On walks around the neighborhood I have recently taken to saving the lives of still-squirming worms stranded on the sidewalk. The proximity of worms to sidewalks and driveways is a great reminder that we live life “in the foothills of death,” a brilliant turn of phrase from philosopher Mark Johnston. Worms have been dealt a rotten hand; to put things in perspective just imagine if mice spent their entire lives adjacent to a gigantic glue trap that expanded towards them in the rain. So far I have rescued at least three worms.
But I still swat mosquitoes with the lethal accuracy and superhuman speed of Stephen King’s gunslinger Roland Deschain, and I don’t think twice about drowning the scores of ants who, forming a division of the army invading my kitchen, have pushed the western front forward into my dishwasher. My approach to the pesty members of the lower animal kingdom who encroach upon my person or my real estate, perhaps best embodied by my practice of using the aforementioned glue traps to catch mice whom I immediately euthanize, is one of certain speedy death with a minimum of suffering. So, it seems, for the worms I wear the mask of Vishnu the maintainer, and for the ants et.al. I portray Shiva the destroyer, all of which reveals my basic philosophy to be “I bidthe old joke goes, Catholic Lite (as in Miller Lite), then I am also Diet Thich Nhat Hahn, i.e. Peace is (not quite) every step.
If a philosophy is to be considered truly basic, however, it should be universal. When gaps open up it means you still don’t know why you do what you do, which is ultimately to be in the same position as the worms, ants, mosquitoes, and mice. Which is why I found it so unsettling to encounter a bug squirming in a spider web on my porch the other day. “I bid you peace on two conditions…” was, in this case, about as useful as “When lost, never ask directions from strangers; get your wife to do it, or failing that, panic” which, while also basic to my approach to life, wouldn’t have filled in the gap left by the bug squirming in silk. If I bid peace to the bug, by freeing it, I starve the spider. And if I bid peace to the spider, I kill the bug. (And, to state the obvious, neither the bug nor the spider gave a rat’s ass about me or my house, meaning that “I bid you peace…” wasn’t nullified by its qualifiers, just merely meaningless.)
I once had an acquaintance whose basic life philosophy was “When in doubt, do nothing.” It was on the back of this philosophy that he gave his heart to a woman with whom he technically did nothing. “When in doubt, do nothing,” is both convenient (my married acquaintance had a “best friend,” not an emotional affair) and, as a means to choosing while pretending not to, bad faith par excellence. Just so, after I left the bug to die I rationalized that since I hadn’t known what to do I had simply chosen to let nature take its course. In pretending not to have chosen the spider over the bug I was simultaneously lying and suspending disbelief, which is known in the vernacular as believing your own bullshit. Believing your own bullshit will likely get you through the day, but it will just as reliably maintain your soul vibration at a low enough frequency such that you keep managing to piss off your wife.
Determined to stay married ‘til death do us part because a) my wife Jen is a badass sexy mensch who is the best thing that ever happened to me and whom I love with an OCD reckless abandon that involves a lot of checking (imagine the staccato rhythm of the Verizon guy’s “Can you hear me now?”, but substitute “Do you love me now?”) , and b) because I would never grant my enemies the schaudenfreude of my divorce, I have just recently, for the first time in my life, decided to begin aiming my bullshit detector at myself in a concerted effort to address what my shaman, who seems to have momentarily forgotten that flattery will get her everywhere, likes to call “my arrogance.” In fact, I used my bullshit detector in this novel fashion for perhaps the very first time when I caught myself pretending to let nature take its course with the spider and bug, leading, inevitably, to thoughts that I might just be a natural at this self-BS-detection thing (i.e. to more BS). But, as they say, Rome wasn’t built in a day.
The unvarnished truth is that I chose the spider. If its captive had been, say, a ladybug or a lightning bug, I would have chosen differently. But this was an average bug, in no way special or glamorous, completely lacking e.g. the erotic danger of the praying mantis, the mystical overtones of the butterfly, or even the grotesquerie of the cockroach. It was only too easy to imagine the generic bug in the web as the equivalent of a pale orange tomato pressed between cellophane and light green Styrofoam.
It is likely that my “I bid you peace on two conditions…” is as self-delusional as “When in doubt, do nothing.” Where the latter denies the inevitability of choosing, the former, as in the case of the bug and the spider, denies the inevitability of choosing sides. Note that Jesus said “Love your enemies,” not “Don’t have enemies.”
And re: my choice of the spider over the bug because the bug basically looked like someone who might be sitting next to you on the bus, there’s clearly still plenty of grist for my shaman’s mill in our next session.
Plus, my math was all wrong. Since when is missing lunch the equivalent of becoming lunch? That’s some bullshit.
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