The Way Poems Mean

 

There are two ways to say this.

You can say that, reading a poem, you use the object, the words, their sounds, their appearance on the page or screen (or in the air if you’re listening, if listening is a form of reading), to create meaning. That meaning exists in your consciousness and nowhere else in the universe. Only God, in voyeur mode, has any access to it other than you. Or you can say the poem uses you to create meaning. The poem does not “have” a meaning. The poem is just an object, physical or aural. It has no more meaning than a rock or twig. But like a rock or twig it can become a meaning, or, more specifically, it can be the material from which meaning is created. If you don’t like the idea here of creating meaning, I could say that the rock or the poem is the object via which meaning accrues in your consciousness. There is something in the middle here between actively creating, like God, ex nihilo and passively receiving, like a Calvinist, salvation. You can’t be entirely passive. You can’t be entirely active, or you would need the object (or work in a language). Any object can become meaningful, can become no longer, for you in your mind, just a rock, or a thing. This second way of thinking is closer to the truth than the first, I think.

But this is how a poem (or any intentionally made human object) differs from a rock. The poem transmits, imperfectly, a meaning that was formerly in the consciousness of the poet.

It’s useful to think through the simplistic communications model we all learned at some point in school. Meaning transferred from one consciousness to another via language like the voice through a telephone wire, starting whole, ending whole.

The poet creates in words; the words manifest the poet’s intention. This is what I wanted to say, and how I wanted to say it, or comes as close as I can, close enough for you, when you read it to share my intention or meaning. Or experience. It would be beside the point to quibble about that vocabulary here. The point is this: rocks are different from poems in that rocks don’t sit in streams so that they can become metaphors, let alone metaphors tied to a specific meaning. But the poet turns the rock in the stream into a metaphor, seeing a possibility of meaning that the poet can use to make a poem, to transmit to your consciousness.

I understand the inadequacy of the model. But the point I hope is clear: that meaning exists not in the rock, not in the poem, but in the mind of the reader who reads the poem or interprets the rock. The difference is that the poem has behind its creating an intention to mean that the rock does not, and that intention informs the reading, making the poem more than sound or the imitation of sound, and print, and visual object. Meaning does not exist in the poem, it does not reside there. Meaning exists in the consciousness of the reader and only during the act of reading or thinking about the poem. Only in the moment of active consciousness. It fades like the light of an old TV screen until or unless it is turned back on.

That’s step one. There are now two ways to take this thought, two roads we might travel from this point. The first is the road of how limited this notion of mind is. It’s the road to the after effects of the processing of meaning, the road of how the poem comes not merely from the conscious attempt to embody fully-conscious meaning on the part of the poet and how the processed meaning in the reader seeps down into the body of the reader, of how the poem is processed not like a math equation (though I suspect math equations are processed more like poems than we usually think, especially good ones, that math equations are also poems) but like nutrients: stomach : brain :: body : psyche.

That road is pretty well trampled. I won’t go any further down it now.

The second road is more interesting to me today. It is the one that understands that this meaning, which I now need to broaden from that inadequate concept into the concept of experience, of which meaning is a major part, in the consciousness of the reader, existing only now, when consciousness is on guard and alert, always uses, as its meaning-producing tools, the circumstances of the reading, as understood by the reader. In other words I’m reading the poem today, in this context, this class, this leisure, within my highly flawed notion of what poems are and what language is and what meaning is and what interpretation is and what poems are for and what they do. And all these things both enable and interfere with my reading, with my experience, with my attempt to convert the artifact into an experience.  

So the better the model I have for how poems work and what situation I’m in when I read, the better, the richer, the more rewarding, more unimpeded will be my experience not just of poems but of everything, every human artifact, every natural object—like air through the vocal cords, the unimpeded vowel, the partly blocked consonants.  

The now of understanding. So let’s return to this fact. The meaning of a poem exists only in the consciousness of the reader. It is important to note here that the poet, the writer, is, as far as interpretation goes, just another reader; this is exactly true; the reader and the writer are on the same side of the poem; there is literally no difference. If one reader is different from another, if one reader can become, in fact must become, different from herself over successive readings, or even from beginning to end of a single reading, if indeed this process of reading is the process of becoming different, then the poet differs from the reader in exactly the same way that one reader differs from another or one reader differs from herself over time.

