Bonne Anniversaire a Catherine Deneuve

Catherine Deneuve is 68 today. Loved her then. Love her now.

Credo (a work in progress, perhaps)

Let’s start with the easy stuff: what I do not believe. I don’t believe in God the Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and Earth, or in his Son Jesus Christ, or in the Holy Spirit. I don’t believe that a god or gods who require blood sacrifice—human, animal, or god-man—could possibly fit my concept of good, not if those gods are all-powerful and all-knowing. The idea that perfect justice requires the blood of the innocent is just that—an idea—and a not very kind one. That the innocent do suffer is a matter of reality—one that must be accepted, surely, but as a human being I accept such a reality with gravity, rather than exultation. A good man, much less a god, would fight to save the innocent from a wrongful death. Nature, which is neither entirely human nor at all divine, sometimes requires the death of an innocent, sometimes thousands of innocents, but it does so indifferently, not to fulfill some end apart from the workings of its laws. Gravity sometimes kills, but it does not sacrifice, nor does it require a sacrifice. A god who eats, murders, threatens to kill, or sacrifices his son—whether only begotten or one of a litter—or daughter or children is nobody I care to know, much less honor and worship.

I don’t believe in a life after death. It might exist—but it’s one of those things that can be neither proved nor disproved. I have no scientific basis for this disbelief, which emerges mainly from the fact that I have no feeling for the idea itself, which is more repugnant than alluring for me. The idea of living an eternal life is no more seductive to me than watching an everlasting episode of Seinfeld. If either idea tickles your fancy, you are welcome to your belief. From an existential standpoint—as a being who currently lives and breathes—my temporariness is indeed a sobering thought: there are movies I will never see, books I will never read, cities I will never visit, people I will never laugh with. But then there are already myriad experiences and opportunities I have missed out on—having a dodo bird for a pet, for instance, or visiting Gertrude Stein in Paris, or fucking Alexander the Great. I do not regret not having had a life (that I know of) before my life anymore than I fear not having one (that I know of) after my life. My existence appears to be not only temporary but finite as well—there are millions of my contemporaries on Earth whose names I will never hear. Such knowledge reminds me of my smallness in the universe, but it does not fill me with regret—or with longing for such things to be different from what they really are.

I am an idealist who accepts reality. I try to imbue my life with meaning, but I am not searching for the meaning of life. My spirituality involves a deep connection (or at least a grasping for such a connection) with things—physical, homely things, without halos—their smells, their textures, their colors, their sweetness or saltiness, their heat, the layered music of the sounds that rise from them. I love the senses—these are my miracles, the only ones that strike me with wonder and a sense of the sublime.  Even pain—assuming you might ask me about pain: pain, by its very definition unpleasant, is a part of life and a part of reality. Still, uncongenial as it is, pain warns, it pulls us into ourselves, it deepens our awareness of who we are, it makes the world vivid, and arguably it makes the sweetness of health and life even sweeter. So, yes, pain has my guarded and begrudged respect, as well.

I don’t believe in a god or gods who exist apart from the material universe. Like the stoics I believe that all beings are material or bodily beings. What the stoics called fate, I would call natural laws, which, I believe, animate persons, magnets, geisers, satellites, comets, lava, dreams, ecstasy, history, economics, breezes, tornadoes, bubbles, avalanches, waves, weather, clouds, emotions, passions, births, sexualities, deaths, decay, humor, intelligence, consciousness, war, love, valor, compassion, and so on. What moves us, moves us all, is the synthesis of natural laws bearing down on us or lifting us up or pushing us forward or blocking our ways. If anything has existed forever, it is, I imagine, the universe—in all its material vastness, its embrace of both chaos and order (with neither ever having a firm stay on the other), its fascinating and perplexing laws, its illusions too (illusion being only a misperception—or misinterpretation—of the ways things really are), its seemingly infinite extensions into both the cosmic and the molecular, its indifference to us and to our yearning to connect with it on some grand, true, but probably entirely impossible level. The universe knows less of the divine than we do, who first thought up the idea to appease our vanity and our itchy and constantly ill-fitting consciousness.

FoxNewsworthy

If the talk-show host interviewing you looks not only more hip but also more in touch with reality and more competent in his or her line of work than you, you might be a tea-party candidate.

If you can't explain how highways will be built, armies furnished, fires put out, and flood victims rescued with your economic policies in place, you might be a tea-party candidate.

If you think a minimum wage is the government overstepping itself but restrictions on who can marry whom is constitutional, you might be a tea-party candidate.

If you think the Bill of Rights and the Supreme Court exist to protect the rights of the majority and promote the tenets of the nation's most popular religion, most of whose adherents can not get along with each other, you might be a tea-party candidate.

If you think that health care and education are luxuries for the wealthy, you might be a tea-party candidate.

If you applaud the deaths of prisoners who may or may not be guilty and the drawn-out suffering of poor people who cannot afford health care, but then you can cry real tears over little white children having to take a long bus ride to school, you might be a tea-party candidate.

If you sit back and let your constituents boo an American soldier stationed in hostile territory because he has asked a question about something he believes in but you and your kind do not, you might be a tea-party candidate.

If you are "not a racist" BUT never complained about the excessive powers of the Presidency until Barack Obama's candidacy, you might be a tea-party candidate.

If the nicest thing your opponents can say about you is that you look good on camera and "probably" have the nation's best interests at heart, you might be a tea-party candidate.

If you think a man with a net worth of $39 billion is a socialist and a man on his third wife, after he cheated on the first two, is a defender of marriage, you might be a tea-party candidate.

If you think fascists tax the super-rich and oppose bullying, you might be a tea-party candidate. 

If you think the Boston Tea Party was mainly a protest against the very idea of government, you might be a tea-party candidate.