Jay Fox - THE WALLS

“Do you feel you know what he looks like? Do you feel like you know him?”

“No, but I can guess that he's probably in his late-thirties, maybe even early-forties. He's white, Jewish, with big ears, apparently. I feel like he's the type of guy you pass on the street without noticing. And that's the point I'm trying to get at: He doesn't want to be famous or anything because he's afraid that that will mean he has to live up to something that he's not.”

“He's the absurd creator!” Tomas shouts.

“Sure.”

“What does that mean?”

“Have you ever read Camus' Myth of Sisyphus ?”

“No.”

“Well, it, Sisyphus , is analogous to The Stranger . He's referencing something from the former — I think.” Tomas nods enthusiastically, and even pulls the book out of the bag he has with him. I smile in return. “I would recommend you read The Rebel before it — it's way better.” She smiles. “As I was saying, he just has these moments of brilliance that he wants to convey to the world, even though the medium he's chosen makes everything he does completely ephemeral. And, yes, I know ephemeral is a relative term — ephemeral can be measured in minutes, days, months, years, eons: a second in the life of a person is capable of filling up a library and the Earth's history is a molecule of ink that is but a fraction of a letter in a sentence within a footnote in the trillion volume history of the universe. But he seems to really, sincerely not care. He just creates. And that's all he does — create and express something that just dwells inside of him. In a sense, that's all art is: a prolonged epiphany that captures something that's kind of rational and kind of irrational and beyond the typical capacity of language. You know, a-and maybe some of his stuff is convoluted because he tends to have these epiphanies when he's half in the bag; but, I mean, he's not there to expound — or elucidate, rather — on every line that he writes. He just wants to express himself. There's something very pure in that. I mean, people have these silly ideas, and suddenly they end up producing great works around them. DeLillo wrote White Noise because he thought it'd be funny to have a college that offered Hitler Studies. D.H. Lawrence wrote a novella based on the idea of Jesus getting a boner.” She squints. “The whole book leads up to one line: 'Christ has risen.'” She gives a begrudging smile. “I'm rambling, aren't I?”

“Kind of.”

“But isn't that so great — that he's just a normal guy doing all of this?”

“And, by normal, you mean working as a drone and finding escape in alcohol?”

“No, I think normal means not being a celebrity,” I counter with a slightly ornery tone. “He lives the way most of the people in this city live. You know, as students we sometimes forget that New York isn't just populated by Suits and Radicals; there's this huge middle ground of people, who are hard-working, middle-class, and, typically, pretty intelligent.”

“You honestly think that the majority of the people in this city are intelligent? Just who have you been talking to?”

“They're intelligent; they're just not that insightful. You know, they can understand a lot if you give them a chance; they're just not that good at coming up with it on their own.” I pause. “I think it has something to do with the way religion is taught now days, to be honest; then again, this could just be a side-effect of some larger problem plaguing our society.”

“Like religion.”

“Look: People are told that it's wrong to interpret the Bible, that it's the Word of God, and that it should be read as one reads the newspaper. But if you ask any religious scholar — who's not of the Evangelical persuasion, of course — they'll tell you that there are three levels to scripture: the literal, the allegorical, and the spiritual. You can't read it all literally, otherwise you end up with a myriad of contradictions; and, if you have contradictions, as well as the premises that the Bible is the Word of God and that the Word of God is always true, then you have an invalid argument on your hands. So it can't all be read literally — unless you believe that God can contradict Himself, which, of course begs the far more important question: why should one care what the Bible says at all if no one can tell which passage, if any, can be trusted. And that's where the beauty of religious study comes in. Just look at Gersonides — he concluded that Song of Songs isn't just a poem about love; it's a manual that outlines the proper way to approach the study of God's Word, which, oddly enough, parallels what Plato said in his Republic .”

“What are you, a former Hassid?”

“No, I just think it's fascinating to see that people continue to be able to get so much out of a book that's several thousand years old. And so much of it is original and new, too. That's what I'm trying to say, you know: that the truly wise are able to see things to which the dunces of the world are blind. And you don't get that from as many people as you used to. Over-zealous Christians don't bring anything new to the table — they just quote Romans thirteen to explain why the Bush administration is infallible, but ignore things that they don't agree with or practice: like Deuteronomy twenty: thirteen, which says that, in war, every man in a captured town ought to be put to the sword; or, also in Deuteronomy, that a man is exempt from military service for a year after his wedding. Are we to infer from this not only that the government is infallible, but that the commandments of Deuteronomy can be abrogated by the commandments of the state? I hardly think this is the case, especially when a God-fearing administration controls the country. And that's what bothers me. The dunces of the world just shrug and accept the contradiction. And the Jobs of the world may be able to both recognize the severity of this dilemma and maintain a steadfast faith, but personally I find myself in agreement with Kierkegaard: true faith is not common, and the Jobs — though Kierkegaard, at least in the context of which I am thinking, would say the Isaacs — of this world can be counted on one hand.

“Look, all I'm saying is that the Christian community — especially the Evangelicals — have fought against intellectualism for so long that there are no longer many insightful Christians. And that's what worries me. Religion without wisdom is like nonalcoholic beer — it's manufactured for people in AA, teenagers, and rubes. But if you hear someone imbued with real wisdom and even partial faith, they are able to see beyond jejune superstition and nihilism. And they are the ones deeply encumbered by these incongruities, the individuals for whom such problems foment into works of genius. An individual suffering from forlorn as a result of the absence of God's total beneficence will always be able to produce a work that is superior to an adamant atheist, for whom the lack of a God, as well as an a priori ethics, is of no concern. Then again, there are those who dedicate their time to establishing some form a cadence between the ostensible contradictions of their respective religions. And this is where religious study itself becomes a form of art — it engenders the human condition, and ceases to be a simple practice in acquiescence. I mean, I don't think it would be possible for there to be a Renaissance without the philosophical movements of the High Middle Ages. For all the rigidity of someone like Aquinas, there is also a great deal of ingenuity and interpretation in his work, too. And isn't that what so much of art is about?

“A lot of contemporary art, you know, especially the really out-there stuff, relies more on eliciting a response out of people by using unconventional means as opposed to raw talent. They are asking you to use your own interpretive skills to think, sometimes simply to feel. But because of the way people are brought up now, they can't deal with it. They can appreciate a Van Gogh or a Vermeer, but they can't sit there and seriously concentrate on the work of a contemporary artist, poet, or composer. But these people would see it as valuable, they would see so much of the art today as brilliant, if the education in this country were less bulimic — as in, you take in information, regurgitate it onto paper come exam time, and then forget what it was you learned. See what I mean: because of the way they've been brought up, they end up being unable to appreciate complexity. They just see a can of soup or a flower.” She's almost laughing. “I'm sorry. I've been drinking all night, and I know I'm rambling.”