The meaning goes away when it is no longer present in consciousness, when I am no longer thinking about it. But the having-read, the experience of the meaning, the memory of the experience, does not go away. Where it goes cannot be determined beforehand. Am I overstating the case? Possibly. There is the possibility of forgetting, of utterly losing not just in the mind but in the body, in the consciousness and the unconscious, the experience. This is a corollary of any experience. I may learn what poison ivy is and then become wary of the plant and then, having perhaps moved to where the plant doesn’t grow, forget what it looks like, utterly lose my wariness of it and absently touch it when I return for a summer. And I may even at that point still not be aware that I had ever learned to identify the plant or that I have ever felt the itch of it. Losing the effect of a poem in the body so utterly may be possible, losing it beyond the zero, deeper than any dream or hypnotism could recover because it’s just no longer there.  But it’s as unlikely as that. If the body ever knew it, the body is likely to retain some vestige of it, like a forgotten language.

The now of meaning. The most productive, satisfying (oddly truest even) way of approaching a poem is to treat it as a potential experience. And then as an experience. Don’t search for a meaning. Have an experience. Meaning will be part of that experience. Analysis may come later; analysis will tell you why you had that experience of the poem, you in particular, at that moment of your life, on that day, in that context in which you read the poem; sanity requires that your reading not be entirely your own. A community readers will have experiences of the poem that overlap with yours. But analysis comes later, if it comes at all. We don’t have to read poems in order to analyze them. And even if we do, experience and analysis are two distinct activities.

I have in the back of my mind still the experience I imagine we all have of reading at least some poems, or even some part of all poems, particularly of difficult poems, the experience I have with any number of poems by T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Charles Simic and once had with poems that now seem to me without mystery, the works of Keats for example. I can’t have this experience when, despite concerted effort, the words just wash over my mind as sounds or as words unconnected to the other words in their sentence. Likely, the words are trying to do something in this context that these words have never done before. I have to come up with a new way of processing these words in order to make sense of the poem (to “make sense” is both to create meaning and to have an experience). I struggle with a poem that may or may not want me to struggle.

Meaning happens now. In my easy chair, picking up a book of poems I may have lying around, reading because I am in a mood to read, I can struggle with the poem, or I can turn the page or I can close the book for now or forever. No meaning happened for me and the experience I had was the experience of not knowing. I am guaranteed to forget the poem I tried to read. I probably won’t forget the experience of not understanding it, the experience that may lead me to give up on poetry or to take a class that teaches me how to read poems. In that class, if I want to succeed, I don’t have that luxury. This is a different reading context. And now I have to bring to bear all I think I know about poems and language and meaning (and school and everything else that for me at this moment might impinge on the process, on the thing I am trying to do: read a fucking poem).

So I ask myself, why am I trying to read this poem? I have so many overlapping and nonoverlapping answers. To prove I’m smart. To see if I can do it. To have the experience others have reported that you have when you read a poem; to find out what that experience is, to see if I can have it. To expand my mind, myself. To understand poetry better. And on and on.

If those things are interfering with my experience of this poem, I should put them aside. Read the poem. If I’m in a college course on how to read poems, I bring my confusion to the class and seek help. If I’m alone in my comfy chair I do whatever I need to do. If I don’t close the book, if I don’t give up on poetry, I get out of my chair and go to reference works or talk to people who like this stuff and ask them what their experience of this poem is. I read critics. I join poetry societies. I keep reading the poem. Or I read a different poem. The only goal I need to have is the goal of feeling satisfied with my experience of the poem.

Readers tend to become satisfied in one of two ways. They either use all texts to confirm their preconceptions, rejecting any that don’t serve that function, or they use or allow the new text, the poem, but also (though it’s a greater challenge) the rock in the stream to extend their being (mind, consciousness, self). They become more, closer to their potential, if that is something they have. More of who a person can be.  

