Whose Name No One Knew

Old Semyon, whose nickname was Preacher, and a young Tartar, whose name no one knew, were sitting by a campfire on the bank of the river; the other three ferrymen were inside the hut.

– Anton Chekhov, “In Exile,” 1892

“Well, this is no paradise, of course,” Preacher told the young Tartar. A few yards away the dark, cold river flowed, growling and sluicing against the pitted clay banks as it sped on to the distant sea… Far away on the opposite bank crawling snakes of fire were dying down then reappearing – last year’s grass being burned. Beyond the snakes there was darkness again.

“God give everyone such a life,” said old Preacher as he took another pull at the bottle. No wife or children or family, no pleasures or comforts; just live. For twenty-two years he has shunted travelers across the river into exile. He has witnessed the foolishness of those who yearned for more, who brought wives and children into this remote waste only to see them flee, sicken, die. The devil lures the exile into hope of a happy life; listen to the devil even once and you’re lost. “I don’t want anything, I’m not afraid of anyone, and the way I see it there’s no man richer or freer than I am.”

The nameless young Tartar struggled to find the words in the language of this cold and empty land. That his beautiful and clever wife might come from his distant village; that she might be with him for three months, a month, a day. “Better one day of happiness than nothing,” stammered the young man, and he wept.

In the morning a call came from the other shore, then a pistol shot, summoning the ferry. The ferrymen, shivering and still sleepy, clambered into the ungainly boat. They took up the crablike oars and the boat began crawling across the dark water. In the darkness it looked as if the men were sitting on some antediluvian animal with long paws, and sailing to a cold, bleak land, the very one of which we sometimes dream in nightmares. The thin old gentleman on the far shore was in a hurry; his consumptive daughter was worse again, and he’d heard of new doctor in Anastasyevska. Manning the tiller, a triumphant and nearly joyful Preacher steered the old man across in pursuit his futile hope. “What freaks,” scoffed Preacher as he watched the old man gallop across the frozen dawn.

The Tartar went up to Preacher and, looking at him with hatred and abhorrence, trembling, mixing Tartar words with his broken Russian, said, “He is good – good. You bad! You bad! Gentleman is good soul, excellent, and you beast, you bad! Gentleman alive and you dead… God created man to be live, be joyful, be sad and sorrow, but you want nothing… You stone – and God not love you, love gentleman!” Back in the frigid hut, Preacher and the three ferrymen heard a sound like the howling of a dog. It was the young Tartar, outside by the fire. “He’ll get used to it,” Preacher remarked, and instantly he went back to sleep.

 

In the Houses Always People and People

“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

– Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, 1875

Unhappiness seems so tiresome, so repetitive, so routine, it’s hard sometimes to remember what Tolstoy had in mind. Tolstoy got his inspiration for writing the book from reading a newspaper article about a woman who threw herself in front of a train. I wonder if he was a happy man or an unhappy one as he set the train in motion that would eventually run down Anna Karenina.

There was a time when I understood. Here’s something I wrote a few years ago in a novel, when I was more optimistic:

A friend of mine had been a therapist, but she quit to become a business consultant. She said she didn’t care enough about people. As the slow flow of clients merged into a monotonous stream, she began to forget from one week to the next: is this the one whose wife is threatening to leave him, or the one whose neighbor is trying to kill her dog, or the one who’s trying to quit shopping? Everyone who came into my friend’s office could be slotted into one of a sadly small number of garden variety pathologies. No florid hallucinations, no multiple personalities, no hysterical anesthesias. Plenty of anxiety, paranoia, anger, narcissism, failure, victimhood.

Adjustment falls within a narrow bandwidth; the therapist is charged with tuning everyone to the same channel. Like Tolstoy said, more or less: every unhappy person is unhappy in his own way, but happy people are all alike. Stretched out on the procrustean couch, the client knows what the therapist is trying to do to him, and still he keeps his appointments with the executioner. He wants to be happy; he’s ready to be purged of all those idiosyncrasies that keep him unhappy. He comes prepared to tell stories about himself, stories he chooses specifically to elicit the helping reflex. It’s a ritual: the therapist bestows the recognized rites of restoration on the transgressor and the outcast. My friend found this work increasingly distasteful. So she quit.

When I was new at the Salon, I believed I could avoid falling into the trap. I had faith that the unhappy outsiders would prove far more interesting than the happy insiders they wished to become. Instead of snipping away at their stray threads, I would look for an alternative weave, a secret and subtle delirium unique to each individual. My job as I saw it was to enter into the client’s real strangeness; to have the client guide me into other ways of seeing, into exotic regions of the soul that we could then explore together. What I really wanted, of course, was to become the client. I didn’t want to pull them out into my normalcy; I wanted to climb with them into their madness. I guess I’m just a romantic at heart.

The narrator is looking back at a more optimistic time in his life, a time when certain forms of heroism could be attained only through the pursuit of unhappiness. It turns out, though, that unhappiness is mostly just boring, the endless repetition of failure and the disappointment that comes with hope.

