That’s just a trick of the mind…
Last night, some kind of incredible feat of brotherhood. After all day tension with Jonah, the worst of which a run we took together, but separated by long stretch of dusty trail before the swimming hole, it came time to read Lord of the Rings, and he wanted to sleep. I took some leap of faith to tell Jonah my tidy inner workings, so sick of waiting for him all the time, and he never makes concessions to me, taking himself out of our shared situation with his constant projects. He’s mad at me for my poking at his insecurities, which he said I “delight in”; I’m mad at him again over basic exclusion and abandonment when all we have is each other. Suddenly the truth is emerging, that we’re not mad at each other at all, we love each other, and our conversation that started as our most heated confrontation all trip was brought outside, morphed under the stars into our most open and searching to date.
Universe, personal gods, capitalism as anarchy, imagination as religion, Kabbalah, Ramayana, loving America for its foundations in enlightenment and liberal arts, and loving Nepal for all the obvious reasons. We spoke of personal god-our relationship with a force higher than us but based on our own ability to make it up, so of course we envision god as man. Or that history is pulling evolution/humanity towards a more realized future form that represents our present God, creation, as we grow into more and more conscious forms that understand the ability to create, and that’s why God is experienced in that place of art and imagination where you are suddenly out of the realm of the regular world, or even the archetypal world, and there is infinite freedom in all directions in your choice of which shapes and elements to move around.
And the funny thing is, to imagine your own personal God, to invent that myth of someone who knows you better than you know yourself, to imagine, you must do the act of imagining. The act of art is what opens us up to our greatest art- a godly experience, where we don’t have it all figured out, but our creation does, and we can come to know both sides if “it”, the humility of being nothing in the face of God, without the arrogance of feeling that you yourself know enough about yourself and the world to the point where you shut down and no longer let real wisdom reach you in the ways that it does: without specifically searching for it, but interacting with your worldly loves until it either trickles down into your open and sensitive conglomerations of nerves from above, or hatches inside of you, and that’s why you feel in a certain way like you’ve known it all along.
But is it just me that doesn’t have to search for it? Have I been blessed with the enlightenment of our founding fathers, who kept slaves because their position to be able to contribute to the overmind inherently excluded manual labor? I have been given education, taught how to write, given teachers like Jonah who teach me to teach myself, but Jonah never had that. And he suggests, “Maybe that’s why you are Gabriel the Angel, and I am Jonah, always searching and second guessing myself.” And it’s beautiful to think of life this way, in terms of a story that history has proven to interact with certain archetypal layers of our psyche. But the Bible is just a story, a collection of stories from a collection of cultures, thousands of years old, and to believe in the power of the names to that extent is superstition. It’s easier to say “Well that’s just who I am” and stop growing right there, and it would seem like freedom to really know something until I’m old and watching tennis in my recliner and my grandchildren are debating whether grandpa is free or enslaved. I’d rather leave having it all figured out to my personal God. We are new Gabriels and Jonahs of the 21st century, infinitely free in our love for each other, creative expression, American privilege, and belief in God.
Sunrise from our rooftop abode over the basketball court.
HILARIOUS ZONE
Jonah is deep in slumber again after a generous lunch of daalbhaat. It’s very hard to stay awake after a second plate, no matter how much sugar is mixed into post-everything chia, black masala tea with no milk. Jonah falls asleep after nearly every meal, unable to both remain conscious and digest food in the heat of the Terai summer, a fact which led to our first rule: no listening to Lord of the Rings after dinner. But now, the season has quickly changed, and we only get so many hours of daylight to adventure in the jungle sun on this rare day off. What’s the best way to wake up a presumably irritable Jonah from a presumably wonderful dream? Flipping the pages of a book, louder and louder, until he concedes to the waking world. We roll sumpin up, pack a bag full of necessities: cookies, water for drink, other cookies, apple, and peanuts.
No bikes today, so we’ll take the long walk to the short bridge, at which point we’ll have reached the swimmin’ hole, of questionable existence locality. The perimeter is littered with dung and candy wrappers, and now peanut shells, and there is a kind of circusy smell. Noid. The water is cool and it feels great! I think sentences like that can be cut from writing usually, he said. We swim up to the aforementioned bridge, locking eyes with a youth harrowing sugarcane peel into the water from above. Well we know at least one person is littering here. Jonah pitches advertisement for aforementioned treat au natural: “3/4 Dentists agree: Sugarcane is Candy!” which seems incredibly clever. “Our jokes are getting a lot better,” he self-congratulated. Gabe almost drowns getting to the shallow bank where he can stand and catch his breath. There he declares a second rule: “No slogans while we swim.”