Cartography 2: Two of Hearts
On dualism, Christism, and Narcissism
Cartography is a 52 week essay series mapping the interior life.
“I want to be a poet, and I’m working to turn myself into a seer: you won’t understand at all, and it’s unlikely that I’ll be able to explain it to you. It has to do with making your way toward the unknown by a derangement of all the senses. The suffering is tremendous, but one must bear up against it, to be born a poet, and I know that’s what I am.” Arthur Rimbaud, Letter to Georges Izambard
The Wikipedia article on dualism contains almost 9,000 words, many of them dedicated to the distinct arguments for and against dualism, or describing different variations of dualism.
In 1944, the play “No Exit” was performed for the first time and introduced its central conceit: Hell is other people. While Sartre was describing an ontological tension about living in a society, irony stepped in and the phrase quickly became shorthand to dismiss and alienate oneself from the world.
Zoroastrianism is one of the world’s oldest continuously practiced organized religions, and speaks of an eternal battle between good and evil, in which good must eventually triumph over evil. This heavily influenced dualist theology across the Levant, not least among the Gnostics who were convinced of the deep evil of the material world.
On May 13, 1871, Arthur Rimbaud wrote a letter to his teacher, one Georges Izambard, where he claims his destiny as a poet, as a visionary, and makes an arresting claim: I is an other.
It’s a cool spring day and the hunter Narcissus is walking along until he comes to a pool and falls in love for the first time.
I had my first intrusive thought at the age of 6 while I was pulling a pair of scissors out of kitchen drawer. As I held them in my hand and looked at the open legs, i had a vision of placing my thin wrist between the blades and snapping them shut. I didn’t act on the impulse it frightened me. I had no clue where the thought had originated, only that it came from the same mind that made me grab the scissors in the first place. But now my mind was full of images of blood, and the idea has never truly left. Even now, when I pick up a blade, I have to make a conscious effort to notice the passing of an impulse. I wonder when my mind is going to make a suggestion I can’t deny.
The first betrayal we encounter in life, for many of us, is the self. By the time we’re old enough to formulate the concept of Self, we’ve come to know how to walk, how to communicate a little, how to act in our own interests. But inevitably, there comes a time where we are split from our Self, and we begin to watch our lives from a distance. We become aware of the ways we fall short, we question how we act, and we attempt to mold and shape ourselves in various ways. We cease to be a unified being and instead the tension of construction becomes all we know.
Even our dreams work against us. We wake up screaming in the night, terrified of the images brought to us in the safety of sleep, crying for our parents. The lucky among us will lose the intensity of the fear with the rising sun, but many of us carry our childhood terrors with us now, in some dark corner of our minds.
The duality of our body and mind from this point on becomes more distinct every day. We know we can’t trust every idea and thought that comes into our heads, and we have to learn to suppress our emotional responses to function in the world. Yet our bodies rely on those fears for reflexes to keep us safe. We flinch, we squint, we catch movement in the peripheral of our eyes that could be a predator and we taste bitter fear on the back of our tongues.
In the French language, memory is a reflexive act. The process of remembering an incident creates a linguistic problem where the act of memory turns the subject into the direct object. This requires certain pronouns, prepositions, constructions. Even something as simple as remembering your breakfast forces you to split your experience in two, to destroy the unity of self in favor of the unity of language and clarity. Memory becomes an act of violence, Solomon splitting the baby to satisfy all parties involved hoping one, either the present or the past, will relinquish its claim over the moment.
“Whenever I'm asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one. To be able to recognize a freak, you have to have some conception of the whole man, and in the South the general conception of man is still, in the main, theological. That is a large statement, and it is dangerous to make it, for almost anything you say about Southern belief can be denied in the next breath with equal propriety. But approaching the subject from the standpoint of the writer, I think it is safe to say that while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted. The Southerner, who isn't convinced of it, is very much afraid that he may have been formed in the image and likeness of God. Ghosts can be very fierce and instructive. They cast strange shadows, particularly in our literature. In any case, it is when the freak can be sensed as a figure for our essential displacement that he attains some depth in literature.” Flannery O Connor, “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction”
Since I was a child, growing up in the South, the matter at hand was almost never my physical body but always my immortal soul. Corporal punishment was common: hands, belts, switches, sometimes worse. This was all done in the name of propriety, an act right and you-won’t-get-hurt mentality. At the same time, true moral education was typically around the acceptance of the love of Christ, of Salvation, escaping the everlasting torments of hell where you would be beaten and prodded and poked by devils for all time. It wasn’t lost on me that the damnation I was meant to escape forever looked an awful lot like the tough love of the world I lived in.
I remember being handed my first Chick Tract when I was in first grade. A small comic from a classmate about a young girl that died in her sleep and went to Hell without first accepting Christ as her savior. Such is the way of the world; works alone will not save you. I remember being so terrified that I would die in my sleep that night I fell to my knees in my living room and prayed for Christ to save me, to quench the everlasting hellfire saved for me and me alone and instead welcome me to the Kingdom of Heaven.
