Alternate, Remnant, Salon

More transcriptions from my 2002 Portality Cahier. The “Salon” is a hypothetical intervention intended for people who wish to enter portals and to explore alternate realities.

(4 Nov 02) The Alternate Reality

Perhaps it’s best to assume that a dominant reality persists, but that there is an Alternative, parallel reality operating for the remnant.  It isn’t a reality that’s being persecuted, nor will it dominate in the future.  It’s just parallel, alternate.

Services related to the Portals would be relevant only in the alternate reality.  Such services would be useful to the remnant; the services would be useful also to the Alternate.

The Alternate is the emergent diversity of individuals actively engaging the external world.  Stuff doesn’t change and develop; it becomes different.  The remnant comprises the individuals who so engage.  Why?  Because they want to create and destroy, not just produce and consume and maintain.  Because they want different, not more or better.  Because they want surprise, not plans.  Because they want open, not closed.  Because they want plenitude, not self-absorption.  Why?  Who knows?  That’s just who the remnant happens to be.

About the Alternate:
•    It is multiple.
•    It is discontinuous.
•    It is emergent.
•    It is real (independent of perceiver or creator).
•    It is open-ended.
•    It grows from the surface.
•    It is complex.
•    It includes the Continuum – or not.
•    It is inescapable – no transcendence.

Self is discontinuous Alternate reality as well:  multiple, discontinuous, emergent, real, etc.

The Remnant

Perhaps there is a remnant, a subset of the chosen, the supermen, who spin away from the Square.  Let’s assume that such people exist.  There is no need to coerce or to seduce them into the Portals; merely putting up a small sign is enough to draw their attention.  If you are to help the remnant, is your job to open up new realities for them, or to keep them from getting sucked under?

Are the remnant committed to anything outside the Self?  Yes:  the Remnant are not self-absorbed.  Are the Remnant committed to a universalism in which everyone eventually joins?  No.  Are the Remnant committed to each other?  Yes, to the extent that the Other is real, emergent, etc. – Alternate.  Are the Remnant committed to the Alternate?  Yes.  The question is:  in what way?

TThe Remnant want the Alternate for its own sake.  We who live on the Square can try to corrupt this external desire into self-interest, but that’s our hang-up.  The Remnant can function only in the Alternate, and the Alternate can exist only by virtue of the Remnant.  It’s an ecology of sorts; or perhaps it’s a milieu for performance art.

The Remnant rely on each other for Social Alternate:  the diversity of culture and relationship and discourse, all real and for their own sakes.

The Salon is for the Remnant and the Alternate

The Salon is there for the sakes of the Remnant and the Alternate.  It is run by the Remnant; it is of the Alternate.

What sort of thing ought the Salon to be?
•    A catalyst for the eruption of the Alternate?
•    An outfitter for the Remnant?
•    A place of emergent reality?
•    A social discourse?
•    A home for the Remnant?  A source of security and comfort and stimulation and fellowship and inspiration?
•    A church?
•    An inn by the wayside?

The Infinitely Vast Salon performs all these functions.  Ultimately, the Salon is the Alternate:  it is the source of the realities, because I’m writing it.  It’s more than a Portal; it’s a (Diversity) Reality Generator.

The Salon is an Intervalic Tragedy

If the Salon is the generator, it is probably decentralized.  It is virtual, not in the electronic sense, but inasmuch as it exists as an Interval.  But the Interval is the only kind of reality that exists in the Alternate.

The Salon is an Interval, through which the Alternate emerges.  Included is the Alternate-as-self of the Remnant. The Salon is all the things required for being a Remnant self engaged in an Alternate reality.

The unfortunate thing is that it’s doomed to fail.  The Salon is a tragedy, and it must die.  But it’s too beautiful to die, so it comes back.  Goes and comes, goes and comes – it is an Interval, something that cannot last.  And so it succeeds in its tragedy.

Erdman, Pilgrimage, My Novel

Erdman has been posting about pilgrimage. He’s doing a nice job linking his own observations on the contemporary scene with my novel The Stations, films, and works of philosophy and theology. I wrote the novel while I was also writing notebook entries about portals, so it’s not surprising that there’s a close connection. A pilgrimage is a type of portal: a space-time vector linking the present with some past sanctified reality.

Oh What the Hell

…I think I’ll reanimate this blog yet again. To get myself back in the mood, I’m posting transcripts of entries in my old cahiers (French for notebooks) focusing mostly on

PORTALS AND ALTERNATE REALITIES

Cahier One
Preliminary Notions (24&27 Oct 02)

A Portal is a channel between one Reality and another.  The Portal is the place or moment at which you enter an Interval.  To step into the Portal is to engage the Strands.

The Strands are links between the Self and the World.  A Strand is intensely personal, but it operates independently of individuals.  It is transpersonal, but it operates independently of groups.  Strands propel the Intervals.  To let the Strands carry you along is to enter an Interval.

