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[...] the stories that captivated and unsettled me were those that remained irreducible. In these, there were no codes to be cracked, no definitive meaning to be exposed—just the faintest sense that the surface of the text was undergirded by a vast system of roots that must remain forever invisible.
I worry, once again, that my oblique approach has managed only to muddle things. I suppose I’ve been trying to suggest that subtlety is always a sign of mystery, and that our attitude toward the former is roughly commensurate with our tolerance for the latter. I have come to regard it as something of a dark art, a force of nature that can be summoned but never fully harnessed, and can backfire at the slightest misstep. Anyone can pick up a bullhorn and make her intent clear to all, but to attempt something subtle is to step blindfolded into the unknown. You are always teetering on the brink of insanity. You are always working on a wire strung across an abyss, hoping to make it from one end to the other without losing your balance, or your mind.
Perhaps this is another way of saying that subtlety is a transaction of faith. The artist must have faith that her effects will be perceived in the way she intends; the reader must trust that what he detects, beneath the surface of the text, is not merely a figment of his imagination. The disciple must come to believe that the whispers he hears in the wilderness are not the wind, or the devil, but the voice of his Creator. All religion, all forms of love, depend on this leap.
I FIRST READ KURZWEIL’S 1999 book, The Age of Spiritual Machines, in 2006, a few years after I dropped out of Bible school and stopped believing in God. I was living alone in Chicago’s southern industrial sector and working nights as a cocktail waitress. I was not well. Beyond the people I worked with, I spoke to almost no one. I clocked out at three each morning, went to after-hours bars, and came home on the first train of the morning, my head pressed against the window so as to avoid the specter of my reflection appearing and disappearing in the blackened glass. When I was not working, or drinking, time slipped away from me. The hours before my shifts were a wash of benzo breakfasts and listless afternoons spent at the kitchen window, watching seagulls circle the landfill and men hustling dollys up and down the docks of an electrical plant.
fuck this is beautiful
LOSING FAITH IN GOD in the 21st century is an anachronistic experience. You end up contending with the kinds of things the West dealt with more than a hundred years ago: materialism, the end of history, the death of the soul. During the early years of my faithlessness, I read a lot of existentialist novels, filling their margins with empathetic exclamation points. “It seems to me sometimes that I do not really exist, but I merely imagine I exist,” muses the protagonist of André Gide’s The Counterfeiters. “The thing that I have the greatest difficulty in believing in, is my own reality.” When I think back on that period of my life, what I recall most viscerally is an unnamable sense of dread — an anxiety that would appear without warning and expressed itself most frequently on the landscape of my body. There were days I woke in a panic, certain that I’d lost some essential part of myself in the fume of a blackout, and would work my fingers across my nose, my lips, my eyebrows, and my ears until I assured myself that everything was intact. My body had become strange to me; it seemed insubstantial. I went out of my way to avoid subway grates because I believed I could slip through them. One morning, on the train home from work, I became convinced that my flesh was melting into the seat.
At the time, I would have insisted that my rituals of self-abuse — drinking, pills, the impulse to put my body in danger in ways I now know were deliberate — were merely efforts to escape; that I was contending, however clumsily, with the overwhelming despair at the absence of God. But at least one piece of that despair came from the knowledge that my body was no longer a sacred vessel; that it was not a temple of the holy spirit, formed in the image of God and intended to carry me into eternity; that my body was matter, and any harm I did to it was only aiding the unstoppable process of entropy for which it was destined. To confront this reality after believing otherwise is to experience perhaps the deepest sense of loss we are capable of as humans. It’s not just about coming to terms with the fact that you will die. It has something to do with suspecting there is no difference between your human flesh and the plastic seat of the train. It has to do with the inability to watch your reflection appear and vanish in a window without coming to believe you are identical with it.
fuck
Transhumanism offered a vision of redemption without the thorny problems of divine justice. It was an evolutionary approach to eschatology, one in which humanity took it upon itself to bring about the final glorification of the body and could not be blamed if the path to redemption was messy or inefficient. Within months of encountering Kurzweil, I became totally immersed in transhumanist philosophy. By this point, it was early December and the days had grown dark. The city was besieged by a series of early winter storms, and snow piled up on the windowsills, silencing the noise outside. I increasingly spent my afternoons at the public library, researching things like nanotechnology and brain-computer interfaces.
I’VE SINCE HAD TO DISTANCE MYSELF from prolonged meditation on these topics. People who once believed, I’ve been told, are prone to recidivism. Over the past decade, as transhumanism has become the premise of Hollywood blockbusters and a passable topic of small talk among people under 40, I’ve had to excuse myself from conversations, knowing that any mention of simulation theory or the noosphere can send me spiraling down the gullet of that techno-theological rabbit hole.
