I have a fantasy where I send my friends portable cassette players - the walkman for readers of my vintage or aficionados of dead media. I then communicate my big ideas exclusively by cassette in the mail. Wandering around my thoughts like a voice memo in a group chat without the obligatory pacing. I imagine my friends listening while they eat a meal, or in bed, or on the train, I imagine they feel a little bit like I’m there - enough so that it’s pleasant, but not so much that they have to do the work of sharing space with someone else. A small comfort, but also, a sort of escape hatch that allows me to talk about what I want to talk about as if it were what everyone likes to talk about.
When someone asks me how I am, I say “hanging in there,” or “alive,” which indicates something along the lines of “well aint life a bitch but I’m alright” which is a fine way to get along. But the question of how I am, asked properly to Joanna Tova Price, is really the question of what ideas I am pondering lately. That is my condition, my weather, my current trajectory.
I got to thinking about atheism and homesickness. About a sort of homesickness that is obscured. Not to miss home, but perhaps to miss believing in the idea of home, but believe is sort of an active verb - it means to choose to adhere to something, and that isn’t quite right either. So maybe, to miss knowing of home. We don’t choose what we know, we can’t disavow what we know, however we might try. Yet, once we knew that there was home, now we don’t know anything at all.
Or so that’s where I started out thinking. But there was a trap door - have you ever had that feeling, where you have no real reason to think you haven’t sorted it, and yet, you know if you probe, you will find something very important you missed. A trap door. In this case, it’s nothing as something. I have a head full of tropes - from fiction, and self help books, and the social sciences, and political rhetoric - about women who will fashion the nothing they are given into something and say thank you. That is the only way I have known something as nothing, as a form of internalized cruelty.
But then, perhaps to know nothing anymore, is to know nothing as something, it is to embrace nothingness and fashion it into a sort of being. That then, perhaps you can see, is where the atheism creeps back in. I got to thinking about how atheism sets itself against specific narratives and how tiny of a fraction of all the possibilities those narratives really are. There is, among serious people, or even unserious people who for the moment are adopting a seriousness, a sort of disdain for almost-indefinite possibility. A scholar settles on his positions and does not stray, science posits a containing hypothesis. Any serious person when approaching the question of whether there is something larger than us that is not random will turn his nose up at anything that has no lineage, or worse, a lineage recently created to for justification purposes. We then require rigor, and evidence based thinking, and we get both of those things from academic metaphysics. To which almost universally one could ask, is there anything worse than academic metaphysics?
What’s the one thing got to do with the other, somehow I am conflating knowing of home with God, conflating nothing as something both with homesickness and with atheism, suggesting perhaps that atheism is itself this strange, hidden homesickness.
One of my favorite authors, Phillip Pullman, argues we should create the republic of heaven here on earth. I believe he, and less articulate proponents of the same idea, mean it to be hopeful - that we could have heaven right now if we simply decided not to wait. An atheism of heavenly presence, instead of some indefinite future state. The trouble is that no republic of heaven can be made out of nothing, the simulacrum of something unmoored is the definition of a delusion. Further that something to which all real things are moored, that something itself that allows anything to be something at all and not delusional, cannot be reflected upon, looked directly at, or known in itself. It cannot have a cause, or if it does, it must be too multidimensional for anything experiencing time linearly to understand. It does only one thing, which is to allow for possibility.
The difference between how I am and an intellectual essay on metaphysics is that when I’m writing about how I am, I am dipping my toes into different, crossing, streams; I am skipping stones across God and home. It feels like gorging on big ideas, not like the slow, careful, detail oriented, safe plodding forward of the Reliable Source.
What you and I do, in this overextended thought experiment, or strange dream, is we navigate possibility to find home: right relation, a true belonging, a real belonging, that can only be real - which is to say possible - because of something that is bigger than us, that we cannot fathom, that is not random. We may not find our way home, or we might, but first we must know it can exist at all.
What I got to thinking about, then, where I actually started at, was how someone could lead the world back to knowing of home, like a mythological lantern bearer, and also, how far away from the world would that person have to live and die, to do it?
Then I realized that this set of ideas I have just splashed about in, in an almost indulgent manner, has both a death and resurrection of God, and also a Moses at the edge of Israel, unable to go in. How I am is the strange bright connections reaching backwards and forwards in time, making the illegible into elegant metaphor, and ruthless practicality into foolishness. In place of rigor, a breadth and depth that absorbs me completely; in place of evidence, awe. I am not something from nothing, I am something from somethingness, a fertile somethingness where home might yet bloom.
The Necessity of a Metaphysics
(Possibility itself)