The Intervals are times when Strands between self and world link together with each other.  The Intervals are spaces and times between.  Between self and world, between self and self.  Between cause and effect, desire and fulfillment, before and after.  Together, the Intervals are a multiplex of places/times for people to operate in.

An Interval is an element of the Discontinuum.  The Continuum is there to help you resist the Strands, disruptive Strands such as gods and cruelty and lust and tyranny.  To engage the Continuum is therefore to enter an engagement of power.  But the Continuum cannot make the Strands go away; it has merely covered them over, tried to hide them.  Because they can hide, the Strands can grab you more easily if you seek to maintain yourself in the safety of the Continuum.

Distortion and Pulling Out

The Portals are a bit nutty.  If I believe them, if I am earnest, I don’t need to distort them.  This tension – earnest nuttiness – often leads somewhere.  To distort what you believe is to enter into self-parody.  Did Freud believe?  Did Jesus?  Kafka?

Distortion is a trick performed to achieve an effect.  The purpose of distorting a Strand is to pull the Strand out of rational orbit, or out of the Modern world.  By distorting to the point of pulling out, does something become revealed that would otherwise remain hidden?  Or, by engaging the Strand in earnest nuttiness, does the Strand pull itself out?  Is this a work of fiction, distorted for effect, or is it a real journey?  Am I a fictional narrator, or a real one?  Above all, I am earnest!

There are good reasons why the Intervals should exist even if they didn’t:  hence there is no need for farce, for self-parody.  Similarly, I need not act out the tragedy, the ultimate failure of the intervals, their implosion.  Rather, I need only be aware of and state the absurdity.  And so it is that a Portal is simply the association between an awareness and a reality.

On Borges

Borges emphasizes the delirium and fantasy and unreality to which the portals lead. But he also emphasizes creation and the openness of possibility.

The Pull of the Strand

The Strand pulls you; it focuses its forces on you; you are caught in the stream.  If you choose not to engage the Strand, it might grab you anyway.  Success is a Strand; the pull to succeed is a Portal.  Pressure is a force, tangible, that speaks of Strands and Portals.  The pressure of stress, of influence, of money:  does it come from within or without?  Because the Strand links Self to World, every Strand is both inside and outside; every Strand links inside to outside.  To speak of a Strand as a physical thing is to speak metaphorically.

Preliminary Portalic Deductions

If Difference exists, then there is a playing field in which Discontinuity is the timekeeper.  If the World exists, then there are Portals affording access to psychological states that exist outside the self.  If the World is an open one, then there are times in which Realities are created and destroyed.

Intervals – Two’s a Crowd?

If the Strands link Self to the World, and if the Strands pulls the Self into the Intervals, can more than one person occupy an Interval?  Is an Interval an objective thing, or at least an intersubjective one, like a war or a fad or a relationship; in other words, like a Strand?  Or does the Interval enclose the Individual in pure isolation?  Isn’t the Interval in fact built for the isolation of the Individual, for individuation?  Isn’t individuation the starting point and the ending point of every Interval?  Isn’t that what the Intervals are for?

If you want a playing field where the individual can exist and function unconstrained by nature and culture, then you need a bubble that’s positioned in between.  In such a place pure subjectivity can come into being.  But make no mistake:  the Interval isn’t just a product of Self, which is deceived into being stretched along in the world.  Rather, the Interval is a place and time between, fragile but real.  It isn’t just a psychological state.

On the Existence of the Intervals

The Intervals are a creation.  The Intervals, as created places/times, are art.  And then they exist.

Faith in the Intervals

Unfortunately, it is difficult to feel strong optimism about the Intervals.  I am  overdetermined – by who I am, by what the world will or won’t allow.  Squeezed – from the past by disappointment, from the future by dread and anxiety.  No decision amounts to a hill of beans, or seems worth having been made.  Surely part of the running from place to place is the search for a new bubble of freedom.  After awhile the places seem the same, but home doesn’t beckon either.

Trying to create an opening by sheer force of will requires a cooperative world that lets the opening exist.  If I can’t pry it open I feel badly about myself, about my lack of ability to make something happen.  It’s the world’s fault really.  Must I then learn to make peace with the world?  Perhaps the Intervals exist outside the world of overdetermination.  I am not optimistic about it.

What then am I to do?  How do I make a life from here?  There’s no going back, and the future looms ominously.  Is there a going through?  Is there some other Reality to occupy, present only in the Intervals?  In this other Reality, future and past don’t go out of existence; they mean something different.  The present thus is shaped differently there.

The Christian can see the possibility of a higher purpose, a higher will, a design, a plot.  Faith gives them the eyes to see the patterns.  But if there are no gods, do the patterns exist anyway, or are they pure fabrication?  Either way, can you build a life on them?

