Desperate Spiritual Need

I’ve had this total feeling of dread. Spiritual dread. Vaster than anything.

I’ve never felt this before. It’s like evil is real, tangible. And it’s horrible. And terrible. It’s an awakening to evil. and that’s been dreadful. I could never have imagined so much evil …

 

And suddenly I understood that I was in desperate spiritual need. I’ve never felt that I was in desperate spiritual need – not before. I’ve never suffered from being in desperate spiritual need. And there I was, in desperate spiritual need …

And crying and crying. That’s what I was doing. In desperate spiritual need and crying. And when I began reading Susan Taubes, I realised that she was a woman likewise in desperate spiritual need. Reading Susan Taubes writing about Simone Weil and writing about Martin Heidegger and writing about the gnostic currents in their work, I realised that she, too, was a woman in desperate spiritual need. And that the thinkers she wrote about were likewise in desperate spiritual need. Which they resolved in different ways. Which Simone Weil resolved by starving herself to death and Martin Heidegger by basically joining the Nazi party. But only because they, too, were in desperate spiritual need. And I wasn’t about to starve myself to death or join the Nazi part (or its equivalent.) And I wasn’t about to drown myself, like Susan Taubes. So what was I to do, with my desperate spiritual need.

 

It’s like God’s turned his face away from the Creation. As if God has become disgusted with the Creation. As though God no longer feels bound to his promise. To the covenant …

Because the Creation itself has become blasphemy. Everything about has become a desecration. We’d been given something, and we’ve perverted it. We turned the world from it was, from what it was supposed to be.

 

Poison and lies. And murder! So many of us! They want most of us dead, the maniacs. The poisoners. The liars. They want to fuck with our genes. They want us changed. They don’t want us to be human anymore.

And I, who’d always thought of myself as a misanthrope, suddenly felt a great love of everyone. I felt a great love of all the people around me. All the people they want to kill. Or alter. Or damage. Or make into some new species. That they own, essentially.

 

And God, seeing all this, had turned his face away. We don’t know what that means, not yet.

The world is too corrupted. Too bad. And we’re too evil. And God no longer watches over us.

It’s a great change, A shift. One that’s barely visible, barely noticeable. Because so few of us think of God. Because so few of us miss God.

 

We’ve left spiritual history. We’ve left it behind. We wandering in the darkness now. All alone. Only we don’t know we’re alone., not really. It hasn’t dawned on us, what it means to be alone.

But it’s dawned on me. I understand, what it means to be alone.

And I didn’t believe in God before. I was an atheist before.  And now I know that God has gone. That God was here, and now God is gone.

 

And God’s not supposed to turn his face away, but he has. God’s supposed to love every hair on our heads. God’s supposed to noticed the fall of every sparrow, or whatever. But God’s turned his face away. Because we didn’t keep the covenant, or whatever.

And I didn’t even know what that meant, before, before. But I know now.

Just when our need for God is at its greatest, God disappeared. God turned his face away. Just when we were overwhelmed by the poison and lies, God turned his face away. Just then.

And that was because we don’t even know that our need for God is at its greatest. That’s because we barely know that we’re overwhelmed by poison and lies. God has turned his face away, and we don’t know it. It means nothing to us. But it’s true – and even the highest truth: God has turned his face away.

 

And I realised that there are only poison and lies because God turned his face away. That this is what happens when God turns his face away. And I saw that the poison and lies have taken over the word, because we no longer look upwards. And that it’s because we don’t look upwards that God has turned his face away.

 

Just this huge feeling of loss. I, who had never really had God had come too late for God. And reading Susan Taubes. And reading her reading Simone Weil, who wrote all about God’s absence, and claimed that God was present in God’s absence, and that God was there by not being there. And reading her reading Martin Heidegger, who wrote all about dereliction and finitude, and never really understood or admitted the religious dimensions of what he wrote, and that he was really writing about the desertion of God and the disappearance of the last signs of God.

And reading Simone Weil’s later notebooks, those terrible, beautiful notebooks, written when she was in London, working for the Resistance. Those bits of maths and bits of translation from Greek and from Sanskrit written at night. And these beautiful lines about God being here when he was not here that Susan Taubes commented upon. And the absent presence of God. Those pages in which, in the neatest, most upright handwriting, Simone Weil was expounding her own religious philosophy, her own understanding of Christianity.

And reading Heidegger’s wartime writings, to which Susan Taubes didn’t have access, about mechanisation and massification and technologization and terrible things about cosmopolitan Jews. Reading Heidegger’s wartime essays, which Susan Taubes knew only in part, about technological enframing, about the obliteration of nature’s own self-revealing, and about the multifaceted mystery that is the earth. Which was really, Susan Taubes, all about the disappearance of the divine! About the obliteration of the holy! Which were really a Gnostic treatise!

