Heaven and How to Get There

Revival Movement Association

revivalmovement.org 

 

 

I. 

 

One of the ironic consequences of mass migration from sub-Saharan Africa is that there are suddenly lots of evangelical Christians on the street corners, preaching the gospel and reaching out as missionaries. 

 

In other words, having been colonised and converted by bible-bashing Europeans in the nineteenth-century, they are now attempting to undo secular modernity and effectively plunge us back into a world of religious mania.   

 

Thus it was I was given a little leaflet this morning, encouraging me to turn away from sin and put my faith and trust in Lord Jesus Christ, Saviour, as well as promising to reveal not only what Heaven is like, but, more importantly, how to get there.  

 

 

II. 

 

According to the leaflet, Heaven is a wonderful place whose beauty is incomparable:

 

The God of the Bible is a God of beauty, and this is why Heaven will be perfectly beautiful. It will be so beautiful that it cannot be compared to anywhere here on earth.   

 

Note how Heaven is capitalised, but earth is not: Nietzsche would argue that this provides a crucial insight into the Christian mindset; to the fact that Christianity prioritises that which comes after life whilst, at the same time, devaluing material (mortal) existence and is therefore profoundly nihilistic [1]. 

 

But let's leave aside the anti-Christian case against Heaven until later and continue with our reading of the leaflet ... 

 

Interestingly, no sooner are we told about the beauty of Heaven than we are informed that this is its least important aspect. What matters far more is the fact that Heaven is the place where all the purest, humblest, most unselfish people the world has ever known finally come together as one flock. 

 

And, to top it off, Jesus Christ Himself is there - as well as God in all His glory! Thus, in Heaven, we will finally have the opportunity to see God with our own eyes! 

 

I find the emphasis on this selling point a little perplexing; I'm no bible scholar, but didn't Jesus say somewhere or other that blessed are those who who have not looked upon the face of God and yet still believe in his majesty? Are we not encouraged to doubt our own eyes on the grounds that the senses can deceive us? [2]  

 

 

III. 

Moving on ... The little leaflet also tells us that Heaven is a place of happy reunions - i.e., a place where the dead and the living can catch up and renew relations, reminisce about old times, etc. 

 

There's no consideration of the fact that not everyone wants to meet with their former friends, partners, and family members - and certainly not if we are then never more to part. For as Larry David (mistakenly) reveals to his wife Cheryl in an episode of Curb, the great attraction of an afterlife is the thought of being free and single once more and able to make a fresh start: click here [3].  

 

 

IV. 

    

Clearly, as much as those who long for Heaven hate earthly life, the thing that really motivates their faith is fear of death, as this (inadvertently hilarious) passage makes abundantly clear:

 

Another great truth about Heaven is that there will be no death there. We will never have to endure the heartbreak of watching a loved one passing away. We will never again have to watch the undertaker as he screws down the coffin lid on the one we loved, there will be no black ties, no funerals passing through the streets, no standing by an open grave and watching a coffin lowered into it, no listening to the clods of earth as they fall remorselessly on the box that contains the remains of the one we love so much and whose death has left us so sad and broken. Thank God there is no death in Heaven!

 

Now, experiencing Angst - as Heidegger was at pains to explain - is a fundamental aspect of being human. Angst isn't merely a form of anxiety born of thanatophobia; rather, it is how Dasein grasps the idea of finitude and confronts the void at the core of existence [4].

 

In other words, angst allows us to understand that being-in-the-world rests upon non-being. An unsettling thought, perhaps, but ultimately a liberating one that dares us to live and become who we are (or find authenticity and accept responsibility for our own choices, as Heidegger would say).    

 

And those who would deny us this - and who would, in effect, rob us even of our own deaths - deserve our contempt.  

 

V. 

 

Finally, as to how to get to Heaven ... 

 

There is, apparently, only ONE way: and that is by accepting Jesus as your Lord and Saviour:  

 

Jesus is the only way, and no man can come to the Father except through HIM. If you reject Him you shut the door to heaven on yourself. 

 

Well, that's unfortunate, perhaps, because I do reject Jesus - and I don't even think, like Lawrence, that there are many saviours and that man can secure himself a spot in paradise via a number of paths leading to God [5]. 

