More Thoughts on Faustian Questions

To go along with what I just posted about the afterlife, here are a few more thoughts generated by my viewing of "The Damnation of Faust" this afternoon at the movie theatre. An aside: nothing is more civilized than going to an opera broadcast with friends, a bar of decadent dark chocolate, some prosciutto sandwiches and a thermos of home-made mulled wine, all enjoyed in the obscurity of one's movie seat without disturbing anyone around you. But nothing is more annoying than people who talk nonstop during such a broadcast, displaying the bad habits they've developed in front of their TV sets at home. We put the kibosh on that when it popped up in our immediate vicinity, but continued to be disturbed by folks farther away yammering on and on. Augh!

One of the great themes of the Faustian drama is, of course, Faust's restless boredom with all that ordinary life has to offer, his demand for omniscience, omnipotence, eternal youth. There are many stories that reiterate this theme, from the fairytale of "The Fisherman and his Wife," one of the rare instances in which it is a woman who wants to be God, to John Adams' new opera "Dr. Atomic," already mentioned in a previous post, in which the "man who would be God" is Robert Oppenheimer.

Hand in hand with the impossible demand for unlimited power and personal immortality goes the (usually male) impossible demand for the perfect, pure partner. As soon as the love object has been sexually enjoyed and thus polluted, or displays any normal human failings, it (usually she) is summarily jettisoned. In the same essay I quoted in my previous post, I explored this dynamic as acted out by the 9/11 hijackers:

"[The] Islamic notion of paradise, somewhat less ethereal than the Christian one and geared to satisfy the imaginations of hyper-patriarchal males, is a magnet for the terroristically inclined. In a September article in the online Asia Times, Arif Jamal, an expert on jihad or Islamic holy war, points out the incentives the Koran offers to men willing to be mujihadeen (holy warriors):
"'The mujahideen [are] assured of entering Paradise before the first drop of their blood [falls] to earth... The martyrs are promised 72 houris [each] in Paradise. These houris [perpetual virgins, black-eyed and nubile] are more beautiful than all the beauties of the world combined. I have studied more than 600 wills of mujahideen... There is hardly any will that escapes this concept. All the mujahideen have mentioned the houris as an important incentive for waging jihad. The Paradise with houris is the prime objective of these mujahideen... they refuse to get married because they want to get married in Paradise.'

"In his final instructions to them, apparent September 11 hijacker-in-chief Mohammed Atta reassured his fellow fanatics, 'You should feel complete tranquillity, because the time between you and your marriage in heaven is very short.' When Palestinians commit a suicide bombing in Israel, their deaths are announced in Palestinian newspapers as weddings: 'The Wedding of the Martyr Ali Khadr Al-Yassini to the Black-Eyed in Eternal Paradise.' (NY Times Sunday Magazine 10/28/01, "What Makes a Suicide Bomber?" p. 51.)

"But these young men aren't committing murder-suicide simply to get sex. Certainly not sex as we know it. The 72 houris are part of a whole package promised to each [male] martyr, which includes guaranteed ever-lasting heaven, no pain, no death, no judgement day. The most important thing about the houris is that they are perpetual virgins. Flesh-and-blood women can never aspire to such purity: they are considered innately evil and seductive, permanently sullied by their menstrual bleeding and even more defiled and devalued once they have been sexually "used." By contrast, a man can have as much contact as he wants with a houri without being contaminated by the filth of mortal femaleness.

"It all hangs together: an obsession with impossible purity, hatred and fear of real women, of the dirt and imperfection of real life, even of one's own physicality, one's own body. Mohammed Atta's last will and testament stipulates that no woman be allowed to mourn him, attend his funeral or even go near his grave. He disdained his own body so much that he stipulated that the man who was to wash his genitals after his death wear gloves, so his impure sexual parts would theoretically remain untouched.

"But let's not kid ourselves that this thought complex is the exclusive property of Islamic fundamentalists. Consider orthodox Judaism, which demands that women cleanse themselves of their menstrual pollution each month, and be banned from synagogue for twice as long after the birth of a female child as after the birth of a male. Any man who touches a menstruating woman has to ritually purify himself and still remains unclean until sunset that day; if he has sex with a menstruating woman, he is unclean for a week.

