In Ink and Blood

Dear Eugene,

“If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood.”  Peter Handke, the latest Nobel Prize laureate in literature, said that.

I asked Peter, What's worse, to lose your storytellers and childhood, or to be told your story isn't real or right and your childhood didn't exist?

I'd love to believe the Nobel Committee has committed a stroke of genius in choosing Mr Handke, a genocide denier, a way to smoke out the hypocrisy in all of us, to force on the world the question: Can we celebrate gunpowder for its pure dynamism?  (Can anything be good without being finally morally good or put into morally good use?)

Words are the worst weapon: they create and re-create, fabricate and obliterate.  We are what we remember, in ink and blood, in zeros and ones.

Yet after years of telling ourselves "What is good/right to you might likely be bad/wrong to me" and arguing this as our default moral position (which actually assumes itself to be right and good to everybody), we are in a bind.  When relationships break down, as they often and always (we didn't forget about you, Death) do, we agree to disagree, we call our arguments off as if to ignore them is to settle them.  Evasion works insofar as we remain evasive.

Last night a dinner guest shared with me how when she first joined a chat group with her friends in China they've promised each other to never talk about politics and how it has since all changed with what's happening in Hong Kong.  Now there's nothing but politics.  Now there's no more ignoring our ignorance of each other, no more dancing around the contours of our soul without venturing into the bloody heartland.

For centuries, the "moral argument," that objective morality suggests the existence of God, has been, among many others, the most convincing.  It's most convincing for being most incisive and answerable to our hearts' yearning.  We either worship a perfectly good God or we risk relying on gunpowder of some sort, even if only sometimes, with civility somewhat.  We can tone down our rhetoric if there's still a button to our decency to fumble for.

"He who dies with the most toys wins," if this is the catechism of our civilization, how can we not demand to speak the last word or puke out the last laugh and remain standing lastly?  If this life is about either winning or losing, being either laureate or laundromat, who's to say we aren't all making claims to be the first and the last Word, the Alpha and the Omega?

Yours, Alex