What is there to draw you, besides the world and the mystic?  What holds you, besides momentum or the holy spirit?  Is there anything in the world to grab hold of?  If it lets you go, is there no handle for grabbing hold again?  Is there faith in the Discontinuum, faith in the Portals, telling you that something will open up eventually?

Sameness and Difference (28 Oct 02)

The Portals are samenesses, like Fate.  They exist independent of individual participation.  The Strands are overdetermination:  you are linked to the Strand that flows through and over you.  Again, sameness.  Difference emerges within the Interval.

Things become different from the surface outward.  At the depths, everything is the same.

The inability to engage the Strands derives from the fear of overdetermination, of Fate.  For surely you must walk into it, and you cannot change it or absorb it.  You can only engage it as a separate being – separate at least for awhile.

Heads as Portals

Is your head a Portal for things – like memes, like identities?  That’s how things got in there, isn’t it?  And you must fear that they will continue to get in, when you engage.  So you must also disengage.

*   *   *

These are pretty much verbatim transcripts from my cahier, so the writing is a bit cryptic and insular. Subsequently I’ve rethought some of these ideas, but the general thrust persists. Over the next few days I’ll post the continuation of Cahier One’s meditations on the Portals, then see where that leads me.

Ecliptics

I’ve launched a new blog called Ecliptics.

This new blog will feature the work and personal observations of writers, filmmakers, musicians, activists, theorists, and anybody else I can find who’s trying to create something. As those who follow Ktismatics know, I’ve begun experimenting with my new mini-videocam. Most of the posts on Ecliptice will consist of videotaped interviews — “E-Clips” — which I hope will enhance the sense of personal connection. I’ll also include excerpts of each subject’s work, along with links to their websites and announcements of their upcoming gigs. Because this format relies on my ability to conduct face-to-face interviews, the blog will center primarily on creative activities in the Boulder-Denver area. Maybe once I get going I’ll conduct some “guest interviews” — either visitors to the area or interviews conducted remotely with people who live elsewhere. Creative work and the work of creation are universal, so I expect the blog to generate interest beyond the local community.

Last night I posted the first interview on Ecliptics. The subject is Josh Minor, whose film I put up here on Ktismatics last week. I’ve got an interview scheduled with another of the award-winning university student filmmakers. There are a couple of writers from a recent public reading event whom I’d like to talk to. And my daughter claims that she too would like to be interviewed. I expect to post maybe two interviews per week once I get up to speed. It’s my hope that these interviews and the discussions they elicit will enhance the sense of common cause among people who are trying to do something different in what so often seems like an indifferent world. As the interviews accumulate, Ecliptics may begin to serve as a kind of collective resource for those who so often work in relative isolation.

I thought about continuing to write my own stuff on Ktismatics, but I don’t see why I can’t roll that into the new Ecliptics blog. I’d like to recommit my blogging energies to what got me started in the first place: “ktismatics,” or the theory and practice of creation. I’m interested in all kinds of creation — inanimate, posthuman, sociopolitical, unintentional, evolutionary, mythical — but since I fancy myself a psychologist it’s the individual work of creation that draws me most insistently. I think there’s room in the new format for me to continue my own ktismatizations as well as showcasing those of others. Of course I’ll continue to welcome discussion and disagreement about my ramblings and divagations. And who knows — maybe I’ll still post an occasional movie screengrab or veer off-topic in other ways that catch my fancy.

Thanks to all who’ve followed along and especially to those with whom I’ve enjoyed stimulating on-line conversations. I hope to see you at the new place. I still have some technical issues to resolve: Can I do better than YouTube, which loses more image resolution than the camera affords? Where can I store these videos without eating up all my hard disk space? Can I get smoother and more efficient as an interviewer and an editor? And of course there’s also the content: Is it interesting? Can I build continuity of themes across interviews while highlighting each person as an individual? If you have any thoughts about these or other issues related to the new blog format, feel free to put comments here or there.

Is Gravity an Object?

Two physical objects are passing each other in outer space — never mind for now what set them in motion. One object is much more massive than the other. As they approach each other, both objects change their speed and trajectory relative to each other. Eventually the smaller object enters into a stable orbit around the larger object. What happened?

Here, as I understand it, is how Graham Harman’s object-oriented philosophy would explain it: The two objects were passing one another in the mutual indifference of their vacuum-sealed separateness. One of them exerted a sort of allure on the other, whereby the other began to experience the alluring object’s features or notes as though these notes were separate from the object itself. An inter-object plasmic field established itself between the two objects, in which the notes of both objects interacted with each other. In particular, the note called “mass” came to dominate the plasm. The two objects merged into a single composite object, with the interrelationships between the components being defined in terms of mass, disregarding other features like shape, texture, odor, sentience, and molecular composition. Through the vicarious influence of the components’ mass on each other the features of the composite object emerged, including the stable rotational arrangement of the two components objects relative to each other.

