Revolution and Incoherent Rambling

Friendship with those who fail to become co-revolutionaries must be eliminated. The revolutionary ideology, once installed in the mind, bust be the sole regulator of all human relationships. Those who refuse to undergo the same 'installation,' however much you may love them, are no longer to be trusted. Jefferson himself complained of this loss. There were excellent people among the Tories. There are always excellent people on both sides. And to adopt an ideology is to take to one side only. This is why even the most justifiable revolution is certain to destroy friendships, families, cross-cultural exchanges and very other nuanced type of human connection. Believe me, this is an inevitable cost.
- Dr. Edward Gurtzner on the dangers of revolution, The Brothers K

I've been reading this book.

My dad assigned it to me. He does this sometimes. This passage terrifies me. I am deathly afraid of becoming a partisan, an ideological fool, a sellout for Grand-Idea-X. I know that I am an ideological young man. I have very lofty thoughts about "how things ought to be, dammit." Very often, these ideas come in violent conflict with the realities of the world we live in. When this happens, I find myself shrugging my shoulders and saying, "Well, that's the hope anyway."

I do not want to take to one side only. I do not want to eliminate my friendship with excellent people. I do not want to tear a rift between myself and my friends, family, the ones I love. But, I fear that my dreaminess, my proclivity for what is mystical and beautiful, will draw me into something so brilliant and gorgeous that I will one day find myself surrounded only by like-minded dreamers. I am afraid of dropping my friends and family like so many sand bags as I try to balloon my way to the surface of the sun, spurned on by a passionate community of Icaruses.

Elsewhere in the book the Ivan analogue, Everett, critiques the Alyosha analogue, Peter. More specifically, he critiques Peter's renunciation of his old life, family and baseball, for Buddhism and Harvard. He accuses Peter of ignoring the outer world in preference for the inner world, baseball for Buddha, family for philosophy, earth for nirvana. Everett does not see these things as supplantations, but imbalances. Human beings are made of both, and we often emphasize one or the other based on what comes easiest. He finishes the rebuke with this  line, "Obviously, I question his calculations: to slough off half a self in hopes of finding a whole one is not my idea of good math."

We are young. We love our minds and the wonderful things they can do. College taught us how to play with our brains, and gave us the confidence (arrogance?) to do it with impunity. But, systems of thought are still man-made systems, incomplete and simplified. We are revolutionaries, we are 18 year old Buddhists, we are extremists and fundamentalists, one and all. But, most of us will be tempered by time. Most of us will find the world much more complex outside the Ivory Tower, and much harder to explain/critique/deconstruct/analyze/understand than we once believed. I hope I make it there.

Immortality

On Friday, my mother ran for 16 miles. She is preparing for a marathon. My father and I rode bikes alongside her, and sometimes ahead of her. My mother is fighting off her age the same way that my father embraces it. My father was born 40 years old 45 years ago. My mother was a wild and passionate teenager, once and always. I don't know how old I am.

The teenager ran. The 40 year old 45 year old and I rode ahead into the masonic graveyard where we stopped at three headstones. The first two were those of my great-grandmother, the one dead person I was the closest to, and her husband who even my grandfather barely remembers.

In my mind, my grandmother died very recently. But, the numbers on the headstone stated rather convincingly that she had died in 2007. Four years ago. So much has changed, but she has stayed the same. I graduated from college. One of her favorite great-grandchildren is now a mother at 17. I haven't seen that girl in four years.

The next headstone we visited was my aunt's. She died when she was two years old. My father rarely speaks of it. Once, when I was much younger, and my faith much simpler, I had said that I believed that faith could do anything. I said that, so long as a person believed strong enough and what they believed was in line with the will of God  they could cause anything to happen. My father said, "when you have seen a mother giving CPR to her two year old daughter in the front yard, and sitting at the side of a tiny hospital bed believing with all her heart that her child will live, only to bury her a week later, tell me that faith is enough." The tone in his voice is hard to describe. It was anger, and hurt, and fear, and sorrow. I have never heard it from him since. Maybe that's what ghosts are.

By the time we'd visited the three graves, my mother had passed us on the road. We caught up with her soon.

The night before, we had dinner at a chinese restaurant with my father's parents. We were talking about things that none of us can remember and my great-grandmother came up in conversation. Not directly, just mentioned offhandedly, as if she were still alive. Nothing to see here. No ghosts. No anger and hurt and fear and sorrow. Just a grandma and mother.

I think... I think that nobody really dies. People talk about our burial sites and what to do with our remains as if it even matters. As if graves become permanent homes, and where we scatter our ashes is where our soul will rest till kingdom come. I don't think so.

Graves are not where we spend our afterlife. My grandma's soul does not rest in the masonic graveyard. She lives in conversations at chinese restaurants, and in characters in books that remind me of her. She lives in memories of taco soup and CMT.

There are thousands of headstones in this city alone. A great deal of them are falling apart, unattended and untouched by anyone but the graveyard groundskeeper for decades. Does that mean that those people are truly gone? Their final resting place slowly crumbling around them? Slowly fading from existence? I don't want to believe that.

Perhaps I'm still young and my faith is still simple, but I want to say that immortality isn't found in a hunk of rock that will last longer than our grandchildren, or even in the memories we leave to our grandchildren. I want to say that immortality is something else, something mysterious. I want to say that it has something to do with love, and Christ, and healing. I want to say that immortality has something to do with the image of God, and living into our sainthood. I want to say that nobody really dies.

I want to say it all. I want to put a cork on this idea and call it over, but the thoughts are still brewing. I have no conclusions tonight.

Even now, my mother is sleeping. Tomorrow she will run again, preparing for her marathon. My Father is in Texas, acting his age in meeting after meeting. My great-grandmother is dead, and so is my aunt.

I am 22 years old, and I haven't any answers.