SOMETHING LEFT TO CONTEMPLATE
Galen Guengerich September 17, 2000
Not long ago, Holly and Zoë and I were in the car late one afternoon, driving east on the Long Island Expressway. We were passing an especially dense thicket of new-growth billboards when Zoë suddenly piped up from the back seat with one of those questions kids ask sometimes that is breathtaking in its honesty and wisdom. "Why is it," she asked, "that the women in advertisements are always undressed and the men aren't?" Holly immediately replied with the definitive response one gives in situations like that: "Good question!" Zoë then continued: "The women are always undressed and the men always look like they are showing off. It's embarrassing!"
Zoë is rightly embarrassed at the way women are treated in our culture; the situation should embarrass the rest of us a lot more than it does. But the real problem for Zoë will develop when her response to sexism becomes more profound than mere embarrassment. What will happen when she begins to pay more attention to the mandates of our culture than to the signals from her own heart and mind and body? Will she too, like so many young women, be confident at eight and depressed at thirteen?
That is what I call a midnight question--the kind of question you and I roll around in our minds when we lie restlessly awake in the heart of the night, pondering the things one ponders when everyone else is fast asleep. What will happen if the report from the pathology lab comes back positive, we wonder? How will my boss respond if I'm not able to close the deal or make the numbers? What if the disagreement yesterday with a friend on the phone turns nasty? What if, this time around, the restructuring of the company leaves me without a job? What if my marriage doesn't last or my partner falls ill or my parents become senile?
What we mostly want, of course, is a life in which midnight questions don't get posed because there aren't any such questions. We want our bodies to be healthy and our minds creative and our institutions just and our consciences clear. We want our relationships to be secure and our children confident and our careers fulfilling and our debts few and our neighborhoods safe. In short, we want our sleep to be undisturbed. We seem to think that if life were perfectly reliable and orderly and safe and predictable, then life would be, well, perfect. Or would it? I have a hunch that the restlessness we sometimes feel in the heart of the night doesn't divert our attention from what is most important in life. Rather, it beckons us toward it.
I am reminded of an essay by W.E.B. Du Bois titled "The Coming of John," which was first published in 1903. It tells the story of two young men named John. Both Johns were from the town of Altamaha, which Du Bois describes as "away down there beneath the gnarled oaks of Southeastern Georgia, where the sea croons to the sands and the sands listen till they sink half drowned beneath the waters." One John was John Jones, a long straggling black fellow who was often awkward and never on time. Yet waves of merriment seemed to follow him wherever he went. His broad, good-natured smile conveyed bubbling good nature and genuine satisfaction with the world.
The white folk of Altamaha thought black John was a good boy--fine plow-hand, good in the rice fields, handy everywhere, always good-natured and respectful. But they shook their heads when his mother wanted to send him off to school. "It'll spoil him,--ruin him," they said. But fully half of Altamaha's black folk followed John proudly to the station with his little trunk and many bundles, and they put their playmate and brother and son on the train. Then, as it bore him away to the world, their talk turned to what would happen when John came back: parties, speakings in the church, a new schoolhouse, perhaps with John as teacher, maybe a big wedding. All of this would happen, and more, they said--when John comes. When John comes.
Up at the Judge's house they rather liked this refrain, for the white folk too had a John--a fair-haired, smooth-faced boy who had played many a long summer's day with his dark-skinned counterpart. "Yes, sir! John is at Princeton, sir," said the Judge every morning as he marched down to the post office. "Showing the Yankees what a Southern gentleman can do." The Judge's dream was that his son would return to Altamaha and settle there, and be the mayor of the town and representative to the legislature, as he himself had done many years before.
"Thus," Du Bois writes, "in the far-away Southern village the world lay awaiting, half consciously, the coming of the two young men, and dreamed in an inarticulate way of new things that would be done and new thoughts that all would think. And yet it was singular that few thought of two Johns,--for the black folk thought of one John, and he was black; and the white folk thought of another John, and he was white. And neither world thought the other world's thought, save with vague unrest."
Seven years later, both Johns returned. Each had changed, as had their view of Altamaha. The white town gladly welcomed home their tall and headstrong favorite son, but the young man could not and did not veil his contempt for the little town, and plainly had his heart set on New York. "Good heavens, father," the younger man would say after dinner, as he lighted a cigar and stood by the fireplace, "you surely don't expect a young man like me to settle down permanently in this--this God-forsaken town?"
The other John also recoiled from the choked and narrow life of his native town. He noticed the oppression that had not seemed oppression before. "He felt angry when men did not call him 'Mister;' he clenched his hands at the 'Jim Crow' cars, and chafed at the color-line that hemmed in him and his. A tinge of sarcasm crept into his speech, and a vague bitterness into his life; and he sat long hours wondering and planning a way around these crooked things."