Here’s my dream from last night:

I’m in high school, at my oboe lesson. My oboe teacher isn’t home; his wife is going to teach me today. She’s doing something in another part of the house. I’m waiting for her in the room where the lessons are taught, listening to the radio, a clunky black box shaped like a suitcase sitting on end, or maybe a loudspeaker from a P.A. system. I turn up the volume; it’s got too much bass. It’s playing some song by Led Zeppelin I’ve never heard before. In his instantly recognizable high-pitched voice Robert Plant sings about picking up a book off the shelf, perhaps it’s a dictionary. A piece of paper falls out of the book. He picks the paper up off the floor: it’s written by Courtauld, a beautiful aristocratic woman from days gone by, dead long before the singer was born. “Because of Courtauld,” the verse ends, then repeats, and I wake up.

Carriers of the Collective

We are all carriers of the collective.

It’s not surprising. We’re humans, and as a species we’ve gotten where we are today because of our remarkable ability to imitate. By the time we reach adulthood we’ve loaded ourselves up with a whole bag of adaptive tricks, cumulatively known as “culture.” Participation in the collective – being “we” – isn’t only a hindrance to personal freedom and creativity; it’s also the wellspring of our ability to create. Whenever we create, every tool we use is an artifact that’s been handed down to us by our genes and our culture. Even imagining that there could be anything other than what already exists, which is perhaps the essential insight behind any act of conscious creation – imagination too is a skill. Imagination is a capability that’s uniquely human but also common to all humans, a cultural artifact that has been incrementally shaped by the generations of creators who have gone before, a skill that each individual can improve with practice, a tool that’s been shaped by the past in order that it might be used more effectively to shape the future. Even our imaginations embed us in the collective.

Still, wouldn’t it be an honor to participate in shaping the future of our species, to contribute in some small way to the incremental advancement of human culture, to create not the merely ephemeral but the one thing in a million that lasts? The sheer volume of man-made stuff testifies to the power of creation to shape reality. And it’s not just the material things; it’s also the ideas, the fantasies, the ways of seeing both what is and what is not that make up the created world. A lot of it is junk, of course, but at least some of it isn’t. To be worthy representatives of the species; to let our higher natures be drawn to true, the beautiful and the just; to put forth our best creations out of sheer love for our fellows; to transcend the “I” in service of the “we” – is it such an ignoble herd instinct after all?

Is it even necessary that we know we’ve contributed? The advance of human culture isn’t planned; it emerges spontaneously from the countless actions and interactions that comprise ordinary life. Maybe it’s just an ego thing to think of creation as a conscious individual act of heroism. Human life is a collective long-term undertaking and, like it or not, I’m not at the center of it. I don’t live “my” life; I live inside a life that includes me. It’s embedded in any number of overlapping and concentric circles – family and tribe, neighborhood and nation, company and profession – that collectively comprise the life of the species. “We” live the human life, and whatever creating there is to be done within it, “we” are the ones to do it.

We understand the idea of creation without a creator: the spontaneous emergent of order from indifferent forces. Cultural phenomena like languages and the marketplace, social status hierarchies and democratic political systems organize themselves this way; so, of course, do natural phenomena like quantum physics and chemical reactions, fetal development and the activation of neural networks. What if some combination of indifferent forces eventually managed to bring into existence a being with advanced cognitive and linguistic capabilities, possessed of curiosity and imagination and intentionality – in short, a creator? Now this creator, be he god or man, contemplates the forces that brought him forth from the formless void. He comes to understand these forces, gives them names, builds from them a system of meaning that encompasses the entire universe – in short, he creates the reality that spawned him. Because this intelligent creator of the universe came forth from and remains part of the universe itself, can it be said that the universe is really the intelligent creator of itself, the inherently indifferent and mindless forces of nature having acquired by reflection the properties of the beings they’ve generated? Instead of it happening from the beginning, though, the universe doesn’t create itself until much later, perhaps billions of years after the sequence of events that eventually begat the gods and the humans first got underway. Causality gets reversed too: instead of saying that the universe came into being because gods first created it, we’d say that the gods created the universe because the universe first came into being – or something like that. I have to admit that I’m reaching the limits of tolerance for my own rhetoric – it’s beginning to sound like some distorted mélange of Eastern mysticism, Hegel’s universal Spirit, and bad science fiction.

Without knowing quite how you got here, you find yourself at the beginning. To an observer you appear as one without history or precedent, but in fact you do have a history. You are the product of genes and chance, history and culture – mindless forces over which you exert no control. A series of accidents – or is it a unique destiny? – leads uniquely to you as an individual, but you’re floating in a wide stream that holds all mankind in its current, pulling us apart and forcing us together, making us one and making us many. Maybe your history holds you down, keeping you from being anyone other than who you are, from seeing anything new, from creating anything different. Or perhaps your history equips you with the knowledge and skills you’ll need to pursue your calling into realms never before imagined. This is the beginning, and all you have to rely on is what your history has made you, and what you’ve made of your history. It’s time to enter the interval of creation.

[Note: After a couple months off to let the text settle, I’m back to editing the Genesis 1 book. This post contains a chunk of text that I’ve chopped back severely in order to avoid exposing too much of my crackpot tendencies. But for the blog? You bet.]

