Bezos ad astra (TLC, 4)

In his latest newsletter—is it the best going? It’s up there—L. M. Sacasas writes about what he calls “earth alienation.” He uses Arendt and McLuhan’s distinct reflections on the significance of Sputnik as a frame for considering Jeff Bezos’s recent comments about space exploration and colonization. Here’s where he quotes and unpacks Bezos:

During his portion of the proceedings . . . Bezos articulated a vision for the creation of space colonies that would eventually be home to millions of people, many of who would be born in space and would visit earth, Bezos explained, “the way you would visit Yellowstone National Park.”

That’s a striking line, of course. It crystalizes the earth-alienation Arendt was describing in Prologue of The Human Condition. It is, in fact, a double alienation. It is not only that these imagined future humans will no longer count the earth their home, it is also that they will perceive it, if at all, as a tourist trap, a place with which we have no natural relation and know only as the setting for yet another artificial consumer experience. And, put that way, I hope the seemingly outlandish nature of Bezos’s claims will not veil the more disturbing reality, which is that we don’t need to be born in space to experience the earth in precisely this mode.

To be sure, Bezos makes a number of statements about how special and unique the earth is and about how we must preserve it at all costs. Indeed, this is central to Bezos’s pitch. In his view, humanity must colonize space, in part, so that resource extraction, heavy industry, and a sizable percentage of future humans can be moved off the planet. It is sustainability turned on its head: a plan to sustain the present trajectories of production and consumption.

Sacasas comments:

Arendt believed, however, that the modern the desire to escape the earth, understood as a prison of humanity, was strikingly novel in human history. “Should the emancipation and secularization of the modern age,” Arendt wondered, “which began with a turning-away, not necessarily from God, but from a god who was the Father of men in heaven, end with an even more fateful repudiation of an Earth who was the Mother of all living creatures under the sky?”

We’ll return to that Arendt quote. After meditating on the set of issues it raises, Sacasas concludes:

What alternative do we have to this stance toward the world that is characterized by a relation of mastery and whose inevitable consequence is a generalized degree of alienation, anxiety, and apprehension?

We have a hint of it in Arendt’s warning against a “future man,” who is “possessed by a rebellion against human existence as it has been given, a free gift from nowhere (secularly speaking), which he wishes to exchange, as it were, for something he has made himself.”  We hear it, too, in Wendell Berry’s poetic reminder that “We live the given life, not the planned.” It is, I would say, a capacity to receive the world as gift, as something given with an integrity of its own that we do best to honor. It is, in other words, to refuse a relation of “regardless power, ” in Albert Borgmann’s apt phrase, and to entertain the possibility of inhabiting a relation of gratitude and wonder.

Go read the whole thing. I can’t do it justice in a few quotes, not to mention the way in which every one of Sacasas’s newsletters is part of a larger, coherent whole. It brought something to mind, though, a recent film that seems to me a perfect example of the phenomenon he is describing, precisely in existential and aesthetic terms. Whether or not it is an illustration or a critique of that phenomenon is an open question.

The film is Ad Astra, which somehow was released only two years ago. (Every pre-pandemic cultural artifact feels much older than it is.) Written and directed by the great James Gray, Ad Astra (“to the stars”) tells of an astronaut, played by Brad Pitt, who goes on a mission to find his father near the planet Neptune, who may or may not have finally discovered extraterrestrial life. Pitt plays his character, Roy, with a perfectly controlled flat affect: his stoic courage is actually the surface of a dying, or dead, inner life. He lacks what he most desires, namely presence: to himself, his ex-wife, his estranged father. Haunted by his mental monologue, Roy’s voyage to the stars to find his father and/or life beyond the human is at once a metaphorical and literal, allegorical and spiritual journey into the heart of darkness.

When the film came out I didn’t write about it in a formal venue, but I did tweet about it. So let me take the opportunity to unfold one of my “Twitter loci communes.” First read Alissa Wilkinson’s excellent review for Vox, then Nick Olson’s lovely thread. (Also a bit from the indispensable Tim Markotos: “Penal Substitutionary Atonement: The Movie flirts with Freud and Nietzsche before finally settling on Beauty will save the world.” LOL.) Now here’s what I said:

Grateful to @alissamarie for this beautiful review of Ad Astra. Couldn't agree more. I'll have to keep pondering whether there's something potentially transcendent there, or if it's as deeply immanent-humanist as Gray's oeuvre suggests.

She's also right that this is the sort of a-theological spiritual art that religious people should celebrate, contemplate, and (quite possibly) read against itself. I mean, what a beautiful film.

It's also something of an anti-Interstellar. What finally doomed that film was its navel-gazing: when we look at the stars, we see ourselves blinking back. Here, Gray's vision is subtly different: the stars are “empty,” but beautiful in their sheer existence for all that.

And that very beauty and wonder of the ostensible nothingness—that the cosmos exists at all rather than nothing—generates not only awe at the mystery of life but love for those closest to us. That's what Nolan sought to accomplish, I think, but failed where Gray succeeds.