The Judge did allow John to reopen the Negro school, after John agreed that he would not--in the Judge's words--"try to put fool ideas of rising and equality into these folks' heads, and make them discontented and unhappy." But John was already discontented and unhappy, a fact which bewildered his people. This once jovial man had become silent and gloomy. When John spoke at the church, he tried to explain. He talked about the new century and the need for new ideas about education and the spread of wealth, about the destiny of black folks and the humanity of everyone. But all the people could hear was the disdain in John's voice for the little world they held sacred. After John finished his talk, one of the elders of the church climbed into the pulpit and, with rude and awful eloquence, held John up for the scorn and scathing denunciation of all.
After the meeting, John left the church and walked down by the sea. His sister followed him. Du Bois writes:
Long they stood together, peering over the gray unresting water.
"John," she said, "does it make everyone--unhappy when they study and learn lots of things?"
He paused and smiled. "I'm afraid it does," he said.
"And John, are you glad you studied?"
"Yes," came the answer, slowly but positively.
She watched the flickering lights upon the sea, and said thoughtfully, "I wish I was unhappy,--and--and," putting both arms about his neck, "I think I am, a little, John."
The final scene of the story is as incisively conceived and powerfully wrought as any I know. Put simply, John Jones courageously saves his sister from being raped by white John, for which he is duly lynched. Joyce Carol Oates has rightly included the essay in her collection of the fifty-five best essays of the Twentieth Century. But much of the resonance of Du Bois' story has to do with the power of its central insight, which is expressed as a restless longing by black John's sister. "I wish I was unhappy," she says wistfully, peering over the unresting sea. "And--and, I think I am, a little."
That insight may strike you as unnecessarily perverse. Why would anyone in her right mind long to be unhappy? Why would any of us wish to lie awake in the heart of the night, listening for hard questions, conjuring up painful possibilities, waiting for devastating losses? None of us would, at least not on purpose. But sometimes the vagaries and vicissitudes of life hit us hard, and sleep is hard to come by. And sometimes, through the insight of a gifted writer or the wisdom of a child, we get a glimpse of how life's greatest cruelties and hardest blows can get built into the structure of things. In other words, if we live during the day with our eyes and our hearts wide open, we will inevitably see and hear and feel things that keep us awake at night. It is precisely life's brokenness, and not its perfection, that gives purpose and direction to both our nights and days.
I was reminded of this insight by the physicist Frank Close in his recent book titled Lucifer's Legacy: The Meaning of Asymmetry. It's a rather learned treatise about the moment of creation and the development of asymmetry in the universe, but it makes a relatively concise point. In the very beginning, according to Close, before the universe came into being, there existed only one ethereal substance, made up of matter and anti-matter. This substance was both perfectly symmetrical and perfectly ordered. There existed an almost equal balance between matter and antimatter. When these two collided in the Big Bang, however, they began to annihilate each other. And if the balance between the two had been exact, the universe would have destroyed itself. But the balance was slightly askew, and the universe had to make a series of decisions, as it were, about how to deal with the excess of matter. It had to do something with the mess left behind by the Big Bang. The universe moved, in Close's words, from symmetry to structure.
In other words, you and I would not exist in a perfectly ordered and symmetrical world. Only the fact that the universe is not orderly and symmetrical ensured that, after the Bang, there was something left to contemplate. Close ends his book with a chapter about an as-yet hypothetical particle calls the Higgs particle, which is believed to be responsible for causing the original substance to split apart and for creating the hodgepodge of forces and masses that gives structure to the broken symmetries that enabled the world to come into being. Some physicists have nicknamed this particle the God particle, but Close thinks it might better be called the Lucifer particle, because it embodies the randomness and broken symmetries that constantly upset a world that would otherwise be too perfect and orderly to exist at all.
In the beginning, everything blew apart, and a big mess was left behind. That's when the decisions begin: what to do with the mess. That's what we do when some part of our world blows apart. It's life's not so subtle reminder to us that randomness and broken symmetries are the very heart of creation; they make life possible in the first place. With each of us as with the rest of creation, it's what goes awry that makes us change and gives us room to grow.
But the kind of pain suffered by John Jones and the kind of humiliation identified by Zoë are not random bad things that happen to good people. They are the result of asymmetries that have become demonic. Frank Close was one hundred percent half right when he named the Lucifer particle, because there are some ways of structuring things that embody an evil so deadly and perverse, that one can but call it the devil. In a world messy with asymmetries based on race or gender or religion or class or sexual orientation, we should each wish to become a little more unhappy.
All of which is why I'm glad we are here together at All Souls. This is where we help each other figure out what to do when we encounter an unhappy mess. If you received bad news this week about your job or your health or a loved one, we're here to rally round. And if you are trying to figure out how to live in a world where women are undressed and men show off, where skin color matters too much and humanity matters too little, we're here to work together on that too. As Forrest mentioned last week, this congregation has a long history of tackling tough problems and thorny issues. But when it comes to creation, there's no resting on laurels. It's our turn now--our turn to get unhappy. Welcome back to church. Copyright AllSouls 2000,