God, groceries and language

I have God and groceries in my pocket. Onions, butter, red bell peppers on one side and on the other, Peter Rollins, saying, "God can no more be contained in experience than in language."

God and groceries equally contained in language, jotted in a pocket notebook, referred back to on a shopping trip or in the throes of back porch contemplation. Of course, neither are actually contained in language. Rollins is right, language is just a finger pointing at the two. And groceries are a lot easier to point to than God is.

Language being imperfect is no reason to abandon it. Maybe to reinvent it. Sonny Rollins (no relation to Peter) in the 1950s was thought of as one of the top saxophone players around. But he stopped playing in clubs and spent three years on the Williamsburg Bridge, reinventing his style. His language. Getting it right.

Martin Heidegger looked at the whole of western philosophy and decided that they'd all missed the damn boat in how they were thinking about "Being," so he went back and tried to start over, better.

I like S. Rollins' commitment to his art and Heidegger's stones to think he could see something that the sweeping history of philosophy was missing. After penning something as dense as "Being and Time," Heidegger throttled off the word count and runed out this:

The world's darkening never reaches
     to the light of Being.

We are too late for the gods and too
     early for Being. Being's poem,
     just begun, is man.

To head toward a star--this only.

To think is to confine yourself to a
     single thought that one day stands
     still like a star in the world's sky.

He peered into one of the early doorways to existentialism, which others would have to walk through later. He trusted groceries more than God, or at least in language's ability to get to the former.

Thought and language. Together they can guide you through the supermarket, contemplate Being, or leave you just shy of God. What is it that gets us beyond? If you asked either Rollins or Heidegger, I think they'd all disagree.

Only one of them can play the sax.

Insane in the Montaigne

Sartre got me sick. His damn nausea, contagious from typed ink on a book written more than 30 years before I was born. But it's not the ink, it's the words are contagious. No, not the words, the ideas behind them.

I wouldn't be concerned if I were you. Maybe you were vaccinated. Maybe they don't get to you. But the existentialists have always soared me and sunk me. It's not that they are right or wrong, it's that they speak to how I am wired. The questions I have, the ones I ask when driving to or from work, or when I wake up, or when I can't sleep. These questions you either ask, or you don't. Some ask them.

Jim Holt asks them. He has compiled and culled a book called "Why Does the World Exist?" I've been asking that question since I was knee-deep in marsh water building bridges and forts to play war. It's part of what tractor-beamed me to study philosophy. Holt digs in and asks folks that might know something about it. I'm just digging into his book, but if you want a taste, Kathryn Schulz wrestles with the idea and the book in one of the most thought-provoking book reviews I've read. Check the technique.

Philosophers, poets and storytellers are the dog-walkers who lead me around by a leash. I don't follow blindly, but I'm led. I'm not after answers, but possibilities.

Our seven year old can't stop singing Cypress Hill's "Insane in the Brain." (for the record, it's the edited for radio version on a mix CD, she really doesn't get the lyrics, just the sticky hook). I can't blame her, I've always dug Cypress Hill myself.

At the same time, I've been reading Michel de Montaigne's "Essays." Montaigne didn't mind searching himself for answers, examining what he thought, on the page, to see what he thought. In his words, "I put forward formless and unresolved notions... not to establish truth, but to seek it."

I think that's what I'm after, or maybe what I'm trying to do. A life's pursuit. Maybe. Or I might just be insane in the Montaigne...

"Existentialists in shorts," creating meaning on the run

"Running wasn't just exercise or a hobby, or even necessarily competition, for them. Basically they were existentialists is shorts. I wanted to be one, too." -Scott Jurek, "Eat & Run."

Sometimes you create meaning with each step of a run. Sometimes with none. Mostly it's a happy medium.

I start out noticing every step. The impact on landing, the effort to move my legs. The first part of a run is an in-body experience. Everyday mind.

Each step moves further into consciousness. The body starts to fade into the background. The mind wanders. Wanders with the music. Wanders, thoughts flitting like birds out of mind. The breath is still there, and the movement. The body doesn't hurt, yet. I don't notice the miles or effort.

Then it comes back, the body. The breath reconnects, the legs are pumping, the arms, everything is in sync, connected, but different from when I started.

On long runs I can drift between these states--in body, out. On those, exhilaration can meet delirium.

I am running right behind some deep revelation, something life changing, if I can only run a little faster, reach out and catch it, grab it, tackle it.

But it's rarely about that revelation. I'm not generally fast enough to catch it. It's then that I get that it's the first step where we create meaning in a run, and every step after, not just some elusive magical step.

It's the knowledge that two, four, 10, 20, 50 miles are underfoot, logged by will, effort, discipline. I've put some order on one small part of the day, in my own way. I've seen things that no one sitting inside got to see. I've lived. I've reminded my mind-body-soul that we are free and mobile, sometimes. When we ask.