Endless cars on the train track

2004-05-17, 3:43 p.m.

It seems to me that most people are bound to the idea that their specific view of the world, driven by emotions, perceptions, etc. are static and unchanging. Religion is a prime example for unquestioning devotion (after all, it�s a sin to steer away from your chosen religion, with eternal damnation as the penalty for your transgression). On some Sundays I drive by the church down the street from me at around eleven o�clock to watch the people leaving. I see men and women gathered together, discussing the sermon while the kids run around, trying their best to satiate their need for physical exertion after two hours of sitting still. I crane my neck as though I were witnessing a head on collision involving a 1978 Toyota Corolla and a gasoline truck; but I am really looking at balding white men in navy blue blazers, and middle aged women with crimped hair wearing flower print dresses.

I must have a fascination with the church goers who ritualistically sacrifice their Sunday mornings for a ceremonial gathering of Christian brethren, because I find myself drawn to the motives behind going to church weekly. I do not look down on devout Christians with a cynical eye, rather I am sometimes bitten with jealousy for the sense of community they must feel in their particular church populace. I never really felt �community�, because I was never taught about what it meant outside of immediate family. I know there is the inescapable kitsch that runs deep in the veins of �community�, but as Kundera points out, there is nobody superhuman enough to escape it.

Here I am, as 19 year old who was born in Virginia, amongst raging fires of racism and perilous mountains filled with rattlesnakes and a few remaining wild cats. When I turned three, we moved into Hayward, where I fell asleep to gunshots and ambulance sirens, and nobody was to be trusted outside of the modestly sized bounds of our apartment complex. Then, when I was five, we moved to the secluded town of Sebastopol, a return to the country life on Occidental Road. But it was just a different form of being extradited from community; our house was surrounded by apple trees (a voracious crop which covered the countryside since the early 1900�s), Eucalyptus groves (a poorly conceived solution to the pest problem that resulted from apple trees), and an even more voracious crop which spread like Necrotizing Fasciitis (that lovely term for a flesh eating bacteria) across the hills. Grapes.

Amongst these lands of bigotry, violence, and viral infection, I lacked that sense of community that my Christian friends must understand so well. What made my separation from that kitsch word even greater was that my parents never force fed me the religious beliefs that are normally instilled in the young mind by their parents. My father was a devout Catholic, being the product of German immigrants that had settled in the vast community of Brooklyn; but he had become sick of church in much the same fashion that a bulimic becomes sick of their dinner; he expelled religion years before I was born. My mother seemed to never taken any interest in religion what so ever, so as some would say, I was �shit out of luck� in the ways of the Lord.

I take a stand here and say this was an invitation by my parents to become an independent thinker. I was allowed to pursue religion if I wished, they would have happily driven me to and from church, but what did this gift of free thought give me? Once I established that religion was just an easy answer to the plethora of questions that life evoked, I became a minority in a world where a staggering 90% of people are religious.

I could have easily found some trend to follow, and I would have found community, no matter how plastic and superficial it may be. I have not found myself in that category yet, aside from some inevitable human collaborations, like schoolyard taunting, or certain unavoidable music tastes which almost nobody escapes (Michael Jackson was my favorite singer until I was thirteen).

Recently I have started studying the infinitely dense worlds of East Asia, in particular I have become infatuated with the fringes of Japanese culture. About a month ago I watched some films by Kurasowa and other iconic Japanese directors. I remember one film that was made during the fading twilight of black and white film Noire, and it had one scene that burned through my mind like napalm in the jungles of Vietnam. In this particular scene the cop chases the killer through a field of wildflowers, where the cop finally trips the killer up and they both fall over gasping for air from the lengthy chase. The killer then looks up and sees some long stemmed daisies swaying in the glaring sun, and he is gripped with anguish as he begins wailing and flailing about on the ground. Of course to him, his anguish comes from the finality of his capture, but I saw the director conveying something else to the audience, and that is that everything is so fleeting, and we too will wail when we see that fleeting beauty, but the realization will only come when we are too exhausted from living.

Friends of mine say this is a sad way to look at such a scene, but I derive great joy from that idea of fleeting beauty, and also that ideas themselves are fleeting. Contrary to the Sunday church attendees that I referred to earlier, there is no solid ground to make a moral stand, and there is no single vantage point at which to view life. I can�t see living my entire life in service to God, or any other higher being, because I am in a constant shift of my mental state. In my head there is a train that stretches across the dusty horizon, with innumerable cars that carry new opinions about the world, all of them are brought to me by various sources, my parents, friends, teachers, or by numerous cultures. So I remain a nineteen year old who does not feel attached to any community, at this point in my life anyway. I also have depression, but to believe that either my depression or my lack of connectedness are here to stay, is a fatal error in judgment, nobody should claim they know the future.