A remarkable few days
Monday, 14th September 2009Posted under: life ,
July
The unofficial reason for this journey is not at all about creating my artistic work, it is in fact an insidious opportunity for me to embark on an insipid navel gazing opportunity of monumental proportions. Whoever said art is a reflection of the soul was a clever wanker and cleverly provided this wanker the opportunity to cleverly justify the worst of his narcissistic indulgences........ thinking. Utterly indulgent because as we all know, spending long periods of time thinking stops us from being productive and earning our way in the world, unless we get payed to think, and then, like all employment, it’s just reduced to an intellectual form of prostitution. I’m sure I am already irritating you, so read on, show some masochistic fortitude.
It was a remarkable few days, an engineer who had found god, a man who died several times over, a woman who everyday witnesses the excruciating ordeals of the diseased and the horribly broken, the finding and losing of god, revelations....
So I have gone for an afternoon stroll beyond the other campground seeking a small orchard that had been planted there in the early 1900’s while the area was still a town, on my way I innocently ask a camper reading in a picnic chair if he gets a lot of wind where he is camped, the exchange is amiable, and what should have been only a short conversation expands and begins to take turns into curious and interesting directions, he’s an engineer, the coal seams in the la Trobe valley are 300 meters thick with absolutely no interspersed layers of sediment , another separate brown coal deposit, being a lower grade of coal still retains the forms of some of the trees and vegetation within. It is astounding, it’s a huge load of bloody coal waiting to be dug up, burnt and asphyxiate the planet..... but what is even more interesting is that the forms of the trees in the brown coal are all jumbled up as if they have all been just picked up and tossed into the mix, like diced broccoli in stir fry. You can walk along the open cut seams and see the chaos right in front of you, my curiosity is really peaked, fascinating, obviously they couldn’t have been ancient swamps as generally understood because there are no layers of sediment as you get with other sedimentary phenomenon in geology, and because of the jumble of trees in the brown coal, it must have all been deposited in one single cataclysmic event........ like a great flood perhaps.....and then came the deluge..... the rejection of evolution, species were designed as they are and don’t evolve, nothing has been proven to actually evolve into a distinctly different species, there is only variation within species, tinkering with DNA which is so infinitely complex ultimately results only in cancer, it can only be intelligent design. Carbon dioxide does not absorb heat so it can’t cause global warming, which the scientists have got all wrong, Jews are constantly persecuted because they are the chosen people, we are facing Armageddon.......and more... it was a barrage, and most people would have bailed early with some lame excuse like a sudden, violent puncturing pain in the bowels and raced off in the vague direction of the pit toilets mumbling purposefully audible curses about the water in the creek. But this character was fascinating, I wanted to know what it was that gave someone like him the motivation to utterly reject the painstaking investigation and hyper analysis that our modern, rational and scientific perspectives have engaged to try and understand the world.
So I let him take me to his world with the mutiny by Satan, the war in heaven, the fallen angles, the coming of the apocalypse, the resurrection of Jesus, the end of the world, Armageddon, and your admission into the presence of God thru the acceptance of Jesus Christ as your saviour. I allowed my disbelief to fade like shadow in twilight and imagined the profundity of all this were it actually true, and it is a colossal rock that shifts within you, the bedrock of your reality has to dissolve. The dark slimy places of my psyche were overwhelmed by the prospect of spending the terror of eternity rejected by God, the creator of all the beauty and majesty of life and the world it inhabits. God who is so full of love , God, who will forgive all your sins as long as you accept Jesus died for you on the cross. In this reality a simple lack of faith has an utterly unacceptable cost....... after all, eternity is endless, infinite, there is no full stop, ever........ So to be amongst the saved, included, chosen to remain beside God..... it becomes a relief of shattering proportions. Consider the emotions born from the reprieve of your condemned soul. I tasted it. And it is as addictive as heroin.
I didn’t confess my short spiritual experiment to my unwitting yet enthusiastic guide, and managed to extricate myself and continue my meandering in privacy with my new found saviour tagging along....... but there were some nagging inconsistencies. A life time of influence by a modern civilisation, shaped by the forces of rational observation and investigation, trickled back into my consciousness like cool water in a forest stream .
My engineer had told the story about how the tower of Babel was destroyed by God because man, in his arrogance, was trying to build a stairway to heaven and raise himself to the same level as Him. It was a calamitous act of destruction to remind us of our humble mortal stature in His world, a lesson which our scientists and academics have assiduously ignored, which will incur the wrath of the Lord and lead all unbelievers into an eternity of damnation. Yet today our supposedly arrogant investigations into the origin of man do no better job at placing us at the most insignificant of levels. Star dust glued together by replicating slime. We are nothing more than ravenous worms that have evolved crunchy bits in order to try and stand up......
