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By Root 335 0

I can practically see his eyes darting back and forth from one monitor to the other, making professional and aesthetic judgments simultaneously as we speak. I’m beginning to get the idea that he’s been editing a particularly nasty bit of footage today, parts of which we peons here in the general public will never see. He points out that inquisitions and holocausts are still happening around the world, we’re just calling them different things, like “jihad,” or “ethnic cleansing.” He sounds like he is trapped in one of his endless video loops. Like a squirrel in a cage. We have somehow put God at the center of a wheel and every time we think we are getting close, we find ourselves traveling back out a different spoke, toward an inevitable encounter with the harsh reality that exists beyond the outer rim. Where the rubber meets the road.

I take a second to think back on all the material currently available and recall out loud that one question on the table these days is, if you abandon a sacred canon of behavior, be it a supposedly God-given set of commandments or a political constitution, without replacing it with a better one, more suited to contemporary needs, won’t ethics deteriorate until our deeds become more and more intolerable?

“Questions, questions, questions,” Gordo heaves one of his more dramatic sighs. “Abstract thought is the basis of imagination.” He embarks upon a ramble of his own, returning to something I was getting at earlier. But he sounds a bit peeved. Maybe he doesn’t like thinking about God as an abstraction. Maybe he doesn’t like what he’s seeing on his television screen. He also likes to quote Voltaire in reminding me that “if God didn’t exist, mankind would be forced to invent him,” and the conundrum posed by his university theosophy teacher that “atheists first must believe there is a God not to believe in.”

Gordo thinks that last piece of sophistry cleverer than I do. Meanwhile, I am trying to keep that mysterious unmentioned video footage in mind. It could be the reason he has suddenly found himself in a moral quandary. Of course, if I were to ask specifically what he’s working on that minute, he would brush me off with yet another sigh, exhaling some platitude about the endless tedium and sameness of his grueling, thankless efforts. He will spare me those remarks if I let him. But I remind myself, before pushing on, that sooner or later he’s going to have to return his full attention to his work. I worm my way back to the topic at hand by reminding him that the imagination is a valuable problem-solving tool when tempered with reason. It is rarely trustworthy when sparked solely by emotion, and becomes what Western Enlightenment philosophers would call the enemy of reason; what fundamentalists of all stripes have always called the enemy of faith.

“So you’re saying that religion and science are both suspect?”

This takes me by surprise. I hadn’t given any thought to the age-old debate between science and religion. The TV screen in my mental picture of Gordo’s workstation has just flipped from the horrors of Bosnia to the moral debate over funding NASA when there are starving people in the world.

“Um, yeah. Sometimes. Maybe. I mean, a medicine man in a primitive tribe can be just as out of ideas as a contemporary scholar who suggests we are at the end of history, don’t you think?”

Silence.

“But look, we’ve gotten off track here,” I say, trying to pull up. “What I grapple with when I consider this stuff is more or less what every sentient being has contemplated, either literally or figuratively, over the course of time. And that is: What are the genuine wonders of the fact of consciousness and at what point are they recognizable as such? Where inside us is the link to the self forged that will then reveal that greater link to what we are trying to identify as God? How do I account for the unexplainable paradox of life and death? Or, why does darkness appear so permanent, and light only temporary?”

Admittedly, I tend to blather like a college philosophy major stoned on Budweiser. So does Gordon.