attention deficit

"I am my own religion," I said.

"Oh shit," said Victor. "This is going to be all philosophical and talky and shit, isn't it?"

"Yeah, maybe," I said. "So what?"

"I thought this stuff was supposed to be all fiction, you know? Action-oriented. Imaginitive. Fuggin interesting, man. Nobody wants to hear your armchair philosophocations. Bring on the weird drama!"

"I don't remember ever stating a goal for this stuff, other than to have something to write about. Sometimes it's lighthearted and sometimes it's heavy. And sometimes, you've gotta take the bad with the good, you know?"

"Like hell," said Victor, beginning to rise from his seat. "I'm outta here." Victor's departure was cut short by the safety belt fastened across his lap. He looked to his right and saw another row of passengers, strapped into their seats in the cabin of an airplane. Victor looked at me as I grinned.

"You bastard!" he said. But Victor doesn't give in so easily. He reached for the in-flight headphones and plugged them in. He fiddled with the armrest controls and changed the channel. He changed the channel again. And again. And again. His eyes widened in surprise, then narrowed in anger. He took off the headphones and repeated himsef. "You bastard!"

"Moi?" I asked, raising my eyebrows in faux-innocence.

"It's fuckin' Vanilla Ice on every channel!"

"Fancy that," I said. "So you've got nothing else to do but listen to what I've got to say, hm?"

"I don't have to like it," said Victor.

"You never do. So, where was I?"

"I dunno, I wasn't listening."

"Fortunately, I was. I was saying that I am my own religion," I said. "Do you know what it is that defines a religion, or, for that matter, any sort of culture?"

Victor paused to think for a moment. As much as he loves to bitch and moan about listening to my armchair (or airline-seat, as the case may be) philosophizing, when we get right down to it, he's a good thinker and enjoys the departure from the ordinary. I looked out the window while Victor continued to come up with an answer. Far below us were endless stretches of brown, featureless desert. A long, straight road bisected the desert, leading from nowhere to nowhere. We seemed to be following the course of the road. Our shadow ran along it and darkened the lanes. There were no cars to observe our passage. I wondered where our flight would take us.

Cute, I thought to myself. Our discussion will ape our travel in this very airplane, tracing a mostly deserted road through barren desert, starting nowhere in particular and ending nowhere in particular. And when it's over, we'll just return to where we started, probably none the wiser.

Victor decided he'd had enough time to ponder the question. "Symbols define a religion," he said. "Symbols define what is in the religion and define what is in opposition to it. The adherants of a religion all know the same symbols, so they can communicate with one another."

"Not bad," I said. "That's exactly what I was thinking."

"Great," said Victor. "So we're done."

"No, because here's the thing," I said. "Those symbols are, well... symbolic. They don't mean anything by themselves. They're pointers." I thought about this for a moment. What points? A finger.

" Do you know the koan of Gutei and the finger?" I asked.

"No," said Victor.

I cleared my throat and recited the koan. "Whenever anyone asked him about Zen, the great master Gutei would quietly raise one finger into the air. A boy in the village began to imitate this behavior. Whenever he heard people talking about Gutei's teachings, he would interrupt the discussion and raise his finger. Gutei heard about the boy's mischief. When he saw him in the street, he seized him and cut off his finger. The boy cried and began to run off, but Gutei called out to him. When the boy turned to look, Gutei raised his finger into the air. At that moment the boy became enlightened."

"What the fuck!" said Victor.

"Yeah, that's what I thought when I first heard the story. I didn't understand it until I had a little more life under my belt, and even then, I think I only understood it by hearing a hint. Anyhow, the point is this. Gutei's finger is not important, it isn't the message. Gutei's finger is a symbol. It points to enlightenment. When the boy stopped being distracted by the pointer -- when he stopped mindlessly imitating Gutei's pointer -- he was able to see beyond the finger, and he was enlightened."

"Uh huh," said Victor. "So we should all cut off our fingers and be enlightened, right?"

"No, not at all. The story of Gutei and his finger is a finger -- a pointer. It's a symbol and it's pointing in the direction of enlightenment. It's Zen but it's not special. All religions have symbols and they're all pointing somewhere, if you can figure out how to understand them and see where they're pointing."

