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I should admit, at the outset, that I hail from a long line of preachers. I look upon this high-concept podium as a kind of pulpit. And in this august company, I'm overwhelmed with a sudden urge to testify: Can I hear a straight Amen from out there? Yes, thank you so much, Jesus, thank you.
I begin with a little text from the Holy Scripture: John 1:1. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God. And the Word was God." Because I am by trade a maker of fables, and because this always means telling of people's lust and greed and sweetness, telling their tendencies to fight wars in the names of Divinity and to usher their greatest loves into the messiest of all divorces, I choose today to try and save just one word. It lives sunk in a ready-made phrase, frosted upon many office doors. "The Humanities" is now a departmental subset of scholastical pursuit. But, within it, a shorter, harder, more luminous word—"Human." That term always sounds a little spurious for those of us qualified for Mensa but with too much class to actually join it. "Human," a sweaty, brief, naked word, and perhaps more beautiful for sounding naked.
Because I have so little time, and because I want to be remembered, useful, and yes, loved—I choose to press "human" free of the Humanities, clear back to an even earlier formulation. Back even before Christ falsely promised to take all guilt and beastliness unto himself, before Renaissance humanists sought to lift mankind through special pleading as creation's very crown—rational, artful, clarified, if mortal. We were then placed far above all other creatures of the earth.
But now, I say to you, we need new myths or ancient half-forgotten truths like this one: "You are an animal." True, you are an animal with a web page, but you're an animal. You're a mammal, which is, you know, kind of high up, but still, animal. You had a mother and a father animal; of that, science tells me, I can still be sure. And they were imperfect. And yet how they tried, or they so often told you so anyway. And sex between these creatures brought you here. Now, picture that deed. OK. Enough, right? One sentence can so sickeningly summon so much.
You've seen that barroom lithograph of the dogs playing poker—the bulldog in a green visor, with cheating cards stuck in one paw under the table? Well, let's all stay humble. This is the American Çï¿ûÊÓƵ of Arts and Sciences for and by Animals. That makes our achievement not less significant. No, more. Apt as we are to come into heat once a month, rigged with the willingness to kill to protect our suburban lairs and temples—this just makes our inroads into understanding far more miraculous, my beasty brothers and sisters.
The Genome Project is the first half of our description. Now the metaphors can come. So half-angelic, we still stand here with our hairy backs and nicotine patches and the God-damn liposuction scars. You are an animal, which makes you both handsome and dangerous. And though you're sure that you're still smart, despite the latest losses of the car keys, you believe you were once maybe even beautiful. But, verily, I say unto you—you are still beautiful, you animal. You are very, very sexual. Still. And you are coming to my hotel room at 2:00 a.m. I hear you laugh, and so I know you are emotional. You are, therefore—however much you may wish to be fully, cleanly logical—really only about as rational as a young mountain goat at rut. You can't help it. In the mind/body split, the mind is, well, a passenger. And because you are emotional, there are no algebraic right answers in the back of the book of you. Aesop often embarrasses farmyard beasts by subjecting them to vain, comic, human motivation. And inversely, we are often shocked by outbreaks of our own raw creatureliness. We go to sign a contract and out from under our white cuff, a dark hoof appears. Surely our very amnesia about our past in the natural world has helped make us its most appalling houseguest ever. The guest who not only doesn't make up his own bed, but soaks it in toxins.
And what are the other animals going to do about it? Write Letters to the Editor? If modern medicine permits us to now live past the age of 110, surely art and philosophy must finally tell us why we should want to. We'll need explainers who understand that emotion, unlike water, will not always flow downhill. Those of us who chart mere emotion, its course and torrents, are always starting over. The heart of darkness is a black hole where even time collapses. I could not describe Grief for you as I might the coloring and cry of all pileated woodpeckers in the Northeastern United States. (And I'll leave it to my friends in the mathematical community to calculate for us the chances of woodpeckers being mentioned in two talks tonight!)
I can't describe Grief, because every bird of that is a new bird. But, what do I know? I still dip pen in ink. My tools are yet medieval, creature-like, crushed berries pressed to reprocessed leaves. I try and chart the saga of the emotions of our age. And oh, does it not seem to you, fellow members of my modern herd in church, that the more ways that we invent to instantly communicate, the less we really have to say? Haven't we all become our own harried secretaries and zookeepers? We're our own employees whose birthdays, if we ever knew them, we've forgotten. Don't we really let our emotions go only when we've paid admission to something else? Aren't we likely to impeach any hyperalive alpha animal that reminds us that we are, if in a more grudging way, also continually beasts, magnificent beasts?
W. B. Yeats in his prayer for his daughter asks: "How but in custom and ceremony are innocence and beauty born?" Art somehow still reconciles the opposites that form our natures—part of us forever abstract angel of the air, part of us locked, permanently sensate, on all fours. Because we wear fur, there is no overarching syllogism. Something must always be left out. Otherwise we would not be mortal. Someone has pronounced His absence the unknowable. Other people call him He Whose Name Must Not Be Called.
We workers in the vineyard of thought risk becoming at times too much the subject of the grey—of our own magnificently trained, surprisingly evolved grey matter. Goethe—half artist, half scientist, half God, yes, half-wrote: "Colors are the deeds and sufferings of light." On the page our achievements are hard-won; off the page there's little logic past the luminous illogic of the heart. And what's left, mere humans that we are, is just work and work. The love by which we say we live is still unprovable as physiological reality. Today the Holy Land does not look holy. The soul, that ectoplasmic envelope, has no more density than, say, a single palpating metaphor. Our long howl becomes at times a song of such sweetness. We know we must die, but we've had no training at all. And, advanced, improved, brilliant creatures, what will make us happier? This, I know. There is a story in all that. Here endeth the lesson, my fellow, sexy, mortal animal. You are human. In the split between the Sciences and the Humanities, we are all a little shaggy. Do you mind? World without end. Amen.