The Attempt

The school is closed on this early Sunday morning. The imposing shapes of the administration buildings stand silent in the background, and just a vague sense of silenced authority finds its way to the parking lot. On this weekend, as with all weekends, there are no cars in the lot, and the recently paved black asphalt is the perfect floor for an education without curriculum and standardization. This is the self-created flat-land of trial and error. The place where there is only will and peer pressure and broken bones and the decision to try it again.

Two dozen teenagers are gathered on the periphery of the asphalt, close to the sidewalk that wraps around it like a thick barrier. They stand there, patient and attentive, but with their hands on their own skateboards, ready in an instant to step into the sacred space.

In the center of the lot are metal rails and obstacles meant to be jumped onto or over, or coasted against. They have brought them here, carried in backpacks and bicycles, easily assembled and built for the moment. These are self-imposed obstacles, and they’re here to be used. To hit, to land, to wail against.

In the center is a young man. His slim-fitting black pants do nothing to prevent him from attempting another trick. He has tried it over and over, weekend after weekend. Sometimes he gets it. Sometimes he pushes himself with his right leg and rolls over the asphalt gaining speed until he is just a few feet from the metal bar. Then he puts a little more weight on the back tail of the board and uses his right foot to push the wooden board up just a little higher. Sometimes he gets it. Sometimes he makes it to the rail and then falls off. Sometimes he makes it to the rail and grinds the bottom of his board against it till it ends. Sometimes he even lands on the ground with both feet on the board. Sometimes he falls off halfway through. After all the attempts, he has still not got it quite right, not enough to be consistent. So he tries it again.

His loose black T-shirt billows with the force of the wind. This is the moment. The gathered on-lookers watch him, and though he has made it to the rail, nearly to the end, he looses his balance. His arms are still out to the sides for balance, his right foot tilts awkwardly on the board, just about to fall off the platform completely. His right foot is bent and raised slightly towards his chest. He knows what’s coming, and he smiles.

The trick has failed. There will be a fall, he will have to roll as he always does and duck his head, and just as he feels his entire body shifting with gravity, he smiles. Another attempt that has failed. But after the fall, he will try again. There will be a line of guys, they’ll attempt the same trick. And he’ll be standing there, watching them, as they watch him now. As he waits for another turn, he’ll watch their footing, the speed with which they approach the rail, the timing and pressure on the nose of the board. He’ll watch it all, looking for another subtle movement to use and push him along. It’s balance, timing. Above all, it is will. There is so much to remember and execute, he has to do it within seconds. If they are watching him from the sidelines, they’re learning from his mistake, just as he learns from them. He smiles. It was a good attempt, another jump into the unknown, taking all the knowledge he could remember and use. And though he jumped, though he ground the wheels for a few feet, it just wasn’t right. When he falls, the sun will still be shining. The clouds will still be scattered. He will be one jump wiser. If he can just remember it all, he can try it again.

For the brief moment, he is suspended, not quite the victor, not quite the fallen. He knows his mistake. He smiles and waits for the crash.

Brian David Mitchell

In this realm of the human. In this society we understand filled with cars, TV, politicians, ads, churches, movies, restaurants, laws…in this realm, in this American culture, there are shared symbols. Each single person will look at the same advertisement (or a thousand other things) in a different way based on their own upbringing, knowledge, memories, etc., but there is a basic shared language that exists between the bulk of the population. The shared collective symbols of right and wrong and beauty and ugly and funny and colors and laws is what allows millions of people to interact with each other through language and action. We can look around and see people behaving in generally the same way as we do, this we consider “sane.” Millions of people in America share the same “symbolic order.” The symbolic order are the words we use to explain our human experience. Words to describe our emotions, to describe our experience, words to describe our actions and understanding of events. Because of a general consensus that there is a God in the sky that created life on earth, because a majority of people share this “symbolic order,” (they use words like god, heaven, hell, creation, bible, etc) they all consider themselves normal and sane.

When there is a disconnect, when a minority of people (or perhaps one person) has a symbolic order (a collection of words used to explain their experience, etc) that does not fit within the larger symbolic order, there is conflict. These people are considered “insane.” They understand and explain the world with different words.

Brian David Mitchell believes he is a man of god. He was a street preacher in Utah in early 2000. Many people would have regarded him as a semi-delusional zealot who believes he can hear God. Many people pray to god. They talk to him, some think they hear answers, all of this is considered sane by the majority of the American public. But when a man does nothing but stand on the street and preach and shout and lecture to the passers-by about the word of God and Jesus, the majority, even the church going people, think that the mind has slipped.

Brian David Mitchell had constructed a world around himself, as we all do, to explain his existence. In his world, God speaks to him, God commands him. In his world, his symbolic system, men may have more than one wife. Men may do what they want with their women as long as they are married. Within his symbolic order, he believed that people must be humbled. They must experience the low-human state so they can one day experience a higher one.

There was one family that did not believe he was completely insane. The Smart family of Utah hired him to help repair their roof. He worked at their house for five hours one day. One night, he cut a hole in their screen, broke into their home and kidnapped Elizabeth Smart, the 14 year old from her bed in the middle of the night. He took her to the woods. His wife gave Elizabeth a robe and told her change to change into it. A small ceremony was performed and Brian David Mitchell proclaimed Elizabeth as his wife, he raped her afterwards, as he would many times afterwards. When his first wife complained that he was having sex with Elizabeth too often, he began to rotate between them. Elizabeth was found nearly a year later. "Anything I showed resistance or hesitation to, he would turn to me and say, 'The Lord has commanded you to do this. You have to experience the lowest form of humanity to experience the highest.”

