Another Post

So now I’m hung up on the discussion surrounding my most recent post. I’ve felt distracted by it for a day and a half now. I felt like something was getting in my way, preventing me from moving on with what I had in mind. But maybe if I allow the distraction to become the focal point… No, better: if I allow the distraction to enter into me, or to wash over me, to dominate me… or maybe it’s an opening of the void that I try to avoid — then maybe something will be revealed, or reworked, or made explicit, or destroyed, or reterritorialized.

The event begins with a comment made by Jonathan. He begins by suggesting that I’ve misrepresented Gadamer, and he offers a corrective. He then continues by proposing that the most reasonable position in a dispute usually, eventually, becomes the dominant position. He asserts that the minority positions, being lesser positions, ought to be ignored so that action can be taken. He concludes by saying that it’s absurd to think of the Church bothering to write an infinite number of anticreeds. (This is from memory; it’ll be interesting to see how much of what I just said is really written in Jonathan’s comment.)

At this point the void opens. I find myself irked by Jonathan’s comment, distracted. The more I try to ignore the distraction, the more pissed off I get. I write a response (again, from memory): if you don’t like my distinction between Gadamer and Derrida, forget it: it’s my ideas I’m stating here, not theirs. Then I say that this sort of conversation makes me wonder why I write a blog. I say that in my opinion the best idea doesn’t rise to the top, that the best idea is usually either over most people’s heads or too far off from the usual way of looking at things, so it gets buried with the other losers in the debate. My position is absurd? Write no creeds, I say, or write an absurd creed. Finally, I say I don’t care what the church does about its creeds: it’s no concern of mine.

Thinking about my reply to Jonathan as I’ve just summarized it, I agree with everything I wrote. But it’s an emotionally charged response, an angry response. It’s the emotion that dominates my response. What’s communicated, I suspect, is arrogance: my ideas are better than your ideas; they’re over your head; I don’t care about what you care about. Now I can disavow the arrogant intentions, say that in the heat of the moment I miscommunicated. Instead I’ll acknowledge to myself that tone of my response communicates some repressed meaning that expressed itself in the void between words.

I try not to think about myself. When I do I usually get angry and depressed. Why? Because I have a sense that my life isn’t going well, that it hasn’t gone well for a long time, that I don’t really expect it to get better. I’m better off if I stick with the ideas, the readings, the writings, the conversations. I’m wary of thinking too much about the other selves who participate in the conversations because other selves remind me of my self — which I’d rather not be reminded of.

So Jonathan’s response to my post distracts me from what I’m thinking about. But it distracts me to myself. First, the interpretation of Gadamer versus Derrida has a history. In my early days of blogging I was trying to attract attention to my interpretation of Genesis 1. Why? Because agents and publishers say they’re interested in nonfiction books only if the author has a “platform” — a public reputation that draws a ready-made audience to the book. I have no platform. Though I’ve got educational credentials, though I’ve had a reasonably successful career by most standards (but not my own), though the content of what I’ve written is excellent, though my writing style is clear and snappy, none of that matters because I don’t have a platform. So rather than sending my book out right away, I decide to devote some months of my time to building a platform.

In the first week or so I came across the Church and Postmodern Culture blog, which was brand new and hadn’t yet put up its first substantive post. It says that James KA Smith is the guy behind this blog. I never heard of Smith, so I read about him on his website: he’s an associate professor at a college where I once took a seminary course; he once wrote a book that uses Genesis 1-3 to contend that man by created nature is a language user, that language isn’t just a consequence of the Fall and the resulting separation from a oneness with God, thus making verbal communication necessary. I think: this guy Smith and I have something in common; my exegesis is right up his alley. Now I’m not looking for this guy to endorse my book — I never heard of him, and I doubt his name on the back cover would sell many books. But I do think he might be able to offer some helpful comments about my book, which I could use to do some further editing before sending it off to an agent. And maybe he’d help get a little buzz going about my ideas in whatever circles he runs in. Plus maybe we can strike up a correspondence on matters of mutual interest.

I send Smith a long email describing my project and how it relates to his; I point him toward the exegesis of Gen. 1 that was then up on my blog; I tell him that if he’s interested I’d be happy to discuss it further with him, email him my whole book, etc. A week goes by: no reply. I send a follow-up email, elaborating on my first one, trying to engage in conversation. This time I get a very brief reply: I’m busy with a lot of other stuff; why don’t you send your exegesis to a peer-reviewed journal. Like a form rejection letter. This pisses me off. I send him another email: if you’re too busy to read something that’s up your alley, you’ve got too much on your plate. Peer-reviewed journal? I’m not playing the academic game; this is a book for general readership. Do you think Richard Dawkins sent his latest book out for peer review before he sent it to the publisher? No reply. Smith has blown me off. Pisses me off. Now it’s no longer about the book, or the ideas, but about me. I regard this Smith guy as a possible colleague, a fellow traveler with similar interests. But he’s too fucking busy — which means there are innumerable other things that he’ll focus his attention on, but not my book, not me.