"Some religions are big," said Victor. "The Catholics, for instance. They've been around a while. They've got a lot of symbols."

"Even the new ones have a lot of symbols," I said. "That's the way it is. And the real fun part is that lots of the symbols don't point anywhere at all."

"That's why I don't bother with religion," said Victor. "It's a mess of made-up bullcrap and conflicting messages."

"That's too bad," I said. "You're painting all religions with the same brush. There's more to religious symbolism than pointers and signposts. Religious symbols provide a framework, too, for categorizing and comprehending experiences. This is especially true in the western magical tradition, which isn't really a religion so much as a really big and complicated set of symbols pointing... well, somewhere. The idea is that once you've built up a sufficient lattice of symbols, the structure itself becomes an even grander symbol, pointing the way to enlightenment, union with god, conversations with supernatural beings, and what have you."

"That's fantastic," said Victor. "Maybe we'll get back to that stuff about the bogeyman later, but I see what you mean about religious symbols being used for comprehending life."

"Yeah?" I said.

"Yeah, like when people attribute to gods events which they cannot otherwise understand. Wars, hurricanes, famines, football victories, and so on."

"Hm," I said. "That's sort of what I'm getting at. Not exactly, though. Human beings like to find meaning in their lives, right? Well, one way of finding meaning is to equate experiences with religious symbols. Since religious symbols supposedly point the way to god, people can then relate just about any experience to the god of their choice."

"Remember after September eleventh that photo of the smoking WTC that supposedly looked like Jesus?" asked Victor. "Or that photo of the two girders that melted or snapped or fell or whatever and ended up in the form of a cross?"

"Exactly," I said. "People searched through the rubble -- literally -- looking for symbols that they could use to fit the disaster into their framework. Things get a little muddled, though, because symbols require interpretation."

"Right," said Victor. "What does the cross in the rubble mean? Christ sanctioned the fall of the WTC? Christ is against it? A cross by itself is ambiguous."

"Well, yes and no. It's not so ambiguous in itself. The Cross represents Christ, and Christ is one of the good guys, always. Even if you're a Muslim or a Jew, Christ himself isn't really a bad guy. His followers, sure. But not the man himself. Anyway, it's the context that's ambigious. What's an unambiguous symbol of Good doing at the bottom of a rubble heap where thousands of innocents died? Is it an apology? A 'whoops, my bad!' from god himself? In the original testament, after the Flood receded, god threw out a rainbow as a promise -- a symbol -- that he wouldn't wipe out humanity again, since he felt badly after having done it. That was very similar: a symbol of good at the end of a mass-murder."

"The differece," said Victor, "is that we had Moses to interpret that rainbow for us, and we have nobody so trustworthy to interpret the cross at the WTC."

"Yeah," I said.

"Yeah."

"So..." I said. "Still sorry we started this conversation?"

"Yes," said Victor. "When are we landing?"

"Landing?" I said. "I still don't even know where we're heading."

"Great."

"Indeed. So, where were we? Ah yes. Not all symbols point directly to enlightenment," I said. "Some just point at other symbols. A daisy-chain of symbols leading from nowhere important to somewhere very important."

"You could even say that about the cross at the WTC," said Victor. "The cross points at Christ who, in turn, points at the Father. Depending on who you ask, Christ is important only because he's a symbol of the greater God."

"Or something like that," I said.

"So how are you your own religion?" asked Victor.

"Not yet, we're not ready," I said. "First, let's think some more about frameworks. People are really hung up on assigning meaning to events in their lives."

"Yeah, of course," said Victor, "because otherwise the world would be a totally random, chaotic, impenetrable, terrifying place. If things just happened randomly there's no chance of anyone being in control."

"Right," I said. "So events themselves become symbols, pointing to some higher order organizing force, whether it's a god or fate or luck or whatever. I'd say that over a lifetime, people tend to build up a framework of symbols. No, maybe a net is a better analogy. When the net has incorporated enough symbols that it's got a heavy mesh, then when a passing event intersects a person's life, it gets caught in the net of symbols and is interpreted as having meaning."

"The more symbols you've got woven into the net, then, the more likely it is to be dense enough to catch a given event."