 

And - just to be clear - I wouldn't want to go to a Heaven in which the purest, humblest, most unselfish people are all gathered; because these people are very often nothing of the kind and they seem to spend a good deal of their time revelling in the misfortune and torment of those burning in that other place, which, let us remind ourselves, has a sign above its gates declaring: Built in the name of eternal Love [6].  

 

Ultimately, I stand with the naked and damned and not the smug and saved in their new white garments; and I choose to be amongst the scarlet poppies of Hell rather than in a Heaven "where the flowers never fade, but stand in everlasting sameness" [7].   

  

 

Notes

 

[1] Nietzsche speaks of afterworldsmen who create a vision of paradise born of suffering, impotence, and an impoversished form of weariness: "It was the sick and dying who despised the body and the earth and invented the things of heaven [...] They wanted to escape from their misery and the stars were too far for them." See Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Penguin Books, 1969), p. 60. 

 

[2] See John 20:29. The KJV reads: "Jesus saith unto him, Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed." 

 

[3] Curb Your Enthusiasm season 4, episode 9: 'The Survivor' (2004), dir. Larry Charles, written by Larry David, starring Larry David and Cheryl Hines.    

 

[4] See Heidegger, Being and Time, Division I, Chapter 6, where Heidegger not only discusses Angst as a fundamental mood, but relates it to his important notion of Sorge (usually translated into English as care and which provides the basis for Heideggerian ethics).   

 

[5] See the fragment of text written by Lawrence given the title 'There is no real battle ...' in Appendix I of Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert (Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 385. 

      In this piece, Lawrence argues that "the great Church of the future will know other saviours" and that the reason he hates Christianity is because it declares there is only one way to God: "'I am the way' - Not even Jesus can declare this to all men. To very many men, Jesus is no longer the way. He is no longer the way for me." 

 

[6] This idea of the sign is found in Dante's Inferno Canto III. Lines 5 and 6 of which read: Fecemi la divina podestate / somma sapïenza e ’l primo amore (My maker was divine authority / the highest wisdom and the primal love). But note that Nietzsche says it displays a certain philosophical naivety on the part of the Italian poet and that if there is a sign it is placed rather above the entrance to Heaven, with an inscription reading: Built in the name of everlasting Hate. See my post - 'A Brief Note on Heaven and Hell' (18 October 2014): click here. 

 

[7] D. H. Lawrence, Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation, ed. Mara Kalnins (Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 144.   

 

The Hopi Indian Series: Indian Time

Indian Time (SA/2024)

 

 

I. 

 

Writing in the 1930s and '40s, linguist Benjamin Whorf argued that the Hopi conceptualise time very differently from white Americans and that this difference was basically linguistic in nature; i.e., that it correlated with certain grammatical differences between English and the Uto-Aztecan language spoken by the Hopi.

 

Whorf claims that the Hopi have "no words, grammatical forms, construction or expressions" that refer directly to what we call time, concluding that they therefore possess "no general notion or intuition of time as a smooth flowing continuum in which everything in the universe proceeds at equal rate, out of a future, through the present, into a past" [a].

 

I would have thought that's a fairly uncontroversial thing to say, but, apparently, it gave rise to a debate within academic circles known as the Hopi time controversy. 

 

Whilst for theorists this may revolve around the complex question of linguistic relativity, it is usually understood by the lay person to simply address the issue of whether or not a redskin can ever be enslaved to the clock in the same way as those with pale faces. 

 

I suspect it's because this becomes an ethno-racial question - and not merely a grammatical one - that controversy creeps in. At any rate, during the 1960s Whorf's work increasingly fell out of favour amongst linguists and anthropologists and when in 1983 Ekkehart Malotki published his massive 600-page study on the concept of time in the Hopi language, it seemed that Whorf's work was refuted once and for all [b].  

 

 

II.

 

Now, I'm not a linguistics expert and don't speak a word of Hopi. 

 

Nor am I particularly concerned to restore Whorf's reputation, although it might be noted that the concept of linguistic relativity was revived in the 1990s when Malotki's own study was subjected to criticism from those who did not consider his work to have invalidated Whorf's claims.