A week or so later Smith starts posting about his book on postmodernism at the Church and Pomo blog. My first reaction is to ignore his stuff; my second is to diss it in comments. But I restrain myself. I will engage in the conversation. The first post is about Derrida, whose stuff I know quite well. Smith includes Derrida in with Gadamer as two pomo guys who support the idea that texts are best read in the traditions they were written in — so the best interpreters of Scripture and the faith are those who participate in the ongoing historic tradition and community of the Church. I don’t know Gadamer, but I don’t think this is an accurate representation of Derrida. It’s like Smith has co-opted Derrida, making him a defender of orthodoxy rather than a revolutionary underminer of any sort of mainstream position. I start commenting. I engage the other commenters in discussion. I’m putting good ideas out there, linking them to others’ ideas. I’m fairly pleased with myself. Smith? He responds to others’ comments but not to mine. Pisses me off. I continue with a couple more of Smith’s posts, where he engages other pomo writers I don’t know as well as Derrida. Same pattern: thoughtful comments by me and others, interesting discussions with others, including Jason, occasional responses by Smith but never to my comments. Pisses me off. My comments are as stimulating of discussion as anyone’s and more so than most. I regard this as a personal slight now.

A couple months go by. Erdman and I have encountered each other at the Jesus Creed blog and have been commenting on each other’s blogs. He puts up a post about Smith’s book. It triggers my anger. I put up a critical comment: Smith is taming Derrida, equating him with Gadamer, who’s more prepared to accept a community’s authority, who’s a better ally for a neo-Catholic traditionalism. Erdman more or less agrees with Smith’s position. He emails Smith: we’re discussing your book on my blog; come check it out. Smith shows up, comments: this whole taming of Derrida I find boring. Asshole. No acknowledgment of my participation on the Church and Pomo debate — maybe he doesn’t even make the connection. I reply: it’s probably boring because you hear it over and over again from so many people; maybe you should pay attention. He comes back, acknowledges his tendency toward arrogance, makes another comment which I don’t remember the gist of, and never comes back again.

So now we’re back to yesterday’s exchange here, maybe 8 months after my emails to Smith. I never built a platform; my letters and proposals to the agents resulted in either a 1-sentence generic rejection or no reply whatsoever. I’ve just posted — again — the distinction I see between Gadamer and Derrida. It’s not the main point of my post — just a little side benefit. Here comes Erdman. Does he begin by talking about my ideas? No: he says I’ve misconstrued Gadamer; here’s the right way to interpret him. This time he makes Gadamer sound more like my reading of the radical Derrida — as opposed to my prior disagreement with Smith, who made Derrida sound more like his reading of the conservative Gadamer. Pisses me off. It brings back my whole history with Gadamer versus Derrida, which long ago had morphed in my head into Smith versus Doyle.

Here I’ve been trying to put my disappointment about the Genesis 1 book behind me. I couldn’t generate a buzz through my blog; I built no platform to attract the agents’ interest; my book will probably never be read by anyone other than the two people who’ve already read it: my wife Anne and an emerging pastor, the father of my daughter’s school pal, who after reading the book says “so what? what does this mean for doing church?” who has since quit the ministry, moved back to the States, and no longer responds to my emails. So like I say, I’m trying to get beyond my anger and depression about the Gen 1 book. I’ve written 3 books, none published, no prospects for any of them getting published. I can’t bring myself to write book 4. I need to make some money; I start thinking about starting some kind of counseling practice. But I want the practice to fit with my larger agendas: creation, interpretation, meaning. Meanwhile, I’ve come to enjoy the blog world for its own sake, not because it might help me build a platform. I enjoy my frequent exchanges with Jonathan and, more recently, with Jason — I think of them as my friends. I also enjoy my exchanges with others on a less frequent basis. I’m rereading philosophy and novels through a psychological lens rather than a theological one, but people seem to be reading along with me, commenting, asking questions. The process is helping me clarify my own ideas. I might also be contributing to others clarifying their own ideas. It’s a good thing, this blogging.

I’m just about ready to pull it together into a tentative pomo therapeutic praxis. I take a walk and something about the Creeds comes to mind, illustrative of something in Derrida’s deconstruction of texts, but also linking to the psychoanalytic insight that the unconscious expresses itself nonverbally. Can a text be deconstructed based not on what’s written in it, but on what isn’t written in it? Do texts reveal traces of repressed matter in a kind of shadow non-textual world behind the text? I don’t think I’ve read this idea before in quite this way. It’s a bridge between the textual guys — the philosophers and literary critics — and the spoken-word guys — the analysts and psychologists. I’m psyched; I can find the way toward what I’ve been hoping to find. And it illustrates something about the ways in which a text written within and for an interpretive community — an idea I associate with Gadamer — reveals all the texts that weren’t written, that would have been written if the community had defined its boundaries between in and out differently — a Derrida idea. So now I’ve got also the beginning of a way of categorizing what isn’t written, what isn’t said, based on these two philosophers translated into a psychological context.