 

And back then, I didn’t know, not yet, that God had essentially turned his face away, and that that was what Susan Taubes was writing about: God basically turning his face away. Back then, I wasn’t ready for the thought that the world had been abandoned to total nihilism. Oh I thought I knew what that meant, but I didn’t yet understand what that meant. I didn’t understand the nihilistic depths of the poison and lies. Which meant I didn’t know the opposite of the depths of poison and lies. I didn’t know what the word, God, meant. I didn’t know what God’s face was. And had been. And I didn’t understand what it meant to write, as Susan Taubes did, that God had essentially turned his face away.

Listen to me, talking like this. I didn’t know what it meant to talk like this. And I still don’t know!

 

So that’s why I need to read. And study. To find a way to talk about what has happened. About what has befallen us. That’s why I’m reading Susan Taubes reading Simone Weil and reading Susan Taubes reading Martin Heidegger. And why I’m reading those pages so urgently and intensely.

Because I need to know that there’s something more than poison and lies. And because Susan Taubes, at her best, knows that there’s something more than poison and lies.

 

Some writers, some bodies of work, are like rubber rings. Some writers, some oeuvres, appear to you only after the shipwreck. Amongst the flotsam and jetsam – amidst all the rest of the cultural junk. You grab at something and you’re not sure why. You cling onto to something, and don’t understand what it is. What you need.

They’ve seen worse, I thought, as I reached out for Mitteluropean thinkers. They knew more poison, more lies than we have, I thought, as I read my Mitteluropean thinkers in desperation. They lived amidst the greatest horror I thought, as I read the pages of Susan Taubes, for the first time. And they were looking for life amidst the horror, I thought, as I read Susan Taubes’s desperate essays about Simone Weil and Martin Heidegger.

 

And I’m writing all these things. But I’m not sure what they’re for. I’m no sure what they’ll add up. A monograph. A scholarly monograph on Susan Taubes? An academic article? An academic essay? Or maybe an essay on Susan Taubes for some online journal. Some popular philosophy thing. I don’t know. Or maybe I should start a blog. A Substack, maybe. And just put the stuff I’ve written right up, without editing it very much. Maybe it’s not about wanting to write something academic. With all these footnotes.

I want to write like Susan Taubes did. I want to write Susan Taubes like Susan Taubes wrote. She published in journals. But those were different times. You could write in a more literary way, or something. Or in a more passionate way. I don’t know …

 

I love everyone now. Now I think the maniacs want to kill is all. I love humanity now. I’m not an misanthropist anymore.

I want something Good to happen, capital G. And maybe it will.

Maybe I’ll look back at this time and be glad of it. Be glad of what it prepared me for. Be glad that it made me look out for good things. To care about people.

 

You can see how she suffered. And that she wrote from her suffering. And eventually killed herself because of her suffering.

 

Is it ghoulish that I love her because she was beautiful and she was a suicide? She meant it … I respect that. She was sincere. Maybe that’s what I should do.

Yeah, but suicide’s too easy now. Euthanasia’s part of the whole depopulation thing. They’re offering it to angsty teenagers in Canada. To, like, anorexics in Australia. To the homeless. You’re supposed to euthanise yourself now.

So living on’s the new suicide. Great. You can’t be a martyr to thought anymore.

Is that what Susan Taubes is?

Maybe.

What about her children?

What about them? Why should she have thought of them? Because she’s the woman?

She as their mother.

 

They’ll offer euthanasia to all Philosophy students as a matter of course. To all humanities students, probably. It might get them off their debts. Euthanasia will be promoted as the only way to claim bankruptcy.

Sure – study, learn stuff about how shit the world is, then die. Might be worth it. Might give a certain urgency to your study.

 

So you won’t allow me my death fantasies. I actually like my death fantasies. It’s very consoling to know you have an out.

A cliched out. An it’s-all-been-done-before out.

How would you do it, anyway? Drowning? You could jump in the Tyne.

They’d just think I was a Susan Taubes copy-cat. Or a Susan Taubes tribute act.

Why are we always talking about suicide?

Because something’s really, really wrong with us. Actually, it sharpens things. Brings things into relief. It makes things mean things.

 

Oh Susan Taubes send us a sign.

She was so glamorous. Are you going to go glamorous?

She had all these affairs. I’m not very affair-y. That’s not my type. In another life, maybe …

 

Susan Taubes is, like, my spirit animal. What would Susan Taubes do?: that’s what I ask myself. Marry a madman Have a string of affairs. Write brilliant philosophy, and then write unreadable fiction instead.

 

The sea, the sea. Is it calling you to drown yourself?

No, actually. I’m not feeling very drown-y today. I’m no sure it’s that great a way to go, anyway. Look, there’s almost some sun. I think we should get some pickled mussels. And cockles. Not whelks – they’re too chewy. A crab sandwich, maybe.  And sit in the sun and eat our feast.

 

How would you go, anyway?

Let’s not talk about suicide for, like, five minutes.

You started it.

I probably did. But I’m actually feeling … cheerful. Is that allowed?

Oh how tedious.

Anyway, how’s your spiritual life? Have you found God yet? It’s apparently all the rage.