In my beginning is my end

Another warm sun-shining morning, door and windows open, with the bells of the local Catholic church ringing ten minutes before Mass. The new crop of lemons on the tree are now out and visible, all green. And the wasps are still alive and well.

I am thinking about origins, with my coffee. On FB, a link to a story that contests the simple Out of Africa theory of human origins, asserting that Europeans are also the result of westward immigration from Asia. (Although I suppose the Asians eventually started out in and from Africa, too?) I apparently means a lot to some people that our species, homo sapiens, had a common and African origin. Is this supposed to make it easier for me to like Hip Hop?

Origins are a tricky business. We live in a Protestant culture where the assumption of primitivity in religion means original purity. Protestantism is always an attempt to recapture the New Testament church, as described in a holy book. But that's just a hermeneutical assumption, that the earliest is the best and purest and that history is always a shabby descent from a Golden Age.

It is funny though, that Jesus' primitive and original choice of 12 male apostles now is treated by Christian liberals as some kind of unfortunate accomodation to patriarchy rather than the golden nucleus of pristine truth. Was the Last Supper the first Mass? Jesus had not yet died on the cross and been raised from the dead...so how does that work? Beginnings are always controversial, I think.
And serve an archetypal need.

Founding myths have a lot riding on them. Take the origins of AIDS. The dominant story is that the virus mutated from monkeys to humans in Africa. Many many American blacks believe that it was concocted in CIA laboratories as a way to wipe them out! Tomorrow's Columbus Day was once a proud celebration of "our" civilization, but now "we" have been fractured by multiculturalism into tolerating the deconstructive bitterness of the losers in that battle and the inimical Aboriginal Peoples Day companion myth.

Some AfricanAmericans and their guilt-ridden allies took the African Origins theory to be some kind of racial transformation event. But it soon revealed its limits in white comedians celebrating their roots in Mother Africa. Yeah, right. But even if the species did originate in Africa, it didn't stay there. And one could make the rude but pretty obvious point that the folks who left by and large developed into something far more impressive than the ones who stayed. Origin can also mean primitive in the pejorative sense.

One black preacher took the theme of African origins to assert that Adam and Eve were black. (This is the Black Muslim thesis, too.) Well, if that's so, then we have two black people to blame for Original Sin and the expulsion from Paradise. The sword wielded by the Cherub at the gate cuts more than one way.

The Official Narrative of gay liberation has legions of warrior drag queens at the Stonewall bar fighting the police, thus making drag queens the Adam-as-Eve's of homo culture, untouchable and to be celebrated endlessly. "They were the real men." Maybe, maybe not.

When B and I were doing well, the stories of how we met had, for me, a kind of founding mythology feeling, the Unexpected Stroke of Romantic Good Luck. With the end of our romance, it would be easy just to convert it all into One Big Mistake. My saner self tells me it was and is neither, but the urge to construct an original narrative from the perspective of present need and desire runs deep, about romance, religion, race. And the world itself.

The seven-day creation of Genesis or the fourteen billion year unfolding of the Big Bang? Adam and Eve in the Garden or increasingly clever primates on the African savannah? The alarmed religionists who saw in Darwin's narrative a threat to a settled human identity were not all wrong.

It makes a difference if a people or civilization sees itself as the intentional center of divine and cosmic drama or as one more expression of a random process with a contingent beginning and a dark, if distant, end. That change is still playing out. In the renewed war between Islam and the West (formerly Christendom), for example. It remains to be seen if a culture can remain strong and survive once it abandons its historical sense of divine identity when its rival has rediscovered theirs.

My favorite quote from Eliot, framed by my front door, is from Little Gidding in the Four Quartets:

We shall not cease from exploration
and the end of all our exploring will be
to arrive  where we started
and know the place for the first time.