One of Those Days

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I recently lived a day directed by David Lynch.  Or at least it felt like it.  While I’m not at liberty to discuss the details, I can say it was a surreal experience that left me questioning everything.  Ever have one of those days?  It happened smack in the middle of work, forcing me to take an emergency personal day, if there is such a thing.  I’ve self-identified as an existentialist for many, many years—that may be changing in the light of Frankl—and the part I most identified with was the absurd.  It became clear to me, starting at least in seminary, how absurd my life was.  Strange things happen to me.  Always have.  I had a weird childhood and it hasn’t become any more normal since then.  Even so, some days are brought to you by David Lynch.

When I proposed to my wife, I told her that I couldn’t promise her much (I was functionally unemployed at the time, but applying for Ph.D. Programs) but that our life together would be interesting.  I doubt she would argue the point now, some 36 years later.  Even in a life defined by the odd—let’s use the existentialist word—absurd, some days stand out.  Days when, as Bruce Springsteen might say, you’re toppled over by “things you don’t even see coming.”  This particular day it was the direct consequence of the internet, our electronic metaverse, to borrow a term from Neal Stephenson.  The older I get the more I wonder if the blessing of constant connectedness is more a curse in disguise.  For thousands of years society got along without it.  Yet, as with most devils, there are definite advantages to dancing.

The next morning I saw a great horned owl while out jogging.  I know owls are difficult to spot and I’ve read enough about screen memories to make me wonder if something truly cosmic was going down.  I’d only seen one great horned owl before, and that was while jogging at Nashotah House.  I have been pondering my David Lynch day.  It actually grew into several days in which I felt completely out of control of my own life.  And the pneumonia vaccine didn’t help, donating a restless night and fuzzy head.  Some people, it seems, are magnets for the odd.  We don’t ask for it—it simply happens to us and we have to figure out how to respond.  Recognizing the absurdity may be a good start, right, Mr. Lynch?

Image credit: Alan Light, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license, via Wikimedia Commons

Precedes Essence

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Lars von Trier makes existentialist art films that sometimes veer into horror.  Antichrist was such a film, and one of the more disturbing that I’ve ever seen.  Melancholia was initially welcomed in a kind of reserved way, as I recall, when released in 2011.  A few years ago I sat down to watch it and didn’t quite make it halfway through.  The pacing wasn’t terribly moving and the story depressing.  These days Melancholia has been upgraded to one of the best movies of this century, so far.  It was a rainy Saturday and I decided to steel myself to try again.  It is an art movie, but not horror.  There are horror elements, but it is more about the torment of existence—existentialism again—as two sisters anticipate and face the collision of the earth with a rogue planet called Melancholia.

The ultra-slow montage at the beginning lets the viewer know that earth will not avoid or survive this collision.  Then Justine, one of the sisters, is shown heading toward her wedding reception.  She’s already depressed and the first hour or so of the movie shows the troubled interactions at the reception.  When things finally begin to wind down near dawn, she refuses to consummate the wedding and sends her new husband away.  Cheerful stuff.  The focus then shifts to Claire.  She and her husband John, and their son, are enormously wealthy.  They are also aware that Melancholia is approaching.  John insists that the calculations show it will be a near miss, but one nobody would want to miss seeing.  Claire isn’t so sure.  Justine comes to stay with them.

As the effects of the larger planet’s proximity begin to be felt, John realizes the calculations are wrong and dies by suicide.  Claire and Justine have opposite views of the impending end, with Justine declaring life is evil and should be wiped out (again, existentialism).  Then worlds collide.  This is a disturbing, but beautifully shot film.  I found out that it is, after Antichrist, the second of von Trier’s “Depression Trilogy.”  As someone seeking joy in melancholy, I’m glad to have seen the film.  I knew the planet collision plot, but I try not to read about movies in advance, so I wasn’t sure if this would be horror or not.  It was pretty clear from Antichrist that von Trier suffers from depression.  Melancholia confirms this and is a poignant cry of distress at being helpless in an uncaring universe.  And it invites viewers to ponder this as well.