A Hermeneutic of Jazz

Heiddeger reacts against the transcendence of Western philosophy, the idea that man can achieve a God’s-eye view of Truth or Beauty or Goodness:

“The Christian definition was de-theologized in the course of the modern period. But the idea of ‘transcendence’ – that human being is something that goes beyond itself – has its roots in Christian dogma.”

Heidegger cites, as an exemplar of the Christian dogma of transcendence, Calvin:

“For the fact that human being looks toward God and His word clearly shows that according to his nature he is born closer to God, is somehow drawn toward God, that without doubt everything flows from the fact that he is created in the image of God.”

Heidegger allows no transcendence. Human being is always human being-in, or Dasein. To live authentically is to live inside a world. The meaning of any given world isn’t imposed from outside or above, or grasped by stepping outside that world. Rather, meaning arises from within that world itself. And even meaning can never be given; it can only be interpreted by someone who lives inside that world.

What does jazz mean? Better question: what does this jazz performance mean? A jazz performance is a world. Who can grasp its meaning? Only someone who lives inside the performance. And the performance is interactive, involving composer, musicians, audience. It’s a dynamic world, always bounded by the music, always moving forward in time. To step outside of that world is to lose the ability to interpret it.

But the performance always goes beyond itself, says Bruce Ellis Benson:

“If we say (modifying Heidegger) that a piece of music opens up a world, it should be clear this “world” of the piece of music is one that is not self-contained. Rather, it is a world within a world, a musical space that is created within and out of a larger musical practice. Moreover, just as the world of Dasein is not a physical world but a world of activity, so the piece of music is likewise a world of activity. It is a ‘space’ that is both created by and allows for musical activity.”

To hear a performance of “’Round Midnight” is to hear echoes of everyone who has ever interpreted that tune. Every improvisation is a tribute, bringing the past forward into the present.

An Eschatology of Jazz

In “Jazz and the Mode of Hopeful Transgression,” church planter and trombonist Wesley White places jazz within an eschatology of hope. Rooted in the gospel and blues of the American black underclass, jazz erupts in rebellious freedom. Jazz, Wes contends, “is premised on the art of breaking the rules.”

“As a public voice for exiles, jazz invokes a sense of solidarity that necessarily disturbs the benefactors of inequality and isolation… Soloing equity is allotted to each musician (not just one select soloist or even a few select soloists) in order for jazz to be jazz. Likewise, the selflessness of providing backup sounds and rhythms while the other solos requires a fraternal spirit that is both musical and communal. In a good performance, that is to say, the rules that dictate and manage inequality and isolation are violated.”

Unlike the practitioners of most other musical idioms, jazz performers “never play the same thing once.” The hierarchical dualisms of classical music – composer/musician, score/performance, performer/audience, mind/body – are purposely blurred. In a culture of conformity and restriction, jazz is the eruption of imagination and possibility.

Wes sees in jazz a manifestation of Christian hope. In our world the free play of individuals in solidarity manifests a kind of transgression, but it also points forward to a time and place when all of life will be transformed into something like a continual jam session. The otherworldliness of gospel, set in counterpoint with the present despair of blues, bursts forth in musical redemption. In jazz, “the future (prefaced in Christological distinctives) is latent in the present.”

To me, jazz is quintessentially a music of the present. Jazz is live; recordings are static and repetitive imitations of eternity. A jazz show is an interval of freedom that lives inside the club; outside the walls, the square life continues unaffected by what’s happening inside. A jazz tune is an interval of freedom that lives inside a “standard” tune. The song is played “straight” once, then the imaginative variations veer farther and farther from the tune as written; finally, at the end, the players return (more or less) to the starting point.

I don’t think jazz points away from itself toward the future. I think jazz points into itself, traversing through a portal to an alternate reality juxtaposed on the “square,” “standard” world. If there’s such a thing as a “hope for the present,” jazz has it.

That They May Hear and Not Understand

 

“Listen! Behold, the sower went out to sow.” (Mark 4:3)

Contextualizing the message, speaking the postmodern argot, meeting people where they’re at. Jesus used his imagination and his creativity in preaching the Kingdom. He spoke in short narratives, using homely illustrations that even the simplest farmer could understand, so his message would come through loud and clear.

Well, not quite.

“And he was saying to them, ‘To you has been given the mystery of the kingdom of God; but those who are outside get everything in parables, in order that while seeing, they may see and not perceive; and while hearing, they may hear and not understand; lest they return again and be forgiven.’” (Mark 4:11-12)

Transgressive Spectacle

 

“In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles.”

– Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, 1967

In his paper on “Christ Collectives,” Andrew Perriman proposed a model of church as art collective. He cited various examples from the secular culture of art installations consciously intended to disrupt normal life and sensibilities. Andrew suggested that, by adopting an art collective model, the church could call attention to the obsessive individualism and self-obsession of contemporary culture. Instead of glorifying the individual artist, the Christ Collective manifests “the body of Christ” – a group consciousness that points away from itself and toward Christ.

