With the turning point comes the realization:
Of course when I woke up the next day-ha… I had second thoughts.. yeah… and I must admit the more I thought about it the more I started to wonder about this one, some dusty little place out there in the middle of nowhere and of course that’s when I started to question my sanity: the ascetic lifestyle, with its simple purity of service at best, versus the sensual hedonistic lifestyle of the tropical Caribbean.. that I can so easily see myself in and actually have to a certain degree here as I looked out my balcony that morning after a pleasant night’s rain and all the palm trees and tropical vegetation in spite of the city and maybe that’s what those paintings were really all about in the first place – the guy with a shaved head yeah – maybe that really could be me, living out there.. on some tropical island because I could build a whole scenario around that one.. living in some tropical island bungalow, with a veranda like in that painting yeah overlooking the beautiful blue caribbean, far enough, but not too far from your neighbor, where town is a comfortable walk away and you can run down the beach with your pet cheetah, into the water, and just take in all the sounds, and the smells, and the sights, the sun, and the surf, and the smell of the exotic YES I could be in an ecstasy of sorts and maybe it’s all part of that innate desire we all have to see ourselves as beautiful and the wish to celebrate that beauty of the natural man. The noble savage doesn’t live in Detroit or Pittsburgh or Gary, Indiana or even the deserts of Arizona – no – he lives in the beautiful sensual tropical Islands with its trade winds and its ideal climate YES where you can run down those beaches in celebration of life, your life, YOUR BODY, YOUR SURROUNDINGS- WHERE “LIFE IS GOOD” – NOT HARD, NOT SUFFERING, AND THEREIN LIES THE PROBLEM:
because you know some day suffering, decay, and death will triumph: Richard Cory killed himself, Gauguin died of syphilis, I’ve got TB, our beautiful bodies will become corrupted – eventually – by fat, disease, degeneration – even if we’re so fortunate as to skip all that and grow old gracefully – or bypass all of man’s other afflictions and LIVE TO BE A THOUSAND even! – still – we’ll die!
and what will we have saved up for ourselves when it’s ALL OVER? I mean better the body than the house, right… but even better, the soul than the body! I mean if all I do is celebrate the body what will I have when it’s all over? – a good looking corpse? Because how many years do we really have to enjoy it all anyway? Twenty to thirty in all our glory? Compared to all eternity? Not even a second compared to the first billion. And then what about the next trillion? Or Quintillion?…
So with that in mind, how seriously should I take all this – this desire to go back? Back to our origins – back to Eden – the Rousseauian dream of the noble savage? A dream you could enjoy – for a while anyway… but for how long? and maybe that’s our problem – we concentrate too much on trying to go back to Eden when we can’t, instead of Heaven which we can.
So compare all this with going to the desert – laying up my treasures in Heaven, with all those funny looking little people (or big people) – disfigured, “mistakes,” features and bodies that look like spare parts at best – more like a mockery of Your design Lord, I mean the looks alone you can almost always tell just by the look – there’s something wrong there with the design, it’s out of whack, it all just somehow misses, funny at times, hideous at other times, but wrong – not noble, not the noble savage, not Eden, Adam, Eve, these people don’t belong in the Garden, that tropical island, no they belong in the desert, the wasteland, with the lepers, the untouchables and it’s true – we don’t touch them – physically even… “even as you’ve done it unto the least of these, you’ve done it unto me,” and what is it that You asked the rich young ruler Lord? Yes! I sell all my possessions and give my money to the poor and then follow you!
To the desert with the lepers.
To be continued…