Sleeping and Watching

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The older I get, the more flexible my idea of reality becomes.  I’m starting to notice things that may have been happening for decades, but the reflection of age throws into sharper focus.  I’ve mentioned before that a good night’s sleep casts the day in a different light.  Such nights are sometimes hard to come by and unrelenting capitalism doesn’t offer enough “sick days” to sit out the bad ones.  But it’s not only that.  I watch a lot of movies.  Since I’ve been writing books on movies that only makes sense.  Still, I’ve begun to notice how movies stay with you after the credits roll.  Sometimes they remain the whole day until a night’s reboot comes.  This can also happen with reading, but on a slower, and most likely more profound level.

In high school, reading existentialist plays (sometimes in German), I learned to remind myself that watching a play (or movie) is observing an illusion.  Now I’m beginning to question whether that’s entirely true or not.  What enters our minds becomes part of us.  Think of the vast majority of human lives throughout history.  People living out their lives by farming and/or hunting.  Spending every day on the many tasks it takes to stay alive.  No reading.  No watching.  Their daily lives constructed their reality.  How many of us could grow our own food or build adequate shelter?  And God help us if we need a doctor.  Our lives require many other people to ensure we keep on going.  Most of them people we don’t know.  People whose realities are different than mine.

My career trajectory misfired fairly early on, and my reality has been years of trying to make sense of what happened.  From the first days of hurt and confusion I began to cope by watching movies.  For ninety minutes, at least, I escaped reality.  Or did I?  Was I enhancing reality?  What of my existentialist outlook?  Perhaps I was doing what existentialists do best—creating my own meaning.  So if I get out of the wrong side of bed, and the day feels like it really isn’t welcoming me this time around, I await the reboot.  Or when I have a few moments to sit down and watch a movie, I get up from my chair with an alternative reality surrounding me.  Perhaps I have learned something by sleeping and watching.  Maybe I have learned that reality is more flexible than I’ve been inclined to believe.  Maybe somehow this all does make sense.  Or not.

The Gift

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Each day, each hour is a gift.  With my mother’s passing two months ago, I’ve been struck by the sheer number of colleagues that have died this year.  Not all of them older than me.  I wrote some months back about Michael S. Heiser, a blogging buddy from days past.  An email about a potential author just yesterday sent me back to the Society of Biblical Literature necrology.  This author had died unexpectedly the day before.  Glancing over the top of the list, I saw that three people with whom I’d worked died in November.  This was quite a shock since two of them were younger than me and the other not much older.  The thing about professors is that you kind of expect them to grow old.  To be old.  Life is a gift, and it’s sometimes easy to forget that.

Both tenacious and tenuous, life is a mystery.  Perhaps it’s perverse, but this makes Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” seem like a metaphor.  In fact, those of us who read and watch horror generally do so with a purpose, consciously or not.  It helps us face difficult things.  Five colleagues in one year sounds like a lot.  Someone in my family, younger than me, had six funerals to attend this year.  Life can feel difficult at such times.  Horror can be a coping mechanism.  At least for some of us.  It can be profoundly hopeful.  The meaning of life can be elusive, which is why, the existentialists conclude, we must make our own.  Existence precedes essence, as they say.

Carlos Schwabe, Death of the Undertaker; Wikimedia Commons

Other than profession, one of the few things these five fallen colleagues had in common was my perspective on them.  I don’t think they knew each other.  Had I not been an editor I likely wouldn’t have known three of them at all.  We live in a web of interconnection.  And I don’t mean the world-wide web (does anyone even use that term any more?).  Lives are gifts and gifts cross paths with other gifts.  Such information, all at once, can be difficult to process.  It makes me wonder why we allow wars.  Why we don’t think of consequences before we vote autocrats to power.  Instead, if we focus on that ephemeral gift we have, and how we might share it with others, appreciation rather than hatred grows.  To this lonely existentialist who watches horror for meaning, that just makes sense.

Rock the Absurd

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Okay, so it was bound to happen eventually.  You see, the internet makes us all interchangeable in a way.  I occasionally lament being confused by various algorithms with other “Steve Wigginses” out there (and there are many).  So while innocently checking my personal email after work the other day I spied a message clearly not sent by one of the many organizations that spam me constantly.  It was an invitation to participate in a conference.  Now, with a 925 job that’s just not possible, but I always appreciate being asked.  Then I read what the conference was about.  Agriculture.  Why were they asking me to attend a conference on agriculture?  Then I recalled, one of the other Steve Wigginses is a professor of anthropology, specializing in agriculture.  Was this an electronic mail mishap?

