Prophecy

My first memory isn’t really a memory.

It was July 4, 1976.  I was about fifteen months old.  My parents had just bought a house across the street from the ocean on Shore Road, and they were moving in.  They placed me on a couch in front of 10 inch black and white television and they put the bicentennial show on, the tall ships sailing into New York harbour.  The mid seventies broadcast technology put the names of the ships on the bottom of the screen as they were filmed in a shaky, all upper case block script, the cameras probably hanging from a blimp or a helicopter, the ships and the accompanying fleet of yachts and ferries and speedboats sailing past the Statue of Liberty.  It was a warm Maine summer day, and there was a breeze coming off the cove, and the waves were breaking loud enough to hear through the open front door.  Adults came in and out, sometime my mom, sometimes my dad, sometimes another person.

That’s all.  I have in my brain, in my body, the recollection of sensations and movement.  It comes back to me from time to time, and I cherish the feeling of that vision waxing out of my nerves, out of my optic nerve and the feeling of the breeze out of my skin.

It’s not a memory, though – at least, not in the way that we usually think of memories, as an intelligible experience that can inform our sense of self and the world.  I don’t have it in my self.  I wasn’t a self yet, I was simply alive, and my body – which includes my brain and my nervous system – absorbed the sensation enough to echo down to today.

Now imagine that you lived that way for your entire life.  You absorb sensations and you absorb the actions of people around you.  You react – even at fifteen months I roll from side to side, rolling back up to watch the television again, watching the adults move in and out of the front door, past me and back in front of me again, rolling my body on the couch to watch them and then watch the ships on the screen and then feeling the sea breeze cool against the warm humidity and the sensation of the cushion underneath my body.  Imagine that is your life.  You experience “things” and “people” and “events” but you don’t have any impulse or need to order, to abstract out a picture of the world more broadly.

Suddenly your mind triggers, though, and it tells you something.  Something banal, perhaps, something like “I think that’s my parents,” in whatever childish language is accessible to you.  Or “I wonder what the next adult will bring through the door”, or worse, “I bet the next adult will carry a chair.”  It’s not simply creating context: your self is awakening and defining new realms outside of the context provided by the assembly of sensations.

Surely that voice must seem like the voice of God.  Surely, if you thought that the adult would be bringing in a chair and in fact they did, it would feel like prophecy.

I’ve continued to read Sources of the Self by Charles Taylor, and while his focus is on the development of the intellectual idea of the self in modernity, he did a neat trick by first observing how western society shifted in Plato from a concept of a unified concept of body-spirit to a segregated notion of body and mind.  His literary focus was on the difference between Homer’s characters – who didn’t perceive their actions willfully so much as they were being directed by the gods to act – and Plato’s observations of Socrates, who acted because of a sense of what he as an individual thought was appropriate in the course of pursuing a conception of an Ideal Good.  Taylor, as I read him, continues to spin out the consequences of that shift, but in thinking about where we stand today, I’m more interested in that boundary point between prehistorical man, who feels no difference between observation and action, and historical man, who observes and then acts with a separation between the two, and the relationship of that to reaching beyond our world for explanations.

Taylor focuses on Homer because he’s examining the foundations of future Greek philosophical notions of the self, but as I read his work I was thinking more about the broader foundations of philosophy around the world, which typically comes from religion and more specifically, from the words of God or the gods or the other which are given to prophets and priests.  I’ve never been comfortable with prophecy, partly because my sensation of the divine is so ever-present that the idea of it speaking at all, let alone to me, is sort of silly; it should have no need to speak as it inhabits everything at all times.  That notion of the divine isn’t, in western terms, really a “god” concept at all – and indeed I have struggled at times to square my sensation of the divine with western conceptions of God. At one point I thought “God doesn’t exist” but that was wholly unsatisfying and didn’t mesh with what I felt.  Then I said “God exists but is everything” and also realized that was just using other people’s words and mapping them, however ineffective or just simply inaccurate, to my sensations.  Then I thought “well, it’s not that God exists or doesn’t exist, it’s just that using a personalization is incorrect” – which felt better but it left me with a question mark about what it was that prophets and priests and Christ and Mohammed and other people were actually feeling when they ascribed a personality and a being to the God which spoke to or through them (or was their father, in one case).

