ON Beliefs
The 2010 Wisconsin Book Festival explores the theme of Beliefs. In the Festival's honor, we asked several authors, poets and other thinkers from across Wisconsin to reflect on the role beliefs have played in their lives. The multiplicity of perspectives you'll see here reflects one of the Wisconsin Humanities Council's deeply held beliefs: That when our beliefs get aired, shared and woven together, community life grows more vibrant and our individual lives are enriched.
The Home of Belief
by David Rhodes, author, Wonewoc
Neither memory nor imagination can have beliefs on their own. They'd like to, but they have to wait until they get married. Then they can have all the beliefs they want.
It's Nature's Way: The fertile memory raises up already-experienced events, and the imagination enters them. Once inside, the imagination happily scrounges for scrap lumber to build mansions in the sky and the infrastructure to get to them. Successfully endowed with the dual inheritance of enchantment and verisimilitude, Eureka!, beliefs are born.
If you encounter a half-grown belief and ask where it comes from, it often refuses to answer. Beliefs have attitudes and are ashamed of their sentimental, fun-loving parents. They want to appear independent, confident and cool - grounded in eternal principles. After all, beliefs know, whereas their parents only remember and imagine, staring at each other with dreamy eyes.
Beliefs don't care for such nonsense. They like to hang out on darkened street corners with similar beliefs, where they intimidate passersby. They're tough, territorial, demand loyalty from other members of the group, and fight with belief gangs on the other side of town. Not all gangs of beliefs are bad, however. Some help coordinate community services and exhibit endurance, which many consider quite valuable.
The repeated expression of identical ideas forms an implacable shell that protects the more vulnerable individual beliefs until, with maturity, they harden all the way through. In this state there are remarkably few resemblances between individual beliefs and their daydreaming, frivolous parents. Many beliefs actually forget they have parents.
Probably for that reason, it took a long time to discover that beliefs didn't just rise up out of the ground fully formed. Less than 300 years ago, John Locke, George Berkeley and David Hume studied some beliefs and found they originated in sensory experience. Beliefs, it turned out, were vulnerable to biological need, social insecurity, vanity and plain old wishful thinking.
When word got out, many gangs of beliefs revolted. The resulting schism gave rise to a new denomination of beliefs that tried to honor their parents without conceding a smidgen of attitude. These new beliefs called themselves propositions and their style of intimidation differed from other beliefs. They also wore less brightly colored clothes and devised more elaborate gang rituals.
As beliefs and propositions get old, however, many stray from the certainty that accompanies early and middle-age. They lose their attitude and some even move back home with their parents. Memory, imagination, belief and proposition sit in rocking chairs on the back porch and fondly watch the world go by.
I think I remember when days like this were followed by days with lots of rain. The hay would get wet and everyone would be upset.
Just imagine if a certain star were assigned the job of signaling when it was about time to rain. Signal detectors could be made out of strands of hay and everyone would know when to drive their car into the garage.
It's going to rain tomorrow, I know it.
If I'm not mistaken, there's roughly a 60 percent chance of precipitation sometime between 8 a.m. tomorrow morning and midnight, provided atmospheric conditions do not change before that.
Pass the lemonade.
To read more ON Beliefs essays from the across the state, please visit the Wisconsin Book Festival website.