It also made me wonder if this poor soul (I don’t know him and have never met him) has been receiving email about horror films and wondering why.  His research trajectory has him trying to help people (which is why I wanted to be an academic in the first place) in a real down-to-earth way.  This made me realize the dilemma of other biblical scholars I know who are interested in monsters and horror, but who also realize that we need to help the world.  I can say from experience that it’s a lot easier to do as a professor than it is as an editor.  At least a professor has a platform to stand on.  And all of this brought to mind the theater of the absurd, tying me back to my younger days.

As I started high school I learned about the existentialists.  Looking at my own life, I saw it was absurd.  The times when I start to get down are when I’ve started to take all this seriously.  This Steve Wiggins, in any case, spends his life trying to figure things out.  But he lives in a world where two and two don’t always come to four.  Anyone who’s been inside an organization with open eyes knows the absurdities—large or small—that go on within it.  As old Ecclesiastes says, the race isn’t always to the swift.  That’s biblical and bankable.  So it’s a bit absurd that three (that I know of) Steve Wigginses are or have been professors.  It’s absurd that we don’t all use our full names because most two-name combinations on the web are going to lead to duplicates.  Mix-ups are bound to happen and we should just enjoy the absurdity we see.

Photo by Steven Weeks on Unsplash

Everything

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It’s been getting a lot of press, Everything Everywhere All at Once has.  It’s been winning awards and it demonstrates that absurdism isn’t dead.  Absurdism is an essential element of existentialism, the philosophical school with which I most closely identify.  I had no idea others found it so appealing.  This movie’s difficult to encapsulate—the summary on Wikipedia is actually not bad—but it has to do with human potential when living in a multiverse where every decision splits the ‘verse into new bubbles where your actions play out in all possible ways.  And, of course, it’s tax season.  There are clearly elements of The Matrix here, as well as Brazil.  And it’s distributed by A24.  The message is good, as the story plays out.  The images are impressive and confusing and will make you think.

From the time I left home I’ve looked for two main elements in movies—they should make me feel and make me think.  When they do both they are successful.  Everything Everywhere All at Once is successful.  It also reminded me of how healing existentialism can be, which is what drew me to it in the first place.  Life, or to point a finer point on it, consciousness, is absurd.  You can follow the same rules and get different results each time.  And you have to live with the consequences.  If you think about it too much it leads to despair.  I need, and it seems others do as well, to be reminded once in a while that absurdity is endemic in this universe.  How else can we explain Trump?  Existentialism breaks in on reality and I used to self-medicate with Nietzsche and Kafka and Camus.  Lately I’ve been using horror.

The thing about absurdity is that it’s funny.  We may not laugh about what the universe hands us as much as we should.  Existentialism also holds that darker element called dread.  Sometimes that comes to the foreground.  In my own life, I guess I thought getting a Ph.D. from a major, internationally renowned, research university might help.  I had forgotten the role absurdity plays in all of this.  Everything Everywhere All at Once shows the universe, or multiverse, is the ultimate trickster.  There are those, serious scientists, some of them, who believe that each decision does split off another universe and that all possibilities play out somewhere in the multiverse.  Even if that’s true, we’re stuck in this one.  It makes sense, therefore, to laugh at it once in a while.

Deep Life

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I have a list, you know.  It grows frequently and changes with my moods.  It’s a list of movies I want to watch.  While I never trained as a movie critic, there comes a time when you’ve watched enough, and written about them, that you can’t help but feel you have something valuable, perhaps, to say.  Movies are modern mythology.  At least if they’re done right.  Being a critic of limited means, I often paw through Amazon Prime’s list of freebies for subscribers.  Seldom is anything on my list there, so I try to find interesting offerings for free.  Sometimes they’re lousy (but at least free) and other times they’re provocative and perhaps profound.  Vivarium is a European film that slots somewhere between horror and sci-fi.  It’s like The Truman Show meets Village of the Damned while at a party thrown by the Stepford home owner’s association.  It’s one of the profound ones.

