Hell In Search of a Christian Ecology
Metadata
- Author: Timothy Morton;
Highlights
we understand that by religion I am not referring to specific denominations: I refer to phenomenologies, ways of handling thoughts, behaviors, tools, other people, myself. The how is the what: how some people are religious is what Hell calls religiose. — location: 675
The feel is what Jesus says, if we take him literally, but not as fundamentalists: the kingdom of God is in one’s heart (Luke 17:21). The kingdom of God is default to one’s biological being, one’s heart, the place that palpitates and trembles. Jesus and Buddha tried to reset religion to biology: Jesus was about grapes and bread and fermentation; Buddha was about rice pudding. — location: 762
Religion isn’t really about obeying patriarchy and racism and speciesism or even just doing as one is told: religion is about the mysterious and tremendous fact of being alive at all.14 — location: 769
The default art is dance, and the default dance is called being alive. And the default life is sleep. It’s why Anonymous, author of The Cloud of Unknowing, describes contemplation as “spiritual sleep.”15 — location: 771
The proof of the pudding is in the eating, and life on Earth is on the menu, life as trembling thumos. How might I live life in its ground state, not mechanically weaponized as a concept (Greek, bios, “alive” versus “not alive”) or as a juridical term (Greek, zoē, as in “This creature has no right to live”)? — location: 778
“Life” as concept (Greek, bios) can cause harm: it’s called biological racism. I wish for arrows of desire in our quiver(ing) to entice me to value life in its vulnerability, its dreamy shuddering, a life- size rendering of the contingency and determinacy and vibration of a universe best described by quantum theory. The ideology of quantum theory is all about epistemological uncertainty, only this uncertainty has been spiritually weaponized. Uncertainty manifests as the delight of a psychopath, not as skepticism but as the feeling that one can become anything and do anything to anything. But quantum theory is saying something about the physical world: the world is determinate. There is blue energy and violet energy and ultraviolet energy and yellow energy. There is a rainbow of energy; there is no transparent energy. Everything has a “wirey bounding line,” as Blake put it, or a specific frequency as quantum theory puts it.16 The line bounds, and it bounds. It surrounds, and it leaps. The wiry bounding line of energy establishes an inside and an outside, while its sinuous movement, like the serpent in the Garden of Eden, suggests reality is never going to make a perfect container: observe the basic state of it, its dancing, funky state. Likewise, chemical signals in nerves and neurons are bounded and bounding: they — location: 780
I wish for arrows of desire in our quiver(ing) to entice me to value life in its vulnerability, its dreamy shuddering, a life- size rendering of the contingency and determinacy and vibration of a universe best described by quantum theory. — location: 781
Transcendence is the feel of immanence. That “feel of not to feel it” (Keats) is how I feel it, how I embody being immersed. — location: 795
A poem glows with a kind of fluorescent light. — location: 888
If you really want to know what rhythm is, explore its Greek etymology: rhein (to flow, as in diarrhea) and thumos, palpitation, the heart’s deep core. Rhythm is the pulsation of the body fluids. — location: 898
Still indicates not total stasis but a gentle vibration. Unlike thunder and fire and wind, electrical and chemical processes involving tremendous loudness, God appears as a wavering, holographic, standing- wave- like, dreamlike shimmer, a disturbingly gentle quietness that is not absolute silence. — location: 937
“Having a dream” is in the middle voice, neither active nor passive. I am not the victim of the dream, nor am I its puppet master. It’s just how my brain flows when I’m not being me. — location: 965
Significantly, to evangelize in Greek is a middle- voice verb (euangelidzesthai), neither active nor passive: who evangelizes is neither master nor slave, and “I have a dream” is most assuredly evangelism. — location: 966
What is scary about fantasies of AI is their antisubjunctive quality. AI fantasy wants to destroy the “might be” inherent in performative or intersubjective theories of intelligence, to replace them with a terrifying actuality. — location: 996
Humans have turned life into chemistry, and those chemicals are busy destroying the rest of life. Where is the still small voice of “might (as well)” when you need it, below the churning of the furnaces and refineries? — location: 1036
Guerrilla warfare against the metaphysics of presence goes by various names: one is deconstruction; object- oriented ontology is another. — location: 1047
I fight for them, not very well: gorillas and coral and whales and stomach bacteria and humans and bunny rabbits and glaciers and the smell of dust after rain. For everything, or as Blake said… every thing that lives is holy. — location: 1050
When it comes to structural things you’re not guilty: you are responsible. The fun thing about responsibility, rather than guilt, is that you can scale it. — location: 1089
And how we treat each other is how we treat the biosphere. Speciesism is keyed to racism and patriarchy. — location: 1105
