January 16, 2012: Tree of Knowledge

January 16, 2012: Tree of Knowledge


Genesis 3:5 "No. God knows well that the moment you eat of it your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods who know what is good and what is bad."


My job, though physically strenuous, affords me enough time and quiet to drift through my thoughts and daydream.  A meter reader has to pay attention to what he's doing at brief moments of the day, opening a fence, entering a backyard, greeting the homeowner, avoiding the pitfalls of frozen ground and mud... but these things have become such habit and ritual that I'm afforded the pleasure of examining all that I know.  After nearly a decade of working at this job, and around four years on the same routes, I can probably trace my footsteps by rote.  I've worn a groove into the lawns of Perrysburg, Rossford, Oregon, Walbridge, and Genoa.  When the deep snows of winter linger for more than a month I can see the ghost of my footprints from before, like those old Roman roads with wide, smooth wagon wheel ruts polished into the cobblestones from ages ago.  


The days drift past me mostly.  Time is measured in distances in between houses and through neighborhoods.  I break halfway through the day to eat a lunch in my car and listen to NPR, then float through the rest of the afternoon thinking about afternoons in the winter and how people will be coming home and the sun will be sinking low.  Fridays and Mondays pass by without fanfare and we all age without even knowing it.  But in that time, I learn things and I feel the world around me.  I think about the truths behind the truths and I think about all the things that we have come to know.  Knowledge, in the early days, was beautifully simple.  There were good acts, there were acts that went against the good of the community, God was in his heaven and we dug the plow in the dirt after it thawed.  We drank from the river, we played games with our children that taught them how to live, we watched the women laugh over the animal hides, and we were wary of strangers.  It's not a surprise that we long for the lost old simple ages.  


This is a postmodern world.  Post Freud, Marx, Darwin, and God.  We have eaten the fruit from the tree and we can see the bad and the good in ourselves... at least some of us can.  We know many things now.  We know that the whole universe is in motion, and filled with things we can only see the shadows of.  We know that the lights we see in the night sky may be the light from stars that have died long ago, like the howl of a wolf that lived in the time of the conquistadors reaching our ears today.  We know that the eternal sun, the same sun that shone on old Egypt, on the knights of Medieval England, and which will shine on children  not yet born to us, will eventually consume itself and this little oasis of life.  We know that the ground we stand on, which has afforded us a safe place to lay upon since we could first stand tall, is hard cold crust laying precariously on a vast swirling mass of liquid.  We know that if we look at each other, and keep looking ever closer and closer, we will disappear and vast spaces will open up where once there was a sentient being.  It is in a world like this that we are supposed to live and be happy.


Is it any wonder that we're all chasing spirituality and philosophies?  Is it hard to believe that we clash with each other in our search for a true life?  What is the question that we're trying to find an answer to?  We analyze and we fret... we drift from book to painting to dance to craft thinking that we're  getting closer and closer... desperate to tell our loved ones that we're on the path to righteousness!  Then we fall breathless into our beds, dream anxious dreams, awake to our pills and carry on the fight.  It is a psychic morass, this life.  With so many people in the world we have to claw our way to meaning, shove our way through the crowds, shout to be heard, and try not to drown in the quicksand.  Do I sound like I have an answer?  Am I being a bit macabre?  Probably.  Make no mistake, I am an optimist.  I can see the old answer is still the perfect answer... love will keep us together.


After a century of Freudian analysis, of Gallup polls, of sociology and anthropology, of Marxian historical reductionism, of deconstruction and abstraction, of new wave neo-pathology, particle physics and fractal geometry, have we found the final thesis, or are we compounding silken threads on top of one another in an ever increasing web?  What does it mean to know?  To me it is a bit of a laugh.  It is a wonder how our mind works.  It is a pleasure to discover new things.  I don't subscribe to the notion "What good does this knowledge for us?"  I'm no pragmatist.  I think the more we think about the world we inhabit the better we can make it.  But to love is to make everything simple again... to work for happiness for each other's sake, and to give comfort in an ever increasing uncomfortable world.  Until we meet again...