Tom and Gemma, a young couple, agree to see a house that an odd realtor insists they look at.  In a planned community of identical houses, the couple find themselves abandoned and unable to escape.  The house can’t be destroyed and food mysteriously appears.  Then a baby is delivered to be raised by the couple.  The child grows quickly, aging about 10 years in 100 days.  Tom decides to try to dig out while Gemma tries to care for the strange boy.  He mimics them and screams if he wants something.  Tom digs until he sickens.  He finds a body at the bottom of the hole and shortly thereafter dies at Gemma’s side.  The boy, now in his twenties, puts Tom in the hole he dug.  When Gemma attacks him he crawls under the pavement and she follows, only to discover other houses with other trapped parents.  She dies and the boy throws her into the hole and buries her with Tom.  He then replaces the realtor, waiting for other couples to come looking for a house.

The film is full of both existentialism and social commentary.  The boy tells Gemma as she’s dying that mothers raise their children then die.  We learn about two thirds of the way through that the boy is not human.  What he is is never explained.  This is the kind of film I would’ve found mind-blowing in high school.  It’s still very intriguing and will require some thought.  It’s well made, with high production values, unlike much of what I find scrolling through Amazon Prime.  It’s a film worth talking about.  And profound.

Fragmented

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The existentialists, remember, used to put scenes in their plays to remind you that you were indeed watching a play.  In keeping with their philosophy, there was no reason to fool yourself.  Meanwhile, movies seldom break the fourth wall, immersing you in a story that, if done right, will keep your eyes firmly on the screen.  With home based media, however, we’ve all become existentialists.  (Of course, some of us had made that move before the internet even began.)  When we watch movies we always have that “pause” button nearby in case an important call, text, or tweet comes through.  We can always rejoin it later.  Life has become so fractured, so busy, that an unbroken two hours is a rarity.  I see the time-stamps on my boss’s emails.

While the existentialist side of me wants to nod approvingly, another part of me says we’ve lost something.  What does it mean to immerse ourselves into a story?  I know that when I put a book down it feels like unraveling threads at the site of a fresh tear in the fabric of consciousness.  Even the short story often has to be finished in pieces.  Poe, who knew much, wrote that short stories should be read in a single sitting.  All of mine have bookmarks tucked into them.  For a fiction-writer-wannabe like me, you need to feed the furnace.  To write short stories, you have to read short stories.  Novels must be spread over several weeks.  Some can take months.  I would like long novels again if time weren’t so short.  Presses are even encouraging authors to write short books.  Readers want things in snippets.

Perhaps all this fragmentation is why I enjoy jigsaw puzzles so much.  Part of the thrill is remembering several places in the picture simultaneously.  Being able to pick up where you left off.  I limit my puzzle work to the period of the holidays when I can take more than one day off work in a row and the lawn doesn’t require attention and those trees that you just can’t seem to get rid of don’t require monitoring.  But puzzles are designed for interruption.  Movies and short stories are intended to engage you for a limited, unbroken period.  The real problem is that we’ve allowed our time to become so fragmented.  A creative life will always leave several things undone by its very nature.  Other forces, mostly economic, will demand more and more time.  The best response, it seems to me, is to be existentialist about it.

Photo by Hans-Peter Gauster on Unsplash

Under the Plague

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Some events transform a society.  While we keep waiting for things “to get back to normal,” many of us have already come to realize that there is no normal to which we can get back.  That’s my main impression after reading Albert Camus’ The Plague.  The story is set in 1940s Algeria where the Bubonic Plague breaks out in a single town that has to isolate itself from the rest of the world.  As the months and realizations of long duration develop, the emotions the characters go through are very much in line with what seems to be happening with Covid-19.  Indeed, that’s why the novel seems to be going through a surge of popularity right now.  I’ve always associated Camus with the great existentialist writers, but that slipped to the back of my mind while reading this poignant story.

Existentialism is all about making one’s own meaning in a meaningless universe.  This is precisely what Dr. Rieux does in Oran as his former life becomes one long ward call of service to the town.  He befriends characters who represent the best and the worst of human nature as they respond to the pressures of isolation and boredom.  Camus pointedly notes that despite the equalizing forces of death and hardship, the rich manage to make sure they have it better than the poor although they all end up in the same common grave.  There are morals to this story, and it’s clear that “leaders” in Washington have never read it.  Literature quite often teaches important lessons, but to get at them you have to read.