What we need to sense is how the divine suffuses the physical, as the weird presence of the footprints of its absence. — location: 1121
Capitalism, which has the telos of getting bigger and faster, intersects with the biosphere, which has no telos at all. The biosphere is a world in the sense of what I am “into,” without end in the sense of without a telos. — location: 1126
Being in the world means being into things. The worm is into the soil. The lily of the valley is into the morning sun. — location: 1128
Jesus was not hostile to the physical realm. He gave his disciples bread and wine, which last time I checked were made from things one can find in a biosphere such as water and grapes and wheat and bacteria. He said these things from the biosphere were his body and blood. How much more ecology do you want in a savior of humankind? — location: 1141
Silence. I love that. Silence is an - ence, a feel, not nothing at all. — location: 1165
This is not a book “about” Blake, but a book “with” Blake. — location: 1181
How we treat each other as human beings is how we treat nonhuman beings. — location: 1208
any subject- object duality implies a master- slave duality. — location: 1209
Blake was all about forming alliances: his image of the future world is of greater human creativity and love. Blake calls it Jerusalem, a sacred city, and declares it a “fourfold” world, unlike the threefold world of sexual love, the twofold world of breeding, or the onefold world of being a tyrant. There are more complex possibilities for more complex relationships in a world where there are four things rather than three. Imagine how many ways one can connect four dots together as opposed to three. — location: 1223
“What is now proved was once, only imagin’d,” as Blake said (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, plate 8), and my job as a humanities scholar is to “only imagine” things. If we can’t “imagine” Earth very well, ecological politics won’t be “proved.” One can imagine acting on many scales and one can imagine actions at planet scale not stepping all over actions at smaller scales. — location: 1236
Far from simply modeling how to act at Earth magnitude in a good way, Black Lives Matter and MeToo are key to producing an ecologically just world: as Carla Lonzi puts it, talking of feminism, “the women’s movement is not only international, but planetary.”10 — location: 1244
Spiritual issues are often distorted and alienated biological issues. Spiritual issues have to do with our physical being as lifeforms who live in a biosphere. Kindness, mercy, compassion— these are qualities that evolved, not things that make us different from other lifeforms.13 Evolution is by no means a realm of merciless competition: that’s called capitalism, and it gets projected onto the biosphere to justify capitalism’s “natural” continuance. Evolution is a realm of symbiosis, biodiversity, cooperation… and a wonderfully creative realm too, a realm where random genetic mutation, free- floating beauty, and accidental symbiosis drive evolution. — location: 1261
We don’t live in a mechanical world with a purpose but in a gorgeously pointless world, as pointless as all the reasons one can think of to be happy. As my Buddhist meditation teacher likes to say, Be happy for no reason. 14 Love is an unreasonable thing; so is beauty. When Blake talked about the oppressive powers of “nature” he was talking about the oppressive powers of human ideology, including religion, which includes scientism, a religion of science that reduces things to their parts and so cannot explain what it likes to call altruism. — location: 1266
But genetic mutation is random; sexual display has no goal other than sheer beauty; symbiosis is a matter of pure contingency. These are the truly sacred aspects of our Earth. — location: 1272
When one is on someone else’s time, it’s called oppression. — location: 1278
The title is in dialogue with ideas about tigers: it’s a fake antique word, a word that looks a bit cute and overwrought: this creature is a construct made of ink and paper, a paper tiger indeed. The artist is a God who creates a world— or God is an artist who fakes it— or both, or… Then the poem becomes relentlessly intense, frightening, dark, awestruck. — location: 1301
We arrive in a different state at point 4, because there was no point 3. We can be aware of what we don’t perceive, which is the most obvious way of stating point 1. — location: 1324
There is no natural religion because “nature” is what has already been established by science and logic and is therefore the past, and religion pertains to the future, to the biosphere and my body as phenomenologically (in) the future. There is no natural religion, not because trees and hills are “pagan” but because they are people. — location: 1329
The idea of freedom is formulated in bondage. Irony is not the fluttering of an angel who has achieved escape velocity from Earth’s gravitational field, but the grin of a demon falling into it: “the fact that we have bodies is the oldest joke there is” — location: 1393
I want a biodiversity of emotional responses to our plight; that we see our plight not as some tragic destiny of the human race but as the necessarily awful part of a comedy when actual violence might break out. Wouldn’t it be great if global warming gave us the chance to see that humans are interrelated and that humans are interrelated with nonhumans? — location: 1423
