Digesting this (for me) introduction to your thinking-writing-life, Nicholas. A cousin of mine has been living-working-loving in Vietnam since the mid-2000s; thinking he would/will appreciate what you've written (and perhaps is aware already). I delight in the many "lessonless images" he shares of his life there. I would steal that phrase from you (with attribution when used, of course) if you would approve. Those two little paragraphs grip me most, at the moment, as an amator photographer (primarily of "pure still scenes of the Earth’s life"). "The past is not lost or unreal" and "Meaning isn’t found at the end of a story that unfolds over time." What I notice (whether recorded or not) is always real, true, and there. And that's all I ever mean it to be, and want it to mean, when I share. Thanks for articulating and sharing!
Thanks Alice - and thanks for subscribing - sorry I'm sometimes a bit slow to respond to comments. It's good to hear that these sentences stand out, because I am pretty sure they are the most important. Not that I can be relied on to act on that knowledge.
Substack in its wisdom threw me back to this post today, plopping a notification in my current notifications that you'd tagged me back in March. Reading it for a second time, I wondered if I ever pointed you towards Rowan Williams' essay on Tolkien? Almost as an aside, he drops in a statement that I found deeply helpful: "Tolkien is seeking to model the way in which the creator works not by intervening but by interweaving." (The next time someone brings him together with Nick Cave, I hope the pair of them talk about this...)
It's interesting to me that you experience Christianity as characterised by a certainty about the future and 'God's plan'. I'll grant that those tendencies are there in the mix – yet part of what draws me back into some kind of relationship with this tradition is precisely that taking God seriously seems to imply letting go of any possibility that I might know 'the plan'. I remember, too, Illich's definition of hope as remaining open to surprise, rather than thinking that you know how the story ends. When I read the Bible, it's full of stories of people having their certainties up-ended and their meanings turned inside out. I'm tempted to say that a faith which goes by way of the crucifixion has the capacity to hold the Great Oxygenation event – but at that point I know that I'd be demonstrating Illich's point when he says that faith is absurd and foolish, that we may experience it, but it is nothing that we can reasonably expect of anyone. In that sense – and knowing you've travelled some way since you wrote this piece in any case, and that what I find it possible to say about faith varies a lot from day to day – I can't see that it could help you to reason your way out of the trap you describe so vividly.
Thanks so much for the second paragraph of your comment, Dougald! Can you direct me to the Illich source(s) these statements are drawn from? I’d like to read more. I live and work among people who are ferociously certain that the “end times” are here. My usual contribution to any conversation about it that I get sucked into is to suggest Matt. 25:13 is the bottom line for me (though I can’t claim that I explicitly “keep watch” beyond being aware of the naturally ever shrinking number of days that I personally have left to make use of my time in this odd body). Thanks again for your useful articulation.
I'm glad you found that comment useful. It's good to be reminded that our words will be read in different contexts – here in Sweden, even in a rural town with a history of evangelical revivals, I don't encounter much ferocious certainty about the end times!
On the Illich sources, the thought about hope as remaining open to surprise is such a recurring note in his writing, I had to think about specific passages. In the closing lines of his book Gender he writes, 'I strongly suspect that a contemporary art of living *can* be recovered ... The hope for such a life rests upon the rejection of sentimentality and an openness to surprise.' In Celebration of Awareness, he puts it like this: 'Our hope of salvation lies in our being surprised by the Other. Let us learn always to receive further surprises.'
The point about faith is my paraphrase of a number of comments he makes in The Rivers North of the Future, the posthumously published book based on his conversations with David Cayley.
I'm currently reading Cayley's Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey (ahead of a Zoom event where I'll be in conversation with Cayley this weekend) and he quotes the passage of Thessalonians about 'a thief in the night', commenting that 'Surprise is rather the structure of messianic experience', and putting this together with Kafka: 'The Messiah will come only when he is no longer necessary; he will come only on the day after his arrival; he will come, not on the last day, but on the very last day.'
