SubscribeSeptember 17th, 2010
Empty promises/threats
I’ve been thinking (idly) about failed prophecies. There are so many, and even so, people still come to my door predicting new dates, new ends. My favourite has to be Matthew 16:28 when Jesus (reportedly) says “Verily I say unto you, there be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom.” Following the description of that “coming” as with “his Father with his angels,” it seems to me that this rather obviously didn’t come true, or if it did, then it is meaningless since not even Christians seem to be able to tell that everything is now OK.
Anyway, I found this site which lists a bunch of other failed prophecies. It’s fun to look at. Then there’s all those fly-by-night sites that predict the fall of the theory of evolution. The fact that they all fail makes no difference, and that it wondrous to me. Then there’s this new one (to me anyway) of May 21 , 2011 and of course there’s the Mayan-based one of 2012. The fact that people can seriously ask “Is it really coming?” is stupendous.
This stuff inevitably reminds me of Frank Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending. It is the way in which we need to make sense far in advance of our ability to do so reasonably that I find so wondrous, and frankly, amusing. Just like an addict in the face of his or her drug of choice, many of us display no discernment whatsoever when faced with the need to know the ending of the human story. Imagine that you are a chocoholic and that the exquisite-mouthful ever recedes just past the reach of your questing fingers. I suspect that’s how those who choose to believe these various end-of-the-world scenes feel about having an end to the human story. There it is that surety, that perfect comfort, just at the horizon. Chase it, chase it. And then when it vanishes over the horizon of falsity, another pops up and off like a hare we go, kicking out hind feet with the delight of the new morsel just out of reach.
Without a narrative fix in the offing I imagine it would be like the horrifying discovery that all chocolate is just an illusion, born of a particularly vivid gustatory dream. I expect there would be more than one addict running for the vial of sleeping pills – to dream, better than facing the fact that the comfort will not come; that death will come instead, and before our story is all worked out, before even the most glaring loose ends are knitted back into the narrative.
I’m looking forward to the first morning of 2013, since this is fairly well advertised apocalypse. Even so, I suspect it will be like the first day of 2000, when the credit card bill still existed. (I actually knew a woman that maxed out her card expecting not to have to pay it.) The reason I look forward to it? Because, I predict, there will be a new end-of-the-world date suggested before close of business 2012. Since we will continue as a species to persist, I do suspect, we will persist with this need to chase the end of the narrative.
July 12th, 2009
What if we didn’t know the ending?
Frank Kermode in his book The Sense of an Ending suggests that we live in perpetual crisis because of the way we, in our various non-indigenous Western cultures, structure the story of what it means to be human. Simply, because of this apocalyptic story we know what our lives mean because we already know the ending. The apocalypse of the western and middle-eastern religious worlds has become, instead, the tragedy of the personal—a sense of failure, of powerlessness in the face of the inexorable—but the sense of crisis has yet to dissipate. Apocalypse and tragedy is, for us, the same story but on a more individual scale, despite all the evidence that we have that the “end” never actually arrives. “We continue to assume…that there is a tolerable degree of conformity between the disconfirmed apocalypse and a respectfully modern view of reality and the powers of the mind. In short, we retain our fictions of epoch, of decadence and renovation, and satisfy in various ways our clerkly skepticism about these and similar fictions.”
It is the fact that we have told many stories about how things were originally perfect for us, how they changed for the worse turning us into aliens in our own garden, and finally how it all gets resolved returning us forever to a state of communion, that gives us rules by which we can guide our behavior as well as the behavior of others. The story gives us the courage to face all that we don’t know, don’t understand and don’t control and because of that we refuse to remember that it is, in fact, a story.
What resists—to the death sometimes—any reasonable light is the idea of a knowable ending. If one precognition of “the end” does not come true, if instead the next day there is just the grocer and the dirty laundry and the rent due, instead of questioning whether there will in fact be a clean-cut end to all the chaos and the merely contingent, we assume we just got the date wrong. We want to know how life turns out. If we don’t know, if we can never know, then maybe all the choices we have made make no sense, have no meaning, have no purpose. “Men in the middest make considerable imaginative investments in coherent patterns which, by the provision of an end, make possible a satisfying consonance with the origins and with the middle. That is why the image of the end can never be permanently falsified.” We story away the unknown and adjust the details as things change, make “adjustments in the interest of reality as well as of control.”
The not knowing, the places that story cannot penetrate, the intellectual dark, all that we can never know, is an immane universe—and that void, those places that we can never understand, never encompass, never realize, make of both the metaphorical and physical dark a scary place.