Fortunately, there are beings who know they are broken and fallen, that they are the evil they see in the world: the angelic demons. I can honestly say that every messed- up thing in my life came from a demonic angel: from trying to look “good”; from trying to look “normal.” — location: 1473
This snapshot is confused with Daddy, the loudest voice in the room: Nobodaddy is born, God as phobic object, theophobia as worship. — location: 1575
If I stay like a mystic with the basic biological fact of being alive, a lingering that Buddha and Jesus endorsed, I discover something wonderful: if the sacred is the phenomenology of biology, then being embodied is the sacred path. Urizen creates a world of body parts floating in a void: the scientistic idea based on anatomy, on a certain measuring- slicing, that humans are bits of flesh, that matter is cogwheels floating in a vacuum. — location: 1578
The gaze of the evil eye is an object- like quality, the place where an “object” appears to look at me: the glint of a sardine can on the shore, the “ting” of a star flashing on a tooth in a toothpaste ad.4 The gaze is the stare of a zombie, not the loving looks of my cat Oliver. — location: 1595
89 known, reaching after things that are remembered yet forgotten. Language is stymied: “biological” or “psychosomatic” or “mental” or “psychological” or indeed any substitute concept at all won’t work, if only because of their being artifacts of what they are trying to describe. We are dealing with primary processes that we were born into. We didn’t choose them. They are an accident. How do you treat someone who has had an accident? Yer reason imagines- generates Ulro, an echo chamber in which only one being resides: Urizen. The existence of a rainbow of humans (in every sense) proves that human existence is not this echo chamber of fading copies. Existence is coexistence among unique mutants joined to the unique, mutant biosphere, with all the uneasiness that is the foundation of empathy and compassion. Uneasiness need not be reified as a threat that must be destroyed in advance of any communications: “We don’t negotiate with terrorists.” The — location: 1664
HOME 89 — location: 1664
Existence is coexistence among unique mutants joined to the unique, mutant biosphere, with all the uneasiness that is the foundation of empathy and compassion. — location: 1669
The actual “body” (including the brain) is the future. Brain states depict the past. But past and future overlap on a continuum. By body I mean all of me, and what is another name for that all- of- me quality? Why, soul: the tantalizingly intangible portion of the body (Marriage, plate 4). My soul is my body, not a ghost in a bottle. What this means phenomenologically is exactly and precisely the opposite of what it means chronologically. The brain activity represents the past; the brain as a physical being is the future. — location: 1672
Everything moves, all by itself, including thought, including this sentence… everything is infused with Spirit. — location: 1722
But I act like the Big Other is God whenever I take a selfie or fire off a tweet. Social media is a distributed videogame that transforms people into Nobodaddies. — location: 1753
proximity, as closer than breathing, the kingdom of heaven at hand… these have nothing to do with the crushing of tape measure distance with which humankind celebrated the Internet in the 1990s. The truth of God as intimacy has never been more urgent— the strange, soap- in- the- bath intimacy of what is truly at hand. — location: 1841
A parable moves away from a topic only to approach it more closely: a parable makes the topic breathe. — location: 1872
This is an image of love, the foot vibing with the sand. Whose fault is it, sand or foot? There’s no way to tell: the beauty of geometry takes place in a “middle” way without subject or object. It takes place in a “subjunctive” way that is virtual: — location: 1889
Geometry as “earth pacing” pertains to the feel of the foot as it presses the sand, the feel of the sand as it soaks up the pressure of that foot. This is an image of love, the foot vibing with the sand. Whose fault is it, sand or foot? There’s no way to tell: the beauty of geometry takes place in a “middle” way without subject or object. It takes place in a “subjunctive” way that is virtual: — location: 1888
Everyone might as well love this “object,” only now it is not an object at all, because of the love. And because of the subjunctivity it might as well be a sentient being, emanating that love toward me. — location: 1894
Beauty is indeed default to sentience, because beauty is the sentience of sentience, that opaque- transparent “feel.” Beauty is strange because it’s not keyed to the (human) ego and not, as a matter of fact, keyed to the human at all. To experience beauty is to feel in the key of plants and beetles as well as primates and humans. — location: 1902
The point was to work with the problem: the people of Delos became absorbed, and thus they relaxed, and the plague eventually stopped plaguing them. — location: 1911
Blake’s Proverbs of Hell are parabolic biblical proverbs, turning weaponized parabolas back into the weird pull- focus quivering of life, deviating yet remaining the same: beating the sword of ballistics back into the ploughshare of wisdom. — location: 1928
