I was so busy quoting long-dead writers in the last post that I never did get around to elucidating what exactly it is that inspires me about immature age-old humor.

It’s the cyclical thing. C. and I talked about it one morning last week when I took advantage of my employer’s flextime arrangement. I decided to go in to work around ten a.m., which meant that we were free to eat a leisurely breakfast outside on our uncomfortable hand-me-down patio furniture.

(This is the same furniture, incidentally, upon which rest my laptop and I as yet one more gloriously perfect spring day in a string of perfect days falls into night. It’s already wasp season, but the mosquitos have yet to find us, and the birds are extraordinarily and noisily randy overhead. I worked from home today (another option available to me as part of my employer’s flextime arrangement), since the last morning commuter bus arrived and departed from my stop five minutes ahead of schedule—as it does with frustrating regularity—at which point I had two choices: (a) stand at the bus stop for half an hour, sit on the bus for fifteen minutes, and then walk fifteen minutes to work, wasting an hour of my morning, or (b) walk home, change into shorts and a ratty old tee-shirt, and commence with a miscellaneous day of the kind of short-and-sandals professionalism I grew to love in Santa Fe. I chose the latter. Even after taking the time to change and open all the windows in the house, I was still on the clock within 15 minutes, with a hot cup of coffee and some pumpkin bread to fuel the daily can of whoop-ass I open on the data.)

So, as I was saying, C. and I were talking about the cyclical thing, which means realizing that almost every moment of your life has been played out before a hundred billion times, and will be played out again a hundred billion times, by generations of people you’ll never meet, in all the places you’ll never go. The details change over time, and now many of the interactions happen by email or Blackberry, but the universals never change.

The kid will continue to tell his parents what they want to hear and then proceed to do whatever he wants anyway. He will continue to be too busy playing to come home to dinner on time. The parents will yell from the front porch. He will pretend he didn’t hear.

She will continue to wish that he would be a little less brutish, a little more thoughtful. She will talk with her friends at length about how to broach the subject. He will continue to make resolutions to be better, to remember to bring flowers occasionally, to drink less at cocktail parties, but he will always forget. She will keep quietly hoping he’ll change, but he won’t.

He will try to come to terms with his mother’s death, or his grandmother’s. He will avoid people at first, then realize that he needs their support, but he will not know how to ask for help. He will not understand the strange series of emotions that drive him to all kinds of extremes, from anger to hopelessness, from resentment to forgiveness to forgetfulness. He will yell at people who are trying to help him.

But it’s not just the Raymond Carver moments that repeat. Every moment, no matter how mundane or epiphanic, is a rerun. From this vantage point, as the hour grows later here in the back yard, through the illuminated windows of all the houses around I imagine parents are beginning to remind their children to get ready for bed. Children are complaining that it’s not bedtime yet. Lights in some rooms go out. TVs cast eerie blue flickering shadows on the walls. Wives read newspapers. Husbands clip toenails.

This is not to say that life is mundane, or that we’re all boring. Sure, there’s some melancholy in knowing that nothing I do is original, that every brilliant thought ever to percolate through my skull has been thunk thousands of times before, that every ecstatic moment of love, adventure, and victory I’ve ever had has been had before by more nameless faceless young men than can be counted. But there’s something immensely comforting in it too. Nothing so terrible will happen that hasn’t been endured before. No immeasurable all-consuming grief will topple me that hasn’t been outjoyed by ten thousand former young men who have been dust for centuries—and knowing that they did, even if the particular circumstances and storylines are lost, is a rallying call for everyone.

But it’s not the just Hallmark moments that repeat. That you’re here reading this now means that your parents met, at some point, when they were your age, if not older or younger, and were attracted to each other. They talked and discovered that the conversation was fulfilling. They became friends. They found each other’s arrangements of bone and muscle and skin mutually attractive and, after feeling various urges and surges of emotion, including but not limited to feelings of completeness and satisfaction, they waited some amount of time (or didn’t wait at all) to engage in official ceremonies with the state (or didn’t). Whatever the circumstances, you are the evidence that, one night (or day), they both took off their clothes and did it like monkeys at the zoo.

When you’re standing at the bus stop, or waiting in line at the grocery store, look for this: A beautiful young woman walks past. It’s spring now, so she’s wearing one of those summery dresses that floats on the wind. She’s having a good day, so she’s got an accidental shadow of a smile on her face without knowing it. As she turns around to go back for the carton of milk she forgot, the eyes of ten men in three register lines will in parallel drift upward, come to rest on some part of her body, drift up, drift down, and then back to whatever they were looking at before. This is not a predatory thing, the grotesque behavior of objectifiers of women. It’s the same reason your eyes are drawn and redrawn to the horizon when you’re in wide open spaces. It’s aesthetics. Or is it?

