NOVEMBER 7, TUESDAY

HEAVEN AND HELL

I am sitting at the white table on the white porch surrounded by pink bougainvillea with a jar of cookies, freshly baked by Efi, in front of me. Up the lane a man is making repairs to a rooftop with a drill that makes a rather loud sound. Below me I hear Efi’s voice talking with another woman. I know she is cooking something because the exhaust fan over her stove is whirling and cooling her kitchen area. Her son, who is on vacation here from his home in Athens, is going up and down the stairs beside me as he paints the furniture in her rental rooms white. Everything is white and blue in the house, the Greek colors. The curtains to the hallway that leads to my room are white with blue stars. At the other end of the street cars swish by.

The temperature is 71 on a slightly overcast day. Laundry is hanging on the rooftop in front of me and my clothes, dark blue so they will show no dirt so I only have to rinse them out, are hanging on the short clothes line behind me. It is a very peaceful day. Her son says he never comes to visit in July and August because Naousa is a madhouse, crowded with tourists. October when I came last time and October/November this time is the right time to visit Naousa. I dream about coming at this time next year. There are four rooms on my floor but I am the only person here and have the whole place, the roof and the porch, to myself.

And then the son brings me up the jar of fresh baked sesame cookies which I begin to munch on and then a little later he brings up a plate of lentils and another of broccoli with lemon for lunch. I am in heaven.

So how do I pass the time? Yesterday I didn’t go out at all, even to walk around. This is an old man’s way of traveling. I pass the time writing. I don’t write because I have something important to say or even because anyone is reading my posts. I am quite aware that my posts are simply a way of sharing, not because anyone wants to be shared with but because for some reason the activity of sharing is pleasant to do, sharing my meandering along through life, wondering what it is all about. The shorter my time here on earth, the more I wonder. But I don’t wonder so much to find out the answer as simply to wonder. I’ve discovered that wondering, trying to be as aware as I can be, is an activity that is alive in itself. It is the process of wondering, the process of words appearing in front of me, that is pleasureable. Apparently part of being fully alive as a human being, at least for me, is trying to figure things out. It is figuring out that is alive regardless of what I come up with. And I know that whatever I come up with will only be a half truth based on my own inner biases and narrow experience and won’t fit the people who read this because the fun they have figuring things out will lead to different conclusions based on their own inner biases and their own narrow experience.

Luckily the process of being aware is not the only thing that makes me feel alive because often the process of being aware can be so abstract and dry and sound so pompous that even I am irritated by it. But I also find pleasure in irony and I feel very alive through the process of listening to others and seeing from their perspective and I am turned on by the sensual intensity of the world around me which I respond to through photographs and letters to people. The erotic presence of the world around me makes me feel very alive. But each of these ways of being alive has an opposite side. While awareness can be deadingly abstract, breaking out of ironic dead conventions can just lead to more conventions that are equally constraining, and being entwined with others and accepting them fully can sometimes be suffocating, and the sensual intensity of the world around me and the people in it can be cloying and undermining to loving acceptance.

So the best that I can do is to balance along in my own day, finding in writing the intensity of all four sides and doing my best not to get immobilized or suffocated by any one single process of being alive.

This is a hopelessly long (and vague) introduction to my trying to deal with the polarization between MAGA fundamentalists and liberal multiculturalists, like myself, caught by relativity. I am trying to get around to dealing with Mike Johnson (and the half of the country who are his fellow fundamentalists) while holding on to my own multicultural openness.

First of all, two things. The first is that Mike Johnson appears to be an affable, sincere, well mannered, church going good person. It is easy to mock Marjorie Taylor Green and her Jewish space lasers and Donald Trump and his self centered resentment and paranoid feeling of being persecuted. How anyone can accept either one of them is beyond me. But Mike Johnson is a level headed good person whose identity if formed by religious Biblical fundamentalism and traditional American values. He is a good patriotic, religious guy. And so are many on the American righters who agree with him. There is no use mocking him as a wolf in sheep’s clothing and an evil threat because neither he nor his 50% of Americans feel that way and it just makes them mad and intensifies the polarization when they are mocked by sanctimonious liberals.

More than that, his fundamentalism is something that makes him feel very alive. If something is true, the more fundamental it is the truer it is, and the more relative it is the less true it feels. My relativism, equating his brand of Christianity to the brand of Christianity in the Warren Wilson Presbyterian church to the form of Christianity that completely puzzled me in the Greek Orthodox Church service I attended last week, let alone finding his fundamentalism to be the equivalent of Hindu fundamentalism which I have experienced in India, or Islamic fundamentalism which is apparent in the Middle East, or Jewish fundamentalism in Israel or Buddhist fundamentalism which I have experienced in Sri Lanka is so subversive to what he feels intuitively is right that he has to insist that I am dead wrong and he is right. His fundamentalism is so foundational to his identity that he has to insist that his Biblical interpretation of the constitution is right and, maybe sadly, everyone else is wrong. He doesn’t want to be nasty, he is just being honest. Fundamentalism, religious fundamentalism or tribal patriotic fundamentalism makes many people feel very alive. So how can I say he is wrong?

I am a liberal. I have to have empathy for his point of view. But he is a fundamentalist and must oppose my point of view.

So that is my personal problem. How can I be tolerant of people who in their fundamental beliefs have to be intolerant of mine? I am stuck.

Of course Mike Johnson is stuck, too. As nice as he is and as sincere as he is he has to affirm his fundamental beliefs even if it it enrages me even if he regrets doing so. He has no choice. And it is this tension between sincere beliefs that I think is so polarizing in the USA. Just as both opposing sides on the abortion issue are right, with the left being right about women’s right to make personal choices about their body and the right being right about their interpretation that abortion is the murder of unborn children. How do we live together in a country in which both opposing sides are morally right in their own eyes?

That is the issue which I, with my own biases and narrow experience, which gives me a liberal identity, deal with defusing this issue. Tomorrow I will try and come up with some kind of a tentative solution for myself.