Fog has a fascinating way of demarcating; revealing distance through gradated silhouettes; converting the world into an enormous pop-up book. Have you ever noticed that? Generally speaking, novel conditions have a way of enforcing themselves on perspective—insisting we take notice of things previously undetected.
We’re in such a novel condition. Our whole world mostly is. The effects of this pandemic are expressing themselves in countless ways, and no one can definitely speak to the duration or true meaning of this time. Yet, as the condition’s name suggests, it is pandemic—of all people. Thus it is common.
For me, as with fog, this has brought into stark relief what we call dimensions: our relationship to space and time themselves. I’m going to try to write four posts, each tied to the dimensions of reality. These are mere reflections; a humble prompt for inspection. May they offer you something helpful, should you read them.
Dimension 0 | A Point
Technically speaking, a point is actually no place at all; a null set. It derives its value, its meaning, its space only insofar as it connects to other points. It is the dimension of zero. The dot in the i of Jeremy Bearimy. There are two symbols for the null set: the slashed zero (Ø) and the empty “curly brackets” ({}). (Yes, I just put curly brackets into parenthetical brackets.) Within the zero dimension we are bracketed thus with curls.
I’ve already written a piece about the present elusiveness of meaning, but, as this moment protracts, this seems even more the case. Yes there is value or, one could say, “values” available. Kindness and patience retain value, reaching out to others within the digital landscape while remaining present to those within our newly-shrunk society, prayer and mindfulness, physical activity and meditation on Scripture, care for self; all these are values within the nebula. And no, this time has not dissolved ultimate meaning; not tossed God from His throne nor totaled the vehicle of Truth. It’s more like we simply cannot find the place on the map reading, “You Are Here.” This type of meaning evades what bible students call “the interpretation” and scientists term “conclusion.” It has the distinct feel of chasing after the wind; literally, “an attempt to herd wind.” “The wind blows to the south and goes around to the north; around and around goes the wind…” (Ecc. 1:6)
This point in space is both a dimension and no dimension at all, which is to say it is a paradox—a mystery. I find that people range from tepid to cold when it comes to mystery. Mystery: a “mouth-shutting-ness.” Forrest Gump has up and stopped running, and we’re left shouting, “Now what are we supposed to do?!” The emphasis is certainly upon the word “now,” a strange track set on repeat.
Days all feel vaguely the same. If you live in Chicago, you have spring, winter, summer, and fall all in one week. We’ve lost track of all of the yearly rituals that have vaporized into the ether: Opening Day and March Madness, Spring Break trips and Proms, weddings and funerals, Holy Week. It is a point whose point escapes us. Tomorrow promises to be much the same. And it is disorienting, no two ways about it, as we discover ourselves scraping and searching for bearings, groping desperately in darkness. Don’t we perceive this pent up energy? Have you been wondering what it’s about?
In the null set we are getting far too much time with ourselves, aren’t we? You are the one self with whom social distancing is regrettably futile, and you’ve become too close for comfort! It was the existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre who portrayed hell as an eternity in which people are their own tormentors—left alone with the abrasion of their own relentless self-critiques—in his aptly titled play, No Exit. The alarming question appears early, “how shall I endure my own company?”
Doesn’t that question speak to a torment we are all presently enduring? One of the characters in Sartre’s play finds herself wondering when the tormentors will arrive, and the valet asks her how she would recognize one. Her answer? “They look frightened.” This amuses hell’s valet, “Of whom would they be afraid? Their victims?”
“Laugh away,” she replies, “but I know what I’m talking about. I’ve often watched my face in the glass.” This character, Inez, knows inherently that fear is at the center of all torment, and it is alluded that the victim and tormentor shall be one and the same. But why?