No, We Don't Write Poems--a formless excursion

 Or music. 

One of the most misleading and perhaps intellectually damaging legacies of the Enlightenment is the idea that people write music or poems. These things are no more written than equations in math are written. They are put down. There is no right word, no single word anyway, that will adequately name the thing that is done when a poem is put down. It is captured, it is discovered, it corresponds to a being or reality that preexists it and that can be perceived when the conditions are right. All artists attest to this fact. A written poem like a written equation is false. E does not equal MC cubed. 

But the Enlightenment needed to create a way of increasing the stock of the commodity "writing." And so it created an author and authorship, a capitalist unit subject to reward an punishment. It's a false equation. Locke's philosophy was written. He can claim it. Whatever is false is written. Whatever is true is found. Locke figured out how to pay people for lying. For making mistakes. For getting it wrong. 

The advantage of math over poetry is that math's equations can be demonstrated to a much higher degree. People who understand math and physics can show that E in fact equals MC squared. But is Hope a thing with feathers? 

Still, I will not say that math or science establishes objective truth. The facts of math or science correlate to human perception and experience. E doesn't equal MC squared in heaven. If asked, God would say not "that isn't true" but "I wouldn't put it that way." 

The two people whose thoughts I'd like to refine are Gervais and deGrasse Tyson. The former says for example "there are 3000 gods, what are the chances you have the right one?" And "I just believe in one less God than you do." I'd like to say, giving God 3000 names does not multiply gods. But I'd also like to say "that doesn't mean there's only one god." The question before this conversation is "does number exist without human brains." And my answer is no. If there are no numbers in reality, no platonic form for number, then the question "how many gods are there" is a nonsense question. 

Why Don’t They Just Say What They Mean?

 

Unless the words were put down in that order in that way it could not do the thing it does to those to whom it does it.

Because the words were put down thus it does nothing to you.

Your move.

F*ing Computers

 

In trying to make our lives simpler, computers have made them hopelessly more complex. What used to be simple, straightforward, intuitive processes now require us to solve a rubrics cube a day to figure out how to store, edit, find, save, and retrieve files. Where is that thing I was working on this morning? I now have ten paths to it, half of which take me nowhere near it, three of which take me to some alternative universe version of it, two of which disappear when I try to click on them. I never know if I do get a file open if this is the one I wanted, the latest version, the best version. It's one of the versions the computer saved for me without my permission when I was thinking about options. The lost bits exist still in the ether. Now I have to train myself in the proper recovery method. I've lost my actual train of thought because I have to inhabit the amateur computer scientist section of my brain for twenty minutes and even to the thing that I dread most in the world: search the HELP menu in a desperate and fruitless attempt to get help. I put in search terms, carefully using the actual terms the computer used with me to tell me what my problem was. But the words a computer uses to talk to you are never the words the computer will allow you to use to talk to it. “You need to verify your username and password.” Ok. Since there’s no useful information there, I go to help, “How do I verify my username and password.” One of two things will happen: “Your query yielded no results.” Or “here are the 10,239 things you might be asking about, including a recipe for blueberry anchovy muffins.”

If I ever to get to the old version of the document without the 20 hours of work I’d already added to it but which, starting from, I’ll save at least 20 hours re-editing that would have been wasted looking for the version I actually wanted to work on I may start working on it again. But before I can do that, I have to offer myself up to a Buddhist monastery.

You Great Unknowns

 

WE know Emily today not because she had great talent

that’s a given

but because she had great luck.

She wrote a letter to the one person who would help her.

We know Kafka today because his best friend betrayed him.

I could go on.

 

The observation is not that we came so close to not knowing these visionaries

but that we don’t know the ones who wrote the wrong letter or had loyal friends.

 

How very many sages remain unknown to history?

We can’t answer that.

When all is finally over, earth exhausted by its native evil

and God gathers God’s own into God’s kingdom

will you finally get your reward, you great unknowns,

or will there be so many of us that we remain

anonymous?

