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Recently
I found myself in the middle of a three-hour conversation about causality,
faith, affect, free will, and so forth. As you can imagine, it was heavy,
like Zizek with citations and American accents. It prompted these thoughts
about faith.
Two nights ago, I watched “Equus”
on DVD, the one with Richard Burton. It was good, obviously, though a
bit shocking to see all that earnest, unabashed late-70’s pondering.
Burton plays Dr. Dysart, a child psychologist overseeing the care of a
17-year-old boy, Alan Strang, who was recently arrested for blinding six
horses under his care as a stable boy. Dysart gradually cons the reluctant
boy into telling him more and more of his story, about how his mother
taught him to worship the suffering of Christ, and then his atheist father
replaced the picture of a bleeding, chained Jesus over his bed with one
of a horse with a bit in its mouth. Alan, who already had a thing for
horses, constructs a religion around Equus, his own personal Jesus, whose
willingness to take the painful bit in his mouth and serve creatures he
could easily destroy mirrors the meekness of God incarnate. Meanwhile,
Dysart has a personal crisis because he has always been fascinated by
the idea of the Greek gods–local, jealous, non-omnipotent, unwilling
to suffer–but feels completely bereft of any real connection with
the world or with the divine.
“Equus” has a lot to say about the problem of mental health
treatment and about child sexuality, but what it mostly inspired in me
were questions about what happened to my faith. When I was a little child,
I developed an extremely violent relationship to Christianity. I was not
just a kid who went to Sunday School and memorized verses for the praise
I would get. I was an intense little extremist, constantly denying the
pleasantness or reasonableness of Christianity as it was taught to me,
pointing over and over to the intensely irrational suffering catalogued
in the Bible. “It’s about blood, you know.” The Bible
said nothing about how Jesus smiles when little girls put on white dresses,
curl their hair, and sit sweetly with hands folded in their laps until
Christian boys come to marry them. Like Alan, I thought faith was about
constant pain.
My school chum was asking me what happens to that kind of faith, which
simply can’t be absorbed by a benevolent agnosticism. I said I felt
I had first converted it into an ugly misanthropy during college, a sort
of Thomas- Hardy-ish
bleak pessimistic faith in inevitable decay and the worst consequences
of every action. An irrational, violent, paradoxical God had been replaced
by a sort of general tendency of everything to pull itself down over time.
(This is not unrelated to reading a lot of Nigerian and Victorian novelists.)
That is, my sense of causality had shifted from random-brutal to predictable-brutal.
Suffering in the former is a product of hubris; suffering in the latter
is a product of hope.
Then I read Tom
Jones, a novel that has Hume stuffed in all its cracks. I don’t
know why it affected me so deeply, but I think part of my joy in it was
that it allows for the possibility of a random-benevolent universe, in
which shit happens for absolutely no reason, but generally, no one with
any power is out to get you. Sometimes you make happiness for yourself,
and sometimes it’s made for you, serendipitously. Sometimes you
do something fucked up and get away with it, sometimes you do something
fucked up and there are consequences, and sometimes bad things happen
for no reason. But no matter the consequences, there is joy in experiencing
the world. You do not get whacked to keep you humble, and you don’t
get whacked to pay for your pleasures. There is joy, and there is getting
whacked. Suffering in this system is a product of losing your sense of
humor.
My interlocutor, a sorta-Nietzschean, stopped me to say, “But there’s
death. I think of death, that there’s an end, and I don’t
know when it’s coming, and that end urgently commands me to find
a causality, whether it be religious or not. And what if doing fucked-up
shit, or even just experiencing the world, makes my death more likely?
I am too scared to die, and who can have a sense of humor about their
own death?”
Here’s where I had a weird epiphany: I’m not particularly
scared of death in the abstract, never have been. Sure, in life-threatening
situations, I tremble like anyone else. When I was a young Christian,
of course, death was a path somewhere, and I wasn’t afraid of it.
I often longed for it, and wondered why suicide among non-Catholic Christians
wasn’t more common. Eventually, I figured that this was part of
the perversity of Creation, that we, like, had to sit around teasing ourselves
with the future happiness of the afterlife in order to suffer even more
on earth.
Now, I no more believe in souls than in ghosts or fairies. I believe I
am a thing, a wonderful machine, only marginally more impressive than
a dog. It will be a damn shame when this thing I am finally breaks. I
would like to put that off as long as possible. But it still doesn’t
scare me.
My friend then said, “But if you are a thing moving among other
things, why aren’t you terrified of your own end? If all there is
is doing and seeing and experiencing joy, isn’t the potential cessation
of that joy devastating? And what if you realize at that moment that you
were wrong?” And here’s where I had my second epiphany: I
have faith after all.
Where did my faith go? All through the past ten years, it’s been
sitting very quietly. My faith is now that I’ve done the best I
can by what I believe, and if there were a Judgment (and I don’t
believe there will be), I would be able to say I did what I thought was
right. I have the same basic moral hierarchy I had when I was eight (which,
yes, means I was a pretty fucked-up eight-year-old). The only difference
in my daily experience is the gradual loss of timidity, which I knew then
was a terrible sin, and of self-loathing, which ditto.
It is something like a faith in Providence, that it is possible for good
things to happen if I am open enough to them. My real fear now is not
that I will offend a god, but that the last cobwebs of religiosity, sentimentality
and moralism will get mixed up in my attempts to live a good life by myself
and others. And they do, they do. [B]
AWB
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cirque:
suivez-moi
by falling_apart
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