When I was a young man, I stated some obscure, seeming truth to my cousin, something I don’t even remember. But the outcome of that brief encounter stayed with me the rest of my life. I had a thought that I believed was not only true but profound. He asked me to explain. I could not. He then told me that what I could not explain I did not fully understand and thus did not know.
I have pondered that seemingly pejorative declaration the past 50 years of my life. But I have come to realize that what he said is not necessarily true. I have come to believe that feeling is sometimes a form of knowledge as yet not fully defined.
The weight of this paradox returned when I used my phase, Dancing in the Jungle. A friend asked me on several occasions to explain what I meant. I could not define it to my friend’s satisfaction. Did that mean, once again, that I did not understand it either and thus did not know it?
The answer is more complex than it seems. Reading Ernest Becker’s book The Denial of Death has begun to posit answers that I could not put into words what I felt and knew: That I had come to terms with the duality of an active mind captured in a rotting, decaying, dying body.
I know what I need because I am instinctively drawn to it. I did what I did otherwise because I once feared the consequence of my being.
When I say I am finally at peace with that duality, I offend people. I assume it is because they are not, because they find it impossible, and because I am just a common man. I offered a book to my wife and told her I thought she ought to read it. When she did not, I asked her why. She said the author has no background. Who is he, she asked? What is his authority?
And so it goes. Without credentials, the thoughts of the common man are without merit. They are not considered worthy of consideration, of challenge, or even worthy of criticism. Yet Ernest Becker states that this terrible duality affects everyone: statist, elitist, scholar, or jughead.
The Jungle is an environmental condition found in parts of Southeast Asia and other places in the world. It is often thought of as foreboding, foreign, and filled with strange things that go bump in the night. It conjures up the idea of darkness and things closing in on you. But euphemistically, it can be used to invoke what humanity is faced with: The utter helplessness of their being. Fraught with the terror of its finality, they protect themselves with myths, lies, and barriers against its inevitability.
The problem is that man reasons within his situation. Although driven by instinct, he is aware of his past and his present, and, if normal, acts on his awareness accordingly. Thus, his instinct does not always win out in his effort to dismiss and disguise what his mind sees as being outside his dying body.
I no longer find myself out of my “self” (schizophrenic) nor overwhelmed by my “self” (depressed). I have no apparent reason to believe in God. I do not cry for everlasting life or salvation. I do not obsess with a feeling that accountability faces evil people in some “here after” life. I believe that reason is a human survival attribute like the claws of a lion. I find a great deal of purpose in life but no meaning. The purpose, of course, is to procreate, nourish one’s young, and shelter and feed them until they are on their own, and then die. All else is filler. That is different in my account than meaning. Meaning by my definition invokes a vision of more than life and purpose.
Dancing is often thought of in the context of joy. One raises his head to the sky and rejoices in affirmation of art and pleasure and contentment. One is no longer plagued by the dichotomy of dualism. For one to sit on the toilet and defecate while listening to the music of Bach symbolizes perfectly the dualism of both the best and the worst of being human. One is either destroyed by this realization or dances when finally coming to terms with the meaninglessness and finality of ones existence amid this duality.
Dancing in the Jungle, then, expresses one’s finally coming to terms with being-in-himself, yet being-beyond-himself. My mind soars as my flesh rots. But I dance in the face of it, in the jungle of human suffering and contradictions and lies and myths that allow us to exist within our own private madness.
People devour the bible, strive for salvation, labor for everlasting life, and pray for a certain mercy that expunges their cognitive aberrations. Christians, Jews, and Muslim’s alike cling, white knuckled, to their bibles. For in them lay the answers to all their questions. Ask a biblical scholar a question, and he will immediately seek out the passage in scripture that answers it. Though the answer might be vague, if not downright incoherent, it is so because it is the word of the lord. And in the breast of each lays a heart that secretly opines: My God can kick your God’s ass.
I did not join the military to defend my God but to defend yours. You would ask if it is not mistaken to act as the agent of something that is wrong headed, for it seems it could as well justify defending the worst in man. Yet it is a matter of practicality. Of all the myths and lies and wrong headedness and mystery of man, America’s the most benign. I would have it for my children. Its values and its culture are what I want for them. It is not a matter of right and wrong to me but one of what it is not.
Dancing in the Jungle is the realization of facing man’s impotence while rejoicing in his reality, his art, his accomplishments, and the fact that though man is mad, though his flesh slowly rots, though he is myth and lies and fear and trembling, he is man alone in the jungle yet free in his discovery that he can at last relent his being.
He is silhouetted on a mountain top against a darkening sky, turning and dancing in his aloneness. Lonely on that mountain top; but worse, his inner soul grasps his aloneness, the space he fills where nothing enters in, where nothing else resides. He feels it creeping under his skin as he faces death.
The ancient Jews believed in what they call basheet, that in modern times seems to have been reduced to bershet. In the Jewish community today, it is defined as something that was meant to be. But the ancients thought of it differently. They believed that there are only so many spirits waiting to be processed, so to speak. There are two thoughts: one holds that each male spirit was paired with a female spirit prior to gaining flesh. The other holds that one spirit was split in two, one female and the other male. They belong to each other and are only parted if one or both do something against God’s will. This a comforting thought in that it relieves one from the torturous realization that one is forever “an aloneness.” And to the thoughtful couple, as he enters her, they become one in flesh and in spirit. Was it their way of overcoming their “aloneness?”
Dancing in the Jungle is a metaphor for the release of my personal madness, the madness of hoping to escape my inevitable death, of not confronting it, and of the thought of my flesh rotting and with it my mind’s eye closing …forever.
But in the interim I shall continue to wage a battle with my pen, a battle to keep the traditions and values of America alive for those who follow me. I will try to render man’s madness a will to survive the onslaught of progressive ideology. For it is just another myth, a myth that captivates the unwary, that seduces man into believing that he is beyond helping himself, that he is stupid and common and impotent, and that, finally, the elitist, the statist, and the progressive scholar shall govern his life.
The statist as well as the liberal progressive scholar despises me. For I have found my way. I am at peace with it, and I am, at long last, Dancing in the Jungle.
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