Enlightened Religion, half a thought

 

From the Enlightenment and its science has emerged the historically crazy idea that religion should be rejected because its stories aren’t true. To what extent has anyone ever believed the stories of Zeus or Brahma were true, or in what sense? And what about Moses and Jesus and Mohammed? Surely people believed that the stories about these figures were true? How can you worship the Western God revealed via these figures if you don’t believe the accounts of their lives are true?

But no one asked about the truth of these stories until after the concept of Enlightenment Truth emerged. Of course the followers of Judaism, Christianity and Islam believed the stories of their founders and principal figures. But the claim that those stories were true in our modern sense of true—historically accurate, recorded and told exactly as they happened—could not be claimed for them until that concept of truth developed. Once that standard was applied to stories, the stories of course unraveled. But not because they were not true. They fell apart when held to a standard was applied to them that was unknown to the people who first told them or read or heard them.

And now we claim very widely that religion is false because the stories are false because they don’t conform to this alien standard of truth. It’s like judging nursery rhymes because they don't conform to the rules of calculus. And even those who today try to save religion from the Enlightenment critique generally doom themselves by using the structure of Enlightenment thought. And they are judged as crazy or confused (which of course they are but no more confused than those they oppose) because they can’t see the plain fact that ancient stories don’t stand up to Enlightenment standards of truth. The imperfect and so-so Enlightenment. But what these well-meaning critics of secular thought are in my view really responding to is something else. They too only have the Modern vocabulary in which to express themselves, so they express themselves badly. The sense they have however that the real is something other than what the critics of religion tell us it is is too strong to die on the altar of Enlightenment. They know that something is missing in the Enlightenment critique of pre-Enlightenment thought. But they don’t have any idea how to say what that is. So they listen to all that science has to say; they never question the absurdity of going to the scientist to ask questions about God, and they go away thinking “that must be wrong.” If they only press the question in the vocabulary of the scientist far enough, they’ll see it fall apart. We’re just not there yet.

But that will never happen. The whole structure of Enlightenment thought ultimately excludes God. And simultaneously excludes religion. God is not an object in the universe, not an object at all. God therefore does not have objective existence. A structure of thought that claims only what is objective is real declares God unreal. And at the same time it declares religion false—which is a radically different step. God does not have to be objectively real—does not have to “exist”—for religion to be an essential part of the human experience.

And I mean essential in a collective not an individual sense, though that may be true as well. It may be that humanity cannot persist without religion. Enlightenment thought repeatedly argues the evil of religion. It was Nietzsche who finally tore the lid off this one. Religion is the source of endless evil, personal and civil, wars and murders and intolerance and prejudice and oppression. War is the great human evil that we’re finally on the verge of eradicating; though Nietzsche’s dates may have been overly optimistic, the trajectory is clear.

The counter argument is easy enough to make, though it would take me off track to make it here. I will only point out that religion did not create nuclear war or gas chambers or mustard gas. It is not responsible for global warming or gun violence or capitalism. Freeing ourselves from religion has not made us a more peaceful species. The claim that if we just continue to push our Enlightenment thinking until it truly sticks is like the argument of the gun lobby that tells us that only way to solve the gun problem is to sell more guns. The same forces that have always used religion to support violence now use the Enlightenment. The true priests of the Enlightenment say they are perverting this thought, that they are illegitimate. Sure. The priests of religious thought said the same thing. And they were right. But then they had the regulating power of religion to counterbalance the violence. We lack that today more than ever before. And it does not appear that the regulating power of Modernism or Scientism or Enlightenment will ever be sufficient to stop the train of ignorance, greed, and violence. If the end is near, it’s not because of religion. It may be because we wouldn’t allow religion to save us from it.

All the old stories are true according to the standards of truth set up for them. And that standard of truth is no less valid than the scientific and quasi-scientific standards that we use today to affirm and condemn all claims. But what is the claim to truth religions make? What difference does it make that we have lost this mythic realm of truth?

