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mirage

A Fist Full of Water, Part 3

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I can stand on the curb and watch thousands endlessly marching toward another blind corner with their fingers in their ears. Disappointment is around that corner, too. I would know. We change directions and try another alley, but the passions remain unsatisfied. Like drug addicts, we must text, we must multitask, we must have sex, we must have the weekend. And the water slips through our balled-up fist: these are the chains of our mortality. We have sold our souls for ethereal promises and vast mirages. Like our fathers, we are carried away for nothing (Isaiah 52:5).

Nothing.

Diddly-squat.

Augustine’s impassioned recollection of his own pilgrimage fits our own: “I had been deafened by the clanking of the chains of my morality, the punishment for my soul’s pride, and I wandered farther from you, and you permitted me to do so. I was tossed to and fro, and wasted, and poured out, and I boiled over in my fornications—and yet you held your peace, O my tardy Joy! You still held your peace, and I wandered still farther from you into more and yet, more barren fields of sorrow, in proud dejection and restless lassitude” (Confessions). He wandered deep into the wilderness of dissatisfied pleasure. He was carried away for nothing and searched recklessly for an opiate. Augustine’s opiates looked a lot like ours.

What is our favorite opiate? Distraction: it is our greatest aid in avoiding the reality of exile. Distract us. Please distract us. Distraction takes a million forms and nobody cares what the form, as long as it works. Unfortunately, the distractions are only one more mirage on the horizon. After all, “man was born for trouble, as the sparks fly upward” (Job 5:7). And again, “How frail is humanity! How short is life and how full of turmoil” (Job 14:1).

Everyone wants to be on the other side of emptiness. Each of us chases varying promises of satisfaction, but this inherited wasteland is a satisfaction vacuum. All the happiness we try to hold slips through our fingers. We were made for happiness, made for the garden of Eden, but the garden is gone and happiness evades us. Still, we keep trying.

Sex.

Sports.

Weekends.

Exercise.

Drugs.

Facebook.

Activity.

Opiates, every single one. Very few of us listen to our emptiness. The grumbling of our starved souls is shouted down by our harried lives. Few of us are asking what the emptiness means. Why the fracture? Why the restlessness? Why the letdown? Until we stop to listen to this misery, we’ll keep trying to satisfy the need with all the wrong things. Our opiates cannot fix the fracture. They will only end in dissatisfaction and we will find ourselves dragged through the wasteland, lashed to a horse that will not tire, nor will it die. Indeed, God has made us for himself and “restless is our heart until it comes to rest in him” (Augustine, Confessions).

My dad was always a little restless and the proverbial apple hasn’t fallen far from the tree. My father’s vocation is medical doctor. His calling, however, swings between writing poetry and exploring whatever is in front of him. This particular day worth remembering was one of exploration; specifically, Mt. Elgon. The mountain was north, northwest of my childhood home in Lugulu, Kenya and for whatever reason, it always seemed to me a gloomy, brooding mountain. It was, of course, tropical but high enough to catch snow with the tip of its head. We never reached those heights, but the jungle vines surrounded us and they were thick enough to hold a full grown man. Dad looped a vine and tied it off like a hanging lasso. He sat down in it and I sat on his lap. We swung like Tarzan and his son. Maybe next time we will take our shirts off and swing one-handed over the jungle floor.

For now, we explored the mountain: sometimes on vines, sometimes on the dirt paths. My little strides could barely keep up with my dad and a medical intern. Trackers, hunting the prints of wild jungle life, we found traces of elephants: elephant dung, enormous piles of poop big enough to cover me up to my knees. Three guys, an entire mountain, all the time in the world, and an opportunity for scientific exploration. We felt like three kings, so we squatted and turned the pile with sticks. Dad and the intern were looking for something. They found it soon enough: a dung beetle, dark like obsidian rock with a trace of blue buried in its blackness.

The beetle moved quickly, trying to recover and rebuild its warm dome. It tried to ignore us, but our sticks were hard to ignore. We kept turning over the lumps and discovered more beetles. There was apparently enough room to share the warmth. Such busy activity kept us occupied for awhile, but we decided to hunt bigger and better game.

My dad began walking again and I had to run just to keep up—we ventured further up and further in. The trees were taller and thicker now. We could hear the Colobus monkeys squealing among the towering cedars and eucalyptus trees, and sometimes I caught glimpses of their white tails and white beards, bushy like balls of cotton. There was no time to sit and watch them swing. Again, we followed a dirt road. Like the road before, this one was littered with elephant dung. The sight was familiar and so we paused, waiting for my little lungs to fill.

The earth suddenly began to tremble beneath my feet and in the distance to my right I heard tall trees creak and groan as they crashed to the jungle floor. Many of them were falling and the earth grumbled loudly. My eyes grew wide, as did the intern’s. Dad clutched his camera with a wild look of adventure peeking behind his shaggy beard.

“Elephant stampede,” he whispered.

Logic, even a child’s logic, said run away.

“Stay with Ben,” Dad told the intern. “I’ll be right back.” Then, without another word, he dashed off into the tall timber. I yelled for him to stop, but my cries of terror did not deter the bearded white hunter with camera. He disappeared from sight, and within a moment I was sure that the last thing I would remember of my dad would be his back and striding crane legs. Surely, he would be trampled to death. I wept and worried, but the worry soon turned to indignation and bitterness: it would be his fault if he got crushed.

I moped and whined and prayed for a few minutes and then I saw him appear through the trees. He was sweating, but sagged at the shoulders. “They were too fast for me. I never saw them,” he said and I was elated to hear the news. Dad described a wide swath cut through the jungle by the stampeding elephants, and I was overwhelmingly glad that he was not a permanent part of that landscape.