As I observe history and my own experience, conspiracies and willful fictions are found out.  Had Christ or Mohammed been frauds – had they just made up out of whole cloth their experiences – then they would have no real staying power.  So my basic assumption is that prophets really do experience something that they feel is a personal, direct message from their god.  What reading Taylor has made me think about is whether there might be a common source of that sensation in the nascent experience of both the initial establishment of the self within our minds, and the shock of what occurs when that sense of self expands beyond previous explanations and requires a redefinition.  In a pre-literate world especially, where memories are caught only within ourselves, and are ordered with only an oral – ephemeral, instantaneous, fluid – conception of language, the emergence of an inner sense of awareness to what will come, and its connection to a set of lived experiences which have occurred but which are only dimly associated with sensation and emotions, must have seen incomprehensible – or rather, comprehensible only if one reached outside of lived experience and ascribed it to the voice of the immortals or of the beyond.

From an historical perspective, moreover, prophets and the origins of religions are also oddly grouped around the world at particular moments: at the emergence of literacy, or rather, at those moments where literacy goes through some sort of jump diffusion process where it is either created at first (the first alphabets or wall carvings), moves from the isolated world of self-referential religion to a broader world of commerce or exchange, moves from being commercial or administrative to being broadly used by anyone with access to education, or more recently, moves from being laborious to being mass-produced and now finally from being mass-produced to being instantaneous.  Each revolution in communication allowed for innovation in explaining the world – the point where prior defining structures became obsolete.  New structures, though, needed time to be refined, but in the moment of discovery, the “shock” of the new appeared supernatural – and gave rise to a religious form which was unrecognizable to those who could not yet comprehend the change but spoke powerfully and directly to those who were dimly aware of a shift occurring in consciousness.  This ends up being very similar to Marshall MacLuhan’s historical thesis of media forms changing the structure of thought, but instead of seeing this as a more generalized epistemological process, I’m more interested here in integrating and understanding the more personalized experience of divinity.

In that regard, I think there is more than a simple correlation of events in the development of shared communication with religious history.  I’d argue, rather, that our personalization of the divine is actually a function of gaining access to deeper levels of self-awareness (or put it ever so slightly differently, awareness of the self), but in the moment of gaining that access, we are too poor in linguistic resources to translate it into anything abstractly intelligible.  We eventually create linguistic forms to make it an intellectual process, but at the moment of creation, we’re stuck being aware of the new insight but unable to fashion it in such a way as to be capable of communicating to others.  Early human thinkers did exactly what modern thinkers do when faced with this wall: they look outside of themselves and assign the effect to that which is not us.  For early humans, that was a deeply personalized divinity in nature – animals, trees, mountains, the sun and the stars.  As humans became more adept at conquering the natural environment and shaping it in their image, they anthropomorphized their natural gods.  As they became even more adept and went a step further and began conquering memory with written words, those gods became abstract.  At each step, the further expansion of our ability to communicate, particularly at those moments when step-function expansions of our dissemination of shared communication exploded the number of people with access to ideas, led to an initial crisis of comprehension which in turn led to reaching outwards.

The existential crisis of modernity is often ascribed to us as the result of coming to the end of that process, where in a world of instantaneous communication and its concommitant release of empirical science to almost limitless innovation, the divine is no longer useful to us.  I’d argue, rather, that what we are experiencing is in fact just the latest crisis with its attendant reach for something outside of ourselves.  In the contemporary case we are replacing abstract personalization with abstraction in its purest form, symbolic logic and mathematics as the basic expression forms of empirical scientific observation.  The parallel communications revolution is the quantization of communications and its release into light speed transmission.  Painfully few people understand mathematics and symbolic logic, just as we are still just toying with what it means to transfer information across space without time; both exist today much as heiroglyphics existed for the Egyptians, a kind of beautiful magical script understood only by a tiny society of the adept.  Symbolic mathematics provides structure and order to us (although it allows for randomness and accepts without issue unsolveable or structurally unresolvable open processes), and the internet provides an infinitely flexible and present architecture for sharing.  But neither is in and of itself that which connects us, or that which we feel exists in the spaces between our empirically observed experience of life, birth and growth and consciousness and dying.  Mathematic expression is just the latest form of religious expression.  We are becoming more capable, broadly, of understanding this latest linguistic form and its new media format, but we’re still in early days, and thus the element of magic is still ascendant.