Often ideologically motivated, secular art collectives seek to disrupt the corruptions of late-modern life through ironic overstatement. Commercialism often comes under attack, with events like fake ad campaigns and the corporate branding of world cities demonstrating the extent to which advertisement and marketing dominate the culture.

Traditionally a distinction is made between a work of art and its public display. For many collective art installations the display is the art. It’s an ironic gesture, calling attention to the extent to which contemporary art serves as an extension of marketing, designed to seduce the consumer. The Situationists started the transgressive art-as-spectacle movement in the sixties, serving as catalysts for the May ’68 French uprisings. Guy Debord laid out the rationale in a Dadaist-Marxist context:

“Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation… Considered in its own terms, the spectacle is an affirmation of appearances and an identification of all human social life with appearances. But a critique that grasps the spectacle’s essential character reveals it to be a visible negation of life — a negation that has taken on a visible form.”

The medieval cathedrals were collective works of art-as-spectacle, but they were generated by the mainstream social order. Blockbuster films are collective art spectacles generated in our mainstream culture. What’s disturbing is the self-ironization built into these spectacles. Pirates of the Caribbean is a movie purportedly about a transgressive subculture (pirates), but its inspiration derives from a ride at a theme park. The movie probably made more money in one day than all the real pirates ever did throughout history. As Baudrillard observes, these simulacra of the real have become the reality of our times. Does transgressive ironic spectacle still mean anything when the mainstream culture has already co-opted the concept? Perhaps the appropriate work of artistic disruption would have been for some group of outlaws to rob the movie theater’s ticket window during the opening of the Pirates film.

Debord prefaced his book with a quote from Feuerbach:

“But for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, appearance to essence … truth is considered profane, and only illusion is sacred. Sacredness is in fact held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness.”

Throughout medievalism the church was the realm of spectacle. Per Marx, capitalism co-opted religion by fetishizing consumer goods, imbuing them with an intangible plenitude that generates consumer desire. Now the church proposes to adopt a situationist paradigm for missional presence in the world. It would create transgressive, anti-commercial art installations and use them in public campaigns supporting evangelism — an activity often disdained by outsiders as a form of marketing. Does the church now create spectacles of itself in an ironic reversal of the original sacred illusion? Is it possible for the church to accomplish its ends as a Christ Collective without being derivative or unintentionally parodying itself?

 

Redemptive Orbits of Imagination

My last few posts were written in anticipation of a meeting in The Hague of the Thinklings, a periodic reflective gathering of Christian Associates staff and friends. The topic this time dealt with the imagination in a missional church. Two days of very stimulating discussions alternated with some tasty meals, intervals of liquid refreshment, music, laughs. Heck, we even went to church. These discussions serve will serve as the basis for the next few posts. Though my personal spin will undoubtedly distort the tenor of the discussions, I intend to serve as biased reporter of the conversations.

Should the Christian imagination be given free rein, or should it be held in check? This was the subject of a paper presented by Hud McWilliams on “the redemptive imagination.” Discussion pivoted in part on fallenness. Imagination is part of being made in the image of God, but if the image is corrupted so too is the imagination. Unrestrained imagination is like unrestrained sex: it might be fun but it can get you in trouble. On the other hand, imposing moralistic restrictions stifles the imagination, steering it in safe, predictable, derivative, boring directions.

The sense of the group was that the church has typically exercised its moralistic restraints with excessive zeal. The emerging church offers a corrective, pushing the church in the direction of greater imaginative freedom. Rather than dealing with the imagination in terms of boundaries, the church might consider the imagination as orbiting around a central core. Some travel in a tight orbit; others explore more distant and elliptical paths. The center’s gravitational pull extends far into the distance; you can go a long way out there without drifting completely out of orbit.

Hud observed that we tend to exercise our imaginations in response to some external crisis. “Our brains are most active when they are confronted with something new. What drives this for most of us is some unwanted, unchosen interruption or crisis and not an intentional, chosen, sought-after experience.” Christianity’s emphasis on rest as the endpoint tends to reinforce a reactive imagination geared toward removing sources of unrest. In the rest model of Christianity, imagination is a coping strategy for surviving in a fallen world – implying that the imagination will not be needed in heaven.

In contrast with the rest model is the freedom model of Christianity. Redemption sets the Christian free; that means the redeemed imagination too is set free. And now we’ve orbited back to the freedom-versus-license discussion: an imagination not bounded, not free-floating, but freely orbiting the center of gravity at whatever distance you’re comfortable with.

A side note: as promised, I’ve contacted various presenters at the upcoming Baylor conference on christian imagination. It seems that none of the authors has finished writing yet. If anything of interest comes to my attention I’ll let you know.

The Ktismatic Mission: First Manifesto

My friend Patrick DeMuth, a church planter in southern France, has invited me to attend a meeting of Christian Associates in The Hague starting tomorrow night. The topic is “mission and imagination,” and the meeting will be hosted by Andrew Perriman, guiding force behind the exceptional blog Open Source Theology. I’m a little nervous, since I’m not part of the organization and my relationship with church is tenuous at best, but I’ve been assured that this is a nice bunch of people. Patrick was kind enough to read my book about Genesis 1; he will be interacting with the book at the meeting. He sent me a copy of his text, which has served as stimulus for my last few posts. This time around I want to address a specific statement of Patrick’s: “Our mission is not to be creative, but to make that which we create real to those around us. Creativity flows from mission, but is not the mission itself.”

