals move around in a brain, and a self-conscious mind emerges. It's like the emergence that Monk alluded to in regard to Foster's rhapsodizing about the whole being greater than the sum of its
parts. Emergent structures arise via the interconnected actions of many undirected, autonomous entities. Other examples include the shape and behavior of a flock of birds or a school of fish, weather systems, economic markets, the worldwide web,
evolution, religion, and the development of languages. The self is not an isolated property of what's inside your cranium but an emergent property of your whole mind-body integration. We don't know why minds emerge from the neural networks in our
uniquely wired brains, we don't know how we acquired the particular algorithms that guide us, and we don't know why we have the sensations, emotions, and thoughts--the stream of consciousness--that we do, but we are borne by them into a realm of potent potential."
"Now when you say 'mind,'" Sylvia said, "you seem to mean not only consciousness, the self, but the soul, the spirit, the atman. Are they all synonyms? Because to me, consciousness and the self, emerging as they do from the brain, are
transient. They die when the body dies. But the word 'soul' connotes something eternal, transcendent, woman united forever with the Trinity, say, or atman united forever with Brahman. You seem to imply that some sort of resurrection
or reincarnation, some material body, is necessary for the soul to continue to exist. Are you positing an eternal body-soul duality?"
"Again, yes and no. Certainly I believe in immanence. The spiritual permeates the material. The divine
is manifested in the mundane. I am pantheistic with a lower-case 'p'."
"As am I," said Sylvia. "I believe that we are in something big. It's in the very air we breathe and the light we see. And I believe that something
big, something numinous, some spark of divinity, of the formless Tao, of the source of life, is in us."
"But I also believe in transcendence," Dave said. "It may well be, as most traditional Christian views have it, that we are resurrected in
the flesh. Alternatively, if--extrapolating from modern science--the soul is the unique hormonal-synaptic signature integrating brain and body through a complex electrochemical flow of neurotransmitters, conceivably it could be reduced to information-laden
ones and zeroes and uploaded into other-than-you substrates, like machines or cloned biological replicas. Or there just might be a transcending, superseding spiritual realm where souls and consciousnesses exist ideally, Platonically, independent
of materiality. The possibilities are provoking."
"Yes," said Sylvia. "My Buddhist-tinged spirituality is as amorphous and mysterious as your Christianity, Dave. There is some us-ness that will merge with the all after our parting
with this physical existence. And we tap into our eternal us-ness, our soul, when we let the chatter and the knee-jerk reactions go by. When we clear our minds, the unknowing frees us to know."
"Many people also find," Dave said, "that
meditation opens them to the value of helping others, of making others happy. Studies have shown that often the more you give to make others happy--love, assistance, material goods, even just simple attention--the happier you yourself become. As
Jimmy Durante sang, 'Make someone happy, make just one someone happy, and you will be happy too.'"
"I don't doubt those studies," the old man said, "or Jimmy Durante either. It's in our self-interest to be altruistic. Doing a good turn daily,
as we learned in Scouts, Boy and Girl, can prompt an oozing of dopamine and perhaps put us on the path to a Merit Badge, both of which I am in favor, but am I the only one who thinks the formula smacks of a pyramid scheme? The song implies that everyone
is sitting around unhappy waiting to be made happy, and that at least one of those is waiting to be made happy by you. And yet, if the sentiment of the song be true, those people should be not sitting around unhappy but
actively working to make someone else happy in order to make themselves happy, not relying on you to do that for them. Further, following the implication of the song, you yourself should be sitting around unhappy, simultaneously waiting for an unhappy
person to come along and make you happy while yet working to make an unhappy person happy yourself. The concept of making someone happy in order to make yourself happy while someone else is making you happy in order to make themself happy dizzies the
brain, with the promise of emotional reward depending on ever-increasing investments of solicitousness and vulnerability, lest the whole thing break down and the participants be left happiness-bereft and forced to start the make-someone-happy cycle all over
again."
"Really, Wayne? Resorting to reductio ad absurdum?" Dave said.
"Who's chopping logic now?" Sylvia said. "Our beloved makebate of a classmate does have a tendency to Waynesplain, to wallow in sophistry and
pettifoggery. For most, the more people who agree with us, the more we're convinced we're right. For Wayne, the fewer who agree with him, the more he's convinced he's right."
"Be that as it may," Zee said, "if Diane was Calvinized
steel and Dave and Sylvia are pure protean possibility, I guess I must be pig iron. I was saved by Billy, too, you know, and I have retained a quietly simmering faith. I believe that Christ died for my sins and that I'm eventually going to a real
place called heaven, where I will probably be given a new body, although I'm not sure about that. Was the universe created in six days? No. That's metaphorical. Did Jesus rise from the tomb on the third day? Yes. That's
literal."
