The Story of B

Last night as I forced myself to go to bed because I knew I had class in the morning, I was disturbed by the clock at my bedside. I have a clock by my bed in order to wake me up in time for class. While it is a brand new clock, it works in the same way as older clocks: it makes a ticking sound constantly (this is what disturbed me last night. I can still hear it as a part of the background noise that I never pay attention to even now- along with the hum of the refrigerator and the soft grinding sound going on inside my laptop and a sound I can't identify that may be related to the air conditioning of the dorm) and its alarm functions mechanically- by a hammer banging in to two bells very rapidly (and obnoxiously).

There is a poem by Pedro Arrupe that I'd like to share-

Nothing is more practical than
finding God, that is, than
falling in love
in a quite absolute, final way.
What you are in love with,
what siezes your imagination,
will affect everything. It will decide
what will get you out of bed
in the morning,
what you do with your evenings,
how you spend your weekends,
what you read, who you know,
what breaks your heart,
and what amazes you with
joy and gratitude.
Fall in love, stay in love,
and it will decide everything.

What I love should be what gets me out of bed in the morning, but it hit me this morning that I do not love being forced to wake up at a certain time to go listen to someone talk at me about things I'm not even awake enough to care about. Of course this isn't the first time this has hit me; it was just rather poignant this morning. Waking up to the terror of an alarming sound is no way to start a day, but it is the only way to rip me out of my natural sleeping cycle. Perhaps it's not such a good thing to be ripped out of my natural sleeping cycle.

I just read The Story of B by Daniel Quinn. It is the sequel to Ishmael (there is also a third in the series, which I will read soon). In it, a priest is sent to spy on the possible antichrist, B. *Partial Spoiler Warning* B does turn out to be the antichrist- not only the antichrist, but the antibuddha, the antimuhammad, and the antithesis of any other person who attempted to lead people to salvation. People seek such salvation because of the suffering caused by our culture- poverty, hunger, isolation. Notice I did not say that this suffering is present because all of humanity has fallen, only our culture. Our culture, as I am using the word, spans most of the world and is composed of people who believe that the earth belongs to us (our culture) and that we may use it however we want. In effect, this most fundamentally plays out in our method of agriculture, in which everything that is our food is preserved and proliferated and everything that does not directly feed us, or that which threatens our food in any way, is destroyed as completely as possible. This way of living eventually leads to its own downfall because it is an unstable way to live, and evolutionarily speaking, unstable methods pass away and stable ones persist. It has taken a long time (relative to our perspective) for the signs of our culture breaking down to surface, but surface they certainly have. Humans did not always live this way, and they don't need to. Salvation from this world is not needed. What is needed is the abandonment of our culture. Humans didn't always have to be woken up by obnoxious and startling bells; humans used to be thrilled about their life in this world, here and now. And that is why B is the antichrist- B tells us we don't need salvation, and that is blasphemous. It is also true.

The priest in the story describes the possession of faith being in one degree, but the losing of faith being in fifty degrees. That is, there is one degree in which you have absolute faith, but there a gradual process of one's faith being chipped away over time. Eventually, though, it is possible to reach the fiftieth degree, at which point, all of your faith is gone. I'm not sure where I am at, but my guess is somewhere in the forties. The faith I am losing is the faith in the need for a salvation and a salvific God. This is a faith that sets us apart as being above and in possession of the rest of Nature and also serves as an escape from this world, directing us away from the present. We are a part of Nature- we are Nature- it is not possible for us to get away from Nature, and it is unnecessary to get closer to Nature. To paraphrase the book (all of this is a paraphrase of the book, by the way), we are just as "close" to Nature when we are in a movie theater as when we are in the middle of a forest. It cannot be escaped. To fight against Nature is to fight against ourselves, and to be in communion with Nature is nothing more than to be human. I don't mean this in any idealistic or hippie "back to the land" sort of communion. We are dependent on nature for our existence. It is our source of food. We could not be without food. And we will one day return the favor by becoming food ourselves. That's how things work. But as humans, we have the benefit of being able to see that that is how things work, and through that, we can experience the world as a spiritual place. This is the one religion every culture outside our own shares- animism. Sorry, that was a really quick summary, and I'm sure I did not express what I was trying to say very well. But, hey, maybe that just means you have to read the book yourself (it is an enjoyable read).

The way of life I see forming before me as ideal is a sort of tribalism in which the tribe is largely self-sufficient. Of course, there is a fundamental difficulty in jumpstarting a tribe in our culture- locating potential tribe members. I have the rather lofty goal of removing myself completely from use of money, but I do know that this will be a gradual process of dropping out, and the important thing is to minimize reliance on the system. A former classmate of mine, Mario, questioned my goals a while ago, saying that I'd just become part of the problem (that I'd burden the rest of society with my choice of monetary poverty), but it is certainly not my intent to burden society. I wish to have zero effect on the health of society- there is enough stress already; it's already going to crumble regardless of what I burden it with. With that foreknowledge in mind, my intent is to remove myself from the processes that are at odds with the health (the rapidly declining health, I might add) of the earth and hopefully share with more people a vision for how things could work after our culture completes its fall. That vision is still in its infancy, in my mind at least, but it is growing in fullness with every passing day.