But… I’m thrown back on myself. First in the allusion to the Smith disagreement. But then this other half of Jonathan’s comment: the dominant voice is usually the one that deserves to dominate; the minority voices should be ignored. I’m struck by the anomaly of his position: it sounds so modernistic, so not Derrida. Is this just sophistry on Erdman’s part, arguing for argument’s sake? But I’m also now doubly pissed. Why? Because my voice is the minority voice. My first novel doesn’t seem to resonate with the popular imagination (nobody but Anne has seen the second one). My Genesis 1 interpretation is all but invisible both to the emerging post-evangelicals and to the evolutionary scientists. Do I believe that the dominant positions dominate because of their intellectual superiority? No: I believe mine is better, but it’s either over most people’s heads or it’s just too far off from the existing interpretive paradigms. Popular tastes of the herd dominate excellence: it’s why top-grossing movies are crap, it’s why I can’t get a book published unless I’m a talk-show host. This gap between popular and excellent, between value and market value, between individual difference and groupthink, is at the heart of my project, and at the heart of my anger and depresssion. So here I’m coming forth with what I see as the leading edge of a new set of ideas that might energize me, but I’m wary. I fear that in all likelihood these ideas will meet the same fate as my books: no one will see them, they will disappear into the background noise.

So what’s Erdman’s comment say? Minority viewpoints don’t deserve consideration because they’ve been tried in the fire and found wanting; we need to move on, take action based on the official majority creeds of our culture. This is precisely the opposite of what I believe about my own minority voice, but also precisely what I see as the obstacle facing my work. And here, on my first launch of this new insight, I’m confronted explicitly with the void, the reason why my other contributions have fallen into oblivion. Or, not a void: better — I’m moving forward and all of a sudden a wall is slammed in my face.

I wish I wouldn’t subject myself to this having the wall slammed in my face, especially right at the moment of breakthrough. It’s like when I finish writing a book: the first book was thrilling; the third one was depressing because immediately the wall separating the book from all possible readers of the book jumped in front of me. Anyhow, this sense of the imminent wall makes me wish I didn’t write a blog, where I’m immediately confronted by a rejection. What I really wish, of course, is something else I don’t say: I wish the readers of my blog wouldn’t throw the wall up in my face; I wish everybody would read my blog and love it, tearing the walls down. When it doesn’t happen, I wish I hadn’t succumbed to the hope that it would.

There’s a positive version of this wish not to write a blog too. When I’ve written my books I’ve purposely isolated myself from readers until the book is finished. I’ve also largely isolated myself from contemporary fiction and trends in the marketplace, not wanting my own vision to be distorted by what others are writing or reading. This has worked well for me: I can write page after page, day after day, like going on a long run by myself. To write in blog-sized chunks, to put the chunks up for public display and criticism, to adapt what I write to the audience — I’m not sure it’s such a good idea. Maybe when I get to this particular stage, when I’m synthesizing what I’ve read and creating my own thing, I should take that stuff off-line and do it in private. So that’s the positive, conscious, “creedal” rationale for wishing I wasn’t writing a blog. The rest of it is anticreed. Which one is true?

Anyhow, so now I string together some sentences in my comment: I sometimes wish I wasn’t writing a blog. I think the best ideas are over people’s heads, or that people are too boxed into their own paradigms to see them. The impression I’m sure this gives is an arrogant one: you assholes don’t deserve to read my blog. Partly that’s what I feel. Partly it’s the rational content, my “creed” about blogwriting and about good ideas, especially my good ideas. The arrogant part is anticreed. Also the inverse of what I wrote: maybe my stuff really isn’t very good, maybe it deserves to be buried with the rest of the loser crap. I of course have to acknowledge this possibility. To buffer myself against this suppressed possibility of my own mediocrity I overreact, adopting a posture of arrogant superiority. Which I wish I didn’t have to do. I wish the writing would just flow out from me into the world, find places to land, collaborators who help me and whom I also help on the front lines of human creatorliness, etc. etc. Instead the flows turn inward, onto the ego, and I have to confront the inner conflict of whether I’m great or mediocre, and of whether other people think I’m great or mediocre.