Thanks for this, Dougald. I plan to be present at Sunday's discussion per invite from DBB. Read some of Illich back in my 20s, while and after attending (Jesuit) university. Encountered him again last year (decades later) while doing some editing/writing for an Irish author/social entrpreneur. And now again, through DBB and you. A thread I am inclined to take hold of and be led forward by. Trying to do a little catch-up reading before Sunday. It occurs to me that living with openness to surprise is how life has gradually shaped me. As a very young person I developed an approach to "faith" in which I would (try to) convince myself that I wanted the opposite of what I really wanted because I believed life or God would then give me what I wanted. As though I could trick/reverse-psychologize a God/universe who/that didn't actually care about me. Sometimes it seemed to work. It was a gentle liberation to evolve out of that spiritual modus operandi. There have been other liberations, not always gentle, spiritual and otherwise. And more to come, I suspect. Thank you again, Dougald.
You know what? I went to that same exhibition Rowan Williams talks about and also was struck by the same exhibit. I like what he says about Tolkien. I like what you say about the crucifixion.
I'm rather bewildered that I keep talking about Christianity. I went to visit Charlotte the other Sunday and she asked me pretty much exactly that. I couldn't easily answer and spent quite a bit of this week trying to, before remembering that wasn't what I was supposed to be writing about at all.
I first attended the Climate Sessions that you hosted because I wanted to find how to translate, or move between, the truths of myth that Martin talked about, and the truths of science that I learned about, in the context of understanding how to treat the rest of the planet. Actually, those things are already connected in our culture through Christianity and there's been a lot of quite different attempts to make that work. I don't really feel that's gone very well, to be honest - which is probably because it's quite hard. But still.
I don't think that the correct response is to say that Christianity is a bad set of myths and we should choose a better set. A more diverse set that includes the Christian ones, perhaps - that makes sense - but - well - have you seen the others?
I am still vulnerable to the idea that actually myths in general are dangerous and outdated things that it's bad to be attached to. I'm also vulnerable to this claim is made about large 'charismatic' and dangerous animal species. In both cases, I hate the idea - because I love myths and large charismatic animal species (at a safe distance, at least), but I do fear that arguments in favour of maintaining them are not strong.
I don't understand Christians as certain about what God's plan is in terms of how it's supposed to go - obviously some are. However I do understand that Christian orthodoxy states that God does have a plan, that it is for the future, and that it involves things turning out well for certain human beings and it is possible to say something about which kinds of humans those are. What God has planned for non-humans - including both animals and machines - is open to interpretations which are diametrically opposed to each other without - as far as I can see - contradicting Christian orthodoxy or the Bible.
I guess, where I'm being most negative about Christianity my story goes like this: "you thought your stories could tell you things about the physical, nonhuman world; you were confident in your interpretation of those stories and you were just so wrong. Don't try and pull an Obi-Wan Kenobi 'true from a certain point of view' on me; that's a retcon. In fact, this is exactly the same complaint I've heard from biologists about the Gaia hypothesis: when someone disproves it, you change the meaning and claim that's always what you meant. So it's not just about Christianity - it's about any attempt to tell stories about the world.
By the way, Substack was informing you that I'd tagged you in this piece because I've been going through reviewing what I'd written and making minor edits. I'd just named you before but changed it to a tag.
It is good that you write without knowing. Without Improvisation, no Jazz. This was a great essay.
2 and 3 are facets of the same thing. 6 is 'having a centre line', principles to adhere to, if you like. They make things much clearer, and don't even have to be 'objectively true', as we can adjust as we go by assessing real world effects of our beliefs / actions. Adjustment and provisionality is important, otherwise: dogma.
I agree, Tao must include the Great Oxygenation Event, all maths, but importantly also all mysteries.
Needing to know is the trap. It is the single most pervasive paralyser and drain of life energy amongst thoughtful, intelligent people, and I have even seen huge martial artists reduced to tears, sobbing 'what's going on?' on encountering something mysterious, or even just not immediately classifiable.