"As for Christianity, early "church father" Tertullian (ca. AD 200) makes it clear: '[W]oman [is] the obstacle to purity, the temptress, the enemy...her body is the gate of hell.' The all-male Catholic church hierarchy couldn't stand the thought that Mary, mother of Jesus, might be a normal, fleshly woman. So the New Testament mentions of Jesus's younger siblings are explained away, to make sure no-one dares think she actually had sex with her husband Joseph, and by the mid-19th century, she was declared a perpetual virgin. Just like the houris.

"It's a given in male-monotheist religions: the immaculate super-woman, a figment of the imagination, is set up as an impossible standard that "standard-issue" women can never meet. This fills women with despair and self-hatred, while men may cultivate exaggerated expectations, sure to be disappointed.

"I could write a Ph.D. dissertation about how male-monotheist cultures associate women with the body, the emotions, what is "lower," and "nature," while men are associated with the soul, the intellect, what is "higher," and "culture." (If you want to read a really good feminist book on this subject, try Susan Griffin's Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her, or Bram Dijkstra's Idols of Perversity.)

"Of course, all the dualistic nonsense about the desirability of a mind-body split and greater female fleshliness automatically conferring superiority on males is unadulterated baloney. Emotions and states of mind don't have a gender, and various quantities of all of them are parcelled out to every human being. As for the supposed ideals of pure mind and pure spirit, our marvelous brains are organs of the body, and if the rest of the body doesn't function, the brain is kaputt! Without the senses, we would be incapable of experiencing or learning anything. No emotion: no joy. About as appealing as the stereotypical heaven I heard about as a child.
I wonder why so many men, and not a few women, presume to despise the miracle of our one life on this earth, and spend the precious days allotted to them bewailing having been born at all, focused monomaniacally on the supposed flaws of embodied living. Mohammed Atta is certainly not alone in his self-hatred, misogyny and contempt for all the world. Variants of that attitude are thickly strewn throughout all male-monotheist belief systems. Atta's will warned people (by which term he meant men) not to be "distracted" by life, to fear God and not allow themselves to be "fooled" by the things life on earth offers. I am completely baffled by someone who thinks the emotion we should feel toward the force behind our creation is fear.

"Of course, this whole line is easier to swallow if you are someone with few perceived options in life, or are unhappy or dissatisfied with your position in the hierarchy you believe the world should embody. Which also links up to why I feel haunted by the afterlife, for the belief in an individual, personal, eternal ever-after, in either "heaven" or "hell," has been used for thousands of years by ruling classes of whatever ilk as a rationale for oppression and exploitation of the vast majority of people. If "the meek" -- read the poor, the disadvantaged, the put-upon -- really believe it will be "their turn" in some vague, glorious post-apocalyptic by-and-by, they are far more likely to resign themselves to the inferior, unpleasant place they occupy during what they think is just their present round on the planet. Karl Marx was wrong about a number of things, but he was right when he said that religion -- or at least the spectre of the afterlife -- is the opium of the people.

"Opium, carrot, and stick as well. A lot of folks believe we can't "be good" unless the carrot of "heaven" and the stick of "hell" are constantly dangled before our eyes. Now I don't think that we're all pre-programmed for saccharine-sweetness, but the vast majority of us can learn to view ourselves as okay individuals, treat others with basic courtesy and take responsibility for our own actions. As one clever T-shirt saying has it, "No child is born a bigot": instead, we absorb the plupart of our problematic thought patterns from our environment. I'll tell you what believing I have only one go-around does for me. It has helped me go from being a type A with a vengeance to an A minus who takes time to appreciate the world around me every day and is moving toward acting out of understanding and joy rather than anger and despair. For some reason, a lot of folks think that if we allow ourselves to accept that we have just one life, we'll drown ourselves in heedless hedonism. Instead, that acceptance motivates me to try to be my best self, to want to make right what I've done wrong, make amends for my mistakes, and do all this with some consistency and promptitude. I still drop the ball quite regularly, but because I can draw strength and pleasure from my connection to everything around me, I stay pretty much on course. "

Needless to say, these will not be my last words on this subject! Stay tuned!