The germs of our modern, Enlightenment, scientific notion of truth can be traced far back, as far back as you want to go. They are in Augustine’s critique of astrology and Manicheism. They are an essential ingredient in the shift from what we today call paganism to monotheism, even in Islam’s critique of Christianity as it is manifest in the Qur’an. But that plant grew and the other was weeded.

Much of the most important thought of the 20^th Century supported the notion that the human species exists like any other species. In rural Maine they keep a close eye on the dogs at certain times of year because they know that if they smell deer, they’ll gather from one back yard to another and spontaneously form themselves into a pack and start killing the hunters’ prizes. Humans are like this. Hitler did not rise out of nowhere nor did Donald Trump or the Right Wing populist, nationalist nonsense sweeping the world today. It would be irresponsible to oversimplify the analysis of why and how this happened. I contend that the intellectual rejection of religion is an essential factor. 

 

The Library of Alexandria

If you believe that poems

are objects inherent in language

like other kinds of objects inherent

in something something like language--

already there, I mean,

which is a meaning inherent in the word

object that I felt the need to pull out

and place before you

like an object

I pulled out of language—

what other possibilities are created by your image

or metaphor? What translates?

First of all that you could have been the one to write this poem.

Anyone sufficiently tuned could have grabbed these words out of language’s net

and arranged them thus. That all the wealth and fame this great poem will have achieved

before the inevitable end of its life could have been yours that will now be mine.

And that all the wealth and fame I’ll get that could have been yours was not

earned, unless you think those stray quarters you pick out of the dirt that fell from the pockets of people who didn’t deserve them are earned.

And that the library of Alexandria wasn’t really lost.  

Sestina: Aren't We a Pair

1

Light diffusing icicles in rain

minor melody dripping in plain sight

mist effusion, this arresting pain

felt-for meaning in an empty rite

incense of memory, forgotten clotted air

in this mockery of spring, this rotten-blossomed pear.

2

O, those days, we thought we were a pair.

Two true gods in love, over love to reign.

Witness this: even true divinity can err.

Consider this: the text of any poem you could cite,

the text of any lines that you could write:

attention getting stones to rock a windowpane.

3

And in the silence, nothing but to pay, and

yet if nothing’s left, for what am I the payer?

So is it so that that that is is right?

No would be a hauling on the rein.

So let it go, yes, let yes take you to the site

Of all this dripping sorrow ere

4

brown unbudding branches are the all the heir

gets; the basses of the air groan out in pain

whatever litany of dripping words you may recite—

unless the heated blade of song can pare

the ice of loss into sounding rain

or modulate the melody as would a gilded wright

5   

to make the magic of the song that can the wrong aright,

inscribed in drops upon the fabric air.

If all things end, so ends the fleeting reign:

so let the melting music swell a paean

and let the rotten blossom yield a pear.

Compensatory wisdom, flowering insight

6

some phrasal consolation to recite

some recollected truth within the rotten rite

like a child’s lost lesson from the dead old pere.

If sorrow is the death of love, the heir’s

Inheritance must just be the pain.

Then let the dead tree live in all this rain.

 

Envoie

Melting ice’s tears, the smell of blooming pear

within the sigh to know the right of pain:

let go the rein in incense sounding air.

Mimesis

Every indi-

vidual yawned, laughed, looked up,

at the sky.

Review of "Semicolon: The Past, Present, and Future of a Misunderstood Mark"

 I read the Cecelia Watson's book over spring break—you could get through it in a sitting; it’s pretty short and easy to read—and I came to the conclusion, which was never mentioned or entertained in the book, but for which the book did give evidence, that the paradigm of “rules” is misguided. It’s foreign to how language actually works. It’s clumsy and Occam would have hated it. Instead, I want to promote the idea of “expectations.” Then we don’t ask “whose rules?” but “whose expectations?” We put “am” not “are” after “I” in almost all cases because the people who(m) we expect to read us expect us to do that. We’re not following a rule. We’re meeting an expectation. That means that there literally are no rules. What we call rules are descriptions of the expectations of a certain audience under certain conditions. This frees every act of composition up to be and do what it needs in order to meet or defy those expectations, to manipulate the reader based on their expectations. Exactly how language actually works.

