Budaeli

The best scene in Tom Robbin’s novel Another Roadside Attraction involves Tarzan’s attempt to get Jesus to stop reading the Torah and cut back on his ascetic adherence to spiritual thinking. While he failed, the most important part of the story involves the little angel sent by God to watch over Jesus (you’ll just need to read the book to know what I’m talking about).

During the conversation, Tarzan embarrasses Jesus by saying that the son of God is a lot like Pan.

Technically, Pan is the Greek god of nature. Above the waist, Pan looks like a normal man with curly black hair, but with horns. Below the waist he looks not unlike a goat, with cloven feet. He was invoked for fertility, and was often sporting a judicious erection. He love to play the flute, and even had the balls (boy did he!) to state that he was a better musician than Apollo, the god of music. Symbolically, Pan embodies the essence of man: half intellectual, half wild animal. Jesus was embarrassed because he wanted to live a spiritual life devoid of his carnal instincts.

I think the concept of Pan was created by people who wanted a way to personify the duality of being able to invent mathematics and build great buildings and write poetry and play music, while at the same time wanting to set things on fire, get into fights, and have wild amounts of sex. To be human is to do all of those.

And yet, we seem to want to go to one extreme or the other. Some of us want to think great thoughts, create great machines and great works of art. Others want none of that. I take that back: we think we’re one or the other, but do both anyway. It’s how Christian ministers can spread the fiery word of the Gospel, but still want to drive fast cars and bone the secretary. It’s how Shakespeare can write the beautiful verse…about a drunk hedonist who corrupts a future king. And it is the definition of Richard Feynman.

How are able to seamlessly integrate such disparate goals, celestial and earthly*, without much issue? Is there even a difference? Duality of anything, to me, seems like a gross simplification. Especially for philosophical constructs that we all accept without question. Take morality: there is no such thing as good or evil, but we’re taught it because it’s the easiest way for a child to understand the world without a wooly explanation, and to help us comprehend some of the more horrific acts we have committed. Yet, how do we tell what is done with bad intent? We’re the only creatures who seem to act upon selfish impulses beyond mere attempts at survival.

In Pan, we can visualize the marriage of the part of us which is very much a part of nature, and the part of us which wants to be more than that. In truth, it’s all the same. We’re all great horny musicians.

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*Completely off topic but worth sharing: some dude at Microsoft said in a podcast that the human mind is still at version 1.0. It was developed on the savannah of Africa and hasn’t changed much. We’re wired to fear creatures that look like the predators we used to have, to enjoy procreation in hopes of having enough offspring to continue, to crave foods high in sugar for the energy and to eat as much as possible because tomorrow may have less food, and to yearn for the company of other humans because we can better defend predators when in groups. Thousands of years later, everything we do is still defined by these rudimentary specifications. Think about that for a moment: you, with your stocks and your smartphones and your sneakers are still acting like you’re trying to survive against impossible odds in the wilderness of Africa.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 27th, 2008 at 9:57 pm and is filed under Essays.