I understand his point. He’s a minister trying to get a church off the ground here in “post-Christian” France. But I’m a ktismatician (yes I am). For me creation is the mission. I’m reminded of Antonin Artaud, who wrote a manifesto for the impossible Theater of Cruelty (see my post about it here). So here is my preliminary riff on what a Ktismatic Mission might look like.

Ktismatic Mission: Preliminary Manifesto

1. The mission of the Ktismatic Mission is to serve as a portalic terminal interlinking all the innumerable realities in the universe, most of which either don’t yet exist yet or remain hidden.

2. The work of the Ktismatic Mission is to discover, create, and reveal alternate realities and the portals for getting to them.

3. There are no clients; only fellow travelers.

4. All kinds of realities are fair game: art, science, technology, relationship, entertainment, thinking, imagining, exploring. In fact, every aspect of human life falls within the purview of the Ktismatic Mission. Specifically Judeo-Christian creations – sermons, liturgies, evangelistic outreaches, etc. – aren’t automatically excluded.

5. The Ktismatic Mission promotes the elohimic ethos. I discuss the ethos at length in my book; there’s a summary embedded in Part Three of this blog page. Briefly, the elohimic ethos:

– values creation for its own sake, not for what it can be used for;

– values the creation of meaning in an intrinsically meaningless universe;

– values the interval of creation over and above the continuum, the moment, the cycle, or eternity;

– operates inside the void, not in heaven or in the heart/mind/soul of the creator;

– builds and traverses bridges between creation and discovery;

– builds and traverses bridges between creation and revelation;

– looks for the good in the creation itself, not in personal taste or market value;

– is the imago Dei in man the individual and in man the species;

– is the impetus for creating a second universe on the foundations of the first one.

6. The Ktismatic Mission has theory but no practice. The Ktismatic Mission resists the instrumental rationality of our practical, efficient, economic age. Praxis is a means of re-creating, not creating; of multiplying the already-is, not generating the never-was; of building the simulacrum, not punching holes in it. Praxis is about enhancing creators’ creativity; the Ktismatic Mission is about creating creations. The Ktismatic Mission is all about what and why, even about who, where and when; it’s just not about how.

7. The Ktismatic Mission doesn’t hope to change the world; rather, it hopes to witness the creation of a limitless number of alternative worlds.

I think there’s more to be said in the Manifesto than I’m able to think of today – maybe after I get back from the meeting in The Hague I’ll be able to elaborate further. I’ll be back on Wednesday. In the meantime, if you have any thoughts at all about what might be included in the Ktismatic Mission Manifesto, I hope you’ll write them in the comments to this post. Make yourself at home while I’m gone; just be sure to leave at least one cold beer in the fridge.

 

The Lure of the Void

The work of creation differs fundamentally from the work of maintenance or renewal or propagation. The difference manifests itself in a different way of occupying time and space. The difference, obscured by the busyness of day-to-day life, fully reveals itself at the brink of the void.

There are things that are – either raw material things; or cultural artifacts like tools, words, ideas, governments, works of art. From the time a thing comes into the world it is launched on a continuous trajectory toward the future. Left alone to follow its trajectory, a thing can persist, grow, spread, deteriorate, mutate. These transformations happen without specific intervention, through the thing’s continuous presence in and interaction with the world.

To work at maintenance is to prevent an already-launched thing from changing over time. To work at renewal is to restore an already-changed thing to its original condition. To work at propagation is to extend the size, range or quantity of an already-existing thing. Work can be done on the thing itself: cleaning, repairing, feeding, replicating. Work can also be done on the environment the thing occupies: removing weeds and diseases, preparing the soil for more plantings, and so on. To perform these kinds of works, the worker must operate within the time and space that the existing thing already occupies. The work is done continually and repeatedly.

Think about a less tangible thing: an idea, say. The same principles apply. You can work at clarifying the idea, protecting it from intellectual attack, restoring its vigor in response to prior onslaughts, teaching it to others, extending its range of application. The same principles hold as with a material thing: the worker lives in the time and space of the idea as something that’s already launched into the intellectual environment.

If your job is to ensure the persistence of an already-existing thing, then the worst -case scenario is for the thing to go out of existence: the artifact is destroyed or rendered obsolete, the idea is forgotten. The thing always exists at the edge of the void; the goal is to keep the void at bay.

Now consider the work of creating either a material thing – an artifact – or a conceptual thing – an idea. To a creator, the void isn’t the end but the beginning; it’s not the fear but the opportunity. The void is the space where the worker sets up shop. To think of the void as chaotic meaninglessness is to see it from the perspective of a world already filled with order and meaning. But if your work is to create order and meaning, then the void is what you seek. The void isn’t existential dread or entropy or nihilism; it’s the realm of pure possibility.

