It looked like a poem when you did this. I only wish . . .
: )
9+) You can no longer rationalize eating for the sake of hunger or living because it is so wonderful to breathe.
9) You cannot rationalize eating or living just to breathe.
7) You cannot eat or live to breathe.
5) You cannot live to breathe.
3) You cannot breathe.
1)Breathe.
9+) A tongue split like a forking road flits over the mountain crags of his teeth
9) A tongue like a forking road flits over teeth.
7) His forked tongue flits over mountainous teeth.
5) The tongue flits over teeth.
3) Tongue over teeth.
1) Split.
9+) You gave up bodily needs for a mind like hunger and an imagination that consumed.
9) You sacrificed bodily needs for a hungry, imaginative mind.
7) Body was released in exchange for mind.
5) Body was traded for mind.
3) Body and mind.
1) Mind.
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Friday, October 16, 2009
Genesis for the Atheist (kudos to Alex)
I hate essays. I am thankful that what we wrote was NOT (in my mind) the (classical) form of essay. In the traditional essay, I struggle most with using and analyzing evidence and working for a voice that is not pretentious but still formal. For me, this essay was much easier. I was able to employ the style of writing that I liked, not the one that was expected of me. This, of course, meant that I exchanged previous problems for new ones. Flow and transitions in my essay became many times more difficult. Evidence too was difficult, yet somewhat changed. In many ways it was harder even. Instead of looking for evidence from an outside source I was forced to look within myself for what I believed to be the truth. I sat for hours staring at my blank computer and when I found something to write about it was obvious what it should have been the entire time – a discussion on self-knowledge and wisdom.
In finished form, I liked me essay well enough – my editing process was fairly thorough, so there were few sentences or phrases that I disliked. The parts that I was least comfortable with were the section on the great philosophers of history and my end. The first I felt was not well-developed enough. It also felt out of place in my essay, since the rest of my essay dances around direct references to anything (I talk about Genesis and the Garden of Eden but never directly say either of these things), whereas this section quotes Descartes, and calls by name upon Plato and Galileo. The end was similarly undeveloped and abrupt (I thought at least). If I could change something, I would go back to add to these sections and make them more fluid.
My essay addresses knowledge, and its ability to corrupt and confuse. Though I used the traditional stage (the Garden of Eden), I changed the point of view and its purpose. As an atheist, my idea of Genesis is quite different from how a believer might perceive it. Instead of looking to all that we have gained with knowledge I listed what we have lost. I believe that we are more easily moved by grief than we are by happiness.
I loved this essay. This project was more an expression of myself than any other personal essay that I have ever written. Using the same idea and memory to create to entirely different works was incredible as well. I wish this was what I thought of when essays are brought up. I still hate essays. This, I repeat, was not an essay.
In finished form, I liked me essay well enough – my editing process was fairly thorough, so there were few sentences or phrases that I disliked. The parts that I was least comfortable with were the section on the great philosophers of history and my end. The first I felt was not well-developed enough. It also felt out of place in my essay, since the rest of my essay dances around direct references to anything (I talk about Genesis and the Garden of Eden but never directly say either of these things), whereas this section quotes Descartes, and calls by name upon Plato and Galileo. The end was similarly undeveloped and abrupt (I thought at least). If I could change something, I would go back to add to these sections and make them more fluid.
My essay addresses knowledge, and its ability to corrupt and confuse. Though I used the traditional stage (the Garden of Eden), I changed the point of view and its purpose. As an atheist, my idea of Genesis is quite different from how a believer might perceive it. Instead of looking to all that we have gained with knowledge I listed what we have lost. I believe that we are more easily moved by grief than we are by happiness.
I loved this essay. This project was more an expression of myself than any other personal essay that I have ever written. Using the same idea and memory to create to entirely different works was incredible as well. I wish this was what I thought of when essays are brought up. I still hate essays. This, I repeat, was not an essay.