This proposed relational dynamic, while idiosyncratic to be sure, accounts for the events that occurred. What I can’t understand, though, is why the vicarious influence of the two objects on each other manifests itself in a specific way. The mass-note of one object encounters the mass-note of the other object, and so the two objects move toward each other. Why don’t they fly apart from one another instead? Why don’t the two objects disintegrate without ever touching each other, or change colors, or start vibrating in harmonic resonance with each other? The influence of the objects’ mass on each other is distinct, characteristic, and different from other kinds of influence. It’s as if this particular influence, extending itself across the plasm linking the two physical objects, is itself an object in its own right.

This influence-object — call it “gravity” — isn’t a note of either of the material objects approaching each other across empty space. Rather, gravity is an object that manifests itself only in the plasm between material objects. It is the plasm-object that links the mass-notes of these two material objects together in a particular way. Perhaps the plasm is a medium traversed by all manner of distinct influence-objects: gravity, magnetism, stong and weak forces, fear, hunger, sexual attraction, curiosity, etc. Each force exerts its influence on particular kinds of features or notes in the objects that have been brought into vicarious relationship with each other in the plasm. If one or more of these plasmic influence-objects encounters the right notes in the material objects that have joined together in the plasm, then the vicarious mutual influence takes on that particular flavor generated by the influence-object. So, when the influence-object Gravity encounters the material object note called Mass in the two material object, the result is a merged object that brings these two separate objects into closer proximity to each other. The influence-object called Love also traverses the plasm, but since in this particular local manifestation it encountered no notes in the two material objects on which it could operate, the Love influence remained latent and had no effect on the emergent relationship established between the two objects.

Or something like that.

Or perhaps the plasm is an entirely undifferentiated medium, exerting specific relational influences depending on the properties of the particular objects that show up within the plasmic field of influence. So, if two objects have mass, then the plasmic allure manifests itself as gravitational pull. If the two objects also have speed and momentum, then this plasmic force also manifests itself as something like deflection. And if the two objects are humans, then perhaps the plasm manifests itself as mutual curiosity or revulsion, or perhaps one human-object’s sadism connects with the other’s masochism. The properties or notes of the object differentiate the generic plasmic allure into the specific kinds of influences it exerts on the vicariously connected objects. If so, then gravity too is a property of the individual object, a property that manifests itself only in the presence of other objects with which it’s entered into a vicarious relationship, linking object to object via the closely-related property of mass. But if a property of an object reveals itself only in relationship with another object, does that property actually reside in the object itself?

Harman’s Carnival of Objects

The carnival tent rustles in the evening breeze, disturbing the moods of those who approach. Inside the tent are swarms of humans and trained animals; there are jarring sounds, strange ethnic foods, and shadows. For a few moments the music of a concealed organ is countered by the rumble of thunder, as emaciated dogs begin to whine. A small fight breaks out, soon to be halted by a sneering, scar-faced man. Suddenly, hailstones strike the roof of the tent like bullets, frightening everyone: the visitors, the fortunetellers, the unkempt and corrupted security guards, the monkeys sparkling with costume jewelry. At long last, the organ player’s morbid inner anger takes command, and he begins an atonal dirge that will last throughout the storm.

It’s not just the beginning: Graham Harman‘s Guerrilla Metaphysics reads like a work of philosophy written inside an alternative steampunk world, its streets teeming with mongrels and halfbreeds, its shops chock-full of mismatched collections of things both mundane and fantastic, both tangible and imaginary. This is a wonderful book. Is it wonderful philosophy? I couldn’t say; I have no reliable basis for rendering such a judgment. I regard metaphysics as a genre of fictional nonfiction in which the writer elaborates an alternate reality, a vast mise-en-scene on which any number of actors might later take the stage and multiple plots might unfold. In constructing such a reality it’s the scope and clarity and even the audacity of the thinker’s imaginative vision that prevail. Did I find Harman’s reality stimulating, thought-provoking, engaging? Absolutely. Is it true? I have no idea.

In his prior book Tool Being (which I haven’t read), Harman describes a world populated by countless separate objects that overlap one another in a multi-layered and crowded space. Though objects can encounter and even use one another, they are also permanently withdrawn from one another in vacuum-sealed isolation. In Guerrilla Metaphysics Harman explores how these essentially insular objects can possibly interact with one another.

I think the gist is this: Objects never interact directly; they do so only vicariously. An object possesses various properties or features or notes — eventually Harman says that the object is its notes. But it’s possible for one object to encounter another object’s notes as if these notes had been cut loose from the object itself. These loose notes float through a sort of plasm or charged medium that extends itself within the empty space separating discrete objects from each other. The objects don’t interact directly; rather, their separate notes encounter each other in the mediatory plasm. There the split-off notes from different objects might combine with each other, and it’s through this combination of notes that new objects are created. And in this creation it becomes clear that the notes never really disconnected themselves from their original objects. Rather, these objects have become components of the new composite object, linked to the whole through those specific notes that encountered each other in the plasm.