In undertaking a work of creation, the void is the portal out of the already-full world into a world not yet made. Does the void already exist, waiting for the creator to find it and enter it? Or does the creator create a void, an encampment in the midst of an already-full universe, a passageway to a universe that doesn’t yet exist? Perhaps it’s a little of both.

There comes an unaccountable fascination with nothing in particular, then the nothing becomes an empty something – an empty space, a gap, a disruption in the continuum, a portal. Through this obsessive fascination the void opens up around the creator, engulfing the creator in possibility. If you experience disorientation and exhilaration simultaneously, chances are you’re standing on the threshold of the void.

What happens inside the void? Does a truth reveal itself; does an idea become implanted in your mind; do the design and operation of a new device become clear? Perhaps it’s the exact inverse: you become aware of a lack of truth, the absence of an idea, the nonexistence of a device. I’m not sure it’s possible to discern which comes first. I think, though, that the creation of something also reveals the fact that, up until its creation, that thing did not previously exist. The void is the portal, signaling the beginning of an interval during which the absence ends and the presence begins.

The void of creation is a realm of pure possibility. Understanding the void is possible only in retrospect. Once it becomes clear what happened inside the void, it isn’t the void any more: it’s become part of the created universe.

Renewing Creation

To create is to make something that didn’t exist before. To renew is to restore something that already exists to its original state. The interrelationship of creation and renewal is the subject of this post.

The Renaissance and the Reformation were the founding renewal projects of what would become the Modern Age. The Renaissance sought to restore the art and the philosophy of classical Greece and Rome; the Reformation, to restore the Church to its Biblical and first-century roots. Both movements saw something wrong with the status quo, something static and distorted in medievalism. The West wanted to release the long-suppressed urge for change and progress. Both the Renaissance and the Reformation sought to recapture the vitality of a prior golden age. Still, neither the Renaissance artists nor the Reformers sought to embed themselves in the past. Instead, they brought insights from the past forward into the present in order to generate forward momentum toward the future.

Five hundred years later, renewal carries more of a sense of alienation from the future, a feeling that modernity’s relentless forward momentum is running out of control, carrying us somewhere we don’t want to go. This time the gaze into the deep past bears an unmistakable savor of nostalgia. We seek to recapture a time before the valorization of change and progress, but also before the rigidity and stagnation settled in – a time when stability and tradition enfolded the community in its secure embrace.

For some the spirit of renewal means experimenting with the old forms and structures, retrofitting the present with attachments retrieved from the deep past. There’s a Borges short story about a writer who recreated portions of Don Quixote word for word, exactly like the original. But he wasn’t just copying the old text; he was rewriting it. The “new” Quixote meant something so different three centuries after Cervantes’ time that the critics regarded it as an entirely new work, perhaps even more remarkable than the original.

For many the spirit of renewal also means stripping away undesirable accretions that have accumulated over the centuries, thereby restoring the world and mankind to an original virtuous state. The Greens, those busy people who want to “simplify their lives,” those uptight people who want to recover their “inner child,” those libertarians who would recover Aristotelian or Stoic virtues as foundational to a society of free individuals, those Christians who want to interpret the world from a first-century point of view, even those evolutionists who would strip away the layers of culture that alienate us from our natural instincts – there are plenty of programs for “decorrupting” the individual and the community, thereby restoring them to an earlier virtuous state. It’s not clear whether this desire to recover the innocence of a prior golden age reflects the devaluing of progress characteristic of postmodernism or the latest manifestation of Romanticism.

Let’s say that man lost his innocence and the imago Dei in the Garden and that fallen man has been progressively corrupting the world ever since. Doesn’t it imply that human creation is the cause of corruption? Let’s say that the goal of renewal is to restore everything to its pre-Fall pristine condition: human nature, human society, the natural world. Doesn’t it imply the need to renounce human innovation and its fruits, to reverse the course of human cultural history?

A lot seems to depend on what renewal is heading toward. If God completed his good Creation long ago, if since then man hasn’t added anything to the Creation, if man has done nothing but detract from the Creation’s original goodness – then what does renewal seek to accomplish? And what of man’s corruption: is it characterized by the desire to compete with God, to be a creator like God, to replace God’s creation with the creations of man? What then does a renewed man do in the world?

One proposal (as elaborated at considerable length over on the right side of this blog) is that the imago Dei manifests itself primarily as a God-like ability to create. By implication, a corrupt imago means a corruption in human creativity, resulting in a corruption of the cumulative works of human creation; i.e., of culture. Again by implication, a renewed imago means the renewal of human creativity and the consequent renewal of human culture.

According to this interpretation, renewing the Creation points not to the undoing of human endeavor but to its restoration. Instead of decreating the man-made world, renewing the Creation means reclaiming the original glory of human creativity. Renewal also means decorrupting man’s cumulative creation over the millennia, which is human culture in all its forms: language, art, science, government, philosophy, economics.

In a word, renewing the Creation would mean renewing the spirit of creation.