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
The Heart Within
Thoughts pass through your mind as you flutter in bird shape through trees of thought. Snake eyes haunt you and speak tantalizing offers to your heart. You can take it back, says the snake to you. He is different somehow than before: shrunken and smaller, younger, as if these many years have strengthened him not made him lesser as they have you. All you have to do is offer yourself, a wrist, an ankle, a clear patch of skin, and you will lose yourself again to the earth. A tongue split like a forking road flits over the mountain crags of his teeth. He does not lie, yet nor does he speak the truth. Is it better to die with eyes open wide with awe or to live with the ghost of it in your mind? You have no time to decide. The hammer of judgment falls, smearing blood and knowledge across the concrete floor. The choice is gone and made, the snake dead. This time you do not fall because when you have hit bottom there is no further place to go.
I know why you chose the apple. When he looked at you, there was something in his eye that was truth and the illumination of mystery. If he wanted, he could make all that was unknown known and make a riddle of the recognized. In this there was some undiscovered joy and so you traded one form of ignorance for another. Now, you are alone. Of all of Noah’s creatures, not a one can sympathize with you. They are busy in their own lives with the need to exist and continue. You gave up bodily needs for a mind like hunger and an imagination that consumed. The natural was lost to you as you renounced it for reason, the ability to create knowledge. It left you starving some nights – your belly empty, your mind without thought. Sometimes though, you are filled to the brim with hope and sudden understanding. You can see now where you were blind and there is contempt within you for past simplicity. Lost to you however is the elegance in the plain and uncomplicated ways of the common beast.
*****
The silken slip of coiling scales across a cement floor does not make a great deal of sound. If you were truly listening for it, a small whoosh might have met your ear, the same sound that fine sand makes as it trickles from one side of an hourglass to the other. Only, though, if you had truly been listening. Otherwise you might have heard the wind as it ran its fingertips through the hilltop grass, so much more beautiful than a watered lawn in all of its luminescent splendor. The chittering of birds in the trees could also have drawn your attention or even the glint of a smiling, afternoon sun through the thick, furred leaves. Whatever it was that you noticed, it was certainly not the rattlesnake that had come to sit complacently at your foot, as only such dangerous creatures can. No, such a thing would have seemed beneath notice to your flighty, thoughtless mind. He waits there though, until some force draws you down again to the deep, cold earth. Until you are no longer a bird that can fly away, but are forced to sink into the ground with your own heaviness. Through it all, the snake is patient, guile glinting charmingly from cunning eyes. He knew always that you would return, that you could not bear not knowing, that you would eat of his damning fruit before the end; such things are unavoidable.
*****
In the Garden he tricked you long ago, told you that it wouldn’t hurt, that you wouldn’t fall. Those diamond eyes looked into yours and said that He would understand – all things must live and survive. Your resistance was strong; an argument set against his sweet words, but there was never hope. Foolish thing that you are, you trusted him blindly, as one feeling through the wet dark. So you took it from his outstretched, proffering grip because it was beautiful and you wanted it. There was a need within you to consume, to somehow be one with that globe that fit so effortlessly into your cupped hands. And it was red, like blood. Teeth sank into the moist, crunchy flesh and the snake watched, intent as you changed. You grew slower, like hot candle wax that hardens gradually but surely. It left a stain on you, that tense, frozen movement. When again your body was your own, it was half of what it had once been, but even that memory was lost to you. Your actions did not have the grace and purpose that they did when every flexing of muscle was a fight for life – the knowledge in that morsel of forbidden fruit had melted it away. The separation had come at last, a divide between you and the world of things that are both one and beautiful. That glorious understanding of the heartbeat within the earth, the common life that we all share, was gone and you could only watch dumbly as time and grace flew all around, unaffected. So much time has passed since then, when you left the Garden, and there is nothing to be done but count each year as it turns. Time disappears quickly enough in a blur of lives so short that their great joys and tragedies are lost before they are begun. Each second darts away to bring you here to this place under the eaves, to this house of stone and wood, to this snake that challenges you again.
Under the weighted emptiness of that haunting gaze, there is nothing for you but to look within yourself past all the pretension, the half-formed morals that you hold yourself to, but cannot follow. Deeper and deeper you search for that thing that makes the animals fight, kill, eat, live, but you still cannot find the significance. You can no longer rationalize eating for the sake of hunger or living because it is so wonderful to breath. There must be something else, something larger, more important than even you are within your small egocentric world. When there is nothing left for you to analyze, you turn to the only thing you have left, the thing that you traded the world for: reason. Thoughts come whispering through your mind, a suggestion from some unknown source. You are not alone. Here at last is some sense in a world that has become senseless; it is unimportant that it was of your own invention. You cannot make, but can still have been made by one as lonely as you. He created you in His image that you might preside over this land that on its own is so vacant. He made you because you would understand your purpose: to make and to break, to crush and to hold. He gave you reason because it is His will. So the animals learned to run from you above all other predators, you who not so long ago were as sister to them.