The Proverbs of Hell devastate anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism with a cannonball of social- biological facticity. This is what it takes to elude Satan’s Watch Fiends: advanced psychic combat training… literary criticism, as I sometimes call it. — location: 1953
To forgive is to “make space for.. .” When I forgave my dad for everything he had done to me, it felt like that: there was all this space inside me to hate and admire and pity and fear and ignore and love my father without those emotions fighting one another. Forgiveness is that gap between the worm and itself, violently underscored by the plough’s slicing. Ignorantly, innocent beings are being annihilated, but does this mean the principle of forgiveness is now defunct? — location: 1987
The fact that worms appeared to live after I sliced them as a little child is how life forgives the mechanical churning of the nonliving universe. Mastery and enslavement reduce the trembling mercy of life as such to mechanisms, to endless wheels within wheels of revenge, action and reaction, Newton’s laws. — location: 1992
To put it in the terms favored here, to be is to have an underworld. Even if you’re a banana. — location: 2025
The “feel” of “true” that beauty evokes, the feel without the content, owes it all to this forgetting of forgetting, this uncanny remembering of nothing: déjà vu is the feel of true without the content of true. — location: 2110
Truth is “unforgetting” in Greek (alētheia). There is something mysterious about this un, this negative, this forgetting to forget. As if forgetting became not- itself: forgetting looped into itself like the self- swallowing serpent, the ouroboros who gives its form to the Indian number zero (Brahmagupta’s void- like 0) and the Norse universe (Jörmungandr). — location: 2125
Beauty is the Waters of Lethe. Beauty is a drink: a psychoactive drug in the form of a transparent liquid, a wall dissolved in water; a solvent. — location: 2161
Mercy might not be able to take revenge on revenge, this time… and this “might not” is itself mercy, the time of mercy, the feel of time redeemed not as decay but as healing, revenge suspended as when a desperate person yells “Mercy!” as someone raises their fist to strike them. — location: 2201
The lion’s fetishistic snuffling of the humans as primordial aesthetic objects that he can “lick” but not devour turns attack mode into mercy. Lions appreciate good art as much as anyone. Lions are Christ’s earthly form divine. — location: 2245
Trees might be rigidly moralistic. Trees keep a record of everything that happens to them in their rings, while human beings can forget. Perhaps this is what makes humans “special,” if that is the right word: not a strong difference between humans and other lifeforms, and certainly not a superiority, but rather something lame and broken, the fact that human memories can lapse more easily. This is because forgetting is the primordial phenomenology of memory: we remember because we forget. — location: 2278
Forgetting is basic to memory, which is basic to sentience, which is basic to life. So forgetful beings are truer to life. “Elephants never forget”? Run. If the body only keeps the score so as to settle it, there can be no end of torture. But branches break; leaves fall; elephants do forget. — location: 2285
never see the wind, only its effects: the breath of the Spirit in the world is the rippling movement of things and of concepts.24 — location: 2304
The word joy thus compresses the human form divine with its mercy, pity, peace, and love into one syllable whose saying enacts its meaning. If “Love is God” for Feuerbach, for our flipped Feuerbach, this is because joy is divine. — location: 2320
Frogs are the first land vertebrates to sing, to speak, and they are using their breath and their throats to burst out percussive sounds that are pure joy. The frogs are at it all night, unlike those reptiles with wings we call birds who only do it at twilight. Reptiles are tadpoles who didn’t make it, the sad silence of suffering; frogs are elves singing for joy in the tree of the world. — location: 2323
Suicide is radically incomplete because it’s a message translated into a physical “language” that isn’t one: teaching oneself a lesson that one can never learn. It is deeply, deeply, intuitive that suicides are trees in Dante’s Inferno: to kill oneself never teaches anyone a lesson, it just adds a ring to the cycle of revenge (Inferno, canto 13).33 — location: 2502
The biosphere just living and dying, for no good reason, without telos, without hierarchy. The biosphere is physically constrained to the amount of biomass possible given the size and composition of Earth. Capitalism is at odds with this in two huge ways. Capitalism gets more and more efficient so it has a long- term telos; and this efficiency has to do with capitalism’s purpose of extracting life. One thing (capitalism) has a directionality, an arrow, a vector. The other thing (life) doesn’t. — location: 2526
That’s how the heart sounds at a distance; close up, the heart swishes and whooshes; it palpitates. A heartbeat is a rare form of palpitation: the fact that there are palpitations at all is because palpitating is the default state. Palpitating in Greek is thumos, which we hear in the last syllable of rhythm. (The rhy comes from rhein, “to flow,” as in body fluids.) This is the “life” that Blake means when he writes “every thing that lives is holy.” Everything that palpitates is holy. Everything means… everything. — location: 2545
Poetry palpitates also.
