2HousePlague

3 years and 3 days ago, the space shuttle Columbia exploded before the horrified attention of all the world. Like millions of other people, I watched it on TV. I watched it happen and felt the sadness of the loss. Then I started to ask myself why do we do such things, putting aside the military agenda and the PR manipulations. I concluded that there is a special kind of ambition that is only awakened inside people when they decide to pursue something greater than themselves. Call it God, or call it anything you like. The movie Contact did a good job of articulating the question: "What is it that summons up our best?"

Before I had watched the explosion of Columbia and the loss of those astronauts, I had read a book called the Anxiety of Influence. If you are interested in the above question, I would recommend it.

All of us come into a situation that is partly the open, undefined promise of the future and partly the residue of all that others before us have tried to achieve. We are born into a world where some of those efforts are judged failures and some successes. It is easy to pattern what you do against the prevailing descriptions of success. It is very difficult to do that with any originality.

For me, the essence of the question I posed in this thread is: How can we be original and great in a context that is dominated by a definition of greatness created by the efforts of people who came before us? How can achievement in Heaven ever compare to achievement in Hell?

The problem, the risk, is that the IDEALS you elevate and emphasize in YOUR definition of what is great will not be echoed by anyone else. The usual, "Pioneer's" answer is "Who gives a fuck?" As a result, many brilliant people toil in their own directions, after the things they have decided are worthy. I have had a hard time doing that, personally. This is because I have a strong desire to "be of service" -- perhaps that is a weakness in me.

Though I have the power to "destroy", I refrain from destruction. I try to use the existing framework, acknowledging that it has value because it already IS.

If you like poetry and literary criticism, I would also recommend the writing of Paul Valery. He struggled with this very issue, in his poems and in his essays. From him I learned that it is possible to serve (to honor) a pre-existing ideal without lassitude (this is important because some people who "honor" become lazy in the belief that their efforts are not work, but a kind of "channeling" and that they are really "mediums" for things that are not created by them, but that use them to come into a more tangible existence)... I learned it is possible to honor with disclipline and in ways that build on the work of the great people who came before me.


This is the same as believing in God. When you accept that something is greater than you, that other great "strugglers" before you were trying to give utterance to something absolute, it makes you a part of a family of effort.

The society in which you live is, therefore, able to measure your efforts against a pre-existing yardstick. In the Anxiety of Influence, the author (my former NYU professor Harold Bloom) discusses how that awareness creates an "anxiety" in the poet, one that either forces him to copy the Greats before him, with little originality, or else to go so far away from anything that resembles their efforts, as to become useless to the conveyance of meaning.

There is no middleground between Heaven and Hell. if you believe that God is superior, it can both enlarge your power and give you benefit of a legacy of effort that was done before you were born. It is an inheritance. If you decide there is no God and no power higher than yourself, you had better come up with something, really, really, really AMAZING -- amazing enough to win converts and worshippers of your own.

I wrote the following poem and dedicated it to the lost astronauts.

I wrote it in God's voice.

THE LAZARUS PROBLEM

If I have bid you ?Rise,
and make all human haste!?
I really must apologize
(for such a human waste),
then turn a Father?s cheek.
I was surprised
to find at such accomplished heights
(however bright and vanishing)
the headway of my Earthly Tribe.
It seems but yesterday
that I first gave you leave to fly
beyond the Garden?s harboring Green.
What can it mean
when all my favored progeny,
and all the very best I?ve sent
(to look and seek among the stars),
return to me but cindered things?
Of course, I wish alive again
the very, very best of me,
that I might prove a deity
deserving of such offerings.
But I prefer to re-invent,
and make of cinders promises:
Another band of reckless men,
of singularly cunning sight,
must rise and come and try again
to find Me in the Night.

09 February, 2003 (For Columbia?s Seven)



2hp

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