Friday, November 11, 2022

The Sign of Jonah


Someone complained that this essay has two parts that I have insufficiently connected together. I disagree.


First Part

I had a nice view of the skyline. Now it is not as nice because they built a monster without a torso apartment/retail complex at 325 Kent. Two buildings joined at the top stand there blocking much of my view. I can still see part of the river and the boats and I can still see the bridge but I don’t know how much of this view will be left in a year when more new tall buildings will stand near the river, right in the flood zone. They are not going to house the homeless, if that’s what you’re thinking, and if you have to ask how much rent will be forget about it. I was depressed by the prospect of being boxed in by these constructions of predatory capitalism but now I want to praise the Absolute for providing these shields, these walls, that will give me some protection when someone finally detonates a small nuclear device in Manhattan.


I can still watch the sky, though, and the other morning I watched a total lunar eclipse. When the moon was in our shadow it was still visible in the night as a dim brown glow. It was like watching a coal burn out. It must have been terrifying to pre-civilized people who didn’t know how the solar system works (not that I do) and didn’t have access to ancient astronomy and news services that could forecast eclipses — without understanding, it would be terrifying to see the moon or sun burn out before your eyes. Is this the end?

Is the universe finally burning out?


I’m watching the eclipse from my cage. Our building is now enclosed by scaffolding and covered with a net, a plastic veil the construction workers covered us with, but I still have a fairly clear, slightly pixillated, view.


I don’t know how long we will be in this cage. Some of those scaffolds stand for decades around buildings in this city. Maybe think of it as a cocoon and the building will eventually emerge reborn and transformed, but that’s not really what’s going on here.


We had a tenants meeting a couple of nights ago. An energy company called Microgrid wants to put big lithium batteries on the roof and collect solar energy they will sell to Con Ed. The energy isn’t for us. It’s because of all the residential construction bringing more residents than Con Ed can handle. Rich people don’t want these batteries on their new buildings so they’re going to put it on top of the one hundred year old factory building we call our live/work space. Someone says that this is the first time this has been done on a residential building and we are guinea pigs. We go to public hearings on Zoom. We’ve been collecting reports of lithium batteries exploding and burning things down, and so on. I don’t know where the line between reasonable concern and paranoia could be drawn. We talk about hiring an engineer. There is no way I could afford to pay my share, I think. We don’t really trust the Limited Liability Corporation that collects our rent. Microgrid is paying them a lot of money for this and probably paying for all this construction work that has us living in a cage. “They’re trying to kill us,” someone says.


Second Part

“You know how to interpret the appearance of the sky, but you cannot interpret the signs of the times. An evil and adulterous generation asks for a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of Jonah.”  Matthew 16:4

The Book of Jonah is one of my favorite books in the Bible because it’s one of the funniest and I identify with the cranky and reluctant prophet.

Jonah was called to go to the wicked city and tell them the truth. After delivering his prophecy of doom — blasting his message in heavy rotation from all the hydrogen jukeboxes — You Don’t Believe We’re On The Eve of Destruction? — Jonah left the wicked city and built a hut so he could watch the destruction of Nineveh from a safe distance. It’s like fleeing to the suburbs to watch the End Times on TV.  He didn’t want to be collateral damage when divine punishment was inflicted on these heathens. But judgment never came. Instead, the city repents when they hear Jonah’s message and so God also repents. Big disappointment for the prophet, who is deeply grieved that the city is not punished and instead undergoes a peaceful revolution, and an expansion of their moral consciousness and conscience, and the people make fundamental changes in how they organize their political economy. They did this out of their love for their city and out of a collective desire for a loving community in which everyone has what they needed. 


The prophet is furious. His life is a joke. His calling is irrelevant. His message against EVIL is meaningless in the presence of too much GOOD. This is cancel culture, he complains and he is angry at the unfairness of it all, that an entire city is happy and he isn’t. Everyone else has been liberated but the prophet’s consciousness is still colonized.

And then his living arrangements fell apart and his comfort zone became unbearable. Jonah had grown emotionally attached to a plant in his yard that had provided him shade.  Then a worm came and destroyed the plant. He loved that plant. Jonah was really mad. 


This is how the Book of Jonah ends:


“But God said to Jonah, “Is it right for you to be angry about the bush?” And he said, “Yes, angry enough to die.” Then the Lord said, “You are concerned about the bush, for which you did not labor and which you did not grow; it came into being in a night and perished in a night. And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left and also many animals?”

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home