Conquering Paradise
It’s Monday morning and another great day in Paradise. Yesterday I started watching the 1992 movie 1492: Conquest of Paradise with Gerard Depardieu. I was prompted in that direction by a National Geographic article on a great new Mayan (more likely Toltec) artifact find in Chichen Itza in the middle of the Yucatán jungle. That reminded me of the Mel Gibson directed film Apocalypto about a manhunt by tribal people though the jungle. On the way to that I tripped over 1492 and decided to watch it (I will go to Mel’s epic “silent” film next). There was something about the title that grabbed me, since a Christopher Columbus story seemed trite with all the controversy and rewritten history about the man, the myth and the reality. Conquering Paradise seemed like a worthy topic to explore since I am faced daily with Paradise and it seems to certainly require more conquest than not.
The word Paradise flows back through the ages through the French, Latin, Greek and eventually Persian languages. It is a concept in most religious works (certainly Christian, Hebrew and Islamic) that harkens back to the Garden of Eden or in Buddhism to Heaven itself and the perfection of place where the virtuous and righteous dead spend eternity in harmonious surroundings. In the Persian context (which seems so very pertinent given the likely location of Eden) it is considered to be a walled garden filled with peace, prosperity, happiness and enlightenment. A walled garden is a form of isolation, and as such, a veritable prison.
In John Milton’s epic and defining work, Paradise Lost, the blind poet describes the biblical descent of mankind from the pinnacle of perfection in the Garden of Eden through the chaos of the world and into the maelstrom of Hell. This was written by Milton in the late seventeenth century when England was wracked by civil war between the monarchy and the parliamentarians. The plight of the common man had become insufferable and the righteousness of a broadened wealth distribution system seemed necessary. Milton reflected these societal ills through his allegorical poem of the imperfections of man and the journey he takes from Paradise into the dungeons of depravation.
I feel that allegory can be extended or reawakened for our plight of the moment. As I stare out at Paradise here on my San Diego hilltop, I could remain blissfully ignorant of the world around me and outside my walls. I am constantly reminded that those walls are now, more than ever, barriers to keep out the ills of the world and barriers to keep me from embracing the real beauty of the world of man. I used to say in my pension course that you can’t build your walls high enough to keep out the reality of the world. This is true now more than ever. The conundrum I face is that I can’t decide if I am being abjectly stupid about everything or insightfully wise. I can probably live out my days here in Paradise and disengage with the world more and more every day.
Sooner or later it won’t be within my ability to choose. Nature has a way of enforcing disengagement as time goes by. It can be disengagement of the body or the mind. I’ve seen it happen as we all have. In my case, it happened nowhere more obvious to me than with my adventurer mother. She knew at one stage to disengage form the world of global human development first through forced retirement at age sixty-two and then eventually by deciding that the hardships of remote foreign interim assignments (six months in southern Brazil and six months in Lagos, Nigeria), which could have gone on for a few more years, were less and less meaningful. She chose an interim Paradise off Paradise Road in Las Vegas where she could help her daughter raise her family in the desert heat.
Eventually, that task accomplished, she cared for her partner, a socialist cowboy turned libertarian who was raised in the Golden Gloves boxing gyms of the Lower East Side of New York and then found his way to an Ivy League crew team. He rowed against the very same Boys in the Boat in 1936 and then went off to pre-Franco Barcelona to box for America in the Alternative Olympics, organized to defeat the buzz of Hitler and Himmler’s Berlin spectacular. He told wonderful stories about the battles for human dignity in 1930’s Spain and then the wilds of Paradise on the Big Island of Hawaii before the world went to war. This man had tramped with his liberal views and agronomy training to Hawaii in ‘37, been put in charge of 2,000 Chinese agricultural workers (he refused to call them anything but “coolies”, which he said they called themselves). The war had him governing the Big Island as an important mid-ocean wall against the Japanese onslaught. He came out the other end a man focused on growing pineapples on horseback in Paradise for the rest of his working life. When I knew him he was enlightened but pragmatic, worldly yet self-aware. He and my mother lived out the last seventeen years of their glorious lives by watching world events from afar, knowing the peace that they had done their bit and would now focus on serving their families. They had both passed through Paradise on their way to Paradise.
So, here I sit looking out at Paradise and wonder how long it will last. It will not be willingly lost by me in descending to the bowels of greed and elitist self-righteousness. I will remain engaged with the world and my family as best I can and for as long as I can. I will write to stay mindful. I will teach to stay giving. I will communicate to stay connected with both the world and those who would choose to listen. At this stage in life, Paradise is a fine luxury and a fine goal, but a much less worthy residence. It is that fleeting ideal that Christopher Columbus sailed towards and that grim reality that mired him in the battle to satisfy the needs of the army against the simplest existence of man. Depardieu has a great line towards the end of the film where he says that a man with riches is not rich, he is just busier.
The richness I desire is the richness of social justice and prosperity to others who dream and strive and work to achieve a better world. Columbus sought a new world and paid a dear price for success. He lost everything and said it didn’t matter to him. Hearing that Amerigo Vespucci had found the mainland in 1499 (actually the northern coast of Brazil) while Columbus was bogged down in the duties of trying to extract riches from his new world in Hispaniola and Cuba, he shrugged and said he was glad to be proven right. Through the publishing of popular booklets about his travels, Vespucci caused one and then more cartographers to label the New World America. Columbus would have the last laugh as we celebrate him as the founder of the Paradise of the New World more than Vespucci. But I bet Columbus would, in the end, have suggested that he may have done less conquering of Paradise and more discovering of Paradise. Our mission now is to restore the meaning and the integrity of Paradise. What has been lost can be found.