The Matter With Things

Finished The Matter With Things, including all eight appendices, and now I'm feeling a little lost and forlorn. I didn't really expect him to end by giving me marching orders, but there lingered a wistful hope that he'd tell me exactly what to do and how to do it. Of course he didn't, and the whole point of the book is that there is not and could not be a context-free algorithm for what to do. The world is not like that.

Vervaeke, of course, coming like me from a Buddhist tradition, delivers practices -- meditations, contemplations, yogas: too many of them, probably. A lot of people probably just walk away from that part of his talks confused. We were already studying a three hundred page menu: adding on to it may not be the most useful thing to do. McGilchrist doesn't offer any practices. He doesn't advise you to walk down to the nearest church on Sunday morning and see what happens. He doesn't advise you to do anything: that's not his business. Which is appealing in its own way: as is his humble admission that he is just as damaged by modernity as anyone else. We are dug into a deep hole here, and nobody is going to just step out of it. The first order of business is to strike a match and get a good look what we've fallen into. For one thing, we're each in our own special, custom-made hole. Getting out will take some custom wriggles, in addition to general hole-climbing skills.

But I do come away with more direction, and more hope. I have been postponing practice until I knew what to practice. "My business, first, is to understand," I keep saying to myself. But it gradually comes into focus that I've misconceived things. It isn't that I need to understand in order to practice. It isn't even that I need to practice in order to understand. I need both of those things, of course, but the missing part, the part that McGilchrist supplies to me, is that figuring out what to do is in fact my purpose. The program is not to make the right guess at what God wants me to do, and then do it. I am God figuring out what to do, you might say; God coming into being. This confusion and aporia is a feature, not a bug. I'm in exactly the right place doing exactly the right thing. And so what I think actually matters. Like, really matters. In all my life I've never taken seriously the idea that what I thought could matter. But suppose it could? Suppose it does?

So many things fall away and so many things come in question, when I really shake free of reductive determinism. What had seemed so very rational and unprejudiced now looks in many cases more like begging the question. What if my family and my nation -- to take just two examples -- are as real as I am? Well, then the world becomes more complex. But it also becomes deeper. And we are so tired of this damned two-dimensional, schematic world we've made for ourselves. It's remarkably easy to convince people of the absurd hypothesis that this world is a simulation. Because so many of us have already made a simulation of it, and crawled inside our representation to live there. So the idea sounds right. 

But it isn't. The world is quite, quite real. And so are we.

Here I sigh, and shake my head, and resist the urge to highlight this whole post and hit the backspace key. The trouble with talking about God is that the moment you start doing it you start thinking you have a handle on Her. (Case in point: you assign Her, or Him, or It, a gender, which is patently ridiculous. You capitalize Her pronoun or you don't. The absurdities multiply inexorably) But the trouble with not talking about God is that you start to forget Her. Equally catastrophic, especially in the poisonous atmosphere of radical individualism. Hypoxia sets in immediately.

Around the time of the equinox, the sun rises and shines straight down Burnside street, and if you are walking east, the sidewalk and the wet twigs of the trees are all on fire, and they make concentric circles of light around it: you are in a fiery tunnel going towards a brightness you can't endure, and it's shockingly beautiful.

“When the Sun rises, do you not see a round disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea?” O no, no, I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying, `Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty.'