A Muezzin from the Tower of Darkness

Alike for those who for To-day prepare,
And those that after some To-morrow stare,
     A Muezzin from the Tower of Darkness cries
"Fools! Your Reward is neither Here nor There!"

Sun: So here’s one question. When we look for a home, or for a way to build an altar: are we looking for something that can actually be found, or built, in the workaday world? Or are we making a basic category mistake? Maybe home is elsewhere. I mean, that’s basically the answer that Christianity and Islam and many sorts of Buddhism give: you don’t feel at home because home is not available in this world. Home is somewhere else: this is the land of sin, where nobody is at home. So that’s an answer that a lot of very smart people have taken seriously. We have resisted that answer strenuously all our lives: not because we have a great refutation of it, but just because we don’t want it to be true. Or, rather, because we are afraid that “our reward is neither here nor there”: maybe there’s no home at all, and the search is a fool’s errand. If that were true, where would it leave us?

Rat: Scrabbling in the garbage, I guess.

Sun: Yes, and this is our perpetual alternation. It seems like a dead end, or at least a profitless cycle. What we what is to move, somehow, out of the plane of this discussion. We’re stuck in two dimensions and we need to move in a third one if we want to do anything but go back and forth.

Lt: Is there a third dimension?

Sun: Of course there is. Where else could WE live? Where would I come from? If there’s no home, we all become totally inexplicable and unintelligible. And, like the Zen people say, it’s not elsewhere: it’s right here. But

Captain: But but but – yeah. That’s fine for a framework, but it doesn’t answer Rat’s question. What IS our business? It’s a fair question, and we have not begun to answer it. Is it writing poetry? Is it building model airplanes? Is it learning to carve walking sticks with elaborately worked knobs? Is it designing the history game to end all history games? Is it REALLY learning Spanish (French, Greek, Latin, Hebrew)? Is it discovering (making, unearthing, disclosing, refurbishing) the one true church?

Rat: And this is where someone pipes up and says it doesn’t matter so long as we pick something. The existentialist move. And I would say, if it doesn’t matter then none of this matters. The center doesn’t hold, and the whole thing collapses. It does matter. And if, as the Sun says, there IS this third dimension, then there actually IS an answer.

Lieutenant … and our business is in fact to figure out what it is: and – until we have figured it out we actually have no other business that matters. We have our work cut out for us. Our work is figuring out what our work is. NOT what we would like to do. What we MUST do because it’s the right thing to do. I mean, I don’t see any other way to read our predicament.