Are we, then, now seeing a new generation of prophets?  I think we are.  Einstein, Bohr, Schrodinger, Bell, the programmers and engineers of Arapnet and Global Crossing – these are all heralds of a new vision of divinity.  Many of the originators of this new era of hyper-abstraction veered (with varying degrees of comfort) into conceptions of the divine, whether it be God not playing dice or the varying degrees of belief among physicists that quantum effects can provide a basis for cosmological meaning, with William Gibson the prophet of parallel computing singularity.  Also, much like past crises where the structure of the divine changes, we’re in a period of religious warfare.  I find it interesting, though, that as in past conflicts, the battles are rarely taken up by the prophets, but rather by social elements who are seeking to break free of conservative shackles, economic and social radicals who assume a cosmetic stance of rallying for the new truth.  Meanwhile, they face off not against the “true believers” of the old regime, but against those beneficiaries of the social structure which came before, who are actually fairly agnostic or cynical about extant forms of religion.  Christ died on the cross, but the early Christians – who were generally urban, almost always literate, and had extensive trading and exchange connections – fought a landed aristocracy of lazy paganists for primacy.  Buddhists and Jains fought Hindus, largely for control of trade routes and land-based wealth.  And not all societies embrace the newer, more abstracted forms; conservatives often win.  Today’s radicals are the hypereducated, who are trying to assert a kind of moral right to power and wealth by virtue of their learning over those who acquired power and wealth using the tools of the past – charisma, connections, inheritance, and force.  But Jeff Bezos is not a theoretician of the new forms of abstract expression; Elon Musk is only a prophet of financial leverage and hucksterism.  Einstein and Bell played with the potential of their new access to deeper levels of meaning; Zuckerberg and Brin will it to power, no matter how ill-suited it is to the exercise.  And regardless, their battle is against the champions of the old regime – energy, transport, finance, communications companies and their shareholders – who are largely indifferent to the early modernist and Enlightment principles that are fading into obsolescence.

I’m largely uninterested in who gets the pot at the end of the rainbow, however – a friend of mine recently called me “weird” because I’m just not emotionally engaged in money, however intellectually fascinating I find it, and she pointed out that may be at the root of me missing the point more broadly in society today.  With that caveat and the knowledge that I may be totally incapable of really comprehending this at all, what interests me here is what will emerge in societal forms, and in the broader sense that this is a kind of long-scale human process.  I am gifted mathematically as well, so understanding the new expressions of the divine comes fairly easily for me – so much so that I don’t see the divine in it at all, and realize that my experience of some kind of universal connectedness has almost nothing to do with how we represent the behavior of the universe in quantum mechanical form.  Instead, my experience of love continues to unfold with far more holistic relevance, but it remains immune to expression in words, or in formulae, or in any abstract linguistic form: it remains only possible to live it, and it becomes relevant only through my journey of learning to give myself over to it without expression, without the need for abstraction. When I try to sum it up or make it into a form which “makes sense” to others – which can be communicated – I fail and it fails.

I wrote in a previous essay about the paradox of acquiring consciousness, how it comes with the pain of being separated from the direct experience of living but also carries the joy of seeing worlds of possibility, worlds beyond what can be simply lived.  Perhaps prophecy is, in that reading, merely a very human attempt to link those experiences, to combine the joy of possibility with the joy of simply existing.  But if that is the case, I think it’s a dead end.  There is no need to combine these very different things.  A more fruitful path, perhaps, would be to accept each in their own light.  My consciousness can explore, but I can also live.  The experiences I’ve had in the last few years have served to emphasize that love has a kind of magic to it: the more you love, the more you open yourself to it, the more it grows and expands beyond the simple additive process of “loving more”.  If you can’t open yourself to it, moreover, you shrink far smaller than the subtraction involved in closing off your heart to a person, or an experience, or an idea.  Accepting both life-as-lived and life-as-imagined at once is, perhaps, the path forward.  Not that it’s bloody likely that most people will try that, let alone pull it off, but still.

