From Alex Garland’s “Annihilation” (2018)
“[Method is]…the soul of structure.”
-G.W.F. Hegel
“It is not the victory of science that distinguishes our nineteenth century, but the victory of scientific method over science.”
-Friedrich Nietzsche
“So they have abandoned the one pursuit, yet draw no profit from the other; for, by seeking what is prompted by their own spirit, they lose the spirit of tranquility and peace which they had before. And thus they are like to one who abandons what he has done in order to do it over again, or to one who leaves a city only to re-enter it, or to one who is hunting and lets his prey go in order to hunt it once more…These souls turn back at such a time if there is none who understands them; they abandon the road or lose courage; or, at the least, they are hindered from going farther by the great trouble which they take in advancing along the road of meditation and reasoning. Thus they fatigue and overwork their nature, imagining that they are failing through negligence or sin. But this trouble that they are taking is quite useless, for God is now leading them by another road, which is that of contemplation, and is very different from the first; for the one is of meditation and reasoning, and the other belongs neither to imagination nor yet to reasoning.”
-St. John of the Cross
“HAPPINESS, FREE, FOR EVERYONE, AND LET NO ONE BE FORGOTTEN!”
-Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Roadside Picnic
I
Roads serve as great allegories for life; when we think of time as linear, as a line with perpendicular markings for key dates and events, the idea that we are moving along a path serves an important metaphorical function. The method, way, approach, or means we arrive at end-goals takes up so much of our time in the quotidian. The “Dao,” or “Tao” is a famous example of a means to “move,” but so much of 20th-century epistemology in science and philosophy likewise fight over the heavy question of “method.” People often say they agree about “ends,” but not “means.” The problem, however, is that our travels are often built on the assumption that a pot of gold, the solution to all our problems, or some other kind of panacea awaits us at the end of the (sorry) Yellow Brick Road.[1]
There has been so much happening in the world lately, or, rather, the last five or so years, that the use of some political, economic, and sociological categories feel like dousing a forest fire conflagration with a handful of sand. The more the world became irrational, the more I hunkered down on the fine-edged tools of theory, science, philosophy, and the apex of abstract mathematics or Hegelian dialectics; the more disconnected people became, the more I tried to grab onto linkages, systems, relationships; but these, too feel like the opening lines of Ecclesiastes, where it reads: “What do people gain from all their labors at which they toil under the sun?” The art of shitposting, likewise, turns to sand after a while, when you realize that the course you believed society could take never existed, at least under the hegemony of the most unjust web of governments, corporations, and special interest groups our species has ever seen. It is hard to work for the cause of life and solidarity on a planet where the basic means to those goals are denied, even by those who believe they are defending them. Unfortunately, my only conclusion from the last few years is that we are all profoundly lost, our political aspirations have been strangled, and we, too, have chosen to believe in fantasies; the problem, here, is that we chose to make reality fit our fantasies, so the genocide we are witnessing became simply one more “issue” for voters, the pandemic that never ended, that is affecting our vascular, cognitive, immune system’s health vanished because we were told it did…and we wanted it to. But please, if you so choose, tell yourself that mycoplasma, pneumonia, or tuberculosis are just “normal” so that you can life comfortably (albeit with a never-ending cough and “brain fog”). I am not here to condemn you, you have already done that to yourselves with much more violence and vitriol than I ever could. Our self-hatred runs deeper than any outside influence ever could imagine, we disregard children’s health, their bodies, and the future as yet another item to take for granted. Someone will figure it out, right?
II
Let’s turn to the topic of this short essay, ways within, ways without, to briefly think about the metaphorical whither and whence as solutions. The roads we take usually serve as a repository for our problems. Sometimes we find that we have to take “that trip,” or that, if only we changed careers we’d find happiness, or that one candidate or another or political project will finally X or Y. I, too, want another world, but for now we have a bottleneck of destruction, disability, fanaticism (centered around “normalcy,” especially in Liberalism), ignorance, and an obscene violence hurled at those who say that maybe our path may be dangerous or inadvisable; the worst, though, is to tell people that the road they are on has already broken, that their destination no longer exists. I just read two fantastic works, both seemingly far apart but parallel in their concern; on the one hand, we have the Strugatskys’ Roadside Picnic, which inspired Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker; on the other hand, we have St. John of the Cross’ The Dark Night of the Soul, a classic of Spanish mysticism.
