chris robinson

raised Presbyterian

"I just really wanted to take on the challenge of building a meaning of the world from scratch.”

I’m Chris Robinson. I was born in Raleigh, North Carolina. Raised in North Carolina. Moved once but moved within Raleigh, North Carolina. So I was there until I was 18 and went to college.

I think Raleigh’s really interesting. We have a lot of the amenities that [larger cities] have and a bunch of universities are there and yet there’s a really strong Southern culture there. There’s NASCAR there and there’s religion there. You see people out and you’re like “Hey! How are the kids, how is everybody.” We’d be at Wal-Mart or something and my brother and I would be waiting in the car just rolling our eyes being like “Did mom see somebody she knows AGAIN?”

All of that to me is one and the same with church. Church is usually the way we were connected to people and met people. The church we went to growing up had 4,000 members in it. Everybody who went to my high school more or less went to my church so my parents knew their parents. I could connect with people in a way more in that space than anywhere else outside of that. Cause I had a feeling that they would be nice to me there?

I desperately needed friends and a place to ask questions and I don’t think those things crossed a lot. And so, for me, church allowed that too and was the only space that allowed that, much more than school did. [Church] was my therapy and my hang out sessions.

It’s not just an accident that when I left home I left the church. All of that world was the church. So I went to college and sort of dove into and was able to find other venues for these questions. Kind of ways to be rigorous about them, and I became a philosophy major and that’s what that all is.

I was really lucky in college to find friends who had also kind of intense church experiences. We’d talk about that and try out church there a few times. And it just…it felt limiting, I think.

I just really wanted to take on the challenge of building a meaning of the world from scratch. I think it was, maybe it’s a very American ideal. I went to church a few times, I still go to church a few times if I’m just feeling kind of lost or if I’m feeling like I want to connect or that I’m not hearing from other sources those kind of big ideas or moral force, even.

I wouldn’t say there’s substitutes for the church, but I just kind of found that in other ways. Friends I value, I consider that as performing the same thing as, say, my youth pastor was. People who I can talk with about anything. And art, literature, and movies. I mean it sounds stupid but that’s what the Bible is in one sense. This incredibly profound narrative that you can come to examine and read, kind of looking at “Okay, how are people constructing what’s good in the world? How are people getting a sense of how to act and how to be?” that I can learn from and figure out how to be and how I should act. So I’ve become much more democratic in the sense that…I think I’m working to build a system of meaning always but pulling from as many sources as I can.

I just miss the really wonderful institutional aspect of it. The way it functions as an organizer of life or this place I can just go to and constantly find everything. I guess I’ve been drawn to, since leaving the church, finding things like the church. The university kind of functions like a church in that sense like it organizes social life and fits in the big questions along the lines of “Who am I going to lunch with?” stuff. New York is kind of like a church. There’s the sense that, Oh, you’re in New York, there’s something common here that we can start a relationship with and that’s what the church was growing up.

I think I see aspects of [that democratic approach to making meaning] in my parents sometimes. But also I don’t. They have really strong core beliefs that they love and there’s kind of no shaking or getting around that. So maybe one way where that came from is a response to that, and seeing the inflexibility of that belief and thinking like “Oh it could be another way though, it could be not that way.”

And secondly I think there’s really something to a place like Raleigh being, having in my lifetime, become a much more socially diverse place than either of the places my parents grew up in and just having access with the internet and universities nearby, I just felt like I had so much access to so much of the world and I never wanted to limit that. I was always a maximalist. [Laughs] So I kind of had a hunger to explore that – and maybe it’s cliché, but it’s kind of the KaZaa fantasy or Napster fantasy, that every .mp3 in the world is at my fingertips, and no offense to Simon and Garfunkel but why should I keep listening to Simon and Garfunkel if I can search for every song that’s been made?

I don’t think I know more than the church or anyone in the church but what works for me is being able to kind of really, independently pursue the thoughts and questions and curiosities or whatever that I have. And I guess my theological justification is that they’re always connected to the idea that God is an omnipresence, and I love the idea of God being life, and the stuff that animates the world and creates the world.