It’s always oscillating, so beauty must perforce have a palpitating fringe of disgust whose phenomenological format is ennui. The disgusting lives symbiotically within beauty, but beauty is not reducible to it; nor is the disgusting the rigid binary opposite of beauty. Disgust and beauty are different, but they overlap. — location: 2605
As an infinity, eternity strictly means “there’s no way to count.” There’s no way to count and there’s no accounting for taste, because in the words of the Proverbs of Hell, “Eternity is in love with the productions of time.” Blake means, “Eternity means being in love with the productions of time.” — location: 2634
It is just what I might say about my measuring things, accurately or sloppily, with numbers or with wriggles, with “reeling” and “writhing” as much as “reading” and “writing.”13 — location: 2674
am simply obliged to accept that we do not live in a mechanism because the basis of a mechanism is that all its parts are touching: “a mill with complicated wheels” (Blake) isn’t an assemblage of nonlocally entangled things spread throughout the Galaxy. But, in a way (perhaps literally), a work of art just is spooky action at a distance. When — location: 2748
I am simply obliged to accept that we do not live in a mechanism because the basis of a mechanism is that all its parts are touching: “a mill with complicated wheels” (Blake) isn’t an assemblage of nonlocally entangled things spread throughout the Galaxy. But, in a way (perhaps literally), a work of art just is spooky action at a distance. — location: 2748
The aesthetic dimension is the causal dimension, not a decal on a machine. Lifeforms constantly affect one another without touching: that’s what affect is, to wit, nonlocal (aesthetic) causality. — location: 2751
Blake touches something deep precisely in the seeming superficiality of this poem. Everything laughs: everything convulses, shudders, palpitates… malfunctions. Laughter is the flow of time without the deadly ticking of Satan’s watch fiends, the shuddering of life that is an index of that life. Laughing: Blake might have said “causing.” Causality is the Universe laughing. — location: 2758
Laughter is what is default to things, things in their “innocence,” that is to say, their nonmechanical mode, just being. — location: 2763
Free association is pleasant because it frees something up. It demonstrates that having ideas is slippery, is slipping. — location: 2764
I can heal because I can free associate, because thinking can malfunction, because thinking is an abortion. — location: 2767
The slave is not wholly defined by their role as a slave. The hourglass seems to indicate the time but really, sand is just falling because of gravity, so it seems as if time is “moving forwards.” This is just a concept imposed on sand and gravity and other parts of the hourglass. — location: 2956
in a sense a word is an inscription on a grave, an elegy for the absent thing insofar as the word flower is not a flower. — location: 2984
It’s not that work is evil: for Milton Adam and Eve tend paradise. It’s that slavery is evil, work with a telos. Work without a telos is called art, sex, dancing. — location: 2987
A trope is a flower because a flower is already a trope. The sin in “The Garden of Love” is the sin of telos, ascribing a point to pleasure: it is evil. — location: 2999
A clod of clay is an experienced pebble, one that just got a lot older as it was “trodden,” eroded: “innocence” might come after experience. — location: 3230
Satan’s problem is that he is a program who claims in some very powerful and constant way that he is not a program. Satan believes that there is a sharp difference between “machine” and “person,” subject and object… master and slave. Satan cannot bear thinking that he might be a slave. So Satan creates a gigantic program in the form of a terrifying army of true believers to prove that he is not a slave by mastering God. — location: 3399
All “my self am Hell” could mean is, one has mastered oneself and has become one’s own slave. — location: 3431
Song is a dance for one’s face and throat and lungs. — location: 3507
To be a lifeform is to create and inhabit worlds that cannot and do not and will not have an end, a purpose, an arrow, a weaponized directionality. The biosphere is quite literally a world without ends. — location: 3611
An arrow of desire is aimed at the target of itself. Desire desires desire: an arrow in a loop, in the lotus position; an arrow whose loopy, contemplative mode is an expression of its being part of a biosphere. — location: 3614