Now it might seem that this sort of creative encounter between discrete objects violates Harman’s basic premise that objects never encounter each other directly, especially since an object never really cuts its notes loose from itself and since an object is ultimately the same as its notes. Harmon says that what seems to be an external encounter between different objects is really taking place inside the “molten core” of an emerging new composite object. The original objects retain their integrity as separate objects, but as soon as their notes reach across the plasm to each other they’re already occupying a newly-formed inner space opening up inside the composite object that’s in the process of forming itself. The component objects remain essentially isolated from each other even inside the new composite object, however: their mutuality is limited to those particular qualities or features or notes that the composite object uses in holding itself together as a separate thing. So, for example, a bridge might use the structural strength of the steel of which it’s made yet fail to encounter the steel’s shine or color or molecular structure or ability to inspire football players. Or the phrase “a cedar is a flame” conjures up a composite metaphorical object that blends certain notes from the cedar and the flame (shape, jagged edges, etc.) while disregarding others (color, temporal persistence, destructiveness, etc.). The steel bridge and the metaphorical cedar-flame possess their own distinct essences that aren’t reducible to the notes of their component parts. And the component objects are never “used up” in the composites into which they’ve been absorbed: they always retain their own discrete objecthood, sealed away from those specific notes that are used in assembling the composite object.

One consequence of Harman’s object-based reality is that the relationship between people and objects becomes a subset of the more general relationships among objects. So the relationship between a human thinker and the object of his/her contemplation isn’t categorically different from the gravitational relationship between a star and a meteor in some remote galaxy that’s never been detected by humans. In Harman’s universe, the meteor-star relationship is always vicarious: the two objects never encounter each other directly, never expose one another’s hidden essences. And the relationship between meteor and star always occurs inside of a composite meteor-star object. By extension, the human thinker never encounters the essence of that which s/he contemplates — the essence of things always recedes from human scrutiny. Further, human thinking about a thing never takes place from an outside, “objective” point of view — it always occurs on the inside of a merged thinker-thing composite object. I’m not sure how this thinker-thing composite object differs from Heidegger’s being-there or Meillassoux’s Correlation. Thinking-about, being similar to any other inter-object relation, encounters only those notes of the thought-about object that are useful in assembling the composite object called a “thought.” It seems to me that Harman’s realism doesn’t overcome epistemological uncertainty and relativism; rather, Harman just makes it less remarkable, less privileged, more similar to all other uncertain and relative relationships among the objects populating the universe.

Harman’s realism doesn’t privilege tangible material objects over imaginary objects. A metaphorical tree-flame and a centaur have essences and notes and can enter into vicarious relationships with other objects in ways are not fundamentally different from objects like horses and table lamps and movie theaters. If that’s so, and if the essence of every object withdraws from direct contact from any other object, then how can the object called “my mind” ever distinguish between a tangible material object and an imaginary object? In constituting an object, sensory notes encountered phenomenologically don’t seem privileged over other kinds of notes that manifest themselves in thought and imagination and words. On another post recently Sam asked me whether “God” counts as an object in Harman’s scheme. I said that it does, but I’m not sure how to determine whether the God-object is more like a horse or a centaur.

The other thing that struck me while reading Harman’s book is that I’m not sure how he accounts for the destruction of objects. I can see how the interrelationship of my mouth and a candy bar exploits only certain notes of the candy bar — taste, mouthfeel, nutrition — while disregarding the true essence of the candy bar. But as I eat, digest, and metabolize it, does the candy bar persist, along with its notes and its essence? Or does it eventually cease being a candy bar altogether? If so — if by eating it I destroy the candy bar — then hasn’t the candy bar entered into a direct encounter with my digestive system? Harman acknowledges in his book that he doesn’t talk about death and destruction. Still, I wonder how he accounts for these events that seem to remove objects from existence altogether rather than just incorporating them into composite objects.

I think that’s enough for now. Obviously I’ve skipped over vast tracts of Harman’s text and ideas by focusing on the parts that come to mind as I sit here writing this post. I’m also trying to think about the book from the inside, exploring the contours of the reality Harman has laid out for me. I generally resonate with the ideas, and I’m eager to think about implications for an “object-oriented psychology.” If readers would like clarifications I’ll do my best. I’m also open to correction if I’ve misconstrued or caricatured overmuch.

Once in a Lullaby

In my last post I mentioned having watched some very good student films at the university earlier this week. I emailed the filmmakers of my two favorites, asking them if they had put their films online, and if so whether it would be okay if I posted the link on Ktismatics. Last night Joshua Minor, creator of the film Once in a Lullaby, sent me the link to his movie, saying that he’d be happy with my putting it up on the blog. It’s a rather disturbing 5-minute re-envisioning of The Wizard of Oz; Josh says at the bottom of the video link that he thinks of his film as “a dream gone wrong.”

