Mausoleum Politics

It's odd what a struggle it is to handle money.

I have a house full of possessions that I find impossible to display, hard to dust and difficult to store with any confidence. In a life-time that spanned the last half of the 20th century, I often sought to inventory everything -- one is told you need that if insurance is going to pay after a theft. I was too busy living though. Cataloguing is a hobby, and not my favorite at that.

For me fortunately shopping was also something that never got done either. So the pace of accumulation has slowed, and the items to be stored has gotten slowly older and easier to cull.

There aren't that many photos. I hated the stage-y-ness of photo ops as a child and lacked the funds for a good camera when I got older. I was also pretty sure I would lose one if I had it -- distractible, caught up in the moment, and confident of an overly vivid memory.

I under-estimated the depredations of age. My memory, really, is in great shape but there's so much more to think about than I anticipated. The details of moments of happiness apparently are less significant to me than the deadlines and telephone numbers I need to remember in the present. The old details, and the colors in the views I tried to memorize -- they've failed me. I think they're still in there. There's a palpable current of pleasure when I close my eyes at night; night has the reruns and though I don't remember dreams very often, I can tell that mine are wonderful.

In short, I remember that I used to remember, but a young person's vivid views won't be back in detail unless I find a cheap Kodak of the moment somewhere, and that is increasingly unlikely. Sixty years of life is a long time; everything fades.

Which leaves the question of why everyone's house is so jam-packed with goods, under-used and overly dusty, a sad burden on the sense of a purposeful existence. Why is that?

My thought is that it's death we're all postponing and lack of significance that is wearing us down. Those possessions are hostages to fate. You'd think, as such we'd be relieved to be done with them, but we're not. Secretly we're planning to throw them to the hound Cerberus when he comes calling at last. Maybe my classic vinyl rock albums will placate him; maybe not.

On the political playing field, there's a related illusion, kind of a paperhanger's trick: If we can assemble a nation of mansions and goods, pave the earth from sea to sea with a chemical brew that shows our dominance and evicts the bugs and the viruses -- It is surely a facade but the illusion is that it's not. That what you build will protect you; and to build biggest of all is to be invulnerable.

To say this things is to realize how laughable they are. Problem is that we still act as if they are true. My secular friends are fond of asking what it IS with God (the Judaeo-Christian one, as traditionally understood) that He is so insistent on primacy in our lives. Why can't Art, or Family, or Achievement properly be primary? Why does God have to be first? What egoism is that?

When we show we can refrain from believing in illusions, then these cavils might make sense. God I think is perplexed at why we don't like the message He sent: He's a better God than the ones we make, and we always make them. It's what we do.

Don't believe me? Convince me that the McMansion, the photo albums and the electronified gadgets are chosen for rational reasons and I'll tell you you're ready to have no false gods. Till it's easy to give up these crutches, I'm in for the count with an old-fashioned God who identifies himself as the only reliable crutch, and then adjures me to walk without it in my hand.

Free-fall might just be the only right condition for a man.