The first novel has inspired so many things I enjoy, from Disco Elysium, Robert Kurvitz’s The Sacred and Terrible Air, Tarkovsky’s film, to (even if the author denies it) the film and novel Annihilation. I was more indebted to the Strugatsky’s novel than I realized; it inspired one of my doctoral exams, where I wrote about the dialectic of materialism and spiritualism (notice any fossils of that here?) in Soviet thought. It also inspired my understanding that, from the cultural Thaw in the U.S.S.R., an immanent critique had developed against bland, so-called “vulgar” materialism, where people sought to bring a dialectical, mobile, creative, rich understanding of matter back to the core philosophy of socialism. I will only name Andrei Tarkovsky, Evald Ilyenkov, and the Strugatsky Brothers as examples (for now). The point here was that, after decades of purportedly achieving the goals of socialism, with many people now having education, housing, healthcare, a missing ingredient remained. I could recommend one read Ilyenkov’s critique of “bad” dialectics or encourage you to watch Stalker, but instead I’ll cite one of my favorite passages from Roadside Picnic:
And then it happened. He had never felt this outside of the Zone, and even in the Zone it had only happened two or three times. Suddenly, he seemed to be in another world. A million smells assaulted him at once—smells that were sharp, sweet, metallic; dangerous, caressing, disturbing; as immense as houses, as tiny as dust particles, as rough as cobblestones, and as delicate and intricate as watch gears. The air turned hard, it appeared to have surfaces, corners, edges, as if space had been filled with huge coarse spheres, polished pyramids, and gigantic prickly crystals, and he was forced to make his way through all this, as if in a dream, pushing through a dark antique shop full of ancient misshapen furniture . . . This only lasted a moment. He opened his eyes, and everything disappeared. This wasn’t another world—it was his same old world turning an unfamiliar side toward him, revealing it for an instant, then immediately sealing it off, before he even had the chance to investigate.
The “Zone” is a local site, close to where the character’s live (in Canada, somewhere) after an alien species seem to drop off a bunch of shit on earth.[2] Originally excited (and terrified) at the prospect of a follow-up alien visit, the denizens of the various zones come to normalize, ignore, and grow bored of the unusual alien artifacts, the Zone’s terrible, bizarre physical features, and the possibilities “for humanity.” The main character, “Red,” is an average guy who, after the Visit, becomes one of the foremost Stalkers in his town. They scavenge rare, bizarre items, they develop a language around them (“Bug Traps,” “Empties,” etc.), and sell them to the highest bidder. For Red it’s clear, though, that what he seeks in the Zone goes beyond immediate gain. He wants to find something else, a “miracle” as he says in the last chapter (Tarkovsky’s based his movie solely off of this section):
Some strange and very new sensation was slowly filling him. He realized that this sensation wasn’t actually new, that it had long been hiding somewhere inside him, but he only now became aware of it, and everything fell into place. And an idea, which had previously seemed like nonsense, like the insane ravings of a senile old man, turned out to be his sole hope and his sole meaning of life. It was only now that he’d understood —the one thing that he still had left, the one thing that had kept him afloat in recent months, was the hope for a miracle. He, the idiot, the dummy, had been spurning this hope, trampling on it, mocking it, drinking it away —because that’s what he was used to and because his whole life, ever since his childhood, he had never relied on anyone but himself. And ever since his childhood, this self-reliance had always been measured by the amount of money he managed to wrench, wrestle, and wring out of the surrounding indifferent chaos. That’s how it had always been, and that’s how it would have continued, if he hadn’t found himself in a hole from which no amount of money could rescue him, in which self-reliance was utterly pointless. And now this hope—no longer the hope but the certainty of a miracle—was filling him to the brim, and he was already amazed that he’d managed to live in such a bleak, cheerless gloom . . .