I’m getting ready to launch a new blog where I put up films, writing excerpts, music clips, etc., along with a video interview of the artist. So Josh says he’s willing to subject himself to my interview, which I hope to arrange for next week. Meanwhile, if you have any comments or questions about his movie I suspect Josh would reply if I let him know about your interest.

So, to see the video, click HERE.

Maladaptive

UPDATE — scroll to the bottom of the post for latest developments.

* * *

My instincts aren’t very well attuned to ordinary life in the modern world. For example, I find it very difficult to use my cell phone. I rarely remember to take it with me. If I do, and if it rings, I frequently manage to flip the phone open and then shut it again in the same move, thus hanging up on the caller. I can’t figure out how to listen to messages, or how to delete them after someone has helped me with the listening part.

I also have a very poor sense of direction. I seem incapable of constructing mental maps, relying instead on following specific pathways to and from the places I need to go — sort of like a rat running a maze. I usually leave extra time to get somewhere in the car, since I expect I’ll make at least one wrong turn somewhere along the way. Sometimes I forget where I parked the car, and must walk around in circles for a long time looking for it. Since my sense of direction is so poor, I’m prone to getting lost again looking for the lost auto.

So last night I went to the local university to see the student film awards, during which all the nominated films are shown (some really interesting and experimental stuff BTW — maybe I’ll post on them later). I was going to take a bus, but time got short and so I drove instead. Turns out I took the bus anyway — took it home, that is. I lost the car. I was pretty sure I parked it on 12th Street — I remember reading the street sign as I hustled off toward the university — somewhere near Euclid Street. It was about 5 degrees Fahrenheit with light snow when I got out of the screening, and I walked around for more than an hour looking for the car. It was dark and the cars were snow-coated, making it difficult to tell one from another. Still, our car has a carrying rack on top, which gives it at least a bit of visual distinction. Finally I gave up, hoping for better luck this morning in the daylight. It’s possible I parked illegally and the car was towed away, but I couldn’t call while I was out there looking — I actually had the cell phone with me, but the batteries were dead. I called the police when I got home, but they had no record of our car having been impounded. They suggested I call back in the morning in case the paperwork hadn’t cleared yet. So I’ll do that before hopping back on the bus and resuming my search (temp. currently 5 below Fahrenheit).

Maybe I’ll take my new mini-videocam with me to record my adventures, try to restore at least a semblance of my dignity by turning it into a documentary.

* * *

Later that day…

If for some reason you don’t want to watch 9 minutes of me trying to track down my car, you can breathe a sigh of relief — the wayward vehicle has been recovered!

God the Strange Attractor

Beginning is going on. Everywhere. Amidst all the endings, so rarely ripe or ready. They show up late, these beginnings, bristling with promise, yet labored and doomed. Every last one of them is lovingly addressed: “in the beginning.” But if such talk — talk of the beginning and the end — has produced the poles, the boundary markers of a closed totality, if “the beginning” has blocked the disruptive infinities of beginning, then theology had better get out of its own way.

So Catherine Keller begins her extended midrash on Genesis 1:1-2. I’d read her ideas before as summarized by John Caputo in his The Weakness of God, and since I’ve written extensively on the Biblical creation narrative I find this sort of thing more interesting than I might otherwise. I don’t read much contemporary theology, but based on these two books it seems that paradox seems to rule the day. Keller and Caputo apply the strategies of Lacan, Derrida, and Zizek to religion. By exposing the irresolvable contradictions that reveal themselves texts and ideas about God, new truths — or rather new interpretations — bubble up through the gaps. Keller is better at it than Caputo, at least based on what I’ve read. As Adam Kotsko observes in his thumbs-down response to Caputo’s book, “The chapter on Genesis is admittedly somewhat interesting, but that is probably because the whole thing is cribbed from Catherine Keller.”

The general idea driving Keller’s thesis is that the first two verses of the Bible describe not the manly exercise of might to create a universe ex nihilo, but rather the evolution, emergence, and self-organization of a creatio cooperationis. The key textual moves are these:

  • “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, and the earth was formless and void,” is how most translators render the first verse of Genesis. Keller follows the eleventh century Jewish commentator Rashi by reading it thusly: “When, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was formless and void.” This way the formless void already exists when God the creator arrives on the scene, making the story correspond more closely to Greek and other Ancient Near Eastern cosmogonies.
  • The formless void, or tohu vabohu, isn’t a vacuum, but rather a hodgepodge, a farrago, a blooming buzzing confusion. It’s the immanent flux, the primal source of inchoate and protean difference from which all things form themselves.
  • The word for God in Genesis 1 is elohim. It’s a plural noun that usually takes a singular verb conjugation. Commentators often construe the plural as an indicator of plenitude or intensity, as if this one god is so far above all other gods as to merit the all-inclusivity of a plural ending. Keller suggests that the plural be regarded as an indicator of an “originary multiple without individuation,” a “swarm” a “differential unity,” a “co-creative collective.” Interpreted in this way elohim is not unlike the tohu vabohu of the pre-creation universe.
  • I’ve heard Christian preachers reduce the Bible’s message to its first four words: “In the beginning, God.” In Hebrew, however, the verb precedes the noun: “In the beginning created…” Keller follows the Kabbalistic Zohar in exploring this translation: “With the beginning __ created God.” The empty space between “beginning” and “created” is an unnameable creative process of creativity that is itself divine and that gives form to itself along with the rest of the universe. Per Keller: The creativity itself does not become; it makes a becoming possible… In other words, our responses become us. (p. 181)

