Gilda was invited to teach a short month-long course in writing at Nairobi University. It was funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities as part of a cultural exchange program.
Dear Babs,
It must be still Saturday there. You’ve driven down from the mountain with my mother and picked up a few things at City Market. Most of it common supplies like wheat, Bisquick, frozen fruit and vegetables, and peanut butter. But you’ve also picked up some exotic delicacies for Wednesday’s Gourmet Crockpot Night. Which recipe have you pulled from your book? Will it be the Poulet a la Grecque you’ve been threatening to make? Or perhaps the Asparagus Mushroom Strata you’ve been promising my mother? (Now’s your chance with me, ‘Asparagus-hating-Gilda,’ out of the picture.) You’ve just had a lunch at the Sundowner, likely the grilled trout, or the shrimp salad. You’ve stopped at the Post Office to see if I’d written. Now you head to the library to drop off the old books and browse the stacks until you find something that strikes your fancy. How I wish I was there.
Life in Nairobi this last week has been hectic. I’m still not sure why they invited me here. It seems strange. All of the other authors they’ve brought in through the endowment have been big names with more mainstream literary sensibilities. I can’t help but wonder why me? Apparently I am a favorite of the Chair of the English Department, but will the students have heard of me?
Other than the heat, which wears me out and oppresses from the moment I step out of the door of my hotel, things have been delightful. My class has been enthusiastically attended. The university is lovely and I must admit I find the students as engaging, curious, and possessed of that rare intelligence that marks a thirst for learning found in climes that I know better. The classrooms where I teach are not air-conditioned and the rows of ceiling fans are no match for the late afternoon sun when everyone is so sleepy (including their teacher) that no one can push through the stifling warmth without a sloppy languor creeping into every attempt at sensible engagement.
Veal cutlets served at lunch do not seem to help my teaching either, but I do what I can to get my message across. ‘Which is?’ you might ask. You’ll remember how uncertain I’ve always been about teaching. I really don’t have any idea how I do what I do when I write so how could I teach it? My writing is organic and waddles out of me like toads from medieval mud by spontaneous generation. Can I teach them anything when I have no idea how I engage with the creative process? I realize that my writing emerges from the dust of my beginnings, framed and fashioned by the culture in which I grew up. I could at least encourage that. I can teach them to let their own culture flower into something that forms fruit.
Everywhere I turn I find stories that astonish and transform me. If the rest of the world could read what these students have lived through, the tracks of a thousand tears would trace a line from millions of eyes down the cheeks of as many faces that would given time, make a pool of such pathos that it would drown hate forever. Maudlin I know, but even so. There it is.
Yet, what’s been most surprising is the common ground we’ve found in our discussions of religion. My students are of a mixed lot. Many Protestants, a good number of Catholics, a couple of Muslims, an annoyingly vocal atheist, and three who embrace traditional African religions.
Old habits die hard I suppose and too often I find myself going off topic and expressing my feelings on religion. I love that you have held onto your Jewish faith despite not believing in God. But poor me I don’t know if I believe or not. It’s neither that I do believe or don’t, so here I sit and spin in a whirlpool that I wish would take me down or let me out, but on I spin, turning round and round swimming away from the yawning gapping center hole yet never moving toward the edge where I long for some sense of freedom.
Unicorns, I think, are a more common beast than me and my lonely faith and my hunger to be a Mormon, yet convinced that underneath it all there are more questions than answers. I’ve been thinking about something my mother said before I left. Something that will not leave me alone and gnaws at my innards like an unrelenting worm.
“Before you go, I want you to get a blessing from the Bishop,” she whispered desperately to me the weekend before I left.
“A what? Rather than protect me it will likely cause a lightning strike.” I acted shocked and put out. I hate when she does things like this to me. She knows my Mormonism is not hers and there is no way I was going to let this stranger declare a blessing on my head.
“Blessings have never hurt anyone,” she snapped at me.
“Stop, Mom. I don’t want one,” I bit back.
“Look,” she said, “I know you’re an atheist, but it would be a comfort to me.”
