Punk Rockers, Beached Whales and Other Expressions of the Meaning of Life

By Brian Elroy McKinley

In a basement nightclub the throbbing music and pulsating crowd of teenagers - hair dyed, faces painted and clothes ripped - filled the room with great life, great death. Beneath the black leather jackets and studded bracelets, beneath the screaming guitars and screaming singer's voice was the walking purgatory our society produces: kids trying to decipher between what is nonsense and what is valuable in the life they were given, kids seeking to be more fully alive by pointed their fingers, and the hair, at the crap they feel is being piled high upon their heads. I got the feeling that the girl with the largest, spikiest mohawk wore her hair that way to keep anyone from sliding one more yoke around her neck.
Standing on the ridge in Mesa Verde National Park, I could almost hear the high-pitched creaking of the yokes used to pull children and supplies behind the Anassasi Indians on their voyage away from the death of the desert, into the life of the Mesa Verde canyons. As I stood overlooking the ruins of thousand-year-old cliff dwellings, the images and sounds played like ghosts in my chest. The "old ones" came by the hundreds and thousands, seeking a more valuable life, a better home, a postponed death. For five hundred years, generation after generation of Anassasi built better cities in the safety of the giant cliffs and learned to harvest corn on top of the mesa. Instead of remaining in the meager life they once had in the open desert, they grabbed a hold of life with both hands and dragged themselves over rocks and sandstone to avoid becoming the waking purgatory they once were. Looking from the ruins, down the valley leading to the high New Mexico deserts, I could feel the struggle, the sacrifice, the uncertainty of the battle for life as the wind surged from the latent images of skin and blood on the rocks below, up into my nostrils and into my brain.
While in Budapest, Hungary, I watched as the crowds jammed around the makeshift booths in order to register to vote with the political party of their choice. My brain filled with awe when I considered these were the same streets that saw Soviet tanks run down other civilians trying to make their voices known. Laughter, then hush, a glance over a shoulder, a look at an obvious stranger, then laughter again, then silence as the whole group reads from a single registration sheet, then beaming pride as fingers grasp pen and scrawl name on document that only a year earlier would have represented treason, these people were rejecting the yoke of Stalin and signing up for life. In their voices was the uncertainty of what their new life would bring. There would be struggle. There would be sacrifice. But none of these fears stopped them. They were taking life by the neck and dragging themselves away from their walking purgatory, the quiet death that ruled their lives and drained their economy until abject need silenced the rhetoric and the regiments.
In economically bankrupt Haiti, I listened as up from the muddy doorstep of a thatched-roof, bamboo-woven house came angel voices and heart-beat drums. While walking down the steep path from one of Haiti's historical fortresses toward the town of Cap Haitian, I could hear the music start and stop. As the curved path, like the arc of the sun, brought into view the four children squatting in the mud, they straightened with a lurch and, pounding on wooden buckets with palms flat and determined, chanted with their high children's voices at my passing. Using the only tools they had, their God-given voices and inner rhythms, they serenaded me with the hope that my donation would ease their daily search for life. Some with pants the color of mud, some with just a shirt and some with only the skin in which they were born, these children laughed and sang and smiled in an ironic contradiction to the squalid purgatory in which they lived. They sought life - both in their artistic expression and in my gift. Using only muscle, wind and wood, these children grabbed at the very molecules of the air, forced them into patterns detectable by the membrane in my ears and set off a string of neural signals that screamed, like the punk rockers in that underground nightclub, for something more, for something beyond stagnation, for something beyond the empty life and even emptier death that is in their inheritance.
When faced with these impressions of humans striving to pull life from the murky inheritance of meaningless survival, my face contorts and my head wrenches as if I had been struck on the side of my skull with my own striving for complacency. My life has not been a struggle for meaning defined by continued metamorphosis but by mediocrity defended by carcinogenic might. I am a salmon caught in a whirlpool, swimming in circles, food for the bear. I am a whale, dead on the sand, having beached myself for fear of continued living. I am a fossil in stone, life-like in form, but with the tissue of my spirit replaced by sand. I am a hermit, content to see nothing more than the walls of my cave, fearful of interaction with other living creatures, dead to the rest of the world.
How, then, can I join the living? How can I purge my brain of the cancerous thought-cells that restrict my vision and fossilize the tissue of my soul? How can I drag my spirit out of the cave of darkness, the whirlpool of endless activity, the purposeful death from fear of living?
To say I can find the meaning of life and present it on a platter of words is to mock the millions of minds who have struggled with this same questions over the millenniums of human existence. I cannot offer a God's-eye view of life, nor can I claim to interpret accurately those writings ascribed to divine intervention. As one mind among the billions of minds that have used language to describe life, I cannot, for a moment, pretend to have access to more truth than any other mind or group of minds. I can, however, boldly state what I have experienced and what I have seen others experience.
From experience, I say life is experience, and yet, also from experience, I say it is more. Each new experience, each new friendship, acquaintance, situation brings new emotions and qualities to my existence. My mind is a conglomeration of all that has passed through my senses and into the neural-encoded memories from which I draw my thoughts, emotions and understanding. Through the experience of hearing sound patterns I learned to utilize those patterns to communicate. Through those same symbols, I was able to put mental handles on my inner reactions to stimulus. I could remember, conceptualize and communicate these inner happenings and connect them into patterns. Pattern upon pattern, each new experience gave me a framework on which to interpret, evaluate and incorporate new experiences into my being, adding to the overall meaning of my existence. Yet as I became enticed by the security of material wealth, I tended to stop exploring the world for new experiences and have concentrated on repeating, endlessly, those behaviors which grant me that security. My experiences have diminished, and, consequently, so has the excitement of living. Like pinching a hose, I have restricted the flow of new sustenance into the framework upon which my entire reality is based. To gain more life, therefore, it is necessary for me to gain more experience.