This is not to say that I have outgrown those elemental desires that drew me to transhumanism — just that they express themselves in more conventional ways. Over the intervening years, I have given up alcohol, drugs, sugar, and bread. On any given week, my Google search history is a compendium of cleanse recipes, HIIT workouts, and the glycemic index of various exotic fruits. I spend my evenings in the concrete and cavernous halls of a university athletic center, rowing across virtual rivers and cycling up virtual hills, guided by the voice of my virtual trainer, Jessica, who came with an app that I bought. It’s easy enough to justify these rituals of health optimization as more than mere vanity, especially when we’re so frequently told that physical health determines our mental and emotional well-being. But if I’m honest with myself, these pursuits have less to do with achieving a static state of well-being than with the thrill of possibility that lies at the root of all self-improvement: the delusion that you are climbing an endless ladder of upgrades and solutions. The fact that I am aware of this delusion has not weakened its power over me. Even as I understand the futility of the pursuit, I persist in an almost mystical belief that I can, through concerted effort, feel better each year than the last, as though the trajectory of my life led toward not the abyss but some pinnacle of total achievement and solution, at which point I will dissolve into pure energy. Still, maintaining this delusion requires a kind of willful vigilance that can be exhausting.
But the vast majority of our day was spent doing nothing. My mom talked about the importance of “hayloft time,” her term for idle reflection. Children needed to think, she was always saying. They needed to spend a lot of time alone. She believed that extended bouts of solitude would cultivate autonomy and independence of thought. I did hole up many afternoons atop the ziggurat of hay bales, reading, or sometimes just lying there in silence, watching the chaff fall from the rafters. I also spent a lot of time in the woods, which I called “exploring.” Behind the sheep pasture was a dirt road that led up the mountain to a network of abandoned logging trails that were, for all I could tell, limitless. I walked them every day and never saw another person. It wasn’t uncommon to stumble on a hidden wonder: a meadow, an overgrown pasture, tiered waterfalls that ran green over carpets of algae. In those moments I experienced life as early humans might have, in a condition not unlike the one idealized by the Romantics, my mind as empty and stark as the bars of sunlight crossing the forest floor. I walked until I was tired, or until the shadows grew long and the sun dipped below the mountains, and then I headed home.
pretty
MY CHILDHOOD WAS, in many ways, a walled garden constructed in accordance with 19th-century notions of innocence and autonomy. I was aware on some level that there was a broader culture from which we had deliberately exempted ourselves. My mother called it the World, which was neither the planet nor the cosmos, but a system of interlocking ideologies that were everywhere and in everything. Sometimes the World was capitalism, as when she complained that Christmas had been co-opted by the World’s consumerism. Other times it was socialism, which was synonymous with the State, a vast and elusive force that had the power to take children from their parents. The World was feminism, environmentalism, secular humanism — ideologies that sprang from a single source and reinforced one another. We were to be in the World but not of it, existing within its physical coordinates but uncontaminated by its values. “Schoolkids,” according to her, were hopeless products of the World. They could not think for themselves, but simply mimicked behavior they’d seen on television. (“Stop popping your gum,” she would say. “You look like a schoolkid.”) Media made for children was naturally suspect. My mom once pronounced an animated film about dinosaurs Darwinian propaganda, and marched us out of a community sing-along because a folk song espoused new age pantheism. I have more than once considered the brilliance she would have achieved as a critic, so relentless she was in deconstructing any artifact and reducing it to its essential message. Of all the things she taught me, this was the most formative: that life concealed vast power structures warring for control of my mind; that my only hope for freedom was to be vigilant in recognizing them and calling them by name.
I wish I could say that all of this passed like a bad trip, the way high school does for so many people. But to this day, it’s rare that I end a social interaction without retracing the steps of those long walks home from school: convinced that everything I said was false, that authentic communication is impossible within the confines of social norms. I suppose I might be an angry person had I not, in the end, found my way back to Nature, or its closest analogue. It was during high school that I began writing. I transcribed conversations I’d overheard at school, observations about people, insights about the books I was reading. It became a habit that I came to depend upon, like nourishment, in the same way I craved solitude. The world was pulsing forward at a relentless pace, but the page was infinitely slow, infinitely patient. My first-person voice became my primary sense of identity — an avatar of words and air that I constructed each day and carried in my backpack like a talisman. Its private sustenance was less like a pastime than like the wilderness I explored as a child with total freedom, never exhausting its limits.
wow
I suppose this state of “contradiction,” or disunity, sums up my position today. I left my family’s ideology somewhat late — in my early twenties, after two tortured years of Bible college — which ultimately made the exit more difficult. I wasted a lot of time mourning the loss, drinking, working lousy jobs. But despite everything I now know about the ideologies that informed homeschooling, I maintain mostly good memories of those years I lived in innocence. I sometimes credit homeschooling with the qualities I’ve come to value most in myself: a capacity for solitude and absorption, a distrust of consensus. It is tempting, even, to believe that my childhood inadvertently endowed me with the tools to escape it — that my mother’s insistence that the World was conspiring to brainwash me cultivated the very skepticism that I later trained on my family and their beliefs. But this is circular logic, like someone saying they are grateful for their diabetes because it forced them to change their eating habits. Its wisdom resembles the hollow syntax of rationalization. If I’ve often found it difficult to speak or write about this ambivalence, it’s because it’s impossible to do so without coming to interrogate my motives and doubt my own independence of mind.
i love her!!