"Right," I said. "Do you have a lucky number?"

"No," said Victor, "I don't believe in that sort of thing."

"Me neither," I said. "My lucky number is 817. It's been my lucky number for so long that I don't even remember why it's my lucky number."

"Fascinating," said Victor.

"Yes," I said, "it is. I use it for the lottery, for passwords, for lock combinations. Anything that requires a number. Do you remember how I met Margie?"

"The uh... off road, right?"

"Yeah. Do you know what her license plate number was on the jeep at that time?"

"817," said Victor.

"Close. N8174U."

"So her plates got caught in your symbol net, huh? The number means something," said Victor. "But what?"

"Ah, that's where it really gets interesting. Symbols, generally, don't have any intrinsic meaning."

"Like a cross."

"Right. A cross itself is just two lines. You've got to know the history of a particular cross from two thousand years ago for any given set of intersecting lines to be meaningful."

"Right. Now, what happens with a symbol like the number 817? Or any symbol, even the cross, for that matter? Where do they get their meaning?"

"Well," said Victor, "consensus, I guess. Enough people start interpreting a symbol in the same way, and it comes to have an accepted meaning. Enough people associate a cross with Jesus or a swastika with the Nazis, and those become the 'standard' meanings for those symbols."

"Exactly. Once enough people start agreeing on the meanings of a set of symbols, and creating symbol meshes out of those symbols, and interpreting life in terms of those symbols, you've more or less got yourself a religion, complete with religious iconography."

"817 hasn't got a 'standard' meaning because only you attach importance to it," said Victor.

I looked out the window again. We were lower now. The lonely stright two-lane highway had turned into a lonely straight four-lane highway. In fact, it wasn't so lonely any more. There were cars traveling in both directions. Odd, since the volume of traffic heading opposite to us would indicate that I should have seen more cars the last time I checked. I wondered where they all were going, and whether they'd exit before the road became narrow.

"And now you see what I mean when I say that I am my own religion," I said.

"You mean that instead of adopting any of the widely-available ready-made symbol nets, you create your own, replete with random superstition and illogical associations."

"Precisely," I said. "I don't like to let other people do the work, so I place no reliance on Virgin or Pigeon."

"Cute," said Victor. "I recognize it."

"Thanks," I said. "Anyhow, as you said, I create my own symbols, or weave existing symbols into my mesh. And since I'm also in charge of the interpretation, they mean whatever they want, whenever I want."

"How flexible," said Victor.

"Quite," I said. "That's the point. In my own personal search for meaning in life, I'm not bound by any pre-existing symbol systems."

"So nothing has any meaning for you, at least not for very long."

"On the contrary," I said. "Once I've taken meaning from a thing often enough, it comes in itself to have enormous meaning. Even if I started investing meaning into the thing only as a joke."

"Like your so-called magic underpants, for example," said Victor.

"For example, yes."

"You've worn them so much that they've taken on a whole new meaning."

"Something like that. Do you know that I have three holy sites?"

"Is one of them Jerusalem?"

"No."

"Thank god," said Victor.

"One of them is Mecca, though," I said.

"Good luck visiting," said Victor.

"It's never a problem," I said. "Fortunately, my Mecca is in California."

"Fortunately," said Victor.

"But you see," I said, "I've invested so much... well, for lack of a better term, 'spiritual energy' into these three places that they're as holy for me as Jerusalem is to a Jew, or at least, they're as holy to me as a place can be, given my beliefs."

"Or lack of beliefs."

"Right. These places, as holy sites, would be appropriate for a burial, or a naming, or a wedding, or an invocation of god, or any sort of business you'd conduct at a holy site."

"As opposed to a church."

"Which would be inappropriate," I said, "because?"

"Because a church is not part of your symbol system."

"You've got it."

"I wish I hadn't."

"Well you have, and you can't get rid of it."

"Well," said Victor, "I'd love to hear more, really, I would. But this is my stop."

He pulled the cable, and as the cable car came to a stop, he got off and walked up the hill. I waved to him from the window. He saw me waving and stood still. He raised his arm and pointed his finger into the air. I smiled all the rest of the way home through the desert.