Put another way: prophecy isn’t necessary, really, at all, if one could imagine striking a balance between a pre-self lived experience (the grounding point for any of our explorations as replicating, entropy reversing beings) and the increasingly abstract and penetrating notions of the self generated by communications within ourselves and amongst ourselves.  Again looking historically, those moments in which meaning becomes lost, where existential pain is at its most acute, come at those times when we become lost in one or the other process, of living for itself or abstractly trying to define the world.  Those moments when scholastics of any age define the divine to the point where love is just an abstraction, not a lived experience – or when living in the moment drives out the desire to be possible, to innovate, to imagine, as in the Romantic and Neitzchean counterrevolution to the Enlightenment – that is when we see the emergence of narratives of despair, of confusion, a sense that something is unsolveably false about lived experience, and when society broadly finds them most compelling.  Arguably we are in such a moment right now, where conservative traditions attempt to define “the good” in response to the enormously rapid expansion of mathematically defined science and its parallel construct of “the real”.  Anomie and displacement is almost an inevitable response to such a state of affairs.

Surely, then, it would make more sense to balance the descriptive possibilities of abstract thought with grounded joy of living in the moment.  Surely grace exists in the navigable space between these two absolutes of the lived real and the dynamic and spiralling possible.  This feels very Aristotelean or Emersonian all of the sudden, seeking out a pragmatic balance instead of wrestling with a dichotomy, but I’ll stick with it – intuitively it makes sense, and empirically, it seems to hold as a more sustainable path for the human soul than those purer alternatives.

I treasure my pre-self actuated memories.  I have others too – I remember my mother fussing over me after I had put on my Sunday suit, complete with clip-on tie, carrying a briefcase and a tiny corncob pipe in imitation of my father.  I remember her beaming and smiling and hugging me as I walked into her bedroom where she was getting ready for the day, but I also have no memory of thinking about putting on that get-up or thinking about why I was doing it.  I was simply aping my father, although that is to put a post hoc spin on things: I aped my father without thinking about it, without consciousness.  I was rewarded with hugs and fussing.  The contextualization came later – my mom tells me I was three when that happened, a good two years after selflessly watching the bicentennial – but I was still without self at the time, I was still acting without conscious consequence.

I gained a sense of self in an explosion of consciousness that I still remember when I was four years old.  It wasn’t long after dressing up in a clip-on tie and carrying a fake briefcase; I was in the house on Shore Road and my parents were having someone redo the dormered top floor of the house to be rooms for my sister and me, and I was in what was to be known as the family room and a workman plugged something into a wall plug and the plug exploded – it was an old house, with knob and tube wiring, and such things happened – and I suddenly started having a memory that one would think of as a proper memory. The workman was surprised and (no doubt) electrically shocked; my mom rushed up to see what was happening, and while I was on the other side of the room I remember the fire bursting out of the plug and the workman and my mom desperately trying to fan out the flames.  They died down quickly, leaving a scar of carbon on the wall, and I was hustled upstairs to my new room while they dealt with the aftermath.  I remember looking down the stairs as my mom dragged me up and thinking “I wonder what they will do next, and I wonder if everything is okay”.  I remember thinking about the fire, and wondering how it had come about.  I wondered if the fire could come from any of the wierd holes in the wall, and would I get burned some day when out of nowhere one of them exploded into flame?  I had consciousness; I was aware of a past and a future, and I was aware that there were consequences, and I was aware of the fact that I wasn’t going to be a part of the fabric of everything that would take place next.

But the house on Shore Road was infused with a simple brightness of joy in living and love that gave my life a multidimensional background.  I had my consciousness and my self but I also had that richness and depth that my parents gave me, that surrounded me with love just because I was alive.  They would say it was from their shared experience in God and Christ in the Church, although to me that’s not particularly resonant, and in the end it’s just a narrative.  The lived experience was in love and in acceptance.  It’s why their houses on Shore Road – first with the door looking out onto the ocean, then later with the forest and raspberry bushes and the wood stove glowing with warmth – were refuges not only for me but for my friends too, and why it became a place where the emergence of my self, and the start of the never-ending path of diving into the depths of that consciousness, was also a place of safety, and warmth, and peace.  That balance is still my grounding, and it is where I still live today.  No prophets, or prophecy, needed.