This memory ties no knots in my stomach as I record it, even though the event itself caused plenty of them. What is interesting is that over time, my mind has objectively distanced itself from that little terrified boy and put me smack in the middle of Dad’s shoes. I understand the urge, I think, to witness something so frolickingly fearsome. I was cowed at the time, but there is something inside me now that admires and understands my father’s tenacity. He too would be satisfied, but he too met dissatisfaction. We will discuss where such imaginative satisfaction is found in the next edition of “A Fist Full of Water.” In the meantime, if you’d like to be a part of the conversation let me know what other ways we try to satisfy ourselves. 

A Fist Full of Water, Part 2

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In part 1 of “A Fist Full of Water” I painted a rather bleak picture of life as we chase these desires for satisfaction. Is the picture always so bleak? No. Many days are pleasant enough. A ceasefire between the warring parties of our desires and the fragmentation is temporarily instituted. A peace holds the inevitable battles at bay. Sometimes, to our great relief, the sun shines so brightly that we wonder whether a permanent peace treaty has been signed. Sometimes we actually get along with ourselves. Sometimes we even get along with others. There are days when failure’s moldy finger doesn’t come close to touching us and we feel like the stars are aligned. “Look at me now,” we call out, capering over the rocky ground of this world like a mountain goat. All angular obstructions are ours to overcome. Ours. On really good weeks we’ll caper with ease for several days in a row, but sooner or later the stones rise up and bite the heel. One phone call, one mistake, one dead battery, one migraine headache, one bank statement, one blood test result, and we’re pedestrian again, dragging through the wastes and wondering why the shaded spring-water and happy palm trees vanished. No peace treaty. No ceasefire.

“Mirage,” whisper the blinking stars. “Illusion,” says the pale moon.

Illusion: a false perception of reality.

My dad used to practice sleight of hand for hours. He had this tiny, hand-carved stick with two red dots on one side and nothing on the other side. He could make each dot disappear and reappear with a simple flick of the hand. Maybe I was easily impressed, but I was baffled and overawed by what I perceived to be magic in my dad’s fingers. “My dad’s a magician!” I told my friends. Illusion. A more experienced eye would catch the trick. Another illusionist, even a B-level conjurer, would spot the trick a mile away. My eyes were colored by fancy and I confused magic with sleight-of-hand.

Like my childhood self, I still fall for the world’s sleight-of-hand. I willingly believe the mirage on the landscape of this life because I so desperately want it to be real. I trust and, therefore, envy the happy faces on the advertisements. I lean in when they show me a shiny new tinsel gadget that will surely make my life happier: I can order it online and not move from my spot on the couch. All is bright and beautiful and clean and easy and within reach. The vinegar of disappointment is not yet in my eyes. The milk has not yet soured in my mouth. I am Eve, dissatisfied and desperately wanting to believe the airy promise, the illusion, of happiness found the easy way. I am Adam, flippantly following the fad of popular opinion. I ignore the wormhole and bite the apple.

Like our Israelite fathers before us, we are desert wanderers who desperately clutch after happiness. All effort is made to barricade unhappiness from our lives. We claw and grasp and refuse to admit any negative, unhappy thoughts onto our mind’s property. With all due diligence, we set dogs at the gate and sentries at every wall. We lay the barbed wire and set up the video surveillance. How tragic, then, to re-enter the house and find unhappiness sitting quite comfortably on our favorite chair, wearing our robe and soiling our slippers.

So many of us are too often like Thomas Wolfe’s protagonist, Eugene: “Caged in that little round of skull, imprisoned in that beating and most secret heart, his life must always walk down lonely passages. Lost. He understood that men were forever strangers to one another… Caught in that insoluble prison of being, we escape it never, no matter what arms may clasp us, what mouth may kiss us, what heart may warm us” (Look Homeward, Angel, p. 31).

And then we hear the preacher’s words in Scripture, saying, “the crooked cannot be made straight, and what is lacking cannot be numbered (Ecc. 1:15). And although I did not keep any pleasure from my eyes and I did not withhold from my heart any pleasure, all was still vanity and grasping for the wind” (Ecc. 2:10-11). We grasp after happiness and it slips through the hand. We live and breathe and make love in a spiritual wasteland where fulfillment is fleeting, where the heart, like a desert traveler’s tongue, is scarred, swollen, and heavy. We taste pleasure like drops of water on the tongue because God’s creation is good, just as he said, but lasting happiness remains evasive. Let the Pollyannas of the world preach their gospel of positive thinking; regardless, the hunt for happiness remains persistent and often desperate. We keep running full throttle into dead ends. The soul, “like some heat-maddened summer fly, keeps buzzing at the sill” (Theodore Reothke, In a Dark Time).

Lost. Exiled. We bumble from one mirage to another “and of all the years of waste and loss…these are blind steps and gropings of our exile, the painting of our hunger as, remembering speechlessly, we seek the great forgotten language, the lost lane-end into heaven, a stone, a leaf, a door. Where? When?” (Look Homeward, Angel, p. 4).

Why?

Why the loss?

Why the exile?

Why the restlessness?

Because we traded in a garden for a wasteland. Well, our father and mother did. Genesis states it quite plainly: we inherited a thousand acres of sand and ninety years of futility. Eve bit first and Adam followed, as he is wont to do, leaving generations stranded somewhere between a garden and a city, wandering bewildered through a desert of unsatisfied desire. Nobody wants to say it out loud, of course, lest they spoil the illusion. Nobody wants to point out that people are parading through the wasteland, filling their mouths with sand and licking the dust. Somebody should run to the front of the line, throw up her hands and yell, “Stop!”

“This is the dead land

This is cactus land

Here the stone images

Are raised, here they receive

The supplication of a dead man’s hand

Under the twinkle of a fading star1.”

Stop!

1T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Men, part III