But experience, alone, is not an answer. It is merely a tool with which to build the framework of life. If I build a great building and do not use it, I have only made a monument to futility. Echoed throughout the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes are the words from a wealthy man who had bought all the goods the world had to offer, who had made love to hundreds of women, who had gained power beyond compare, who had sought out every experience that could add wisdom to his soul, and yet he called it all "vanity." He saw that it was good for humans to eat and work and enjoy themselves, but he saw that all these experiences, alone, were a waste of human existence. But when that experience and that existence was used for a purpose, he found the meaning of life that God intended.
For what purpose, then, should our experiences be used? The writer of Ecclesiastes said it was "to do good." Christ said it was to "love your neighbor as yourself, and to love God with all your heart." Mohammed said it was to let your life be a form of worship to God. The writings of many eastern philosophers say it is to reject the bondage of greed, and to counterbalance evil with good. Even the atheist existentialist, Sartre, stated that meaning in human existence flows from each person working for the benefit of all humanity. I echo these famous minds because my own experience bears witness to their validity in my life.
When I have used my faculties, my resources, my experiences to better someone else's existence, to do good by the definitions of many great philosophers and prophets, something in my soul lights up. My insides feel like a skyscraper fully lit and bright against the night sky. It's something magic. It's something spiritual. It's something beyond the framework on which my life is built. My experience cannot explain it, but my experience cannot deny it. It just is. In my experience I have come to believe it is part of the way God designed humans, but I cannot attempt to explain why. I can say, though, that this "beyond" dimension is born directly from my willingness to be involved in the lives of others and in the use of my personal framework to help remove many of the life-damaging obstacles that exist for other humans currently waking or crawling the globe.
Finally, my experiences and those of others have shown my that meaning comes from personal risk. The punks risk rejection from society because they have rejected much of what their societies offer - that same security that enticed me into seeking complacency. Within that risk they have built a fellowship of brothers and sisters that also adds to their existence (not unlike what our churches should be doing). The Anassasi risked great danger and hardship to leave the lowlands and travel hundreds of miles by foot, dragging either belongings and loved ones behind them, in the pursuit of greater experiences, greater life. The Hungarian people risked the chance of another Soviet invasion, being the first Eastern European country to open its border with the West and allow anyone who wanted, to emigrate, including people from other Eastern European nations. The Haitians live with the daily risk of not having enough to eat. Their risk is forced upon them, but with the same result - an added dimension that prods them to seek life instead of living purgatory.
Out of risk comes a greater resource of experiences than a life of security can ever offer. My experience tells me this is why high-security cultures have many active enthusiasts in high-risk sports and activities. For these people, life flows through the risk of throwing themselves down a snow-covered hill on two small pieces of wood and plastic. Life from through the risk of hanging on a half-inch thick piece of rope on the edge of a rock outcropping. Life flows through the risk of being suspended over bone-crushing rapids by some millimeter-thick rubber and pressurized air. Life flows through the risk of hanging from the sky by wings, hot air, or a canopy of fabric. Life flows through the risk of being propelled down a narrow path of pavement by internal combustion engines matching the power of hundreds of horses. Life flows through the risk of performing with all your energy in front of an audience that may or may not respond, through letting your creative energies flow - even at the risk of being rejected.
Unlike the salmon in the whirlpool, I need to risk leaving unending activities that only lead to a false sense of personal security and actively choose to swim the rapids. Only then will I reproduce life.
Unlike the whale on the beach, I need to risk facing whatever dangers have scared me out of the water. Only then can I continue to participate in choosing life.
Unlike the fossil, I need to be filling my soul with new life, new experiences, new meaning. If I close off the hose that brings new sustenance to my existence, my soul will dry up and be replaced with a facsimile of dry sand. Instead, I need to crank open the faucet and come alive with the life-giving experiences the world has to offer - whether it be new friendships, new adventures, new literature, new travels, or even just a new way of seeing the world that passes by the car window on the way to work.
And unlike the hermit, I should stop hiding myself from other life and use my framework of experience for the good of others. I should use my experience in a way that will allow me to gain that unexplainable spark that comes from giving life away, from increasing life in others.
In all these activities, the key component is choice. I must choose to live, or else I will fall into a walking purgatory and a silent death. I must choose to experiences new things. I must choose to risk my security. I must actively choose to participate in doing good for the lives of others. I must chose, because if I'm not living, I'm dying. Why not, as so many around the world do everyday, reject death and, instead, choose the kind of life that reproduces itself many times over in the lives of others?

"I know that there is nothing better for them than to rejoice and to do good in one's lifetime, moreover, that they should eat and drink and see good in their labor - it is the gift of God."
Ecclesiates 3:12-13

Email: el@elroy.com

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