I respect the effort that Keller puts into these related moves to immanentize the transcendence of the Biblical creation story. In my view, while each of these textual moves is clever and could possibly represent what some earlier version of the text might have said before it got “theosized,” the Hebrew text as written doesn’t really support these alternative wordings. Still, if you’re looking for a way to reconcile the Judeo-Christian texts with the way the universe really did come into existence, then Keller offers a coherent and only mildly distorted rereading. I make similar small moves to tell my own version of the Genesis 1 story, so I can relate.

If she really believes that this is what the Bible narrative is saying, then she must accept that those early anonymous writers really were inspired beyond any possible human knowledge. And to regard the process of emergence itself as divine is not without precedent in the history of ideas. But why not just go all the way and assert that the writer of Genesis 1 is describing a materialistic process of creation where the gods don’t have any role whatsoever?

I’ll conclude with a particularly evocative passage from Keller’s book:

The Jewish delinearization of the time of creation opens up space for a biblical theology of creation, in which the chaos is neither nothing nor evil; in which to create is not to master the formless but to solicit its virtual forms. Such solicitation, when expressed as divine speech, may sound less like a command than a seduction… If this divine speech no longer blasts royally into a vacuum, how would we then interpret the iterative utterances of the “let there be”? Less, perhaps, in the monotone of command than in the whisper of desire? (pp. 115-116)

Two Minute Readings

I’ve previously bitched about local public reading events because of their focus on “commercial fiction,” the implication being that if you want your work to sell you have to conform to the strictures of some recognized literary genre. I also bitched about attending a meeting of a commercially-oriented fiction-writers’ critique group. Here’s an example of commercial writing at the microlevel. One of the members passed around a 7-page excerpt from a novel in progress, dealing with the plucky adventures of a young girl toughing it out on her own in nineteenth-century Dublin. In this excerpt one of the male characters happens to reflect on the fact that the heroine’s two older brothers didn’t stick up for her when their father was molesting her. This male character wondered what it would be like if he couldn’t rely on his own brothers to help him out in a tight spot. The other members of the writers’ group insisted that this fellow would think no such thing: instead of putting himself in this girl’s shoes, he would have taken the male point of view and reflected on what wusses the girl’s brothers were. Maybe so — I didn’t know this character well enough to say. The point, though, was that all the characters must remain true to gender-role stereotypes if the book is going to sell.

So anyhow, last night I attended another public reading. Apparently this one woman organizes readings every three months or so, presumably just because she feels like doing it. Last night’s readings were limited to two minutes each, which meant that twenty different people had a chance to present snippets of their stuff. Total attendance was about forty, consisting mostly of the readers and someone they brought with them. Going in I was skeptical: what can anyone say in two minutes? — that’s about 200 words at the pace I read aloud. But it turned out to be pretty great. The sheer variety of material and presentation style kept my attention from wandering, which I found happening to me in the ten-minute readings. Plus I didn’t have a sense that these pieces were crafted specifically to attract particular kinds of audiences. There might have been a bit too many personal memoirs for my tastes, but even those never made me squirm uncomfortably since the narcissism and angst generally took a back seat to crafting a good yarn. And there were some quirky literary bits put out there for us to sample. In one story a guy drops his Dickens book on the bathroom floor because his girlfriend says he’s too immature to read that sort of thing, leaving the disconsolate book to read itself to itself. Listening to these short pieces I found that how someone says something — the technical proficiency and literary artistry, the specific word choices and stylistic flourishes — is a lot less important than what the person has to say.

The commercial instinct wasn’t completely suppressed at this event. One presenter, reading a piece about how she just can’t manage to develop a taste for goat cheese, mentioned in her story that she’s able to get particularly good meals at restaurants by flashing her Gourmet magazine badge. After the event was over this woman was surrounded by quite a number of admirers — I didn’t get close enough to see whether they were trying to figure out what she could do for advancing their writing careers. Or maybe they just wanted to tell her that they don’t like goat cheese either.

While chatting with two of the writers I found out about another public reading event coming up tomorrow night. I’m going for it.

History is Whose Story?

