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The Sermon on the Metaphor: Living by Fiction
An Apology for Atheism and Poetry
In much of my work, I quite consciously sell the religious imagery of the Bible into white slavery, and gleefully collect the metaphorical dividend, as I force the kidnapped verses to do the bump and grind in my tawdry sideshow blasphemies. As an Atheist Baptist, inoculated as a tender and impressionable child with the virus of the King James Version and the rhetoric of Protestant Christianity, I consider it my ungodgiven right to abuse any and all Christian texts. As to the eternal feminine, I admit that I have always been psychologically dominated by the archetype of the Goddess, particularly the Crone, but that does not mean I believe in a GODDESS any more than I believe in a "god." The women addressed in my poetry are all quite real; that they are flesh and blood is rather the point. I do not believe I have ever addressed a poem to my "spirit" woman that was not instanced by a collision with a particular living breathing woman, tho' indeed many a poem may been impelled more by the archetype thus activated within me. But I'm not a dualist; I don't accept "spirit" as supernatural quality separate from matter, or as some sort of sacral parasite infesting profane flesh. Whatever "spirit" there is, is in the world, and of it. The world and the flesh are sacred, awesome and terrible. Just because I'm an atheist doesn't mean I'm not religious. Every poem is a ritual act, an act of contrition, of thanksgiving, of joyful noise making, and of submission to the angels of this world. You may see that as a reflection of my prejudice.
More than one godfearing friend has tried to tell me I'm not really an atheist, and I would like to say here: Thank you so much for defining my "religious" relationship to the Cosmos, and thereby absolving me of the crime of atheism. You are correct, I do not believe in God as defined by the Judeo-Christian religion. I also do not believe in Buddha, Allah, angels or demons, the Goddess, or any supernatural entity or agency. I do not even believe in poetry, as a supernatural entity or agency. In answer to Camus' fundamental question (Why not kill yourself?), I still mostly enjoy this life, and I believe that I get just one. That is to say, I think consciousness most likely ceases at death, and that I'll have an eternity to enjoy the surprise if I'm wrong. It is a pretty bleak world, and anybody who truly believed a better one was waiting for them would simply check out, as did the Heavensgaters. Simply put, I believe that the cosmos is a-theos, without god. I'm perfectly willing to admit I might be wrong, which is more than the god-ridden majority will concede, but I don't make such statements just to shock the rubes. I truly believe it. In answer to Peggy Lee's famous question, "is that all there is?" I must ruefully answer "THIS IS IT!" As to my alleged and oft cited "higher power," if you wish to play a linguistic shell game in order to somehow get a soothing lozenge of "god" brand couth drops into my mouth, I must say it is more for your comfort than mine. I do not believe that our human existence, life on earth in general, or the universe at large has any meaning, other than what we collectively make up for it. If I make an idol of poetry, and idolatry is precisely what we are talking about, it is because I believe I must add my bit to the collective meaning-making of the human race. Or condemn myself as an useless shit tube. I live by the fiction of my poetry, and that fiction can contain without contradiction the Goddess, Lucifer, and even that Al Capone of deities, old Jahova hisself, or any other demiurge humans have dreamed up. But I do not forget that is all a fiction.
I've already confessed that my poetry is often inspired more by the archetype activated by the collision of my imagination with the flesh and blood woman I address, than the women herself. But there is always a flesh and blood woman behind the curtain as the Great Oz thunders. The hyperbolic language I employ partakes both of my clinical mania and the nature of the experience of romantic love. There are other genres but this is mine. Though I have been accused of idealism, I don't feel I'm idealistic at all in my poetry. I simply download the metaphors, and after a bare tidying up, present them as an offering to an overwhelming reality. You may say it is a religious function, but I don't have to believe anything to perform it. Is it a function of the form, to "mythically" spout "gods" and "goddesses" in so profligate a manner? I only know it's more fun that way. I have tried to write non "mythically," non "religiously," which is to say without metaphors. I find no joy in that Mudville. I can live without god, but human meaning can not live without metaphor.