 

As a Lawrentian, however, Whorf's work continues to resonate sympathetically; for he's basically repeating what Lawrence observed during his stay in New Mexico in the 1920s, when he came into contact with Native Americans and expressed an interest in their religious beliefs and understanding of the universe. 

 

And so, without wishing to sound like a New Age hippie who subscribes to any myth so long as it seems to reveal the supposed limitations of Western thought, I'd like to take a closer look at what Lawrence wrote, thereby challenging the Kantian idea that time and space are universal categories underlying all human thought. 

 

For despite what Malotki says, it seems clear that not everyone is as clock-observant and time-obsessed as the Germans, for example.   

 

 

III. 

In Mornings in Mexico [c], Lawrence describes the white man as "some sort of extraordinary white monkey, that, by cunning, has learnt lots of semi-magical secrets of the universe, and made himself boss of the show" [36]. 

 

And one of these secrets is the secret of time:

 

"Now to a Mexican and an Indian, time is a vague, foggy reality. There are only three times [...] in the morning, in the afternoon, in the night. There is even no mid-day and no evening. 

      But to the white monkey, horrible to relate there are exact spots of time, such as five o'clock, half-past nine. The day is a horrible puzzle of exact spots of time." [36]

 

The white monkey, says Lawrence, has a perverse passion for exactitude; for time is money and every second counts. And he insists that everyone should be as enslaved to the clock as he is; always fretting about what happened yesterday or anxious about what might happen the day after tomorrow; living and dying to the same monotonous rhythm: tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock ... 

But, according to Lawrence, the Native American is essentially different from us: "The Indian is not in line with us. He's not coming our way. His whole being is going a different way from ours." [61]

 

Again, I don't know how true that is, but there are times, like today, when I admire Lawrence's attempt to learn something from the Indian and appreciate what he calls in Apocalypse [d] the "pagan manner of thought" [96] which allows the mind to "move in cycles, or to flit here and there" [97].

 

Challenging the Western concept of time, Lawrence writes:

"Our idea of time as a continuity in an eternal straight line has crippled our consciousness cruelly. The pagan conception of time as moving in cycles is much freer, it allows movements upwards and downwards, and allows for a complete change of the state of mind, at any moment. One cycle finished, we can drop or rise to another level, and be in a new world at once. But by our time-continuum method, we have to trail wearily on over another ridge." [97]

Anyway, I have to stop here: it's dinner time ... 

Notes

 

[a] Benjamin Lee Whorf, 'An American Indian model of the Universe', in Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf, ed. John B. Carroll (The Technology Press of MIT, 1956), pp. 57-64. Lines quoted are on p. 57. The essay was written c.1936.  

 

[b] Ekkehart Malotki is a German-American linguist, known for his extensive work on the Hopi language and culture and his refutation of the claim (some might say myth) that the Hopi have no concept of time. 

      Malotki published two large volumes, the first in German; Hopi-Raum: Eine sprachwissenschaftliche Analyse der Raumvorstellungen in der Hopi-Sprache (Gunter Narr Verlag, 1983), and the second in English; Hopi Time: A Linguistic Analysis of the Temporal Concepts in the Hopi Language (Mouton Publishers, 1986). 

      This latter work provided hundreds of examples of Hopi words and grammatical forms referring to temporal relations and Malotki demonstrated that the Hopi do, in fact, conceptualize time as structured in terms of an ego-centered spatial progression from past, through present into the future, despite what some - including, as we shall see, D. H. Lawrence - choose to believe and despite not having any word in their native tongue that exactly corresponds to the English noun 'time'.  

 

[c] D. H. Lawrence, Mornings and Mexico and Other Essays, ed. Virginia Crosswhite Hyde (Cambridge University Press, 2009). Page numbers given in the post refer to this edition.  

 

[d] D. H. Lawrence, Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation, ed. Mara Kalnins (Cambridge University Press, 1980). Page numbers given in the post refer to this edition. 

 

 

To read other posts in the Hopi Indian series, click here and/or here.

 

 

Horses, Horses, Horses, Horses!

Horses, horses, horses, horses! [1]

I.

 

Yesterday morning, I was in a central London café sipping a mint tea when, suddenly, from the other end of the street, a commotion was generating ... 