Still, this One who came to you in the dark mystified. You and yours bent your minds on this new question, a choice not yet made. You saw the stars in all of their forbidding distance and knew them as they were. Plato turned to Him and asked, “Is this alright?” but his eyes were turned inwards to that distant heavenly throne and no answer came. Galileo never felt this weakness, steady in his goal, yet somehow He demanded his attention and cast him from the world. It had never been quite right, not the banner under which He could allow his folk to parade, and so He subsided into smoldering impatience. Descartes came soon enough though and His strength was kindled. Cogito ergo sum. “I think, therefore I am.” You pronounced the words with pride, for they made you something worthier than the animals that groveled in the earth. No thought to what they were, only to the fact that they were not. You, who could no longer understand, sneered at their obsequious fear, their abject horror of your shadow. Learning to hunt came easily to you, as death for them did not.
*****
Did you know yourself then, when you hid your motives beneath a cloud of meaning? No, you struggle still so uselessly to find what is in your own heart. You can no longer understand your own mind with the ease of the beetle or the fox. Some of your kind now speak of this lost knowledge, put it into the written word. “The Law of Club and Fang” they call it, for it is beautiful in the way of blood and pain. The hateful things of living are necessary evils, endured and suffered through, until the injured rise to smite down the well. For all this, there is no need within animals to search frantically for heart or mind; all has ever been clear to them. Their need is their desire. They are avaricious, cruel, and power-hungry. They hunger, thirst, love, and hate. Never is there a veil between their mind and their purpose. Always within their chests, no matter how small, there is the steady beat of the earth.
You do not now how to find meaning in this world that has become a stranger to you. There are those amongst us that can see what has left our hearts, and only they can begin to understand the sharp arrow, the clutching shock of loss. For there is something within all of us that can sense the ghost of it, can almost feel the swaying of a branch in wind or the death of a snake as part of ourselves. This sense comes and is gone though, and we lost with it to the light.
I know why you chose the apple. When he looked at you, there was something in his eye that was truth and the illumination of mystery. If he wanted, he could make all that was unknown known and make a riddle of the recognized. In this there was some undiscovered joy and so you traded one form of ignorance for another. Now, you are alone. Of all of Noah’s creatures, not a one can sympathize with you. They are busy in their own lives with the need to exist and continue. You gave up bodily needs for a mind like hunger and an imagination that consumed. The natural was lost to you as you renounced it for reason, the ability to create knowledge. It left you starving some nights – your belly empty, your mind without thought. Sometimes though, you are filled to the brim with hope and sudden understanding. You can see now where you were blind and there is contempt within you for past simplicity. Lost to you however is the elegance in the plain and uncomplicated ways of the common beast.
*****
The silken slip of coiling scales across a cement floor does not make a great deal of sound. If you were truly listening for it, a small whoosh might have met your ear, the same sound that fine sand makes as it trickles from one side of an hourglass to the other. Only, though, if you had truly been listening. Otherwise you might have heard the wind as it ran its fingertips through the hilltop grass, so much more beautiful than a watered lawn in all of its luminescent splendor. The chittering of birds in the trees could also have drawn your attention or even the glint of a smiling, afternoon sun through the thick, furred leaves. Whatever it was that you noticed, it was certainly not the rattlesnake that had come to sit complacently at your foot, as only such dangerous creatures can. No, such a thing would have seemed beneath notice to your flighty, thoughtless mind. He waits there though, until some force draws you down again to the deep, cold earth. Until you are no longer a bird that can fly away, but are forced to sink into the ground with your own heaviness. Through it all, the snake is patient, guile glinting charmingly from cunning eyes. He knew always that you would return, that you could not bear not knowing, that you would eat of his damning fruit before the end; such things are unavoidable.