My current practice: imagine the worst that can happen, imagine the best that can happen, imagine an impossible thing. Make tea and pack my bag. Not sure it would work for anyone else, but I swear by it.
Is that a practice for going away - or just in general?
It's good but it's not convenient! I think the difficulty with this piece was that I wanted to get it done and go on to other things and there was too much to say. As a result I may not have been that comprehensible sometimes. Using things like "the Great Oxygenation Event" as quick shorthands.
At some point I have to talk about the things I wrote my PhD about. It was really about rational ways of dealing with the unknown. I am realizing this is still definitely part of the story but not really one I'm looking forward to going back to...
...anyway within the domain of 'rational ways of dealing with the unknown' I never really liked the ones that tried to make categories of unknowns. You know like that Donald Rumsfeld quote about the known unknowns and unknown unknowns etc? But that said, there probably is a difference between things you've thought of and things you haven't.
For me that's why 2 and 3 seem utterly different. 2 is not being attached to the future whereas 3 is not being sure about it. If thinking about personal mortality, 2 might be saying 'mortality makes life meaningful' or even just 'there's nothing you can do about it anyway' whereas 3 might be 'maybe there's an afterlife, who knows?' or 'we could be close to a breakthrough in reversing ageing,' or 'what about quantum immortality?' So practising 3 seems like an obstacle to practising 2.
That practice is general. Since the fire, I notice I am mostly ready to just go.
Great Oxygenation Event is superb shorthand. Human-centric thought is limiting.
Rationality is only half of Reason. Reason = rationality (measure) and intuition (culture). The unknown, by definition, cannot be approached only with known tools. We must flex the 'uncanny musculature' to find new moves into spaces we didn't know existed. This requires looking and sounding like a fool.
2 and 3 are linked inasmuch as both are about unknowing. You finesse yours more than I do!
There are no obstacles to practice, once you know what to practice. Not even death.
Right, gotta go get the groceries. greeting to VN from DE (Dorset, England) x
Digesting this (for me) introduction to your thinking-writing-life, Nicholas. A cousin of mine has been living-working-loving in Vietnam since the mid-2000s; thinking he would/will appreciate what you've written (and perhaps is aware already). I delight in the many "lessonless images" he shares of his life there. I would steal that phrase from you (with attribution when used, of course) if you would approve. Those two little paragraphs grip me most, at the moment, as an amator photographer (primarily of "pure still scenes of the Earth’s life"). "The past is not lost or unreal" and "Meaning isn’t found at the end of a story that unfolds over time." What I notice (whether recorded or not) is always real, true, and there. And that's all I ever mean it to be, and want it to mean, when I share. Thanks for articulating and sharing!
Thanks Alice - and thanks for subscribing - sorry I'm sometimes a bit slow to respond to comments. It's good to hear that these sentences stand out, because I am pretty sure they are the most important. Not that I can be relied on to act on that knowledge.
No worries, Nicholas. No expectations of either speed or perfection from my direction. :)
Substack in its wisdom threw me back to this post today, plopping a notification in my current notifications that you'd tagged me back in March. Reading it for a second time, I wondered if I ever pointed you towards Rowan Williams' essay on Tolkien? Almost as an aside, he drops in a statement that I found deeply helpful: "Tolkien is seeking to model the way in which the creator works not by intervening but by interweaving." (The next time someone brings him together with Nick Cave, I hope the pair of them talk about this...)
https://www.newstatesman.com/long-reads/2018/08/master-his-universe-warnings-jrr-tolkien-s-novels
It's interesting to me that you experience Christianity as characterised by a certainty about the future and 'God's plan'. I'll grant that those tendencies are there in the mix – yet part of what draws me back into some kind of relationship with this tradition is precisely that taking God seriously seems to imply letting go of any possibility that I might know 'the plan'. I remember, too, Illich's definition of hope as remaining open to surprise, rather than thinking that you know how the story ends. When I read the Bible, it's full of stories of people having their certainties up-ended and their meanings turned inside out. I'm tempted to say that a faith which goes by way of the crucifixion has the capacity to hold the Great Oxygenation event – but at that point I know that I'd be demonstrating Illich's point when he says that faith is absurd and foolish, that we may experience it, but it is nothing that we can reasonably expect of anyone. In that sense – and knowing you've travelled some way since you wrote this piece in any case, and that what I find it possible to say about faith varies a lot from day to day – I can't see that it could help you to reason your way out of the trap you describe so vividly.