 

I looked at my companion, who wanted to run. But we stayed sitting as a pair of terrified horses - including a white horse drenched in blood - galloped past, causing chaos as they collided with vehicles and shocked observers [2].

 

And not only did I hear Patti Smith singing from out of the remote past, but I remembered also something D. H. Lawrence once wrote: "While horses thrashed the streets of London, London lived." [3]

 

 

II.

 

Today, still upset at seeing such noble beasts in obvious distress, I ironically went with a friend to the Horse Hospital, to take another look at the artwork of Gee Vaucher, which, to be fair, is better than I first thought (even if the overtly political nature of the work does get a bit tiring).

  

However, the thing that really caught my attention was a nude female mannequin, posing provocatively, wearing a horse's head mask and standing before a large red plastic bin at the top of the ramp that leads to the first floor ... 

 

As my friend, a longtime member of the kink community who was distinctly unimpressed by Vaucher's work amusingly remarked: I may not know much about art, but I know what I like.

 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Fig. 1: Patti Smith photographed by Robert Mapplethorpe on the cover of her album Horses (Arista Records, 1975): click here to listen to the three-part track 'Land' (part one: "Horses" / part two: "Land of a Thousand Dances" / part three: "La Mer(de)"). 

      Fig. 2: A mannequin with a horse's head was one I took at the Horse Hospital earlier today.

     Fig. 3: Quaker (the dark horse in the foreground) and Vida (the white horse bleeding profusely), taken in central London yesterday.  

 

[2] This sounds as if I'm recounting a nightmare, but it actually happened. Apparently, five military horses were spooked and bolted when building materials were dropped from height at a construction site in Belgravia, next to where they were on a training exercise. For a BBC news report, click here.

 

[3] D. H. Lawrence, Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation, ed. Mara Kalnins, (Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 102. 

 

 

The Goddess, the Whore, and the Policewoman (Notes on D. H. Lawrence's Apocalypse)

Hans Burgkmair the Elder's depiction of Babylon the Great;
Mother of Prostitutes and Earthly Abominations, etc.
One of a series of woodcuts for Martin Luther's translation of the New Testament (1523)

Coloured and uploaded to Wikipedia by Shakko (2008)

According to D. H. Lawrence, if the ancient Jews hated pagan gods on the one hand, then, on the other, they "more than hated the great pagan goddesses" [120]. Which is why the author of the Book of Revelation found it tricky trying to reconcile the overtly pagan figure of the woman clothed with the sun with his own religious misogyny.

This wonder-woman, writes Lawrence, "was too splendidly suggestive of the great goddess of the east, the Great Mother" [120], for John of Patmos. So, whilst he reluctantly allows her into the Bible, he makes sure she is soon chased off into the wilderness by a dragon and presents us with the alternative figure of the Scarlet Woman, whom we are encouraged to curse and call vile names, rather than revere. 

As Lawrence notes, this marks a real turning point in the text:

"There is a great change. We leave the old cosmic and elemental world, and come to the late Jewish world of angels like policemen and postmen. It is a world essentialy uninteresting, save for the great vision of the Scarlet Woman, which [...] is, of course, the reversal of the great woman clothed in the sun". [120]

He continues:

"Only the great whore of Babylon rises rather splendid, sitting in her purple and scarlet upon her scarlet beast. She is the Magna Mater in malefic aspect, clothed in the colours of the angry sun, and throned upon the great red dragon of the angry cosmic power. Splendid she sits, and splendid is her Babylon." [121]

Alas, the exiling of the goddess, with her feet upon the moon and crowned with the stars of heaven, and her replacement with the Scarlet Woman - magnificent as she may be holding her golden cup filled with the wine of sensual pleasure - has had negative consequences for us all - but particularly women.  