"Okay," Charlotte said. "So Sylvia and Dave think that heaven is and is not a real place, Gary thinks it definitely is, and Wayne apparently thinks that the very concept is a chimera. I'm with Sylvia and Dave. Monk?"
"With Zee."
"Carolyn?"
"With Gary. I think Wayne's problem is that he is unable to imagine existing on a higher plane, an ineffable realm, at one with God, loving Him, communing with Him, basking in His glory, contemplating truth and
beauty, and also being at one with all other resurrected beings or disembodied souls and loving them as well. We can imagine heaven as that place where we are at last ourselves, where we feel taken in, accepted, free of the needs and insecurities that
haunted us throughout our earthly existence. Wayne can only conceive of heaven as a continuation of high school. He wants to be a perennial sophomore."
"Carolyn, you are so right," the old man said. "I can't imagine atonement, I can't
imagine just being, brimming with love and saturated with grace, I can't imagine disinterestedly contemplating truth and beauty, just ratiocinating and appreciating like a madman, beholding the sublime, for any prolonged period of time. Whether
I stare at a starry night or A Starry Night or a building whose form oh-so-Wrightly follows its function or the faces of people I love, I cannot remain long in a bath of wonder, joy, and awe. I am self-obsessed, time-centered, analytical,
control-oriented, individualistic. I am an action, not a state of being, verb, my past imperfect, my present tense, my future conditional. To live is to act and to act upon, to fend off, with what Ernest Becker would call my 'character armor,' death,
to secure and dominate my minuscule portion of the universe, even if I share it literally and symbolically with other people and symbiotically with bacteria and viruses and parasites, to keep breathing and keep eating as long as I have consciousness, even
if this means intubation and intravenous feeding in a hospital bed or an assisted living facility. I can't be without doing. Life is strife. To me, stasis, such as is apparently found in Heaven, is inconceivable. I crave process, not completion.
I doubt that the prisms through which each of us view the world--our gender, race, ethnicity, socio-economic class, formal education--that unique fusion of implicit biases that is us--could ever fully dissolve in the afterlife, causing everyone to see 'reality'
in the same way, but if that should happen, in my opinion it would not be a good thing. Let's say that in heaven everyone is happy, in no need either to administer or receive the Jimmy Durante anodyne. And everyone is equal economically
in the Karl Marx-Thomas Picketty sense. And everyone is dreamily free, appreciated for the content of their character, in the Martin Luther King sense. And everyone is equally privileged (or equally unprivileged) in the Peggy McIntosh sense.
We've all achieved the speed of light and time has stopped. What now? Is that all there is? Work of any kind would be pointless, because no one would have any physical or spiritual needs. Play of any kind would be pointless, because
no one would have any need for re-creation, no need to discover an already discovered self. Love would be pointless, because one would have no need either to give it or receive it. We're left to bathe in sublime awe somehow at one with and
yet less than and separate from God, contemplating truth and beauty, lovely equations like Euler's identity, say, ecstatically reveling as our medial orbitofrontal cortexes continuously fire and flare."
"You know, Wayne," Dave said, "maybe you won't
have to throw the baby out with the sublime bathwater. As I suggested a minute ago, the soul might be digitizable and downloadable. It might be immortalizable. We are clearly moving in that direction. Can you hang on until 2029?"
"For the arrival with a shout of Ray Kurzweil's Singularity, you mean? Ten more years? I doubt it. Probably both me and Kurzweil will be erstwhile by then. But I admit that the possibilities of Transhumanism have excited and fascinated
me."
"Well, they have me, too," Dave said.
"As Wayne well knows, they appall me," Sylvia said.
"And me," Charlotte said. "I'm no Dr. Jekyl. At the base of Transhumanism is egotheism, solipsistic self-love, narcissistic longing
for a transcendence of the human body, the quest to make an infrahuman. It's human-racism. It's immoral. It's unthinkable. It's a consumer culture's ultimate dream of turning humans into commodities."
"And it's inherently unfair,"
Sylvia said. "It favors the privileged--the educated, the rich, the Alpha dogs who have the awareness and the means to turn themselves into cyborgs, to take advantage of things like cloning and cryogenics."
"So you two are bioluddites?" Zee asked.
"You're against implanted pacemakers and defibrillators and nanomedicine and bionic prosthetic limbs?"
"Well, of course not," Charlotte said. "I used to implant pacemakers for a living. I strongly favor the use of devices that can improve
the length and quality of life. That's not playing God, it's using God-given intelligence to make life better."
"I do, too, of course," said Sylvia. "I think what Char and I resent and resist is the Promethean hubristic belief that
humans can supplant God and live in awe of themselves. Although I'm not a Christian, I would argue that Transhumanism is the Antichrist, the mark of the Beast."