My engineer had said that if I accept Jesus as my saviour before I die all my sins will be forgiven. Yet from a magnanimous offer of salvation, why did this seem to become like an ancient marketing ploy. To be accepted into heaven after a life time of misdeeds merely on the confession of my sins and the acceptance of Jesus seemed to contradict the purpose of having all these biblical rules and commandments in the first place. I want to make the world a better place through the preservation of life in all its variety and abundance, I can’t imagine a more noble and spiritual path to tread, yet it seemed as if my little engineer was convinced that my deeds on this earth had no bearing on my admission to the afterlife as long as I confessed my sins and accepted Jesus.
So our God given dominion over the plants and the animals has become manifest in the endless destruction of natural ecosystems, the emptying of the seas of its fish, the hundreds of millions of animals that every year horribly suffer their way onto our dinner plates, the vast expanses of forest laid waste to feed our wants, skies filled with poison and oceans turned to acid, as if we are the progenitors of Armageddon ourselves. And yet all the actions that drag us down into this madness will be forgiven if you confess your sins and accept Jesus before you die. There seems to be an abdication of responsibility here, like some cosmic escape clause that I just couldn’t reconcile. I resolved to read the bible, even if it was only to verify the evangelical claims of this fellow.
So that night I knelt on the ground like so many Muslims do and offered prayer to the lord to help me understand the interesting conflicts that my experiment had stirred up. And with that, the fantastic world inhabited by the armies of God slowly faded back into fantasy land. The next day was a stunningly beautiful, utterly appropriate day for having a reply in my prayer inbox.
Enter Pete and Zoey, what a cracker of a couple. We spent several evenings around the fire exchanging stories. Both Pete and Zoey told their tales with a down to earth humour and joy that lifted the spirits and warmed the chilly evening air with mirth and laughter. These were people who had both lived a tough life, rich in experience, raw in its beauty, a life worth telling.
They had found each other later in life. Zoey, a medical assistant, fed the steak knives to the surgeons as they made a meal of peoples ailments. With long scraggly black hair accenting her punctuations she would tell the stories of her life with a thick Greek accent that flew from a pair of lips never devoid of a cigarette. People dying in her arms, the endless flow of crumpled and diseased bodies, loves lost and found, pain and hardship, escape and abandonment.... and Pete.... in the dark he looked like an emaciated drunk, his jeans were too big and saggy, his hair was a wild spray of thin orange that vibrantly burst forth from his completely reconstructed face..... Pete had a tragic car accident when he was young, he died several times on his way to the hospital and despite his stories of all manner of mischief and vice, Pete was a clever bloke who’s memory was gallantly fending off the ravages of a lifetime of serious living.
He told of his near death experience, floating above his body watching the medical staff tinker with the slithering remains of his carcass..... meeting his deceased grandmother, following the tunnel towards the light and being enveloped by an unfathomable love which told him it wasn’t his time yet, and sent the bastard back.
It was an experience that drove Pete to reading the Bible, the Koran, the Talmud, investigate Taoism and Buddhism. And still he didn’t find the god he had already met..... he certainly believed in something, but it wasn’t the god he found lurking in the texts of the ancients.
So here was a man who had come back from the dead, had visited the realm of the impenetrable and returned. A man who, by all accounts, had met God at the very gates themselves, he didn’t return clutching a bible to his chest.
It seemed as if my spiritual side trip had come full circle and I was back where I started. There is something inspiring, beautiful and profound about the universe and everything in it which will never have its secrets divulged through science alone. And any man brandishing whichever texts claiming he knows the mind of God is demonstrating utter hypocrisy and the greatest arrogance. The identity of god has through the ages been endlessly reframed by our struggling little egos to such an extent we have forgotten how to believe in the unbelievable. And yes, the world is unbelievable. When you sit far away from the distraction of humanity, on a hill side and just watch the sun slide lazily under the horizon without having your thoughts raped and pillaged by the superficial trivialities that box our daily lives, if you cannot feel how sacred this life is at moments like this than perhaps you have lost god..... whatever that may mean.
It would indeed be the greatest irony if all the holy texts were the works of Satan. Feeding the weakness of man, convincing us that with a few scribbles on a page we know the mind of God, fuelling our stupidity and arrogance like it were an open and infected wound, inciting us to disagreement and hatred, violence and death.
And upon that happy note, let me introduce you to the trite little ditty I composed in the first phase of my artistic journey. I had purchased a lot of audio equipment to supplement my compositional aspirations and I still had to learn to use it, investigate it’s capabilities and potential. So below you will find a short music video of my 5 weeks in the “wilderness” conveniently distracting you from the shamefully happy clappyiness that oozed from my technical explorations. Except for the drum track, everything you hear was made using my electric cello, routed thru an analogue to midi converter and then into my laptop. It would indeed sound muuuuch more funky if it were played by a group of real people playing real instruments..... but hey, I was playing with myself, what can you expect...
Stay tuned, there is more to come..... soon.