Yesterday on the steps of the US Capitol the evangelical leader Rick Warren stirred a bit of controversy by concluding his inaugural invocation with a recitation of the Lord’s Prayer — a distinctly Christian prayer of course. I was surprised more by how he began:

Almighty God, our father, everything we see and everything we can’t see exists because of you alone. It all comes from you, it all belongs to you. It all exists for your glory. History is your story. The Scripture tells us “Hear, oh Israel, the Lord is our god; the Lord is one.”

“Hear, oh Israel” — this is the beginning of the Shema from Deuteronomy 6. Having wandered through the wilderness for forty years after fleeing Egypt, the Jewish people stand on the east bank of the Jordan, ready to cross over into the land of Canaan, also called Palestine. Moses has just delivered the Ten Commandments in Deuteronomy 5, and now he’s giving the people a set of final instructions and warnings before they surge across the river to take what God says is rightfully theirs. It’s at the beginning of the very next chapter that we read Moses’ instructions regarding what should be done with the current occupants of the land:

“when the LORD your God delivers them before you and you defeat them, then you shall utterly destroy them. You shall make no covenant with them and show no favor to them.” (Deuteronomy 7:2)

Is it mere coincidence that Warren chose of all things the Shema as the opening theme for his invocation at this particular juncture in history? I don’t think so.

Creating Hybrid Objects

I’m continuing with my reading of Graham Harman‘s fascinating Guerrilla Metaphysics. Here we find him elaborating on José Ortega y Gasset’s exploration of metaphor. Ortega had selected as an example a line from the Catalonian poet Josep Maria López-Picó, in which Picó says that the cypress tree “is like the ghost of a dead flame.” Harman explores the stripped-down essence of this poetic phrase — “a cypress is a flame”:

If someone tells me that a cypress is like a juniper, what happens is that my attention is absorbed by a set of remarkably similar qualities; I am adrift in a world of attributes of things. But if someone tells me that a cypress is a flame, then I have entered the magic world of a cypress-flame-feeling-thing. Since the two images are unable actually to melt together instantly by way of their truly minimal common qualities, the cryptic essences that my life senses in them remain before me in a kind of permanent collision. My exultant feeling of the cypress and my exultant feeling of the flame attempt to fuse with one another, but without final resolution: their hard carapaces crack as they fill each other with molten plasm. And as Ortega admits, “even when a metaphor is created we still do not know the reason for it. We simply sense an identity, we live exultantly in this being, the cypress-flame.” This new being may be constructed out of feelings, but given Ortega’s object-oriented concept of feeling, it is actually a new thing that has entered the world, and not just a private mental state of mine. To create such an object is to de-create the external images that normally identify it, reshaping the plasma of their qualities into a hybrid structure. What we call a style, says Ortega, is nothing other than a specific mode of de-creating images and recreating them as feeling-things. (p. 109)

I find this explanation of metaphor as a hybrid feeling-object really quite helpful. Though I’m not sure I’d draw quite so sharp a distinction between the pairings cypress-juniper and cypress-flame, this is a relatively minor quibble that actually supports Harman’s case for realism. He says that in observing the similarities between a cypress and a juniper, one becomes immersed in a plasmic medium of attributes cut loose from their objects. But these attributes can congeal themselves into a new merged object called “evergreen.” For that matter, even two separate cypresses become linked together in the plasm of multiply-shared attributes, forming the merged object “cypress.”

A cypress and a flame eject from themselves certain shared attributes into the plasm, most notably the flamelike shape of those tall thin varieties of cypress that so often line Mediterranean roadsides and driveways. Should we assert then the obvious simile: the cypress-juniper object is like the cypress-flame object? I think yes, while recognizing that similarity isn’t the same as identity. The cypress-flame hybrid object is pulled together inside the plasm from attributes of the component elements “cypress” and “flame” and the observant and imaginative mind of the poet. This is one style of assembling a hybrid object. Another style relies on sexual reproduction as a means of transmitting genetic material. DNA carries biochemical attributes that afford both individuation (this tree, that one, the other one…) and speciation (these cypresses).

Some time after human beings showed up on the earth they began reflecting on the things that surrounded them in their environment. These early humans became able to think about individual trees and tree attributes and tree collectives, and together the humans ssigned names to these things. But thinking and naming is only one style for spawning the proliferation of hybrid objects within the plasm. It’s a style that didn’t arrive on the scene until the universe had already amassed billions of years of object-creation successes. One particular genetically-created species of tree and the cognitive-linguistically-created species named “cypress” share many attributes, but they aren’t identical to each other. Human cognition, social construction, genetic reproduction: these are but three of the many different styles for configuring hybrid objects. Different styles generate different kinds of objects which, when again cut loose from themselves inside the plasm of attributes, also share certain similarities with each other. But again, similarity isn’t the same as identity.

I haven’t even finished Harman’s chapter on metaphor, let alone the whole book, but based on what I’ve read so far I presume this is the direction he’s guiding his readers.