POST-EVERYTHING

I’m developing a meta-theology which has to be either a philosophy or a cosmology since I don’t accept a theos. Not even one defined in abstract terms. God is dead. There is no such category in my thinking. All you people who think that since I’m a “nice lady” -- whatever that is (I suspect it means that you think I’m like you and would approve of you) -- I must deep down believe that god is love or the ground of being or some other abstract thing. Some master principle that unifies everything.

Why do we need a master principle? Why isn’t everything simply itself? Whatever it is. If no one can really conceive of it whole, why should we trouble ourselves? A recent correspondent was worried about the idea that there is no reality, but it has long been established that each of us takes from the universe what we can perceive and then -- with a little guidance from the culture and our genetic endowment -- maybe a little cultural input -- we set up our categories. Some will never vary over a lifetime, preferring to ignore any evidence that contradicts their favorite ideas, esp. those that put a crimp in our egos.

I’ve entirely missed some ideas that come from the language of popular cosmology, taking the “felt” issues to music. The U of Chicago Div School’s Monday essay was about “Death Gospel.” There has been some debate over the religious relevance of the genre's title. In February of 2012, “Professor M. Cooper Harriss of Virginia Tech published an article about the genre and its connection to modern culture. In it, he concludes that "‘Death Gospel’ offers an interesting rejoinder to a culture that denies death and decay, insisting instead that particular individualities require a universal point of convergence; it addresses a generation of young adults (and their elders) who, despite their spirituality and electronic connections, feel alienated from their traditions (religious or otherwise), from their humanity, and from one another. "

Surely we all see the world collapsing around us, the young more sharply than those of us who have already survived a lot. But these guys seem to have a craving for the end days, a “Jones” for apocalypse which they see as a kind of cleansing that will let them live. In the meantime, they are energized by the excitement of all those explosions, all that suffering, death everywhere, the skulls and swastikas that have so symbolized the holocaust and Pol Pot’s killing fields. If that’s what it takes to get our attention, they’re up for it.

The roots of this seems to come from the South, from country Western gospel, and Bob Dylan whom Harriss claims once said the message of his songs is “Good luck, I hope you make it.” And you should spend your last time and energy in a consuming, tragic, super-intimate, fusion of love. I’m handicapped by not knowing pop music, but isn’t there a Japanese tradition of melancholy and ill-fated love: the archetype for the “Blue Willow” plates off which I ate my childhood meals in the Forties?

I’ve said again and again that sin is a human construct (“dark matter” in space is neither good nor sinful) and pop genres do not shy away from that. The music analysts claim that rap music is the most moral of genres, demanding accountability by reporting in the snapshot way of smart phones, not extended reflection. In an essay called “Cultural Approaches to the rhetorical analysis of selected music videos” by Karyn Charles Rybacki and Donald Jay Rybacki, the claim is made that music videos are not seen for the commercials they are. (“The world economy has been shaken -- quick! So shopping!”) “With nary a reference to cash or commodities, music videos cross the consumer’s gaze as a series of mood states. They trigger nostalgia, regret, anxiety, confusion, dread, envy, admiration, pity, titillation -- attitudes at one remove from the primal expression such as passion, ecstasy and rage. The moods often express a lack, an incompletion, an instability, a searching for location.” Too often that location is either the mall or the dangerous urban streets, “using any number of techniques in order to appear exotic, powerful, tough, sexy, cool, unique.”

But now the tide seems to be changing. A call for papers for the Modern Language Association in January, 2013, asks for “Environments in Science Fiction: Beyond Dystopias.” Science fiction, a genre of writing that thrives among roughly the same demographic as rock music, is asking for what amounts to a religious vision of sustainable life on the planet, a melding of desiderata and the world as cleansed by fire, brimstone and horseback angels.

Harder than you might think, when one takes a viewpoint that includes the whole continent, the planet, the solar system, all possible conceivabilities. One begins to think that the only hope is just to wipe the board clean and start from scratch. We cannot destroy the world. But we can eliminate ourselves by failing to adapt to new conditions, even the ones we’ve caused ourselves.

We may have to give up our conviction that all this is for us or about us. I’m convinced that the next religious step has got to be leaving anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism. It is not about us. Everything is in play, including all our behavior, and we certainly have ideas about how we want it all to turn out, but on the scale of eternity we cannot persist. To survive is to transform. Too much transformation and we don’t recognize ourselves anymore (do we recognize ourselves now?) and that’s the same thing as death, which is only physical, only means that this specific arrangement of molecular community that supports my identity is going other places for other reasons.

It’s unthinkable, insupportable for many people. Maybe most of all for the generation just a little older than myself that has had the idea that they could earn the future, if not for themselves then for their children, their nation, their kind of people. It took a long time for the UU’s to find new hymns that weren’t all about God or Jesus taking us for a walk in a garden of love. I’m not sure what music expresses surrender to the inevitability of change that is felt as loss. For me, it’s neither “Death Gospel” nor rap. “Space music?”