Atheist. That’s what my mother thinks I am. But does it work? Does that fit? No. Atheism is a claim about what is not, theism is a claim of what is. I’m not making any claims. I stand in awe at what unfolds. Atheism is just creationism in disguise. It assumes some universe just pops into existence in all its complexity and now is just sitting here—a grand object jutting out of space-time that happens to have things like shoelaces, kangaroos, planets with rings, soap bubbles, old tomato cans, coffee plants, geckos, and maple seeds flitting on the breeze. Because time is an illusion, in their view, time and space are just a manifest glob sitting in this weird universe. It is worse than creationism in that nothing causes it. It just leaps out of nothing for the hell of it. This complex object we call the universe just is this strange manifold floating endlessly through existence.
Conversely, theism is just atheism in disguise. There’s this thing sitting there in the middle of nothing contemplating itself in some sort of timeless la-la land, bored and lonely and then up and decides to create time and potato chips. In both these two extremes, there is always something that just happens to be there, in one a universe, in the other a God. Each pointing their finger at the other and declaring that their neighbor has no evidence for their beliefs. A childish game ensues with theists pointing to the atheists screaming: Unmoved mover! Natural Theology! Ontological Arguments! God Exists! God Exists! While the atheists wag their finger at the theists and say: material world is all we see! Is all that is! Is all that can be! Show me God working in the world! No Causal efficacy! No God is necessary! If God is not necessary God is not! QED! Neither one not seeing they are the same doggerel verse on two sides of the same limerick.
Kick them both up the side of the head! Why do they think they can figure this out? I think about that poem you shared with me, What the Ant Knew:
Every day, at a certain time
(with some variation)
when the sun was shining,
the informative sky would
darken only for a moment
then brighten again.
No one asked why,
(except her,
for an ant)
her tiny brain spinning
around and around
trying to work out why
the darkness came
and where it went.
She would often pause
in her task, whether
it was in gathering
some bit of food,
or attacking her neighbors,
or swarming en masse
some marauding beetle,
she would consider
this puzzling aspect of her world.
The more she thought about it,
the less obvious it became
what could be afoot?
She realized
that perhaps she needed
a change in perspective.
So despite her wet-programming,
or perhaps because of it,
her tiny neural mass
click-clacked her away from
the colony.
Up up up she climbed,
until from a high place
she could survey the world.
from the polarization
of the sun’s light,
and at the appointed time
she watched.
It came,
a white blur,
pulling with it the darkness
she knew so well,
past the place where
her colony robotted
so far below.
Her sight was poor
(her senses more
attuned to olfactory needs),
so she moved her head
a tiny bit and waited
for the next day
when it happened again.
And again.
And again.
In her tiny memory,
each day, she stored
a bit of sensation,
a modicum of perception.
Each day she moved
her head
ever so slightly,
seeing at different angles
the busy white blur
sliding with it.
Day by day.
Until one day she saw it
clearly,
fully,
white, square and holy.
So she went home
to gather food again,
to attack her neighbors,
and swarm en masse
a wandering beetle,
but this time when
the darkness
passed over
she knew something
the others did not.1
You told me once that the ant was watching the arrival of the postman’s truck. That the darkening was the shadow cast as he delivered mail at nearly the same time every day. It knew nothing of the societal network that formed the complex relations tangled in the mail system. Or of the postman’s fear of his wife’s cancer and the invention of a new treatment that gave him hope. It knew nothing of the road or the machines that built it, or of the lumber operation that milled the post to which the mailbox was affixed.
Ostensibly, we stand at the top of a great chain of being hugging the knees of angels while we play at the foot of the shepherds. But is it so tough to imagine that we are more like that ant than the Olympians we fancy ourselves?
Umbrage must be taken against our arrogance. I dismiss all knowledge about gods. Remember my vision? The vast ball of existence that just sat there filling up all that is? That still makes sense to me. I don’t want to say that that is what I believe, because I don’t. I did learn things through it. Not about ontology. No I learned something about my consciousness. About deep things within me. But I like the idea that we emerged from randomness, from chaos. Like in the opening lines of Genesis where God is brooding over the face of the waters, without form or void. That’s something like what I encountered there at the edge of all beginnings before it exploded into an infinity of space, time and objects. I like that idea, but I cannot bring myself to think I’m right about the nature of existence. Too often we clutch too firmly what came to us accidentally and are we unwilling to explore new horizons. So I abandon the project of certainty. I wash my hands of surety.
