The Value of Hard Work

In what might have been some kind of sub-conscious slip up, I almost wrote down for the title of this post, “The Value of Hard Words.” Perhaps it was just a mix up in the right and left hand digits, some wire that got crossed somehow—seeing as how the same finger on both hands is responsible for the D and the K respectively—but perhaps that is what I meant to say.

“In the beginning was the word, and the word was with god, and the word was god.” Word is god. I’ve been struggling a lot lately with the concept that we don’t employ language as a part of our existence, rather, that we are language. We exist language. Whatever it is that has brought us to this understanding, it seems to be a very real and difficult to understand concept.

I teach English to Korean children. My teaching strategy basically revolves around reading. Any time you are trying to learn a new language, there are four aspects that you must consider: reading, writing, speaking, and listening. Those are the four components of any language, really. I make every single one of my students read whatever the current passage is that we’re working on out loud. Sometimes, they get bored because, especially for the higher level classes, the passages can be long; however, when reading out loud, you are practicing three of the four aspects of language: reading, speaking, and listening. Once I explain this to them, they usually understand. Then, a curious thing begins to happen. They get noticeably better at the language.

What I have discovered is that when they are reading out loud, they are interacting with the language, and, by proxy, with themselves. That’s why reading is such a dangerous thing for your totalitarian regimes: any time people are reading, they are learning about themselves and understanding their essential freedom in the form of consciousness and understanding. When we read we understand that there is nothing anybody can do, as long as there is something there to read, about how far we can read (I meant to type “reach,” but I like “read” better) into our own minds. But, the turnaround is, of course that this is a lot of hard work. You don’t just pick up a book and not work through it. Even when reading for pleasure, there is a certain amount of work that goes into deciphering the symbols on the page.

Language, the thing that we essentially are, the thing that we exist as, is an exemplar of existence in that it requires work. Life ought to be work. Don’t let me be misunderstood here: I’m not saying that life should be about going to a job. There is a difference between going to a job and doing the work of life. I think I’ve said it before, somewhere, somehow, but your life is either your work, or your work is your life. This is why I will never rise to the top of a Fortune 500 company. In the words of Bob Dylan: I’d give ‘em my heart, but they would want my soul—and, believe me, I’ve been close enough to this situation to understand that this is exactly what they want.

I have also been thinking about words, and heresy has come up pretty often, because I have been thinking about consciousness, as such, and the nature of religion—especially in its Christian mold—and there seems to be a parallel in the structure of the trinity and the structure of human reality, and I can’t help but think that my thinking here is complete heresy.

The three aspects or manifestations of the almighty are God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. Taken at a metaphorical level, God the Son is the physical manifestation of God, and this would represent the human body. God the Holy Spirit is the untouchable, but felt, essence of God that is haunting the world, and this would represent consciousness. God the Father is only knowable, only touchable, only approachable at a purely “real” level, after death. Oh, I understand fully from my years as the son of a Baptist minister and the grandson of a Baptist preacher that you can communicate with God every day through the power of prayer; however, what I am talking about here is approaching God in the sense that you can see him in his full glory in Heaven, you can eat at his table, and walk on his streets of gold. After going over the Nicene Creed, it is an understood part of church dogma that Jesus as God’s son was made of the same stuff of god and that he was not made, but rather begotten—meaning that he was always with god. In the same way, the Holy Spirit has always been. They are all manifestations of God. More accurately, they are all God. God is God. Jesus is God. The Holy Spirit is God. This only begs the question of me: what am I? Am I my body? Am I my consciousness? Am I the death that know awaits me eventually? Yes, yes, and yes. Also: no, no, and no. Just as god is not JUST God, or is not JUST Jesus, or is not JUST the Holy Spirit, I am not simply my body or my consciousness or my death. That kind of parallel structure is difficult for me to reconcile. Ah, faith. The issue isn’t faith, either, because what is implied is a specific form of faith. You can have faith in just about anything. Any time this fallback is invoked, in the sense of, “You just have to have faith,” what is really being said is: “You just have to have faith in what I and other people believe. You are not allowed to have another faith, because you’d be wrong.”

Do I have to believe in your shape of God? Do you have to believe in mine? What is the shape of God? What gender is God? Is he beyond gender? Where we created in God’s image or was he created in ours? There is something entirely incongruous about the image of god as a squishy human. As he exists in reality, God seems to be contingent on the physical human form to exist through, and that's weird to me. How can we be created in his image if he is omnipresent and omniscient? Or, did he have an image of us and create us into that, which would effectively make us a work of art? What are the ramifications of a thing like that?

I don’t really want to be heretical. I have a lot of work to do to understand this god character, especially now that he seems to be something of a metaphor of words. Or, perhaps, god is metaphor precisely as word is metaphor—there are hints of post-structuralism running around here. God is a lot of work to understand. God is a lot of words to understand. Words are a lot of God to understand. Words are a lot of work to understand. Work is a lot of words to understand. Work is a lot of God to understand. It would be a lot easier to just give up the struggle and go one way or the other: I believe in your Christian god OR I am an atheist. I choose to be other. I think I’m actively choosing, right here, right now, to engage in this struggle. Christian God is not winning right now, this is true, but who knows what happens when we truly engage and work out the words of God.