Saint Thomas Aquinas said, "Love takes up where knowledge leaves off." I would really like for that to be wrong. Old Tom wasn't really that smart, was he? As practical as I am, I am unwilling to surrender to the idea that the only way to honor your emotions is to give leave of your faculties. Can’t you respect both worlds and still be at peace with yourself? Can’t I?
My life-long take on these things, I suppose, has been in deference to a way of life that mirrors the ant and the grasshopper. You know the story: the ant toils all summer preparing for winter while the grasshopper has the summer of his life, drinking and smoking and making merry with all the free-spirited lady grasshoppers. Come winter, the ant is eating truffles by the fire with a cocktail, a cigar, and a harem of sexy ant ladies while the grasshopper freezes to his untimely death.
I think the story is a good one, but both extremes truly unsettle me. If I were writing the story I might have ended it with the last day of summer: the ant is tragically crushed by the unknowing boot heel of a sexy, Latin construction worker sweating through a pair of Levi’s and a wife-beater t-shirt. Thus retirement never comes for the ant and his life is wasted.
If I were going the Shakespearean tragedy route, just minutes after the ant’s funeral, the grasshopper would discover he has contracted a horrible, yet-to-be-discovered sexually transmitted disease, whereby he will live a life of misery but can never die. So that he who has not prepared will be forced to live eternally with no preparations to comfort him.
Or a Hollywood ending: the grasshopper is somehow awakened by this tragedy and learns to merge work and play in a tribute to the ant and his work ethic.
Simply put, all I’m really hoping for is an intersection of work and play that fuels my creativity, my passion, my sentiment. I know someone has to till the soil and chop the wood, build the fire, buy the groceries, wash the dishes, clean the toilets, all those things. I’ve no fear of good hard work. But I am desperate to find the grasshopper’s way while living in the ant’s world.
I’d like to see love take up where knowledge leaves off but then, in a bizarre twist of events, I‘d like to watch the two, love and knowledge, the ant and the grasshopper, doing a dance with one another, timing out a synchronized but unpredictable tango to a background of jazz, taking turns, sharing the work until they sweat, making each other laugh uncontrollably until they forget that what they’re doing is really work at all.
I think that would be an excellent way to prove old Tom wrong.
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4 comments:
Karl Marx wrote in one of his first books that "work" is a means of happiness. There is no distinction between cleaning the toilets and creating a painting. It is your work regardless. You find joy in a material world because that is the only world you know. The problem is society as it is now (and particularly capitalism) has warped our minds because we can only ascribe value to things in economic terms.
For example, cleaning the toilets is something we would gladly pay someone to do. The person who cleans the toilet gets paid whatever the "going rate" is. It is no longer the person who is cleaning the toilets to ascribe his or her own value to it. Plus there are standards to what a "clean toilet" is that come from society not from the individual. The individual is expected to value those standards enought to adhere to them to get the "going rate".
This is why Marx detested "leisure time" as we have come think of it. It gives us too much time to ascribe value to things. I want to go to the museum on Monday to see a painting rather than clean my own toilet. But there is no "value" in that. The only reason you want to see that painting is because someone said it is important, but there is nothing of YOU in that painting. You are ascribing value to something that is not done by YOU. By going to the museum and not cleaning the toilet you have joined the herd.
A bunch of crap? I don't think totally. I like paintings and music and reading. But there is a great deal of satisfaction in building a fence, mowing a lawn, or planting flowers that have nothing to do with raising property values.
As St. Thomas lay dying, they were burning tightly bound bundles of straw in his fireplace--it burns quickly but dumps a lot of heat into the room, a comforting things for a dying man in a stone building. As he lay there, watching the flames, he murmered of his own magnificent work "It's all straw..."
Which bit of history I bring up to put his comment into perspective. One might spend a pleasant hour or twleve discussing whether Thomas Aquinas or Moses Maimonides (Moshe ben Maimon, whose work Guide for the Perplexed is remarkably similar to--though shorter than--the Summa Theologica) achieved the most clarity and completeness in their intellectual apprehension of God--but both men, in the end, acknowledged that love provided a bridge to the ultimate that knowledge fell short of.
Quoting Michale Ledeen recounting a teaching story:
"In the Philosophical Investigations, [Ludwig] Wittgenstein asks an apparently straightforward question: what do all games have in common? He ties himself in mental knots trying to get the answer, but nothing works. Finally he realizes that the question was posed wrongly. It should have been: Is there anything all games have in common? That’s the real question (and the real answer is “not much”), but the language of the first question tricked him into searching for an answer that does not exist."
Rephrase the question. Once you do that properly, the answer, I think, leads exactly where you are hoping to go.
You're pretty.
;)
I'm with Babs.
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