Journalist Judith Shulevitz addressed this in her 2003 New York Times Magazine essay, “Bring Back the Sabbath,” bemoaning our “machinery of self-censorship” and the arduousness of “stilling the eternal inner murmur of self-reproach.” Our activity, it would seem, performs an unacknowledged function; it is a noise machine to muffle this irritating murmur, whose droning has largely been eliminated without our consent. (In CS Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters, Screwtape informs his demonic protégé Wormwood of hell’s intent, “We will make the whole universe a noise in the end. We have already made great strides in this direction as regards the Earth.” Yes they have.)
This condition is what theologians call “ontological lightness”—the perceived weightlessness of our self. As the late Brent Curtis put it, “the reality that when I stop ‘doing’ and simply listen to my heart, I am not anchored to anything substantive. I become aware that my very identity is synonymous with activity.” The discomfort, it turns out, is an existential crisis over which we skate precariously. The calls are coming from inside the house!
So we are all versions of Michael J. Fox’s character Marty McFly striving desperately against the disappearance of his world and very self. It is both terrifying and amusing. It is our corporate plot line. “As soon as they stop performing,” Curtis observes of our culture, “their identities—and ours—disappear.”
Are we the null set? God forbid! Constructed entirely of our doing? Or is there a self beneath it all; one with which we may be at rest, even apart from its productivity, even in naked stillness or newfound ineptitude in performing and producing? Maybe. Maybe not. We’ve never stuck around long enough to find out.
Faced with her own crisis of self, my friend Kendra penned a poem that is both deeply honest and deeply wise,
Would your dove ever descend on me and say you are well pleased?
I’m not even a son but a daughter, so the quote doesn’t even fit
You speak a foreign language when you say I’m loved apart from what I do
What clothes, skin, and bones do I have apart from my endeavors?
She continues later,
If you unraveled my performance you’d keep going going going
Is there a core it wraps around or simply the end of the string
If it’s just the string God don’t unravel it
I’ll exist no more
The poem ends with a gut-level plea that says so much,
Do you like these words? Will you put them in a book?
Good, then it was worth it. I don’t have to do the real work.
My heart can remain unchanged; just tell me, “wow your heart’s so real!”
Tell me, tell me, tell me so I do not have to feel.
Can the love and pleasure of God actually rest upon those whose ledger of merit reads zilch? Can there be a being with value beneath the yarn once it is all unspooled? Can we avoid having this conversation a little longer? Please? We discover in times like this just how much our lives are a mad scramble to cobble together our sense of self.
The one thing I know is that the “You” in “You Are Here” is precisely where the now has brought us; inescapably so. Are you coming to see how ontologically light you really are? Have you any answer your auto-torment—your own frightened face in the glass? If not, can you re-enter the world with anything but fear and renewed desperation? Or will the you who you are re-enter with greater rest and an enlarged capacity for generosity?
“You have made us for Yourself,” observed the great bishop of Hippo, “and our hearts are restless until they rest in You.” The you who are here, are made in the very image and likeness of the Creator, and, before a work hour was complete, were beheld to be “very good.” The Dove descended upon Jesus, and, before a single sermon or miracle, the Father’s voice pronounced love and great pleasure; the type of love that defines the object as beloved. And he became “a life-giving spirit.”
You are here.
And, to quote my friend’s poem, “the real work” is before you; to name your noise and restlessness; to claim your silent rest—or at least a taste of it!
Wendell Berry spoke so simply and so poignantly about this “real work” in his poem “Our Real Work”:
It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,
and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.
In his Noise-lauding letter, Screwtape quotes George MacDonald’s “sickening” description of heaven, “the regions where there is only life and therefore all that is not music is silence.”
“You Are Here,” and here you may remain until the you who is here comes to rest with your self, as defined apart from all of its noise and accolades; to rest in the goodness of your being and belovedness. The “Where” of “You Are Here” may only disclose itself by way of this real work, and although it may remain murky, you will be allowed to orient yourself by the unfamiliar sounds of music and singing—issuing from within, of all places!
As this happens, you will actually have something new to offer; something to give. And you will say along with another poet, Walt Whitman, “When I give I give myself.”
Matthew Podszus 