To echo E. M. Forster, "I do not believe in belief." Belief is a very dangerous and addictive substance, rather like the intellectual equivalent of a crack-cocaine/heroin speedball. One should indulge in it as little as possible, if at all. I belief in metaphor the way Archimedes believed in his lever: it moves things. It is a tool, the hammer that drives the nail home. More subtly, it is the equation that allows the quantum mechanic to divide a proton into three quarks. But the sane physicist does not forget that his equations are just equations, human mathematical constructs deployed to delineate a limited understanding of physical reality, not the reality itself. I regard the poet as a sort of mathematician or physicist. The poet deploys his equations, namely metaphors, to delineate a limited fictive apprehension of a metaphysical reality. The sane poet does not mistake his metaphors for reality. Of course, the pertinent question is: Is sanity at all useful? It might keep a poet out of the hospital, but it won't make him or her happy. The answer of the variety of poetaster known as theologian would seem to be no. The general noncognitive population embraces and employs primitive metaphor, not even knowing the word for it, as the magic that make bad things in real life go away. So, no separation of church (metaphor) and state (reality) for the majority. We all live by our fictions, though few realize it, and most if told so are insulted as if accused of lying. I, for instance, live by the fiction, among others, that I am a discrete conscious entity named Dana, with a self-contained and coherent personality. That is not really true, but I pretend it is as if my life depended on it. I answer to the name "Dana" and would be perplexed, possibly insulted or even angry if someone instead insisted that I was "Fred" or "Alphonse." Our "I" is the first lie, the first metaphor. The aim of metaphor is to make the sum of our falsehoods equal truth. After all, a metaphor does not compare two things that are akin or alike; it compares two things that are essentially and incontrovertibly unlike. It is in the gap in the broken equals sign between that a tiny spark of light arises.
But I do believe, and as I have said, belief is a dangerous thing. I do not believe things because they are a comfort to me. It doesn't make me happy that I think there probably isn't a god, that the universe is not a theme park designed for human enjoyment or uplift, or that "I" will most likely cease to exist at death. I simply and reluctantly think it the truth. Or as close I can get. The universe is much larger than my brain, and it’s possible that, as a species, humans are just not smart enough to figure it out. As Arthur Clarke said, more or less, not only is it more than I have imagined, it is more than I can imagine.
Again, I do not believe in something because of its utility to me, because it is practical, or because it make me feel better. When I say I believe I mean I think something is most likely true, as far as my understanding goes. I realize I am in the minority in thinking that a system of belief is not equivalent to a self-improvement program.
Are believers really improved by their beliefs? Believers like the Christian mob that flayed the last librarian of Alexandria alive, after setting fire to the great library itself, in the fourth century anno domino? Believers like the Crusaders who wantonly murdered ally, enemy, and bystander, on the way to Jerusalem? Believers like the inquisitors who burned Giordano Bruno at the stake for maintaining that the earth orbited the sun? Strong believers like Martin Luther, who wrote pamphlets proclaiming that Jews were vermin to be exterminated, and that there were witches aplenty, overdue for a barbeque?
My belief that god is unbelievable is such a modest thing that I don't think I'll ever be able to commit murder or oppress another human being in its name, as countless "strong" believers have done.
Let me clarify my main point: "Belief is a dangerous thing." "Strong believers," which I would define as people who have mistaken the metaphors which they use to deal with "life, the universe, and everything" for the everything itself, in my view are much more likely to be incited to mass antics and to commit any crime against their fellow creatures, precisely because they think their belief (undone metaphor) system gives them the sanction. There are always bad 'uns in the human population who would be monsters no matter what, but they gladly embrace the first handy belief system to enlist their followers, who are mostly not monsters, and who commit crimes on behalf of their leader because of their belief. And if you want to throw Stalin or Mao at me as exemplars of godless mass murderers, go talk to a Marxist. There are a few left. Then come and tell me Marxism is not a fundamentalist religion.
We must choose our metaphors well, use them thoughtfully, and not make the mistake of believing in them. In that way lie dragons. The truth of the matter is comfortably larger than the four trillion or so neurons (even with all the interconnections) we each use to natter about it. To indulge myself in a little mathematical jargon, "The Truth, the Light, and the Way" lies in the orthogonal complement of our location, and for our intents and purposes is incomprehensible.
