I guess that started when I turned down Reg's offer to sell me his boat. Reg is ... a character, to put it too mildly. Short, stocky guy with bristly dark hair and a permanent frown. The situation was, he'd bought this boat a while back, but had to borrow to get it and now his wife was on his case about it. He'd said as much, in fact.
So -- "There you go, Tommy," he says at the time. "Just what you wanted, right? Zip across the water any time you like. Right?"
"Sorry Reg," I say, "can't afford it."
See, backing up a bit, Reg was one of the "fundies" in the utopianist community, meaning "fundamentalist", riffing on the religious variety obviously. It meant, among other things, that he felt anybody could just waltz into Utopia any time they felt like it, and leave too, if they felt like it (but then, why would they?). So the boat was a kind of expression of his beliefs -- but, like the rest of the fundies, it just so happened that he never felt like it. Funny, no?
The fundies themselves didn't like the term, naturally, but the point was that they had a kind of simple or literal notion of what Utopia meant, that it was a place or a community just like any other place, only better -- perfectly better, for many. Whereas for me, and the other utopianists, it was a place alright, but not like any other, in that you could expect to just walk into it. This was complicated, and there were a number of competing explanations why that was so -- for example, it would alter you in some way, maybe consume you in your impure state, or you'd encounter a barrier, maybe an invisible one, or a mental one, and so on. For my part, I was never committed to any of those notions, I was just sure, instinctively, that actually crossing the water and docking at Utopia wasn't in the cards.
So anyway, the episode with Reg's boat -- it showed how something minor can snowball, into a community-wide kerfuffle. I mean, I thought it was funny that he'd bought a boat to make a point, and then never actually made it, and maybe I smiled. And Reg being Reg, he wasn't going to ignore the attitude.
"Yeah, I see," he goes. "Guess you're afraid. It's all right. I understand."
"Afraid?" I say. "Afraid of what?"
He just smiles, says "You know."
"No, don't think I do," I said. "I can't afford your boat, Reg. That's all there is to it."
He nods. "Keep telling yourself that, buddy," as he walks away.
Which pissed me off, as of course he intended, but instead of just forgetting about it, as I should have, I made a kind of joke about it to a few friends, and that got around. And then it turned out that Reg was also telling people about my turn-down, and how it showed what a chicken shit I was. So, though there's long been differences within the utopianist community, as there is in any, now those differences started to look like an open split.
And then that attracted attention from the larger community around us. A lot of people, you see, don't really get the interest in Utopia.
They're like my own wife, Moira. She used to think I was a bit obsessed, and sometimes she'd get on me about it. "You think their toilets are made of gold or something?" she's said. "You think it's the Emerald City?" And, "They die there too, you know. Just like us." Which was a point.
Other times, she'd just say why she wasn't that interested in it. "I wouldn't fit," she'd say. "I'm not the Utopia type." "So what's the Utopia type?" I'd ask, and she'd say, "Oh, you know, nobility and such. Graceful people. Higher qualities." I didn't think that was the problem, myself, and one of those times I said I thought she had it reversed -- you don't have to be special to be in Utopia, I said, being in Utopia makes you special. But I wasn't really that sure of that, and of course I knew there was a problem of some sort anyway. Whatever, it went nowhere with her.
Same thing with a lot of people, who were ordinarily just focused on more practical problems. But, when this split appeared, the whole topic of Utopia became more prominent, and then some people started to think it was detracting from our own community, reflected badly on it. That was what snowballed. I would get some fishy looks and some snark at meetings, but it affected my family more than me. Moira's hat shop in the Square lost customers, and Erin, the older of the two kids, got some verbal bullying at school. I mean, It was upsetting. Mostly people didn't say anything directly, but one time, for example, Moira told me about some woman asking her why she thought I was so obsessed -- her response was "I don't know, but he's not hurting anybody! Christ!"
That was about the strongest curse you could get from old-school Moira. But it related to what happened next. The hubbub had come to the attention of a new style preacher recently come to town, who was looking for publicity anyway, and I'm sure figured one way to get it was to start denouncing Utopia. This was one Reverend Antoninus Smith, who nobody called Tony, but some just "the Rev". Like Reg, he was another character -- rake-thin, pony-tailed, bouncy stride, face like a bird of prey. What he preached was apparently, according to folks who've been to his "meetings", some sort of mix of Christianity and Buddhism, with various other isms thrown in the hopper. Still traditionally religious, but "eclectic", as his supporters would say.
In any case, for the Rev, Utopia was an ideal foil, a God-send you might say. Babylon, the false Heaven, the Tower of Babel, etc., etc., --- these were the sorts of comparisons he tossed off in painting anyone at all interested in Utopia as members of some sort of deranged cult. Eventually it all culminated in a Town Hall meeting, believe it or not, which was supposed to feature a debate. There was no "resolution" as such, but there were Pro and Con Utopia sides, with the Rev leading the Con and me, of all people, leading the Pro.
