[Oe List ...] Fwd: OpEd Tuesday

[Jaime R Vergara]

The usual caveat: curious, welcome; not, see you at the bend.


j'aime la vie



-----Original Message-----
From: jrvergarajr2031 <jrvergarajr2031 at aol.com>
To: editor <editor at saipantribune.com>; Mark_Rabago <Mark_Rabago at saipantribune.com>; jayvee_vallejera <jayvee_vallejera at saipantribune.com>
Sent: Mon, Mar 26, 2012 4:07 am
Subject: OpEd Tuesday


The Journey
 
The metaphor is as old as humanconsciousness though we were introduced to it through our religious heritage,first with the elderly nomadic Abram inexplicably waking up to the hope ofsiring a people as chronicled in the Torah,with its genesis coopted by Christians to map the journey from beginning toend, enshrining time into human history.
 
Chaucer got Middle English into storytelling in The Canterbury Tales bythe 14th century CE and we have latched on to the format ever sinceas a form of telling the truth.
 
The Hans insularity busted out West inthe 16th century when the Buddhist Wu Cheng’en told of Xuanzang’sjourney to India to retrieve some Sutras. The Sino mindset at the time headed towards monotonous and disastroushomogeneity got a shot of diversity by the wild adventures of a fallen shavedhead and his equally fallen four super guides in The Journey to the West, or more popularly, The Monkey King.
 
Jules Verne’s hidden paradigm shiftingin his Voyage au Centre de la Terre in1864, a descent to the center of the planet, is often noted more as an earlysci-fi rather than its revolutionary assault on the religious orthodoxy of thetime that based earth science on the biblical narrative of the Garden of Eden.  Geology presented a challenge to Church ecclesiologyin the same way as Darwin’s 1843 Originof the Specie made evolutionary biology an alternative image to creationistmythologies.
 
The story of the WonderfulWizard of Oz came out at the turn of the 20th century, and withthe economic depression of 1929, and inward looking America emerged.  The German Hermann Hesse in 1932 picked up onthe European fascination on eastern mysticism in his Journey to the East, in which the internal struggle of the “protagonists”HH and Leo later captured the existentialist imagination of our post-WWIgeneration.
 
Hesse’s parade of Western civilizations’ notables got usriveted to our mental hammocks.  Histelling keeps company with Plato the dialogical philosopher with echoes ofearlier math whiz Pythagoras of the theorem-fame.  Mozart the classical composer chimes in withthe colors of artist Paul Klee while Cervantes’ alter ego Don Quixote battles his windmills. Serialized Tristram Sandrymeets up with modern poet Baudelaire and we are impressed with the companyHesse keeps.
 
Dubbed a musical fantasy with less depth but blaring thesame message, Dorothy in her ruby shoes in the 1939 movie version of the Wizardof Oz novel (silver shoes in the novel) realized that the whirlwind journeywith Toto never really left Kansas.
 
In fact, told stories in the last one thousand years was thesubject of Joseph Campbell’s 1949 seminal non-fiction work on comparativemythology in the Hero of a ThousandFaces. The monomyth ‘hero’ had similar features across time, and thedemocratization of the function would find lyrics in Mariah Carey’s Hero.  S/he may be found in everyone, if webother to look inside. 
 
The point of a journey, our mystics now cry, is to awaken atthe place where one started realizing that the place may be familiar but onecan never really return home ever again.  The journey in fact is the transformation that happens within.
 
Why would we want to belabor this point in a season ofMarch’s Madness when one’s life journey is measured in terms of 15-minute of fameshould one’s team makes the final four on one’s efforts, or, on the last secondtheatrics of a 3-point hoop before the buzzer?
 
Projecting our concern to the literature of the civilizationthat shaped us, or to the current frenzy of fame and infamy from which wecannot escape as the Final Four weekend of Collegiate basketball finallyarrives, is certainly a round about way of raising how the 75K some residentsof the CNMI actually view their journey in life?
 
Dichotomies, especially sharply defined ones, are alwayssuspect, and though there is conceptual accuracy to the notion that the westernmind is led by the questions of “when” (history) and “why” (philosophy), andthe eastern brain hums to the role of “who” (socio-psych) and their location“where” (like my wealthy real estate acquaintances), it does not inform us whythe folks up Capital Hill play with rules and regulations like they do, or whythe robed justices decide where the wind needs to blow, nor why parents sendtheir children to war.
 
It is, nevertheless, our image of our journey thatdetermines our behavior.  One who comesout of life’s gate a dejado (handicapped)like those of Augustine’s original-sin-Christianity, will act like one.  With the prominence of the CNMI Hispanicculture of death where Christ forever remains crucified, sanctifying penanceand martyrdom, conjugated to the Midwest Easter lily’d blonde Jesus swiftlyascended to the clouded land of an Other World, giving the self-righteoustrigger-happy grunts rationale to nuke the Bejeesus out of places like Iraq,Afghanistan and Iran to usher Armageddon, and we sense that the object lessons reflectingthe reality factor of the human journey is missing all together in ourlives.  Abram joyfully went under hismound as Abraham of the Chosen Ones, but we suspect he still turns over in his grave.
 
Lent reveals the dark night of the soul, a good time toreview once more the trajectory of our lives. Quo Vadis?
 
 


 Jaime R Vergara


All of yesterday, thanks; all of tomorrow, yes; all of today, let it be!

 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://wedgeblade.net/pipermail/oe_wedgeblade.net/attachments/20120325/b0cdc941/attachment.html>