Thanks so much for the second paragraph of your comment, Dougald! Can you direct me to the Illich source(s) these statements are drawn from? I’d like to read more. I live and work among people who are ferociously certain that the “end times” are here. My usual contribution to any conversation about it that I get sucked into is to suggest Matt. 25:13 is the bottom line for me (though I can’t claim that I explicitly “keep watch” beyond being aware of the naturally ever shrinking number of days that I personally have left to make use of my time in this odd body). Thanks again for your useful articulation.
Hi Alice!
I'm glad you found that comment useful. It's good to be reminded that our words will be read in different contexts – here in Sweden, even in a rural town with a history of evangelical revivals, I don't encounter much ferocious certainty about the end times!
On the Illich sources, the thought about hope as remaining open to surprise is such a recurring note in his writing, I had to think about specific passages. In the closing lines of his book Gender he writes, 'I strongly suspect that a contemporary art of living *can* be recovered ... The hope for such a life rests upon the rejection of sentimentality and an openness to surprise.' In Celebration of Awareness, he puts it like this: 'Our hope of salvation lies in our being surprised by the Other. Let us learn always to receive further surprises.'
The point about faith is my paraphrase of a number of comments he makes in The Rivers North of the Future, the posthumously published book based on his conversations with David Cayley.
I'm currently reading Cayley's Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey (ahead of a Zoom event where I'll be in conversation with Cayley this weekend) and he quotes the passage of Thessalonians about 'a thief in the night', commenting that 'Surprise is rather the structure of messianic experience', and putting this together with Kafka: 'The Messiah will come only when he is no longer necessary; he will come only on the day after his arrival; he will come, not on the last day, but on the very last day.'
Thanks for this, Dougald. I plan to be present at Sunday's discussion per invite from DBB. Read some of Illich back in my 20s, while and after attending (Jesuit) university. Encountered him again last year (decades later) while doing some editing/writing for an Irish author/social entrpreneur. And now again, through DBB and you. A thread I am inclined to take hold of and be led forward by. Trying to do a little catch-up reading before Sunday. It occurs to me that living with openness to surprise is how life has gradually shaped me. As a very young person I developed an approach to "faith" in which I would (try to) convince myself that I wanted the opposite of what I really wanted because I believed life or God would then give me what I wanted. As though I could trick/reverse-psychologize a God/universe who/that didn't actually care about me. Sometimes it seemed to work. It was a gentle liberation to evolve out of that spiritual modus operandi. There have been other liberations, not always gentle, spiritual and otherwise. And more to come, I suspect. Thank you again, Dougald.
You know what? I went to that same exhibition Rowan Williams talks about and also was struck by the same exhibit. I like what he says about Tolkien. I like what you say about the crucifixion.
I'm rather bewildered that I keep talking about Christianity. I went to visit Charlotte the other Sunday and she asked me pretty much exactly that. I couldn't easily answer and spent quite a bit of this week trying to, before remembering that wasn't what I was supposed to be writing about at all.
I first attended the Climate Sessions that you hosted because I wanted to find how to translate, or move between, the truths of myth that Martin talked about, and the truths of science that I learned about, in the context of understanding how to treat the rest of the planet. Actually, those things are already connected in our culture through Christianity and there's been a lot of quite different attempts to make that work. I don't really feel that's gone very well, to be honest - which is probably because it's quite hard. But still.
I don't think that the correct response is to say that Christianity is a bad set of myths and we should choose a better set. A more diverse set that includes the Christian ones, perhaps - that makes sense - but - well - have you seen the others?