"I see Transhumanism more as syntheism," Dave said, "humans working with God, as we
understand him, interning, for eons, probably, before ultimately achieving theosification. The Mormons have always believed in the project of becoming gods, you know, and a few years ago some of them formed the Mormon Transhuman Association. They
believe that God and his works are subject to natural law, and they seek exaltation through scientific knowledge. We hear all these remarkable conjectures these days. We could map and download the human brain onto a collective server, thus achieving
universal immortality. We could live forever inside a mass virtual universe, without the limitations of our physical bodies. The parts of our brain that generate visceral sensations could be digitally manipulated to make it feel exactly as if we
were still alive. Our minds could become the Internet. We could become the Cloud. Our brain avatars could automatically access all the information that exists in the virtual world, so we would all know everything there is to know. And
then, Wayne, you could be at one with all the resources that exist. You could become Becker's answer to the crippling denial of death, an artist who transcends the repressive limitations of culture and becomes the father of himself. You would be free
to do, not just be, in the workshop of a virtual and eternal high school. You could make art or create new universes to your heart's content."
"And is that all there is? Becoming God or the Cloud? Isn't even that pointless?
Art would be irrelevant because as God we would already know all possible literary uses of all possible languages, all possible ways to combine all possible materials into things like paintings and collages, all possible ways to combine all possible musical
notes into songs and symphonies, all possible ways to achieve expression through all the possible movements of dance. We would already know the abstract laws and the material representations of all possible kinds of universes. We would already
know all of the possible ways life can be life and people can be people, all the possible ways they can organize and comport themselves, all possible topias, utopias, and dystopias. Anything we did would be like filling in a second copy of a crossword
puzzle that we've already solved. A lot of learning is a dangerous thing. It's exciting for mere humans to play softball game after softball game because we don't know how each will turn out. We don't know how we ourselves will play, how
our teammates will play, how our opponents will play--there is an infinite number of permutations and commutations, an infinite number of unpredictable butterfly effects. A softball game is unalgorithmicable. For the same reason, it's exciting
for mere humans to make art, or tinker with technology, or work to build or tear down a society or to strengthen or remake a culture. We are such stuff as make dreams. To our limited minds, there are so many unknowns, so many possibilities, so many hypotheses
to form and test. Perfection is sterile. The simulacrum, the simulation, is everything. The mimetic, not the ideal, is the human plane. We are cave people drawn toward the light whose only hope is never to emerge fully into it. The
most we can ask of life is that it be a perpetual high school where we matriculate, just keep taking course after esoteric course, but never graduate."
"Wayne, you've got Peggy Lee on the brain," Sylvia said. "One moment everything
isn't enough for you; the next, it's too much."
They all took a moment, possibly to be in the moment. This was possibly the last moment they all would ever be together. The air was cooling, the breeze becoming wind. Dark clouds
were massing to the west. In a few minutes water and mountains would vanish into thick air. They shivered and stamped their feet. The old man gazed downward to the busy Bowl, people in cars and people on foot hobnobbing transactively, intent
upon getting and spending. It was not, could never be, until those final moments when he was overcome by physical pain and exhaustion, too much with him. Like an earlier, unrelated American Adams, to his life as a whole he was a consenting, contracting,
party and partner. He gazed outward and gave himself over to the fallacious pathos of a concupiscent Sea baring its swelling bosom, of an Olympic range offering its ample flanks, to an elusive sun. He felt in tune, if not at one.
"Well,
people, I need to be going," Charlotte said.
"Me too," Carolyn said.
"It's time," Dave said.
That instinct of the aged, to get home before dark, was kicking in.
In their farewell round of hugs, they pulled each other in tight, squeezed
hard, pounded backs a second or third time.
"See you at the 65th," the old man said.
"And you'll write an Edmonds song for us?" Monk asked.
"I'll write something."
[I am trying to wrap my head around what Wayne is saying.
Humans search for meaning. See Viktor Frankl. But meaning is not to be found. On the one hand, if we are not immortal, our lives are meaningless. After 10-to-the-10th-to-the-68th-power earth years have passed, there'll be no trace
of our genius or our genes or of any systems with which they have been affiliated, perhaps no trace of anything at all. On the other hand, if wewere immortal, if we became God or the Cloud, our lives would be meaningless because omniscience and omnipotence
paralyze. Can you imagine existing in a state of sterile perfection for 10-to-the-10th-to-the 68th Groundhog Years? Whether we were in, or out, of any moment would be of no moment. We would be blasé. Why even bother?
Therefore there is no God because why would there be? Carolyn]
[Carolyn, might I suggest you lie down with a cold compress on your forehead? Your brain must