A Through Thought

 As I understand your infinite God, he knows and sees and has complete power over all and every etc.

Okay, then. What can an infinite imagination imagine? For starters--everything. 

And what is it like for an infinite imagination to imagine a thing? How is imagining a thing different from creating that thing? If God imagines a thing, does it therefore thereby exist as a thing? I can't see how it can't. To an infinite and free imagination, I'd be as real as I am whether I existed in myself, outside that imagination, or just in it. 

I'd like to set aside the question then of why or whether God actually created me, whether I actually exist as anything other than a thought in the imagination of this God. How could I know? I can't even reasonably speculate--about that.

But I can about this: If I'm right that I am as real to God in his imagination as I could possibly be outside it, some things follow. God knows not just everything I ever did or will do but everything I didn't do and every branch that act would have taken if I'd done it. Every single time any one thing could have gone another way, in God's imagination it went that way, and all the other women I would have married and all the other children I would have had and all their lives.

But this infinite God is much much bigger than that. He knows what lives every stillborn baby would have lived if it had been born alive, and all the paths. And all the aborted babies. And his knowledge is as real to him as if they had lived. 

And all the babies that would have been created if each individual sperm that didn't fertilize the egg in that ejaculation had got there first. And all those lives. And all the lives that would have been created if you'd had sex on Tuesday of that week instead of Wednesday, or an hour later or earlier, and all the infinity of possibilities. Remember, this God is infinite beyond the library of Babel. 

In God's mind every sperm ever created has joined with every egg ever created and has created every baby that could have been created and all the lives they could have lived and all their forking paths.

And not just that. God knows with equal assurance every sperm that could have been created, every permutation of DNA, even the ones that never lead to live birth, in sperm and egg. Every baby that was never actually possible and how they could have interacted with all the other people in every conceivable permutation. 

It would take trillions of universes to play these things out in reality. 

There may indeed be trillions of universes. 

In fact there are, inside God's imagination or in what we like to call "reality" or "physical reality." The difference is immaterial.

Every heartbreak. Every love. Every time anyone of them was cut from a baseball team.  

It's What It's

We can say
It is what it is

But we can't say

It is what it's.

Or

It's what it's.

We an say

What it is it is.

But we can't say

What it's it's.

Or

What it is it's.

What the rule it?

Occam Has No Conductor

It starts as noise—chaos (call it)

bruit. Then, in the sonic miasma, a note

hard, loud, singularly indistinguishable

from the cacophony. And then another

giving shape to what has come before—

a loud dim din of melody. As long as you live there

will always be noise. And in the noise

melody, infinite overlapping

like symphonies on so many together turning turntables.

The joy not of life but in it.

Not the wonder of the universe,

Not the miracle of mind,

Not the blessing of the church 

But the blessings in the church.

Love in a field of indifference.

You say there’s nothing new here. That’s so.

These words still sound within the old vocabulary, within the old old language

and so you miss them if you listen hard.

The opposite of the rattle in the hum of the car.

Tinnitus on top of everything else.

If I suggest that God did not create the universe 

but was created by it and lives here 

have I excluded myself from all religion?

Such a God no one needs.

Such a God explains nothing.

Maybe Occam has another job for God.

Religion is an industry but

in that industry a melody

the managers didn’t put there

and can’t hear. Hear the shrill whistle

issuing order into sounds

confused. The diamond in the carbon deposit.

The possibility that the noise itself is a melody I can’t entertain. 

Zap all the symphonies ever made into outerspace.

Let aliens hear them. And let one clever one among them posit

a conductor. 

Now listen.

I Think

I think. I think

I think. Am I

thinking? I think

I am. I think I am

thinking, thinking I

am I. Thinking,

I am I. Thinking

I am I? I think. Thinking

I am, I am I, I think.

I think I think. Am I?