Brian David Mitchell and his first wife are in police custody. They are both declared mentally unfit to stand trial. It is Mitchell’s explanation that the court sees as unstable. Although many people in this country pray, when God is used as a reason to commit a crime (actions the collective accepts as “wrong”) the general consensus of the explanation is “insanity.” This explanation is not shared in the symbolic order of the larger society.

The writer of a particular article about the Elizabeth Smart case used words like “horrific and sick” to describe Brian David Mitchell. This is the conflict. One man believes he is doing what God wants him to do. He is humbling a young woman so that one day she can reach a higher state. This is what he actually believes. This is how he actually understands the world. The police, the criminal justice system, her parents, neighbors, journalists, the Americana public see this act as the raping of a young girl by a crazy zealot. One deed is thought of as righteous, the same deed is seen by others as evil. Both are words used to describe an action.

Even in custody and in court, Brian David Mitchell continuously sang hymns to himself until he was removed from the courtroom. Perhaps the world around him seemed crazy, full of evil men who had no contact with god. Perhaps he sang to remind himself that he was the one with the truth. He was the one with God on his side. He had to sing to protect his world. He sang to protect his symbolic order, the world he had built for himself, the only world that still had a place for him.

Intentions

The Rabbi looks down upon his followers and says:
“You must build a wall. With this wall that you build, you will separate your altruistic intentions from your selfish intentions, your selfless transcendent center that yearns for God will thus be separated from your ego based desires that only yearn for pleasure and fame and power and sex. By building this wall, you will begin on the path.”
I look around myself, at the wide desert that surrounds my little city of dreams, and I can plainly see that the construction of such a wall is impossible, such as it has been described. For the desert hides its depths, and in its depths there are caves through which the masked inhabitants travel, and there are deep secret rivers full of forgotten beasts, and there are great mythic birds that fly overhead in translucent silence, and there is a heavy burning rain that comes down from the skies every so often, and carries with it news from other lands, and there is an ever evolving sickness that travels through the open mouths of all of those that talk, and finds its way into all those that listen, and there are sounds that no wall can stop, screams from distant places and distant times, anguished screams that still yearn to be heard.
Far from the city, the ancient walled city within which the Rabbi speaks, there are people being killed, people being tortured, people being banished, people being thrown away like yesterday’s garbage, pushed away to find their misbegotten lives among the refuse of a thousand bloody wars. Can it then be said that the city is safe from this, as long as the pain and the screams and the tears and deep lakes of blood don’t touch the city walls? Does the Rabbi not know that the quest begins here, from the heart of the city, but it extends far beyond its gates? If the men that kill and torture come from the streets of this protected city, is the city then safe from their guilt? Are the city’s own intentions not corporealized in the sound wrenching missiles that tear through hot air and mud wall and fleshy membranes? Maybe the Rabbi does not know of this. Maybe he is simply quiet and blind, aloof from the madness around him, centered on the true God above. But if he is, then can he not be blamed for his own blindness? Is it not a self imposed exile that ultimately betrays his own stated intentions?
Why has he chosen to remain quiet in the face of so many atrocities? Why has he chosen to remain ignorant of the pain that travels in bits of dust through storms of pebbles and sand? Are these the altruistic intentions that remain hidden within the city walls? Or are these the other intentions, the ones that have managed to walk past the checkpoints, past the interrogations, past the security police, past the careful eye of the guards, and they have penetrated deep into the heart of the city, ready to unleash chaos with a single flicker of a switch?
I am that I am. I am One. There is no Other. I am the Rabbi. I am the soldier. I am the killer. I am the bomb. I am the baby blown to little red bits.
How can we then build this wall around our inner city, when we can’t truly distinguish the good from the bad, the true from the false, the right from the wrong, the image from the real?
Within each step of my strange robot, the fleshy machine that I currently ride into extinction, lie a million electrical accidents, free in their randomness, wild in their flight. They flash like little lost torch lights in the middle of the desert night. Some of them, in their wild run through my body that is a world, may in fact look up to heaven. Most of them still stare into the bloody heart of the Void, and, as they stare, they yearn for power, they cry for revenge. They are all enmeshed, like spider webs around other spider webs, like the pages that you may read on a network of light, pages like this one, that make no sense in themselves and don’t even have the intention of clear communication. They swirl and they crash, they come to bursting bubbles of orgasmic supernovas and then sink into themselves to become eternal black holes.
Above all, they don't reveal themselves easily. They may look friendly and hide a bomb beneath their coat. They may look righteous but pull out a boy’s fingernails when the lights are down, and the walls are thick.
As above, so below.
As below, so above.
And if they hide from me, these strange wild intentions that roam within the electrical network that makes my fingers move across this keyboard, they will certainly hide in the endless desert of deeply entrenched resentment and hatred. And if they manage to get past a hundred checkpoints, and a thousand vigilant eyes, they will surely get past mine, my single pair of eyes which fall asleep recurrently and only come to a clear place of attention but a few times per day.
To start by building this wall, then, is a path to certain disaster. Or maybe just a path to blindness. The blindness that is willful, the blindness of the eye that can see but can’t rise above the very wall which its own hands have built.
We start from where we are. As evil as our intentions may currently be, they are the only ones we have.