A testimony? Like given in my Moab Ward? Sure why not? Would you like to hear it? OK. I have had encounters with something deeper than me. I sense it likes me. That it knows me. It wishes me well. It once, as I sat on the edge of insanity visited me as rats I loved died around me. It visited me in music of such beauty it kept me sane. Or maybe it didn’t, but sane or not it was there for me. More or less. What it is, I make no claims about.
Realistically I know that my vision came in the midst of extreme duress and every psychiatrist worth his couch would wager on me having a bad trip freak out. But I was there and I had an encounter. I can’t bring myself to disbelieve in it as thoroughly as I should. As hard as I’ve tried to make myself into a raving madwoman it doesn’t work. My memories are too clear. My mental states too apparent. Its reality is remarkable.
Everyone who I’ve told, including you and my mom, have smiled and patted me on the head and looked for other explanations. You, I understand. You, an ultra reformed Jew situated in a firmly materialist universe, have no room for Heavenly Mothers or guiding shepherdesses. As you know I don’t expect you to change your mind and I’ve encouraged you to just processe it however you feel comfortable. Our relationship is based on the joy we take in one another’s company, similar interests, and shared experiences, not upon some metaphysical alignment or agreement on ontological commitments.
Enter my mother though. She has told me many times that she knows that Joseph Smith encountered God in a grove of trees. Her faith is founded on a boy who had an experience, not much different than mine (although his God did not have much style and not even close to having as fabulous shoes as mine did). Experience grounds all of the axial religions: Abraham, Jesus, Paul, Mohammad, St. Theresa, Hildegard von Bingen, Pascal, on and on, these encounters with something beyond this world become an access point to that something-beyond. Indeed, all of Mormon faith is about seeking an encounter with the divine. So why when I have one is it not authorized—I can’t see any case of an encounter that was sanctioned by whatever religious community happened to be dominant at the time. It is only on the lonely road, the cave, the cell, in the desert, on the floor while a prisoner of war lies surrounded by an ensemble of singing rats that these seem to occur. And they are always personal, reluctantly shared, reinterpreted, but at the time it was just a one-on-one, ‘I Am is here.’
Vacuous as it sounds even to my ears, I believe Joseph Smith when he says he saw a pillar of light descending over his head and two personages standing in a blinding white light. I trust his encounter was as real as mine. I sense big things afoot, as if the universe wanted to take these apes somewhere magnificent. Some place more beautiful and wondrous. I cannot guess what it is; I am an ant over which a shadow falls. I could give it a name. I could assign it attributes, or declare negative attributes of what it was not. I could call upon it for help in times of trouble, but not knowing what it is does not make its felt and sensed presence less real.
Encounters need not be interpretable to be meaningful. I remember my father when I was in my last summer before I left for college, became enamored with a set of books called, “The Lectures on Faith.” He would lead us in discussions about them in Family Home Evening. He was obsessed with the idea that you could not really have faith in God without understanding his character, perfections, and attributes. Somehow the more we knew about these things the more we would trust him and have faith that he was leading us on to something good.
Ridiculous. What good would it be for the ant to discover that the postal truck was manufactured in Detroit? What would that add to the shadow that passes over her world every morning at ten o’clock? The shadow and the ant meet, perhaps by accident. Might it not be that bigger things are afoot such that the ant can never fathom their depth? Maybe my encounter on the floor of a Vietnamese lodge or Joseph’s amid the hardwoods he was felling were the aftermath of the ebb and flow of events rocketing past of so massive or monstrously vast events that these encounters are nothing save something like the air whipped up in the fleeting vortices of a car passing an ant colony. Our brush with these higher passings is something like the shadow of the postman is to the formican denizens of the concrete cracks below the mailbox.
Yet. Yet that is not how it felt. Is it? I encountered most of all, love. The encounter was with love. That is my only claim.
That.
Heft.
I.
Noticed. And it.
Gripped me through and through. Emptied me. Grasped me to a core that I’ve not been able to wrestle from any object (and you know how desperately I’ve tried to find that nucleus and in every attempt was proved inadequate). Love ground me to existence and revealed something underlying all surfaces. Love seems more than adequate to unveil masked things, including things secreted in me. Love does that.
Gilda
P.S. Hi Mom. I know you snuck and read this so I just want to say you taught me much about love. It infuses all that I am. Thank you.