Rieux befriends Tarrou and it seems to me that Tarrou’s lengthy monologue on why he has volunteered to stay in Oran and help those who are suffering is the main message of the book.  Tarrou understands the lessening of suffering, the attempt to bring peace, as the main purpose of human beings.  He says at one point that it’s like becoming a saint.  Despite the ways saints are often worshipped these days, that is at the heart of their canonization.  Care for others.  Rieux points out that Tarrou doesn’t believe in God, and yet, as the story winds down it is clear that he has become a kind of savior figure.  The novel is disturbing in its simplicity and in its timeliness.  It would seem that if we’re to get anything at all out of being under the cloud of a modern plague that we need to take the view that others matter, despite what Washington says, perhaps even more than ourselves.

Teutonic Ennui

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I don’t remember its title or its author.  I do recall that there was a character, or perhaps there were characters, who kept saying “etwas muss getan werden”—“something must be done.”  You see, we read quite a few existentialist short stories in German IV in high school.  There were so few of us left from the freshman intro all the way back in ninth grade that our teacher could put us right in the middle of German literature and have us read.  I wish I still had that facility now.  Although I can work my way through many languages academically (German, French, Spanish, Italian, and, of course, the dead languages of koine Greek, classical Hebrew, Ugaritic, and assorted other semitic dialects), the fluency of sitting down and just reading atrophied long ago.  Still, etwas muss getan werden.  That sense of anxiety feels like it’s permanent now.

Every now and again, when tensions are running high—this past week is an example—I find myself nervously checking online news sources frequently to see if anything dramatically good has happened.  This gets to be almost a tic.  I need to have some assurance that we’ve not become a dictatorship, or that there are those in power with enough humanity left inside them have tried to do something to make things better.  Being a nation of throw-away people is ethically wrong no matter what scale you use.  Skin color and national heritage do not lessen the worth of any human being.  We can’t even get out to protest properly because a pandemic, which is still being mishandled, rages.  The days are full of such sameness.  Etwas muss getan werden.  Please.

I wish I could remember the stories I read in high school.  Some have stayed with me through the years.  German class was my introduction to existentialism, a philosophy with which I still mostly identify.  That was the reason I would pick up books by Kafka, Camus, and Dürrenmatt when I would find them in the once plentiful used book stores.  I remember the latter’s Der Besuch der alten Dame. I recall seeing the play performed and being reminded that we are all players in a drama whose only sense comes from our assignment of the same.  Now I sit inside on sunny days.  Afraid of economic insecurity—who knows how long the jobs will hold out?—I don’t go to stores and try to order as little as possible online.  I keep waiting for something to happen.  As I learned in high school etwas muss getan werden, no matter where I read it.

Stranger Things

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Albert Camus preferred the label “absurdist” to “existentialist” to describe himself. The problem with labels is that we don’t always get to pick our own. As a young man fascinated with existentialism, I was introduced to Camus as one of their number that I should read. Categories, of course, are only abstractions to complex realities. So, for learning about existentialism Camus was recommended reading in those days. I selected The Stranger. So many years have passed since then that I only recollected a single part of the plot. Coming back to it as an adult is like walking down that beach a second time, unaware that you’ve just been down this way and something bad happened last time. Existentialism is like that.

Meursault is little effected by life. He has no strong opinions since, at the end of the day, everything seems pointless to him. He sheds no tears at the death of his mother because death is to be expected. When a heat stroke confuses him sufficiently he unintentionally kills a man. At his deposition the examining magistrate finds Meursault’s atheism inexplicable. In the face of the possible consequences of his actions, such indifference leads him to refer to the prisoner as “Mr. Antichrist.” Awaiting his execution, Meursault has a final confrontation with the priest that has come to his cell unbidden. The prisoner is convinced that even on death row he believes more sincerely than the man of the cloth. Camus’ story is surreal but realistic. A parable for his day and ours.

I’ve lamented before about the decline in philosophical literature. Taking philosophy straight requires the kind of concentration that I lack on the bus or before going to bed. Novels like The Stranger express such ideas in digestible form. The reader identifies with and despises Meursault. Why doesn’t he do something to help himself? Boredom and indifference will literally kill him. He is, however, steadfast, and that is something to admire. Along the way existential ideas are woven into the character’s thoughts and dialogue. Everyone is like an actor in a play—they did not write it, they simply perform the roles assigned to them. When it’s all over they end up in the same place. Absurdism and existentialism aren’t very far apart. They’re both categories devised to help us comprehend the enigma that we confront in books such as The Stranger. Meursault can’t give the chaplain any false belief since, as he notes, those who believe have more need of convincing than those who don’t.