For women are not only obliged to deal with the virgin/whore dichotomy that these myths help to entrench within our thinking, but they are also the ones who remain most bitterly trapped, according to Lawrence, in the folds of the Christian Logos:

"Today, the best part of womanhood is wrapped tight and tense in the folds of the Logos, she is bodiless, abstract, and driven by a self-determination terrible to behold. A strange 'spritual' creature is woman today, driven on and on by the evil demon of the old Logos, never for a moment allowed to escape ..." [126]

Worse, she has lost her nakedness and is condemned to wear a police-woman's uniform: "Let her dress up fluffy as she likes, or white and virginal, still underneath it all you can see the stiff folds of the modern police-woman's uniform ..."* [127]

I'm not sure if that's true, or fair, or even if I quite know what Lawrence is driving at here, but on that note I'll say evening all and close the post ...

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation, ed. Mara Kalnins, (Cambridge University Press, 1980). All page numbers given in the text refer to this edition. 

* Of course, some readers might find that thought to their liking: click here for a post on the fetishistic appeal of women in uniforms

On Lunacy

The Moon: lovely to look at but ineffective

Still, today - even in Parliament - there are people who subscribe in all seriousness to the so-called lunar effect. In other words, they believe there's a magical correlation between the Moon and human biology and behaviour. As above - so below, as those with a Hermetic leaning like to say ...

However, a considerable number of scientific studies have found no evidence to support this belief. Thus, despite the insistence of poets, occultists, filmmakers, and various lunatics, it seems that the light of the silvery Moon does not make some individuals go crazy and others become excessively hairy.

Nor does the Moon control menstruation in the same way it controls the tides and Camille Paglia's claim that a woman's body is "a sea acted upon by the month's lunar wave-motion", is laughable. For whilst it's true that women's bodies are (like men's bodies) mostly water, so is it also true the Moon only affects open bodies of water - not water contained in bodies (and even if this weren't the case, there'd be an issue of scale to consider).

So, sorry Camille, but moon, month and menses are not synonymous and do not refer to one and the same phenomenon. It's simply coincidental that the menstrual cycle in women and the lunar cycle are both 28-days in length - and, in fact, even that's not quite the case; for often the length of the former varies from woman to woman and month to month, whilst the length of a synodic period is actually a consistent 29.5 days.

If it's surprising to find Ms. Paglia perpetuating lunar mythology in relation to female sexuality having built her model of feminism upon biology and constantly stressing the importance of hormones, it's no surprise to discover D. H. Lawrence was a great exponent of such baloney, believing as he did that the Moon is "the mistress and mother of our watery bodies".

Lawrence also upheld the popular belief that the Moon is somehow intimately related to questions of madness and suicide, particularly with reference to modern individuals who have, he says, lost the Moon. For it is the Moon which governs our nervous consciousness and soothes us into serenity when we are mentally agitated or disturbed:

"Oh, the moon could soothe us and heal us like a cool great Artemis between her arms. But we have lost her, in our stupidity we ignore her, and angry she stares down on us and whips us with nervous whips."

Thus, according to Lawrence, it's the the angry Moon which is responsible for young lovers committing suicide; "they are driven mad by the poisoned arrows of Artemis: the Moon is against them: the Moon is fiercely against them. And oh, if the Moon is against you, oh, beware of the bitter night, especially the night of intoxication."

To be fair, even Lawrence knows that this sounds like nonsense. He insists, however, that's because we're idiots. If only we opened ourselves up once more to the cosmos, then we'd understand that the Moon is a not just a dead lump of rock with an iron core, but a "globe of dynamic substance, like radium or phosphorus, coagulated upon a vivid pole of energy" and that there exists "an eternal vital correspondence between our nerves and the Moon".

Break this relationship, says Lawrence - though I'm not sure how one might do so, anymore than one might counteract the pull of gravity simply by refusing to acknowledge its reality - and the Moon will have her revenge, like a cruel mistress.

The problem is that whilst Lawrence's lunacy sounds harmless enough, Quentin Meillassoux has shown how such correlationism has crept into and corrupted all post-Kantian philosophy making objects conform to mind - something, ironically, that Lawrence loathes and fights against elsewhere in his work.

Ultimately, it's not a question of wanting to disconnect or come out of touch with the universe; rather, it's about acknowledging the latter exists without us ...


See: 

D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 2004). 

D. H. Lawrence Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation, ed. Mara Kalnins, (Cambridge University Press, 1980).

Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude, trans. Ray Brassier, (Continuum, 2008).

Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae, (Yale University Press, 1990).