 

The Creation and This Particular Creation

This one scientific study, this one business, this one war, this one church: each individual creation is simultaneously a part of a larger reality and a separate reality in its own right. How does the reality of the larger category of Science, Business, War, Church shape the way you create this particular instantiation?

Say I want to write a novel. All the novels ever written comprise the larger reality of The Novel. There are abstract properties that apply to most novels: they are fictional, they are written by one person, they’re pretty long, there are characters, there are stories involving the characters. There are novel-writing skills: good writing technique, imagination, character development, dialogue. There are subcategories of novels, the “genres” of fiction: science fiction, romance, inspirational, literary. Then there is the environment where novels “live”: publishers, bookstores, the reading public. There’s what the customers want out of a novel: characters they can relate to, some sex and violence, snappy dialogue, straighforward story development.

Then there is my novel. A man is sitting at an outdoor café table. It’s southern France. It’s raining, late afternoon. He’s sitting by himself, drinking a beer. Just like every afternoon. He’s distracted, lost in thought – he’s just heard disturbing news from a distant friend. After a while he realizes that there’s a woman standing across from him, greeting him by name. She extends her hand…

This is the reality as it exists inside this particular novel, a novel that isn’t even written yet, a reality that’s being summoned into existence out of the formless void of the individual imagination. I’ve read plenty of novels, I’ve worked on my skills: now I’m writing this novel, creating this one idiosyncratic creation. I’m totally immersed in this emerging reality that’s taking shape around me. To me as I write there are no other novels: there’s only this one.

Say I’ve finished writing the novel. There it sits in the agent’s slush pile, one manuscript among hundreds, thousands, millions. What’s distinguishes mine from the rest? Perhaps nothing: it’s a product of the novel-writing industry. It’s a cottage industry comprised of hundreds of thousands of individual practitioners working in relative isolation. From forty thousand feet my novel is identical to every other novel.

I can approach the work of writing a novel in one of two ways. I can think about where my novel sits in the larger reality of The Novel: the component parts, the skills, the genres, the market. I want to make my novel enough like everyone else’s so that it’s attractive to the publishing industry and the reading public, but different enough that it stands out from the competition. Or I can think about the guy getting up from his café table to greet the woman. Does he kiss her extended hand, shake it, grasp it tenderly? What does he say to her? Does she join him for a beer? Why has she come?

In my view, the only escape from Baudrillard’s world of the simulacra, of copies without originals, of representations without realities, is to ignore The Reality and to create this particular reality. Instead of seeing a world overwhelmed by more and more of the same, you find – or you create – a formless void where nothing exists except pure unprecedented possibility. Are there any formless voids left in a world inundated by mass-produced simulacra of everything under the sun? From forty thousand feet, no. But right here, right now, the guy at his café table rises to greet the woman. He bumps his leg on the table, sloshing just a little of the beer out of his glass, but neither of them notices. The man reaches out to take the woman’s extended hand as the waiter stands by the open door of the café, empty tray in hand, watching the motorcycle as it splashes its way between the double-parked cars toward the sea…

 

The Divine Irreference of Images

For Baudrillard there are no originals any more, but only copies, simulacra. So, for example, when you read this blog post, are you reading the original or a copy? How could you tell the difference?

Sometimes the original and the simulation are reversed. Baudrillard uses Disneyland as an example. A pristine island of pure fantasy, Disneyland is regarded as an escape from the real world. Baudrillard doesn’t dismiss its phoniness; in fact, he regards it as more real than the world around it. Disneyland provides its customers with the illusion that, when they leave, they are returning to the real world – as if the stuff people do every day is natural, normal, significant, real. Whereas Disneyland is a business that generates cashflow, return on investment, and job creation by providing a service in the marketplace. And the nature of that service? To provide the illusion of illusion: to make people believe that they’re entering a world of fantasy whereas in fact they’ve moved into an especially intense concentration of the real, which is the hyperreal. Or again: Los Angeles already occupies the hyperreal realm of images without referents. America is Disneyland; Disneyland is a “third-order simulacrum,” a simulation of what America has already become.

An imitation is a deception, intended to disguise the fact that it isn’t real. A simulation actually incorporates aspects of the real within itself. So, for example, someone who feigns illness has no symptoms, whereas someone with psychosomatic illness actually experiences symptoms of the “real” illness.

An icon isn’t just a symbolic representation of the real; it’s a simulation. The sacred image is a “visible theology,” incarnating a portion of the spiritual reality residing behind or beyond the image. Eventually the icon, instead of pointing beyond itself to the fullness of the real, itself became the focus of attention as the repository of holiness. So the statue replaces the saint, the cathedral replaces heaven, the priest replaces Christ, the church-state alliance replaces the Kingdom of God. Eventually all of life takes place within a reality made up entirely of simulacra, a reality in which the images permanently take the place of the originals. The presence of God can be withdrawn entirely without affecting the real power of the simulacra to fascinate and to dominate. Even the imagination becomes dominated by the simulacra: the saint is like the statues, the kingdom is like the church, Jesus is like the priest. The order is reversed between the original reality and its simulation. The simulacra become hyperreal, serving as the model for the real.