Hiding Out

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It’s seen better days. The spine is coming unglued and the pages are brittle, fracturing into tan snowflakes as I turn the pages. Still, this unusual little book is crowded with memories. I recall the used book store where I bought it—the Boston Book Annex, now sadly defunct. Unlike any other paperback I’d purchased, this one has gray-dyed page edges, adding an appropriate October gloom to the reading. Friedrich Duerrenmatt may not be properly among the existentialist novels, but that’s where he lives on my bookshelf. I picked up The Quarry three decades ago when “Der Besuch der alten Dame” was still relatively fresh in my mind. If I were a younger man I might’ve tried to find an edition in German, but the internet didn’t exist in those days and after a few years of no use, my Deutsch was dusty. It had been my gateway language.

As I read The Quarry I wondered why I had waited so long to do so. The story is brief but intense. And like novels of the period, it is philosophical and theological. (Like many translations it is sold under different titles; this one is also known as Suspicion, but The Quarry captures the duality nicely.) Hans Bärlach, a Swiss police commissioner, is on the trail of a Nazi war criminal. Suffering from cancer, Bärlach is bed-ridden but his quarry is a doctor and he finds a plausible excuse to become his patient. To help him set the trap, he enlists the aid of Gulliver, a Jewish concentration camp survivor. Their dialogue is what makes this brief story so theologically pregnant. Gulliver calls Bärlach “Christian” and reflects on how that feels to a Jew who was intended to be exterminated. I won’t spoil the ending here, but when Bärlach meets his quarry and realizes that he is also the quarry, the conversation once again turns to religion.

There’s an honesty to such novels as this. Writers were not yet afraid to invoke philosophical dialogue. A friend at the time I purchased the book once told me “nobody writes like that anymore.” Since his father-in-law was a novelist, I supposed he was right. I should have instead relied on my memories from high school German. We read “Der Besuch der alten Dame” and even went to see a stage adaption at the local community college. I’d shortly discover the existentialists. Their views on the absurdity of life mingled so readily with a theology becoming broken, tired, and top-heavy. Those ideas I’d met in class such as, if memory serves, Ilse Aichinger’s “Wo Ich Wohne,” became a part of my young psyche and, not surprisingly, many years later I’m finding myself their quarry.

The Falls

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I can’t recall if I’ve been to Mexico City before. You see, back in the late 1980s I frequently read the novels of the existentialists, and although a copy of The Fall has been on my shelf since then, I don’t recall if I read this Camus classic. It’s sometimes that way with existentialists. In late 1980’s Back Bay, a used bookstore called the Boston Book Annex charmed my days. The Annex has sadly closed, but I do remember buying my Camus novels there. This one, however, I don’t remember reading.

So, unsure of my past, I decided to read it. Perhaps again. The existentialists make sense to me. I have to say that in today’s rushed and harried lifestyle it’s a little more difficult to find time to spend in Mexico City. Although the book is short, it’s not quick. There’s much to ponder as you wend your way through an evening bending elbows with Albert. Perhaps that’s an unwonted familiarity regarding a man who died before I was born, but existentialists know that kind of thing happens.

One of the more compelling aspects of this literature is that the existentialists often address religion. The Fall is a first person narrative throughout, and about four-fifths of the way through Jean-Baptiste Clamence begins to address Christianity explicitly. Since this is a retelling, in secular terms, of the biblical “fall,” this is not unexpected. Jean-Baptiste is a lawyer who is making his confession. He states that his clients “probably feared that heaven could not represent their interests as well as a lawyer invincible when it came to the code of law.” Genesis, of course, is attributed to Moses, himself a law-giver. From this point until the end of the chapter he reflects on the fact that although no one is innocent, all are glad to find the crime in others. He describes torture devices of the Middle Ages, exonerating God from their invention. He respects Jesus, but not what people have made of religion.