Now the thing about the Creeds comes to mind. I haven’t written any posts about explicitly theological topics in a long time — since I more or less gave up on my Genesis 1 book, in fact. Why all of a sudden the Nicene Creed? It illustrates a point I’m trying to make, sure. But the Christian Creed? Well, I think partly this. The people I converse with on my own and other blogs are mostly Christians. I’m not Christian. I do, however, hope for some other basis of fellowship than faith in God, a basis in creativity and excellence and difference, as well as a combined struggle against the imitative mediocrity of the mass culture. When I express this hope my Christian blogging amigos tell me I’m talking about some vision of the church they too uphold. But what about the unbeliever? What about me? Am I excluded from this imaginary fellowship? Am I irreconcilably alienated from the people I talk with all the time? Are they all together on one side of the divide, leaving me alone on the other side? Must I subscribe to the Creed in order to enter into the Elysian fields, into the fellowship of the remnant? Isn’t there room for the minority position that’s been pushed to the margins? Doesn’t everyone in the majority also have the minority position in themselves somewhere, providing an unspoken link? And can’t I too acknowledge my own affinity with the majority position, even though for me it’s not what I consciously uphold as my own personal creed? So perhaps my deconstruction of the Nicene Creed is in part an attempt to deterritorialize the fellowship, a proposal to let me in without forcing me to sign the Confession of Faith. Can we support one another? Is what I’m about to offer up here as a set of ideas going to be valued by the Christians? Can the Christians help me clarify my ideas and their application even if the ideas are secular?

Which brings me to the end of Jonathan’s response. Are we supposed to have sixty creeds? It’s absurd. This is the right Creed: it’s proven its value; it gives us the momentum to move forward together. Sure it does, but it means the Creedalists move on and I’m left behind. Okay fine, screw you then. Have no creed, have an absurd creed, I don’t give a damn about your freaking church anyhow. But what I want is a different creed. Do I want a universalist creed that includes the anticreeds? Not really. I want a creed based on a different division of the territory, a creed that believes in human creation, in excellence, in difference, etc. — the creed that gives me my forward momentum but that also seems to keep me isolated. Maybe it is the absurd creed, to create good but different stuff that probably nobody but the fellow creedalists will ever see or value. But at least there would be the remnant to take consolation among one another.

So I write my comment. I get a response from Jonathan. Okay, don’t talk about the church then. My first reaction? Since I’m not part of the church I have no right to talk about the church — meaning especially to diss the Church’s Creeds. I’m pissed all over again. I tell Anne about it. She doesn’t see why I’m so pissed. So she’s in on it too, a Christian conspiracy designed to ostracize me, to make me think I’m the one who’s paranoid. It takes awhile for me to calm down and read it again. No: I’m the one who said I didn’t care about the church. Fine, says Jonathan, let’s talk about the Nazis instead. Now I start to realize my overreaction. I relook at the whole exchange. I feel embarrassed, apologetic. Once again, I’m the asshole. I’m always the asshole sooner or later. I can’t remember if I write my next reply at this point, but I don’t think so. I think I put it aside for the night. My anger has changed to depression.

In the morning, still depressed, I see I’ve gotten an email from Jason. He says (again from memory) that he wants to know where I’m coming from. He feels like he’s been marking time on my blog, covering the same old ground, to the point where it’s getting violent. He wants to know my story. To which I say something like: fine, if you’re bored with my blog, go do something else; get violent on somebody else’s blog. I then tell him that my story is implicit in my blog already, that I’m all about creation and the difficulty of carrying on without recognition and the territorializations of the herd. Then I say here’s probably the story you want to hear, but that isn’t so important to me: agnostic, God is probably the product of human imagination, and so on. There, I say, I hope your curiosity is satisfied. End of response. Once again, the content is accurate. But the tone implies something else: if you’re bored it’s because you don’t get it. You say you want my story but you’re missing it. You only want my story to satisfy your curiosity. But of course I’m also reluctant to tell my story. It again makes me think about myself. It again sets up the test I’m bound to fail, or that Jason is bound to fail: my story as I tell it to myself, versus my story as the Christians want to hear it. I’m resentful, demoralized, isolated.

I have breakfast, I cheer up a little. I write an apologetic blog comment, I send an apologetic email to Jason. I get back to the original subject matter of the post, responding at length to Jonathan, Jason, Ron, Sam. But I sense my own momentum has been sapped. It all feels futile, like I have to force myself to think about it. And here 24 hours before I was so enthusiastic, so ready to push forward into the creative interval. Now I’m neither angry nor depressed; just sort of flatly melancholy. I feel this way fairly often: no energy, no creative flow, a vague sense of futility. And I sense the steam has gone out of the Anticreeds blog post too — the comments have drifted into some strange realm of sarcasm, resentment, disinterest. I ought to get back on the horse, write the next post in the series. But my heart isn’t in it. Maybe I’ll just quit right here. I’ve thought about quitting the blog before; maybe now is the time. But then I decide to let the distraction take over my awareness. And so here is another post.