Imagine all the contours in the world, if you can, all the possible curves and intersections of forms. That we find the particular physical features of another human animal irresistably attractive and even sexually persuasive—the particular alignment of the features on the front of his head, the way the medial collateral ligament on the back of his knee tenses when he walks, or the way his pectoralis minor draws his scapula forward when he writes on the chalkboard—suggests that we are hard-wired to do so. Why should arrangements of muscle on bone incite such strong emotions in us? What can be “beautiful” about those lines that form at the outside corners of her eyes when she laughs?

And why should we spend so much time thinking about it? How many trees have died so that young men and women could try to put into words the various urges and surges instilled in them by some other creature? How many

XX
+
YY
FOREVER

have been inscribed in the sand, bark, and picnic tables of the world? That ‘+’, whether inspired by the physical, the spiritual, the moral, or the unknown and unnameable, has as much of the monkey as of the poet. That’s reassuring too.

I never stoop’d so low, as they
Which on an eye, cheek, lip, can prey;
   Seldom to them which soar no higher
   Than virtue, or the mind to admire.
For sense and understanding may
   Know what gives fuel to their fire;
My love, though silly, is more brave;
For may I miss, whene’er I crave,
If I know yet what I would have.

If that be simply perfectest,
Which can by no way be express’d
   But negatives, my love is so.
   To all, which all love, I say no.
If any who deciphers best,
   What we know not—ourselves—can know,
Let him teach me that nothing. This
As yet my ease and comfort is,
Though I speed not, I cannot miss.
                             —John Donne

Everyone is half-monkey and half-poet—you, me, and every last author, playwright, director, and singer. Bono celebrates God; John Donne celebrates what is unknowable about love; Chaucer wonders about virtue; we turn to these and others when we need wisdom, or inspiration, or a laugh. But there are times when it is most reassuring of all to know that the smartest of the smart, the most holy of the holy, the most moral of the moral, the people who feed on intellect, poetry, spirituality, and the other high beauties are also half-monkey. It makes my monkey-nature feel less ashamed of itself, less like an unwanted step-child. My spirit takes comfort when John Donne says

Wilt thou love God as he thee ? then digest,
My soul, this wholesome meditation,
How God the Spirit, by angels waited on
In heaven, doth make His temple in thy breast.
The Father having begot a Son most blest,
And still begetting—for he ne’er begun—
Hath deign’d to choose thee by adoption,
Co-heir to His glory, and Sabbath’ endless rest.
And as a robb’d man, which by search doth find
His stolen stuff sold, must lose or buy it again,
The Sun of glory came down, and was slain,
Us whom He had made, and Satan stole, to unbind.
’Twas much, that man was made like God before,
But, that God should be made like man, much more.

but my monkey-nature giggles with delight to know that the same man also says

. . . Licence my roving hands, and let them go
Before, behind, between, above, below.
O, my America, my newfound land,
My kingdom, safest when with one man mann’d,
My mine of precious stones, my empery;
How am I blest in thus discovering thee!
To enter in these bonds, is to be free;
Then, where my hand is set, my soul shall be.
   Full nakedness! All joys are due to thee;
As souls unbodied, bodies unclothed must be
To taste whole joys. Gems which you women use
Are like Atlanta’s ball cast in men’s views;
That, when a fool’s eye lighteth on a gem,
His earthly soul might court that, not them.
Like pictures, or like books’ gay coverings made
For laymen, are all women thus array’d.
Themselves are only mystic books, which we
—Whom their imputed grace will dignify—
Must see reveal’d. Then, since that I may know,
As liberally as to thy midwife show
Thyself; cast all, yea, this white linen hence;
There is no penance due to innocence:
To teach thee, I am naked first; why then,
What needst thou have more covering than a man?

Damn, dude. I like to think I have a way with words and thoughts, that it's only time and circumstance that have my best work in that regard collecting dust in a box with other stuff from twenty years ago, that pretty soon I'll get the rest down on paper (or whatever); but Thou Art God.

Peace

From this week's "Speaking of Faith" (an American Public Media radio show) newsletter by Krista Tippett — The Necessity of Desire for Liberation

This week we hold the Exodus story up to the light and turn it and turn it — like a jewel, the ancient rabbis would say. And Avivah Zornberg tells us what she sees: astonishing detail, hues of meaning, and a cargo of hidden stories. We follow Zornberg and find ourselves addressed, whoever we are. This story among all the narratives of the Hebrew Bible has proven itself a bearer across time of near-universal themes. Scholars locate it in history. But Exodus also qualifies lavishly for my favorite definition of "myth" — a word we’ve diminished, equated with things that are not "true." Myth, said the Greek statesman Solon, "is not about something that never happened. It is about something that happens over and over again." In a paraphrase I also love, Rabbi Sandy Sasso once said to me about the Exodus story, with its irresistible dramatic potential: "What happened once upon a time happens all the time."

See also http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/programs/exodus/index.shtml.