"The gods are in metaphor. Snatched up in the sudden swerve, poetry gains
a beyond without surveillance." Rene Char
The Sufi poet Rumi addressed the sacred ground of being through his Beloved, and I attempt the same. What is required is metaphor. Belief is not required to address the matter. I in fact think it an impediment. With apologies to Stephen Crane, whose work I parody in part:
Theodicy
"Sir, I exist!" said
God to the universe.
"Nevertheless, that
fact does not create in me
in sense of morality,"
said the universe.
A spider eating a moth is free of moral evil, and only creatures such as ourselves possessing the conscious capability of choice can commit a moral evil. However, I would guess that the moth, with whatever smidgen of consciousness it possesses, considers being eaten alive an evil. If you believe God created the spider, that the spider is part of God's design, or even if you just go for the distant prime mover god and think that God set the initial conditions that resulted in the spider; then the spider's need to eat moths in order to survive is a natural evil and the perpetrator is God. To my mind, that does not lead to the conclusion that there is "overwhelming evidence that God is Love." My if, then is a very human conclusion, too, and god if it exists would probably be beyond any human understanding by definition. But that would imply god's justice, god's dispensation of good and evil is beyond our comprehension, and therefore, in human terms, unavailable. Just as human justice is unavailable to a spider. And if, as you assert, god loves and attends us, we can no more be aware of it than a spider is aware of biologist whose specialty is arachnids. In that case, I say god might as well not exist.
Even as "conscience" creatures we make the choice every day to survive by the suffering, death, and destruction of other living creatures, tho' most people don't make the decision "consciously." We can hardly nourish ourselves or move without doing so. Or we take the way of Kafka's Hunger Artist and starve ourselves to death. That, too, is a natural evil. The definition of Theodicy in my 1913 Webster's is:
"The vindication of God's justice in creating or permitting natural or moral evil."
Some ascribe moral evil to God's gift of free will. What about natural evil? As Jack Nicholson's character in "Three Witches of Eastwicke" said, "Was it an accident, or did He do it to us on purpose! I really want to know!"
All the great sages we know of have been polished down like stones under running water, thinking on these questions. Buddha found his answer; Christ another. I will go so far as to say that I accept, embrace, and rejoice in the world as it is, on a profound existential level, with all its suffering and death. I don't pretend to know why it exists, or why I love it in spite of the fact that I suffer along the way, and it will kill me in the end. Why we love is another mystery. The Buddhists would say that suffering does not exist. The Christians would say death does not exist. Some say natural evil does not exist. I do not agree. I simply don't believe a loving god would create a world in which pain, death, and evil, either moral or natural exist as integral parts of the whole. If one still believes in god, that leaves you with the remote alien god and what my wife Elspeth calls the "neglected high school experiment universe." I seek another way. One without god. It may be, fundamentally, a matter of aesthetics, a choice of metaphors.
I can speak from my personal life and say that I have been exalted by visions that few people I have spoken to have experienced. Given a medical diagnosis of Manic Depression or Bipolar Disorder, a psychiatrist would say I had hallucinations. A religious person, experiencing the same visions might say he had seen angels and spoken to god. I find neither point of view adequate to the reality. In a different time or place, I might have been a shaman or a prophet. I choose to be a mere poet, the discipline of metaphor, and an attitude of unbelief. Were I a believer, I think it possible I would be a much more wicked person, a doer of evil.
The sentimentality of belief is essentially a theft of the real to serve the unreal; stealing the authentic materials of real life, inner or outer, to fuel a worn out belief system's metaphorical engine. Galway Kinnell says, somewhere in The Book of Nightmares: "It is the wound itself that lets us know and love." All our experience is inner experience. But it is precisely that projection of the meaningful contents of our interior life upon the outer world that brings forth monsters. Some make war, commit rapine and murder, because God is Love. Others make art because a transforming inner metaphor compels them to make love, in stone, with paint, on paper. I prefer living arts and dead gods.
Dana Pattillo 2002
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