Reading, perhaps re-reading, this reminded me of why I found the existentialists so compelling as a seminarian. They force you to think. I read Kafka, Camus, and Duerrenmatt, pondering how much wisdom could be crammed into such brief books. Ironically, it takes time to read them. Our world is crowded with concerns about money over meaning. Matter over mind. Once in a while we need to step back, spend an evening or two in Mexico City, and consider how we’ve become a fallen race.

Final Frontiers

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Is there such a thing as an existential illness? Answer that if you want to, but it’s rhetorical. I’ve been voting since 1980 and I’ve taken my fair share of bruises in the process, but this time my soul feels as if God has hung his “gone fishin’” sign on the pearly gates for good. I am ill. Maybe it was the ebullience that came from having eight years of progress where, although things weren’t perfect, they were sort of holding steady. I’ve always considered myself a populist. I don’t know how a billionaire can convince millions of people he’s one. To be populist you’ve got to be one of hoi polloi. Growing up poor, I took my licks then and I’m still taking them now. No, this wound goes deeper than the bone. Deeper than the viscera. It’s an existential illness.

All things considered, I don’t write too much about politics on this blog. All my adult years I’ve been an unapologetic Democrat. I confess to having grown up Republican. But I believe in the fair treatment of others. I know not everyone will or can be happy. I also know that it’s wrong to denigrate anyone because of their gender, race, orientation, or physical ability. Seems to me that our country was sort of the final frontier where you could go if you believed this kind of thing. Where can you go from the final frontier? There are no other land masses to discover. Maybe if I put on enough layers, Antarctica might not be so bad. Beyond that, where can one go to be a liberal in a world that desperately need some heart? Where money isn’t the measure of all things. Where Mom is right just as often, if not more than, Dad.

It’s a strange thing, this existential illness. Politicians are already cooing their pleasantries, as if nothing more than a slight upset occurred. It seems to me that whenever there’s an upset the popular vote disagrees with the electoral college. It also seems to me there should be a place where the wealthy aren’t considered better by virtue of their material status. I have this existential illness, but I can still dream. Is there a way forward from here? Sometimes I think I can see that horizon where all people are treated fairly and equally, and sometimes the sun seems to be rising over that horizon. Today I feel motion-sick from being jolted backwards. I’ve been disappointed before, but I don’t remember it hurting this badly. If anyone knows a good existential doctor, please pass along her name.

Engineering Meaning

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ExistentialPleasuresofEngineeringEngineers have been a part of my life in many ways. My mother’s father was an engineer. Although she did not know it, my grandmother’s grandfather was also an engineer. My wife’s father is an engineer, and grandparents on both sides of her family were either scientists or engineers. My daughter is studying engineering, and other relatives have made it their profession. In fact, had the peril of my everlasting soul not caught my early concern, I would likely have headed into the sciences myself. Not that I would have made it in the profession, but the interest is certainly there. Many years ago my wife bought me a copy of Samuel C. Florman’s The Existential Pleasures of Engineering. Unlike my claims about engineering, I can boldly declare myself an existentialist. The moment I found out what existentialism was, I knew it was my outlook. Now that I am firmly settled in a profession about as far from science and engineering as I can be, I decided to read the book.

Quite surprisingly, I found Florman turning to religion from time to time. Existentialism isn’t inherently religious, but engineering is inherently empirical. Florman notes that the New Testament, with its spiritual values over the physical, often presents serious problems to engineers, enmeshed, as they are, in this universe. That made sense, even if it surprised me a little. A few pages later, however, I was astonished that Florman praises the “Old Testament” for its more earthy viewpoint that has a great appreciation for the physical world its god has created. Perhaps there was a reason my life took this track after all. Although I’m not Jewish, I always felt an attraction to the Hebraic outlook. Maybe I should’ve been an engineer.

Toward the end of his extended essay, Florman once again turns his thoughts toward the spiritual. Noting that massive works of engineering tend to evoke the divine—the most obvious, but by no means only, example being cathedrals—we glimpse a sense of the sublimity in the greatest of human edifices, sacred or secular. The engineer still has recourse to the spirit which is, to a frustrated scientist, a cause for great hope. When I pulled a book on engineering off the shelf, I certainly did not expect to find any religion in it at all. Of course, the book was written before science and religion had become entrenched in such a shrill standoff as they seem to be today. There is balance here, and an appreciation of beauty. And when the engineer does the impossible, it is indeed a work of human divinity.