Among the shit left behind, the alien dung, the bizarre, possibly useless contraptions, Red finds a world of adrenaline, danger, action, and thrills. Then again, unfortunately for Redrick, the thrills were not enough. He was searching, among the sublime, horrifying alien ruins and all their dangers, for some sort of aufhebung (there it is!), redemption, or fork in the road. This section hit me pretty hard, and got to the core of what I was describing. In the U.S.S.R., many had reached a relative level of basic economic, material satisfaction, and yet something was missing. Yes, the bureaucracy and the censorship were a thing, but these lines say more when he thinks “I was born as riffraff, and I’ve grown old as riffraff. That’s what shouldn’t be allowed! You hear me? Let that be forbidden in the future, once and for all! Man is born in order to think (there he is, Kirill, finally!). Except that I don’t believe that. I’ve never believed it, and I still don’t believe it, and what man is born for—I have no idea. He’s born, that’s all.” Red is trying to find something to hold onto, some sort of meaning, and yet it eludes his grasp. He grows harsher when he writes “my Lord, it’s a mess, a mess!… But how do I stop being a stalker when I have a family to feed? Get a job? And I don’t want to work for you, your work makes me want to puke, you understand? If a man has a job, then he’s always working for someone else, he’s a slave, nothing more—and I’ve always wanted to be my own boss, my own man, so that I don’t have to give a damn about anyone else, about their gloom and their boredom . . .”
III
I turned to read Meister Eckhart, the German Medieval mystic, probably for three different reasons:
1) I had read that he was influential for both Hegel and Martin Heidegger.
2) That thread originally interested me as a connection to Karl Marx’s dialectics.
3) I read that Eckhart is considered a sort of “bridge” between the Buddhist concept of Sunyatta and Christian mysticism (whose roots are common between Marxist and religious schools of thought).
I use him as a preface to speak of St. John of the Cross because their thought is quite similar, though centuries lie between them. Here’s the gist:
If you empty the Self, if you remove all attachments, if you “annihilate” yourself, you will be filled with everything, much richer, and the void is filled with “God.”
I added italics for extra melodrama. In any case, the idea goes back to Plato, whose Parmenides I recently read. His idea (or my favorite from that text) goes thusly:
Nothing is more than Nothing.
Essentially, my main takeaway from that text, which was FOUNDATIONAL for Jewish Kabbalah, Christian mysticism, and various Sufi Islamic traditions, is that “Nothingness” itself is more than “the sum of its parts,” to paraphrase the German Gestalt school of psychology.
St. John of the Cross’ work is the second part of a longer work, which describes the ascent of a person from sensual, material interests to spiritual ones and eventually “Communion” with God. His work is notably different from Eckhart’s, though, since it is steeped in Counter-Reformation language. The spigot of Grace, Love, etc. are arbitrarily closed or opened according to St. John (as a representative of the Church), there is one path “to God,” and he describes it in great detail. The most beautiful part of the text, in my view, is the way he describes how, through a “purge” of the Self, one can be filled with everything, like Eckhart. Unfortunately, unlike Eckhart, the Beguine women mystics, and other traditions, it is steeped in conservatism and authority. Nevertheless, his description of deep, profound pain and suffering is powerful, as are his acumen in citing Psalm texts, such as: “Save me, Lord, for the waters have come in even unto my soul; I am made fast in the mire of the deep and there is no place where I can stand; I am come into the depth of the sea and a tempest hath overwhelmed me; I have laboured crying, my throat has become hoarse, mine eyes have failed whilst I hope in my God.”
Whereas one work takes a journey outward, another works inward. As within, so without, as above, so below (or so they say). I think we, too, are in a sort of “mire of the deep” and are looking for another path. It can be inward, outside, both, or “a secret third thing,” as they say, but that we are heading in the wrong direction and no longer care about our fundamental health, well-being, and cannot relate to others is beyond question.
Ivan Kramskoi, “Sleepwalker” (1871)
[1] If by the end of the second paragraph I haven’t redeemed myself for this awful metaphor, I personally invite you to stop reading.
[2] It’s called a “Roadside Picnic” because a scientist in the novel imagines the aliens left shit behind like humans might after a picnic…and afterwards the animals may find the items interesting and likewise scavenge them.