If that’s true, then wanting to get the most of life and really dig into it is also kind of a theological exercise of wanting to get intimate with this kind of divine thing that’s everywhere. I think that’s completely been my experience. Not in any profound kind of on-the-road-life-changing way. Just that I’ve come across things that I feel are divine or whatever people mean when they say divine.

I volunteer at this retirement home every week, a program for LGBT senior citizens. I go visit this one guy every week. He’s 66, not much older than my parents. He’s really incapacitated and today we walked around the wing of his nursing center, not a long walk at all. So he was getting out of his wheelchair and we were watching Underworld, and it’s like 6 o’clock, and he was getting ready to spend the rest of the night in bed and he has this bed mat. And he was like, “Can you get the wrinkles out over there?” And he was like, “I still see this one here.” And I was like okay, smoothing it all out. And he was like, “I still see something there!” And I was like “I don’t know why you’re so persnickety about your bed tonight.” And he was like “I’ve got this lady coming over tonight to give me a blow job!”

And that’s hilarious. I’m 90% sure it was a joke. But for me that’s such a live moment of “Look, he’s got a really not great life to a lot of people, never leaves the nursing home, doesn’t get a lot of visitors, but he’s gonna make a joke out of his crappy situation.” To me, that is divine in a sense. There’s so much shit in the world but when kind of joy and humor and just vivid life makes an appearance, that’s divine.

I did my Master’s thesis, the critical part on this John Cage text that I love for a lot of reasons. It’s a diary but didn’t have a lot of his self in it. He was kind of insistent about how one should try to think of the world outside of themselves…always keeping in mind how small your perspective on the world is compared to every one else’s. Not just humans but also animals and plants. That’s definitely kind of a new addition to my thinking.

I think the golden rule ethic is still really basic too. Maybe that’s related, putting yourself in the position of someone else, thinking, “How do I move about so if I was that person, I can be happy with that person’s interaction or how can I make things better?”

I’ve realized that what I’m really good at is spending one on one time with people. Also writing and creativity and stuff. At least that’s what I’ve been thinking recently. And so I do this volunteering thing every week, and that’s what I was talking about with that guy, and then I work at a writing center for underprivileged kids to explore their creativity. I don’t know if that’s better or worse than if I tried to work at a homeless shelter all the time. But kind of balancing self-care and thinking about the way you can be a self that actually contributes to the world that’s not through exhausting or killing yourself.

I think self-care is really important. Maybe because of being gay and growing up, I don’t know, I just needed to have a deep encounter with myself and kind of figure out a way to sustain in the world. I think I’m better for other people if I’m happy and taken care of and feel stable and all those kinds of essential securities, I can give more to other people if I can do that. And that’s hard. There’s always the question of what’s enough and what’s too much and what do I need? I think I feel more guilty about that than I should.

Also, just the making space for other people to take care of themselves in the way that they need is also acting ethically to others. I had this friend transition genders recently and I was joking with her being like “You’re putting a bunch of selfies up!” And she was like “Yeah actually I just need to document my transition and it’s helping me come into my body and get over my dysmorphia.” And I never thought about that. So allowing things like that to happen.

For me I guess I kind of have become comfortable and found a lot of beauty and divinity in the idea of conservation of matter. Just going from dust to dust and going back… I think it’s so beautiful that my molecules will just go back into the earth and help a new plant grow, and that’ll feed a new baby.

It’s something I’m more comfortable thinking of as something I want to do in my creative work, it’s something that I want my legacy to be, an idea or object of life that other people can access as I go. I have a really strong materialist or just of-this-world thing that’s also connected to the idea of being divinity being all around the world and I’m just going back to participate in this big party of divinity.

I just lost my grandmother and I lost this guy who was my last visiting partner from this [LGBT seniors] program. He was 80 something. It’s almost just like, let it be that. It’s a good run. Life’s long and life’s great, but I don’t know if I want to be myself for eternity. Gosh, it doesn’t seem heavenly at all.

Death for me is just a going back to the Earth thing where I came. Contributing as much as I can to life and calling it good. And saying it was a good run.

August 2015, Gowanus, Brooklyn

This interview has been edited and condensed.