I am still vulnerable to the idea that actually myths in general are dangerous and outdated things that it's bad to be attached to. I'm also vulnerable to this claim is made about large 'charismatic' and dangerous animal species. In both cases, I hate the idea - because I love myths and large charismatic animal species (at a safe distance, at least), but I do fear that arguments in favour of maintaining them are not strong.
I don't understand Christians as certain about what God's plan is in terms of how it's supposed to go - obviously some are. However I do understand that Christian orthodoxy states that God does have a plan, that it is for the future, and that it involves things turning out well for certain human beings and it is possible to say something about which kinds of humans those are. What God has planned for non-humans - including both animals and machines - is open to interpretations which are diametrically opposed to each other without - as far as I can see - contradicting Christian orthodoxy or the Bible.
I guess, where I'm being most negative about Christianity my story goes like this: "you thought your stories could tell you things about the physical, nonhuman world; you were confident in your interpretation of those stories and you were just so wrong. Don't try and pull an Obi-Wan Kenobi 'true from a certain point of view' on me; that's a retcon. In fact, this is exactly the same complaint I've heard from biologists about the Gaia hypothesis: when someone disproves it, you change the meaning and claim that's always what you meant. So it's not just about Christianity - it's about any attempt to tell stories about the world.
By the way, Substack was informing you that I'd tagged you in this piece because I've been going through reviewing what I'd written and making minor edits. I'd just named you before but changed it to a tag.
It is good that you write without knowing. Without Improvisation, no Jazz. This was a great essay.
2 and 3 are facets of the same thing. 6 is 'having a centre line', principles to adhere to, if you like. They make things much clearer, and don't even have to be 'objectively true', as we can adjust as we go by assessing real world effects of our beliefs / actions. Adjustment and provisionality is important, otherwise: dogma.
I agree, Tao must include the Great Oxygenation Event, all maths, but importantly also all mysteries.
Needing to know is the trap. It is the single most pervasive paralyser and drain of life energy amongst thoughtful, intelligent people, and I have even seen huge martial artists reduced to tears, sobbing 'what's going on?' on encountering something mysterious, or even just not immediately classifiable.
My current practice: imagine the worst that can happen, imagine the best that can happen, imagine an impossible thing. Make tea and pack my bag. Not sure it would work for anyone else, but I swear by it.
Speak soon. Cx.
Is that a practice for going away - or just in general?
It's good but it's not convenient! I think the difficulty with this piece was that I wanted to get it done and go on to other things and there was too much to say. As a result I may not have been that comprehensible sometimes. Using things like "the Great Oxygenation Event" as quick shorthands.
At some point I have to talk about the things I wrote my PhD about. It was really about rational ways of dealing with the unknown. I am realizing this is still definitely part of the story but not really one I'm looking forward to going back to...
...anyway within the domain of 'rational ways of dealing with the unknown' I never really liked the ones that tried to make categories of unknowns. You know like that Donald Rumsfeld quote about the known unknowns and unknown unknowns etc? But that said, there probably is a difference between things you've thought of and things you haven't.
For me that's why 2 and 3 seem utterly different. 2 is not being attached to the future whereas 3 is not being sure about it. If thinking about personal mortality, 2 might be saying 'mortality makes life meaningful' or even just 'there's nothing you can do about it anyway' whereas 3 might be 'maybe there's an afterlife, who knows?' or 'we could be close to a breakthrough in reversing ageing,' or 'what about quantum immortality?' So practising 3 seems like an obstacle to practising 2.
That practice is general. Since the fire, I notice I am mostly ready to just go.
Great Oxygenation Event is superb shorthand. Human-centric thought is limiting.
Rationality is only half of Reason. Reason = rationality (measure) and intuition (culture). The unknown, by definition, cannot be approached only with known tools. We must flex the 'uncanny musculature' to find new moves into spaces we didn't know existed. This requires looking and sounding like a fool.
2 and 3 are linked inasmuch as both are about unknowing. You finesse yours more than I do!
There are no obstacles to practice, once you know what to practice. Not even death.
Right, gotta go get the groceries. greeting to VN from DE (Dorset, England) x