Leibniz and Voltaire reconciled at last

It occurred to me last night that Leibniz and Voltaire aren’t really so far apart. Leibniz claimed that “Of all possible worlds an infinite and all-powerful God would create the best.” That best world would follow the “principle of plenitude,” according to which it would contain “the maximum richness of variety of modes of being.” Voltaire looking around at our dark, spacious, flawful universe asked, rhetorically, via Candide, “If this is the best, what are the others like?” Well, if, according to the principles of Leibniz God would create the best of all possible worlds, according to the principle of plentitude, he’d create all the other ones as well. If so, we may just be living in what Candide called “One of the worst.” Reward yourself with another coffee.

After the Well Goes Dry

 

Digging a dry well deeper’s not a crime.

Hey, it’s your funeral. Everything that can be said

About the dead’s been said at least a million times.

Your chances of striking water are quite low.

If time itself is dying it’s its time.

 

But then again, who knows, there may be moisture yet

Below the empty coffin bed to fill a garden hose.

Stranger things have happened, muddy clothes

Washed in blood river come out clean. I’ve seen

 

A dead man on a concrete sleeve

After the paramedic crew’s thrown up their arms

Pull desperate balls of air into his lungs and breathe.

 

It’s true. If you ask yourself, and think quite deeply on it,

It may not be too late to write a sonnet.

The Problem with Evolution

The problem with the "theory of evolution" is not that it's false. Being a scientific theory, a conclusion based on upon a certain methodology that structures a certain type of narrative to the exclusion of all other narratives--being, as I say, a scientific theory, it is as true as it can be given the information available and the structure allowable. The problem is that it is bad story telling. It purports to be a true--not a scientific but an actually true--account, i.e. narrative, story--of how things happen and how things have happened. We are story-charged beings. We live on story. We see and experience ourselves and our world and everything in it via story. And this story sucks. It lacks a goal. It lacks even a trajectory beyond eventual extinction, which it gets when coupled with the cosmological story that starts with an event--whether or not that event is still called the Big Bang or gets a better name and more precise description. It allows for no point and no values, nothing worth living for or doing. Nothing. Even hedonism gives us something to want, some way of marking and evaluating progress. Science disavows any relationship to value or meaning even while it serves, more than it serves anything, as the elemental structure of the grand narrative of our time, and that not for a single culture but for the whole earth. Nothing is more certain to destroy humanity than bad story telling. 

NOW

the

O

of

now

the frozen past’s chaotic stasis

threaded through

the opening to all

that will have been

Nietzsche and Borges and Murphy: Fiction and the Empty Universe

Neil deGrasse Tyson declares the number of possible persons by the number of possible combinations of DNA. This would make twins and clones the same person. In fact the number of possible persons is infinite. 

Borges added to Nietzsche’s notion of Eternal Return a Library in which all texts return infinitely, but with variation. But if the library is infinite, all texts also return infinitely without variation. All commas are forever where they belong. And if the universe is structured like the library, then not just all texts but all lives return eternally with and without variation. Every mistake you ever make you make eternally. But you also avoid it eternally. Everyone you ever could have married, you marry. Every life you could have lived, you live. Every mistake you could make, you make. Every mistake you could avoid, you avoid. Everything that can happen happens, happens forever in infinite repetition. And this helps us understand the great emptiness of the universe, an argument against the existence of God. Most of the universe is empty. Most of the library is nonsense. Pockets of meaning are infinite and infinitely rare at the same time, at every time, at all times and in all times. That’s the structure of the library. But it also means that the books we write which are fictions here are realities elsewhere, providing they are possible anywhere. Is there a universe in which flying carpets are real? If there is, there are flying carpets there and Persians who fly on them. If not, not. But Silas Lapham exists with his paint in a universe somewhere. And somewhere he doesn’t gamble on the stock market and somewhere he does.

Rushdie's God

 I am a particular fan of Salman Rushdie. Of his published words, the few I have not (yet) read are like the water that's left in your cupped hands when all the rest has passed through. Not much. I have taught an entire graduate seminar on his works--though that was long ago, before most of the ones we now have were written. I've gone to India to present a paper on his sense of history, which was soon after published in a book that came out of the conference. I did this in the days when I wasn't quite sure it was safe to travel to India to talk about Rushdie. (Turns out I had nothing to worry about.) If nothing else of Rushdie lasts, it's hard to imagine the Midnight's Children will not be read as long as there are people who read novels. 

