2log

When I was in high school, I took a few summer jobs as a house painter. Friends of the family, mostly – a child’s room here, an exterior of a barn there. It was one of those jobs with a very satisfying conclusion at the end of each day: you’re tired, dirty, and look! A whole side of a house is a different color from when you’d started! Most of the things I do on a day-to-day basis are pretty cerebral, so it’s with a certain fondness that I remember the paint-splattered shirts and oppressive Virginia heat.

A side perk of the process of painting houses, for me, was getting into (relative) strangers’ homes and getting a sense of their space and how they used it. There was one house, owned by our friend Jack (not his real name), that has stuck with me. It was a yogi house – focused around a large and well-lit meditation room and equipped with many a book shelf and many a eastern religious symbol. It fit Jack, a spaced out hippy with a fringe of gray-white wavy hair and a mole on his check that dominated my (and it appeared, his) attention. Jack, despite seeming a little removed from the hard and fast realities of the earth-bound, still was able to offer concrete and useful suggestions on my labor.

I was there, Jack told me, to paint a few things. A trellis and a wall outside, which took me one day, and then a bathroom off the master bedroom.

The bathroom was small, with lots of detail work. Really my favorite type of painting -- Taping and touching up, moving, taping, painting. Pulling off the tape to reveal crisp lines. Very satisfying and engrossing stuff.

Plus, Jack had hooked me up. I had a small tape recorder with an audio version of the Upanishads, read first in Hindi and then again in English, with the translator adding interpretation and explanation to each line. He had a deep, clear voice that managed to overcome the tinny little speakers of the tape player and bore deeper and deeper into my skull.

Tape. Paint. Truth. Repeat. I felt as though the basic facts of the universe were being unveiled piece by piece, stroke by stroke, as the bathroom turned from white to yellow and human existence and basic compassion revealed themselves in an equally piecemeal (put also equally complete) fashion.

Painting happily away, I realize later, I had forgotten to set up a good system of ventilation in the tiny little room. The proliferation of paint fumes was contributing to my soulful connection to the readers voice, as well as to the splitting headache that I would spend the rest of the day nursing once I emerged for lunch.

I do not, as of this moment, remember the name of the contemporary religious leader who’s new age interpretations of the classic Upanishads texts I found so compelling on that humid summer day. I’m not sure that I ever knew it, or if I did I’m sure I was tripped up by the many Indian syllables and simply stored it under his the first initial of each name.

This leader, who I am going to call Swami S.V., was telling me about the Upanishads, but also about their place in a larger tradition of religious thinking. At the end of one of the books, he expounded on his theory of One Idea. Essentially, as S.V. explained to me – every major religious tradition has been exemplifying the One Idea. Fairness. Brotherhood. Equality. Community. Each time the One Idea is rediscovered, the person who rediscovers it (be they Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, or any of those folks that never managed to get into the history books) has a good run of about 50 years when the truth of the One Idea shines forward and humanity advances. Unfortunately, the One Idea then seems to become wrapped in waves of myth, story and tradition. Other people interpolate the idea, silly rules are applied to it, and eventually people manage to use the idea for things that seem to have literally the opposite effect of the original language.

To digress for a moment: Take the story of the Iliad. I’m not an expert, and sure as shootin’ can’t read it in the original Greek, but people who CAN tell me that the basis of the war on Troy isn’t actually all around a jealous King. Instead of a face that launched a thousand ships, the war can instead be blamed on the idea of “guest friendship”. The word, in Greek, is Xenia, and the violation of the principle of hospitality (as I understand it) is what motivated the Greeks to pursue young Paris. The Iliad is filled with discussions among mortals about doing the will of the gods versus allowing the gods, as actors, to work their will on man. The violation of Xenia, the rules of hospitality and friendship, is a violation of a sacred will of the gods. The question then becomes: should man be doing the gods work, or should man stand back and allow the gods to do their own work. Anyway, think about that next time you read the Iliad. You know… next week. Poor Helen (or women in general?) got a real short stick in our western conceptions of that story.

Back to the initial story: Something about the paint fumes or the deep and compelling cadence with which swami S.V. read have crept into my mind as a fundamental truth about life. The sage old hippy Jack, with his mole and his Yogi meditations, felt as though he had somehow tapped a thing in the universe that just made sense. That doesn't happen much to me, a mostly non-religion type.

It’s reflecting on Jack, Paint Fumes and the Swami, then, that I consider the recent decision by the Republican party to read the entire constitution on the floor of the Senate.

The goal, I think, of the reading, is to try and shame legislators into only passing laws that grow directly out of the constitution, including a citation of the passage that give congress the right to make that law. The entire rabid focus on the constitution as the source of all legal authority for our government makes sense. It IS the basis of the legal authority for our government. But the problem seems to be a focus on (and a debate over) the words.

The words. The very specific words. They have taken on a dogmatic, potentially even religious significance. The are poured over, and parsed to death. The One Idea, that for a moment had surfaced around the founding of this country, has, two hundred and fifty years later, found it’s self again disappearing under a group of disciples, each of whom claims to have the true story of how our founding fathers dreamed up the idea and an inside track on interpreting the discussion into common lexicon.

Like the debate over the bible and what it allows, the discussion of the constitution seem to have moved so far past the conceptual meaning of the work as to be pointless. Clearly, like the bible, there are some things (mostly ignored in this recent stunt-reading) that aren’t still relevant. 3/5ths of a person reads to me like Leviticus. Mistakes were made, and the realities of the time were placed over The Idea. But, for many of the more rational followers of the teachings of Jesus, I think it’s fair to say that the good ideas in the Good Book are pretty clear anyway.

So, why does this matter? Because the American experiment is reaching a dangerous point. We are closing in on 250 years in, the time period that the Swami S.V. says is the longest the One Idea ever lasts before someone really mucks it up. Is there a religious fervor around many peoples worship of the actual document of the constitution? I think that there is. Perhaps, if the One Idea can be the basis of a secular society, it can also be subsumed and destroyed by that same society. Perhaps, though, any society that starts editing Mark Twain, but worshipping the words of some totally fallible yet unquestionably brilliant dudes who lived 250 years ago, while ignoring the context and the situation in which those words were written gets what’s coming to them. Thanks Jack!