“This is precisely what was feared by the Iconoclasts, whose millennial quarrel is still with us today. This is precisely because they predicted this omnipotence of simulacra, the faculty simulacra have of effacing God from the conscience of man, and the destructive, annihilating truth that they allow to appear – that deep down God never existed, that only the simulacrum ever existed, even that God himself was never anything but his own simulacrum – from this came the urge to destroy the images. If they had believed that these images only obfuscated or masked the Platonic Idea of God, there would have been no reason to destroy them. One can live with the idea of distorted truth. But their metaphysical despair came from the idea that the image didn’t conceal anything at all.”

Modernity was built on representations – material, linguistic, conceptual – that pointed away from themselves to the originals: truth, purpose, relationship, God himself. In postmodern reality the representations no longer point to anything but themselves; the icons have become idols. The difficulty lies in going back, either to a reality of representations or to a reality of direct engagement with the originals. We excavate the past – the original texts, the writings of the Fathers, the foundations of traditions – and live among the ruins in an attempt to return to a firmer reality, to reaffirm by weight of history the reality behind the images. But taking the relics out of the museums doesn’t change anything, because now we’re just creating a simulacrum of the past.

This blog is about creating. What possibilities remain for creating in a reality comprised of simulacra? I’ll try to address that issue tomorrow or the next day. Meanwhile, you can find a somewhat modified version of the first chapter of Baudrillard’s book here.

The Desert of the Real Itself

 

“If once we were able to view the Borges fable in which the cartographers of the Empire drew up a map so detailed that it ends up covering the territory exactly (the decline of the Empire witnesses the fraying of this map, little by little, and its fall into ruins, though some shreds are still discernible in the deserts – the metaphysical beauty of this ruined abstraction testifying to a pride equal to the Empire and rotting like a carcass, returning to the substance of the soil, a bit as the double ends by being confused with the real through aging) – as the most beautiful allegory of simulation, this fable has now come full circle for us, and possesses nothing but the discrete charm of second-order simulacra.”

– Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 1981

Embedded in this first sentence is a summary of Borges’s story that’s nearly as long as the story itself; the sentence in which the story is embedded is almost precisely the length of the story. The first sentence of Borges’ story goes like this:

“In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province.” (Jorge Luis Borges, “On Exactitude in Science,” 1946)

Borges attributes the story to Suárez Miranda, Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV, Cap. XLV, Lérida, 1658. This citation is entirely fictitious and should be considered part of the story itself. The story was originally published in 1946 under the pseudonym B. Lynch Davis; later Borges and Bioy Casares would publish a collection of detective fiction under the pseudonym B. Suarez Lynch.

Elsewhere Borges acknowledges American philosopher Josiah Royce as the inspiration for his story:

“Let us imagine that a portion of the soil of England has been levelled off perfectly and that on it a cartographer traces a map of England. The job is perfect; there is no detail of the soil of England, no matter how minute, that is not registered on the map; everything has there its correspondence. This map, in such a case, should contain a map of the map, which should contain a map of the map of the map, and so on to infinity.” (Josiah Royce, The World and the Individual, 1899)

Royce was an objective idealist: he believed that the material world exists only as it is known by an ideal knower who must himself be actual and not just hypothetical. It’s possible that Borges was inspired to write his story not by Royce but by Lewis Carroll:

“That’s another thing we’ve learned from your Nation,” said Mein Herr: “map-making. But we’ve carried it much further than you. What do you consider the largest map that would be really useful ?”

“About six inches to the mile.”

“Only six inches!” exclaimed Mein Herr. “We very soon got to six yards to the mile. Then we tried a hundred yards to the mile. And then came the grandest idea of all! We actually made a map of the country, on the scale of a mile to the mile!”

“Have you used it much ?” I enquired.

“It has never been spread out, yet.” said Mein Herr: “the farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight! So we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well.” (L. Carroll, Sylvie and Brumo Concluded, 1893)

Lewis Carroll was the pen name of the Rev. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, who was by all accounts an excellent amateur photographer.

In Baudrillard’s hyperreality Borges’ story has been reduced to nothing but a second-order simulacrum, a story that once revealed the truth but that now conceals it. Once the world was inundated with copies of the original; now there are copies without an original. Now the map precedes the territory; the map stretches itself across the tattered vestiges of the real.

The representation no longer makes reference to the thing represented; the sign no longer points to the thing signified. Once the image reflected reality – this was the sacramental or iconic order of the image. Then the image masked reality – the satanic order. Then the image masked the absence of reality – the order of sorcery. Now the image “has no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum.”

At the beginning of the first Matrix movie the Neo character is introduced as a programmer who moonlights as the designer of illegal virtual reality programs. A gang of punked-out clients comes to his apartment to buy Neo’s latest simulation. He gets them a copy of the simulation from his secret stash, hidden in a hollowed-out book on his bookshelf. The book: Simulacra and Simulation, by Jean Baudrillard.

Baudrillard’s book actually begins with a quotation, which perhaps should be regarded as the “real” first line:

“The simulacrum is never what hides the truth – it is truth that hides the fact that there is none. The simulacrum is true.” – Ecclesiastes