That's not to say that I think Rushdie is universally brilliant and not even sometimes rated higher, I won't say "than he deserves" but, as I would rate him. He's a novelist. He's not a philosopher. And he's not theologian either. I'm neither of those things myself, so there's my grain of salt.

I, like Rushdie, like to talk about God. I don't like to talk about God the way Rushdie does. Rushdie is not just a devotee of Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, but is (or in one case was) also a personal friend of theirs. It's the tradition of no less a mind than Bertrand Russell. And like them, he isn't just an atheist--I have no problem with atheists--but contemptuous not just of religion (I understand even when I don't share that response to religion), but also faith in general, to theism in general. As such, he equates believe in God with magical thinking, with believing in fairy tales and Santa Claus. Something only children and small minded adults can take seriously. 

On the question of whether God exists, I will not take any stand. On the question of whether this characterization of belief makes sense, I will. 

In Languages of Truth Rushdie offers a standard atheists "history" of religion (he cannot distinguish between belief in God and adherence to religion). Ignorant, pre-scientific people, needing to understand and control what they could not understand or control, felt the wind and invented an invisible blower of the wind to whom they could appeal when the wanted the wind to stop and who, if he did not stop the wind, hated or blamed them, in any case required some response from them if they still wanted the wind to stop. (I'm not quoting because the idea is so simple and so standard that it doesn't even matter if I embellish or understate; it comes to the same thing.)

God did not create us in his image, he tells us, we created God in our image. 

Rushdie may be right about all of that. That's not the question. He also may be wrong. Offering no evidence between "common sense," which is an extraordinarily slippery sort of evidence, no one reading Rushdie has in fact any reason to accept his version of history, his story, or, to put it in the terms it best deserves, his myth. There's an essential difference between a plausible explanation and an established fact. Rushdie wants to put his eggs in the basket of science, but then he offers a hypothesis as a conclusion. He has told the story many times of how he lost his faith as child--around the age of 14 if I remember correctly. A lot of children do. I don't see any evidence that his thinking on the question has advanced since then. Almost no one's ever does. (C. S. Lewis is an exception to that trend, not that I don't have problems with the version of faith advocated there as well. But whatever one might say about Lewis, his faith is well thought out, not the shrug-off of Rushdie.) I don't think anyone needs to take too seriously the undeveloped atheism or the theism of a fourteen-year old.  

The point that I wish to make is this: Rushdie replaces a faith in myth with a myth in which he expects us to place our faith. A myth of origins. A simple reversal of the old idea about God's image. How does Rushdie know we created God in our image? Here he does not delve. It's too obvious to need to delve. 

The problem with saying that faith is unreasonable, fairy-taley, jibber jabber, is the number of reasonable people who maintain that it isn't, not just amateur theologians like C.S. Lewis, but actual philosophers like Rene Girard and Paul Ricoeur. And the problem with the idea that we created God in our image is that the claim is always based on the unverifiable notion that God if God existed would never create the universe in which we live. It's unjust. It's too tolerant of evil. Our reason tells us that it is unreasonable for an omniscient, all loving God to make such a shit show universe. 

That may be true. There is reason to assert that it is. But we have nothing like a reason to believe that it is. If we do, we do so on faith. That an infinite God would use human reason, with not just its lack of knowledge but its lack of apparatus, its thoroughly qualified finiteness, to make what we have to call from our perspective "decisions" about how to make a universe is not just an act of hubris but an act of willful blindness. It's plainly silly. Think of a toddler telling you how to fix your car or your government or global warming and multiply that difference infinitely and you have the difference between what religion calls the mind of God and what Rushdie calls the mind of God. 

There's no getting around this. It will sound like a cheap response to the Rushdie, Hitchens, Dawkins crowd. But it is in fact the more reasonable response. It is the line of thought that unlike theirs takes into account reason and science. It sets myth aside to confront the facts as we know them.