I had serious misgivings from the start, and I thought at the time it was a big mistake, a mess. On my side, we tried to focus on the simple idea that an interest in an ideal society isn't crazy, and doesn't mean disrespect for one's own community. But that got drowned out in the din of the Rev's big words -- "eschaton", "immanentize", "transcendental", blah, blah, blah. As things turned out, it wasn't quite as bad as I'd feared -- I think our side gained a little sympathy, and theirs got a bit lost in the Rev's rhetoric. But still, after that, things just settled into knots of hardened opinion, unpleasant for both sides.
So imagine my surprise when one day the Rev himself accosted me in a Starbucks -- he wanted to talk! I guess, looking back at it, and to his credit, he could see that the general atmosphere wasn't good for the community as a whole, and of course I agreed. So, just the two of us, we picked the library for a neutral venue, and I got the librarian to let us in after hours one evening. We both wanted to keep it low key, and I didn't tell anyone else about it, not even Moira.
It was weird, yeah. We sat at one end of a long table next to the stacks, with only the yellow light from a low reading lamp. I had brought a six-pack of Coors, but I'll admit I was wary and more than a little suspicious, not knowing him at all. Anyway, we started talking.
I think he hoped he could make a convert of me because he started with my "fear", and how there was an answer for it -- he'd obviously heard of Reg's side of the split. His "answer" was that there's another world than this one, and that world saves us in a way that this one can't.
"You've got it wrong, Reverend," I say.
"Tony," he goes, "Just call me Tony." Couple of friends having a beer, in other words.
"Tony," I say. "You've got it wrong. I'm not afraid of Utopia or 'this world', by which, I'm guessing, you mean death. That's just Reg, and I don't know what he means or meant. But see, I think you're projecting, as the shrinks say. I think you fear death, and that's why you've invented this other world."
"Okay. Tom -- can I call you Tom?" I nod. "You have no fear of death, Tom --"
"Not what I said," I interrupted.
"No," he says. "So what do you fear?"
"Oh, lots of things. Spiders. Floods. Disappointing my parents, my kids --"
"Let us not talk falsely now," he goes. And that shut me up because I knew that line.
"Okay," I say. "You too, then." A little pause. "Do you fear God ... Tony?"
He nods. "Yeah," he says, "I do. But it's complicated."
He says that with a wry smile on his face, and that makes me smile. We're both silent for a moment.
Then I say, "So maybe I do fear Utopia. But like you say, it's complicated."
That was how it started. And once it was clear that neither of us was likely to convert the other, things got more interesting. The topic of hope came up, for example, and how that related to ordinary, everyday things, like family and work, but also to maybe deeper things, like worth, identity, even purpose. Even "meaning", whatever you take that to mean. It all had me thinking about things I hadn't thought much about, I'll admit, but I think it also got the Rev out of his ready-made religious answers.
We were two-thirds through the six-pack before things came back around to fear, in a different light. What led into that was the Rev -- or Tony -- bringing up the word "faith". I said I didn't know what that word really meant, even though I'd heard it often enough.
"Belief," he said. "It just means belief."
"Yeah, I get that. But it's not like a belief that this table is solid, is it?"
"No. It's not a belief based on phenomena."
"Based on what then?"
"A decision, I suppose. Ultimately. An accumulation of experience, too, life-experiences, but finally it comes down to a decision."
I was looking at his face as he said this, and I thought it looked troubled. "Like a kind of will to believe, hm? You ever worry that the will might fail?"
He looked right back, nodded slightly, and then said, "That's the fear, isn't it Tom? The real fear. My bet is, you feel it too."
And there he had me.
So, yeah, okay, maybe that was at least half the reason I didn't want to cross the water and walk up the streets of Utopia. What if they were just as cracked as the streets outside? Or what if all it amounted to was better pavement? That was, I realized, what I had against Reg and the like, that they didn't have -- or really that they just didn't admit to -- this fear.
We finished the beer and wound it up not long after that. But though the meeting was a small secret at first, we agreed it didn't need to be kept that way, which implied a certain degree of trust. Anyway, in the aftermath, the Rev's denunciations of Utopia weren't just toned down, they pretty much went away, replaced, so I heard, with a doctrine of tolerance, for the different ways people have of finding meaning (whatever they mean by that). Me, I never managed to convince Reg that his unused boat indicated he shared some kind of fear, but others on his side of the utopianist split came around to it, and the split gradually healed. As did the larger fault in the community, and the whole kerfuffle died away in a sort of anticlimax.
So we're mostly back where we were, including me and my family. My backyard is on the water, though, and Utopia still sits there on the far shore. I bought a telescope a while back. If you look through it you can see people there, walking on their shore, and they look like us. I've thought that maybe a bigger, better telescope would be able to see further, deeper, and then you would see the difference. But I haven't bothered to get one.
No comments:
Post a Comment