*****
In the Garden he tricked you long ago, told you that it wouldn’t hurt, that you wouldn’t fall. Those diamond eyes looked into yours and said that He would understand – all things must live and survive. Your resistance was strong; an argument set against his sweet words, but there was never hope. Foolish thing that you are, you trusted him blindly, as one feeling through the wet dark. So you took it from his outstretched, proffering grip because it was beautiful and you wanted it. There was a need within you to consume, to somehow be one with that globe that fit so effortlessly into your cupped hands. And it was red, like blood. Teeth sank into the moist, crunchy flesh and the snake watched, intent as you changed. You grew slower, like hot candle wax that hardens gradually but surely. It left a stain on you, that tense, frozen movement. When again your body was your own, it was half of what it had once been, but even that memory was lost to you. Your actions did not have the grace and purpose that they did when every flexing of muscle was a fight for life – the knowledge in that morsel of forbidden fruit had melted it away. The separation had come at last, a divide between you and the world of things that are both one and beautiful. That glorious understanding of the heartbeat within the earth, the common life that we all share, was gone and you could only watch dumbly as time and grace flew all around, unaffected. So much time has passed since then, when you left the Garden, and there is nothing to be done but count each year as it turns. Time disappears quickly enough in a blur of lives so short that their great joys and tragedies are lost before they are begun. Each second darts away to bring you here to this place under the eaves, to this house of stone and wood, to this snake that challenges you again.
Under the weighted emptiness of that haunting gaze, there is nothing for you but to look within yourself past all the pretension, the half-formed morals that you hold yourself to, but cannot follow. Deeper and deeper you search for that thing that makes the animals fight, kill, eat, live, but you still cannot find the significance. You can no longer rationalize eating for the sake of hunger or living because it is so wonderful to breath. There must be something else, something larger, more important than even you are within your small egocentric world. When there is nothing left for you to analyze, you turn to the only thing you have left, the thing that you traded the world for: reason. Thoughts come whispering through your mind, a suggestion from some unknown source. You are not alone. Here at last is some sense in a world that has become senseless; it is unimportant that it was of your own invention. You cannot make, but can still have been made by one as lonely as you. He created you in His image that you might preside over this land that on its own is so vacant. He made you because you would understand your purpose: to make and to break, to crush and to hold. He gave you reason because it is His will. So the animals learned to run from you above all other predators, you who not so long ago were as sister to them.
Still, this One who came to you in the dark mystified. You and yours bent your minds on this new question, a choice not yet made. You saw the stars in all of their forbidding distance and knew them as they were. Plato turned to Him and asked, “Is this alright?” but his eyes were turned inwards to that distant heavenly throne and no answer came. Galileo never felt this weakness, steady in his goal, yet somehow He demanded his attention and cast him from the world. It had never been quite right, not the banner under which He could allow his folk to parade, and so He subsided into smoldering impatience. Descartes came soon enough though and His strength was kindled. Cogito ergo sum. “I think, therefore I am.” You pronounced the words with pride, for they made you something worthier than the animals that groveled in the earth. No thought to what they were, only to the fact that they were not. You, who could no longer understand, sneered at their obsequious fear, their abject horror of your shadow. Learning to hunt came easily to you, as death for them did not.
*****
Did you know yourself then, when you hid your motives beneath a cloud of meaning? No, you struggle still so uselessly to find what is in your own heart. You can no longer understand your own mind with the ease of the beetle or the fox. Some of your kind now speak of this lost knowledge, put it into the written word. “The Law of Club and Fang” they call it, for it is beautiful in the way of blood and pain. The hateful things of living are necessary evils, endured and suffered through, until the injured rise to smite down the well. For all this, there is no need within animals to search frantically for heart or mind; all has ever been clear to them. Their need is their desire. They are avaricious, cruel, and power-hungry. They hunger, thirst, love, and hate. Never is there a veil between their mind and their purpose. Always within their chests, no matter how small, there is the steady beat of the earth.
You do not now how to find meaning in this world that has become a stranger to you. There are those amongst us that can see what has left our hearts, and only they can begin to understand the sharp arrow, the clutching shock of loss. For there is something within all of us that can sense the ghost of it, can almost feel the swaying of a branch in wind or the death of a snake as part of ourselves. This sense comes and is gone though, and we lost with it to the light.
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