When I came to understand that my eternal soul was split from the vessel it was housed in, it didn’t hit immediately. I thought of it occasionally, but always as a fact of life: my soul would continue on after my death. I had no justification for this belief other than the entire culture that surrounded me, the instruction i received at home and school and in church.
My mother was raised a strict southern Baptist, and my father was raised as Boston Irish catholic. I remember the occasional weekends where I would get to see both sides of the proverbial family: mass on Saturday night, sermon on Sunday morning. I was always struck by the earthy mystery of Catholicism: snacks during service, a swinging censer, hugging strangers with a wish for peace. And then the next day, in the pews at a church across the county, it was hellfire and brimstone, the eternal torments promised to sinners and those who denied the Lord.
It wasn’t often I met the same God twice.
Instead, it was the image of crucified Christ that followed me everywhere. Pierced wrists, broken body, bloody thorns. School sporting events began with prayer. Teachers made no effort to hide their beliefs, and minor skirmishes would break out in the territory war between Presbyterians, Baptists, Methodists and every other theological schism of Protestantism. And what struck me, always, was that these people were so concerned with minor wins in a world destined for the gutter.
If my spirit is all that would survive after death, if my soul was the only part of me that was eternal, what good was it for me to attend school, pursue the material nature of life? Wouldn’t I be better served by one of two paths, that of letting go or that of leaving the path?
I was 4 or so when I asked my maternal grandfather if God made us, who made God? While my Papaw was well-known as a stubborn man, and a cruel man in many respects, Forrest gave me a surprising and welcome theological education in the cab of his truck. There were things that even the angels in Heaven weren’t meant to know. The world and all its mystery belong to God and his plan alone, and we must learn to bear it even when we don’t understand divinity. This was the lesson of Job, God’s most faithful servant subjected to purgative punishment in this life to prove his faith and his love of the Lord.
I tried to read the Book Of Job many times over the years, and it never pushed through my young mind how a God that loved so much could put his servants through so much pain.
But even without Job, even without God and his petty bets, I was aware of the split in my life between my soul and my body and my deep, deep desire for unity. There were moments, flashes of living in the current of life and approaching what might be called a mystical experience. I deeply wanted what the prophets had: knowledge of God. Union with the divine. To become flush with holy light and to deeply commit myself to joy and ecstasy for all of my days.
I wanted to be a seer. A visionary. And everywhere I looked, there was only the world and its mixture of beauty and pain. Mostly pain.
I was betrayed by my body as early as I was betrayed by my mind. Asthmatic child, a weak eye that needed strong lenses, prone to bouts of vertigo. Every day carried with it some fresh physical Hell. Was it any wonder I wanted to escape my body and my mind for the world of spirit instead?
“Horrible though the Phibionites’ eating of the embryo, of which Epiphanius goes on to tell us, may be, it follows naturally according tot he basic religious ideas of this sect. The danger that the Archon’s realm may be increased through the birth of a new human being must obviated, and through the communion of the foetus the divine power trapped in the creature by the Archon will be liberated and ‘gathered in’ for the use of the All-Mosther once more. The Phibionites thus identify themselves with the negative, devouring aspect of the Eternal Feminine personified in Barbelo: ‘This terrible Female is the greedy earth that eats its own children and feeds on their corpses, the vulture and the coffin, the flesh eating tomb, whose grinning jaws greedily lick up the blood seed of man and beast.’” Gerhard Zacharias, The Satanic Cult
When I was 11, I was sitting in my room on a Saturday night, thinking about the eternity ahead of me, either in heaven or hell. And without warning, it was like a voice spoke to me:
For better or worse, there is only this moment and there is nothing better than this moment.
At that moment I gave up my faith in Christianity.
I still have no idea where that idea came from. It felt fully formed, planted in my head: I heard the voice as loudly as if someone else was in my room with me, and with the clarity that one normally reserves for hi-fidelity audio equipment. Looking back on it now, it’s funny that I would take that to mean the death of God. It could just as easily been Him speaking comfort to me; this was a chance for me to live in the world and praise Him every step of the way. It could’ve been a waking dream. It could have been another betrayal by the mind. And instead, I became an ardent atheist that drifted between the poles of Gnosticism and Mysticism for the next twenty years, looking to reconcile my own tensions.
It was a moment like Narcissus at the pool; I saw my reflection in that moment. My mind became quiet. And I felt the rift in myself, the split between my feeling body and my seeing soul, become one again for however briefly.
The world I was born into has faded almost as quickly as it arrived. The physical is disappearing in favor digital, or being relegated to various corners of the world. Entire relationships can rise and fall between people who have never met in the same room. The cultic wish for the dissolution of the material world of the Demiurge is becoming fully realized.
But for now, so long as the moment is present, and I live in a body, I must try to strike a balance and heal that rift without falling too far towards either pure spirit or pure body. I stare into the moment of experience and seek to see myself with my own eyes without reflection; the split of my body and mind is not to be resisted, but it is to be healed.
I have news for you—
there are people who get up in the morning and cross a room
and open a window to let the sweet breeze in
and let it touch them all over their faces and bodies.
Tony Hoagland, I Have New For You