The next day I read Nick’s thread and riffed on this tweet of his in particular:

The TOL [Tree of Life] parallels come easily. One way of putting it is that this is TOL without Mother. Maybe in spite of itself, it winds up being a film that’s in search of Mother in lieu of distant Father. AD ASTRA’s “we’re all we’ve got” is also that TOL cut from the universe to the infant.

Here’s what I wrote:

This is good too. If you can accept the father/mother // nature/grace symbology of Tree of Life then apply them to Ad Astra, what you have in the latter is nature without grace, because a creation without a creator.

Then you can read it one of two ways: 1. The father's despair is a proper response to the realization that the universe is bereft of Logos (much less a Logos incarnate), and the son in effect embraces a false consciousness in the face of a potential nihilism.

2. The son's affective embrace of an "empty" cosmos is the proper response because "Man" has been searching for meaning (or ratio) apart from "Woman" (here, a figure for concrete love, rather than abstract wanderlust).

Again, you've got to accept that gendered symbology on the front end, but if you do, and you import it from Malick (and other sources!), then Gray is doing a lot here with his choice of characters. (Also makes me think of what role Ruth Negga serves in the story . . .)

Having said all that, though what I most want is to read the film in the vein of #2, inflected theologically, I have to admit that if I'm going to read the film against itself, #1 is the more penetrating as well as the more provocative route.

The next day I expanded on this line of thought, using an interview of Gray on one of The Ringer’s podcasts, The Big Picture:

In that James Gray podcast interview, he says he wanted it to star someone like Brad Pitt, who brings with him a “myth” or “mythology” that he, Gray, could then deconstruct in the film—referring to Ad Astra as “a deconstruction of masculinity.” Pairs well with the thread below.

Not only is Brad Pitt a global icon of “manhood” or “masculinity.” In Tree of Life he literally plays “Father/masculine” (=nature), as opposed to “Mother/feminine” (=grace) (Jessica Chastain). Gray then makes him a Son who spurns Woman while searching for the absent Father.

And in the process (again, literally) cutting the umbilical cord (in the heavens!) connecting him to the Father, thence to return to Mother Earth—now no Fall but a reditus of the aboriginal pilgrim-exitus—to reunite masculine (nature) with feminine (grace) via the bond of love.

I also had the following “aha” moment:

Somehow it only just occurred to me that Ad Astra opens with ha-adam, the royal Man (Brad Pitt)—husband of Eve (Liv Tyler), whose name (Roy) means "king" (le roi)—literally falling from heaven to earth.

Now I realize Brad Pitt's character's name, Roy, has not only royal connotations (Leroy, le roi, the king) but also a biblical-theological connection (el-roi, Hagar's naming of the Lord as God-who-sees). Roy wants truly to be seen by his father/God—a hope left unfulfilled.

Now recall that Arendt quote from above:

Should the emancipation and secularization of the modern age, which began with a turning-away, not necessarily from God, but from a god who was the Father of men in heaven, end with an even more fateful repudiation of an Earth who was the Mother of all living creatures under the sky?

It seems to me that Ad Astra is, from start to finish, one long cinematic meditation on this question. And whereas my initial reading of the film leaned immanent-cum-nihilistic, I feel prompted to revise that reading in a more hopeful, if still humanist, direction.

Sacasas writes of “Arendt’s warning against a ‘future man,’ who is ‘possessed by a rebellion against human existence as it has been given, a free gift from nowhere (secularly speaking), which he wishes to exchange, as it were, for something he has made himself.’” In this respect Pitt’s Roy might be construed as that “future man” who goes beyond himself by his own means but, ultimately, reaches the end of his tether—again, this happens quite literally in the film—before returning to earth to accept the limits of finite human life for what it is: a gift. As given, it is not subject to the manipulations or technologies of man, but as what it is it is good in itself, howsoever concrete, delimited, and therefore subject to loss. The gift is a mystery from without and can only be accepted with gratitude or spurned with ingratitude. Though Gray insists on an immanent frame—indeed, we are given to understand that going beyond that frame is itself a rejection of the gift of finite existence—the film’s closing scene is less a period than a question mark. Roy accepts the gift in love, and as love. But if a gift, then a Giver? If love, then a Lover?

The question is apt for Bezos and his ilk. To escape the immanent as immanent is a rejection of transcendence, not its embrace; the technological sublime is a substitute for the beatific vision, not a means of reaching it. Accept earth as the gift that it is, and you will gain heaven with it. Renounce earth for the stars, and you will lose it all.

James and le Carré (TLC, 3)

This is an entry in my “Twitter loci communes” series; read more here.

P. D. James and John le Carré are two of my favorite novelists. I’ve written about each of them before. A question occurred to me as I was reading le Carré’s Our Game this week, and that question reminded me of a question I asked on Twitter a couple years ago.

Here’s the first one, sincerely asked by one who lacks the expertise or breadth of reading to know a good answer:

If you wanted to chart the social, moral, and political changes wrought in England between the immediate postwar period and Brexit—not only the Cold War but the brave new world opened up by the fall of the Berlin Wall as well as by the fall of the Twin Towers—could you do better than reading every one of the novels written by James and le Carré?

Put differently: What would you be missing by using their novels as a window onto the successive societal revolutions that sprung up during the reign of Queen Elizabeth—or, say, between Winston Churchill’s final year in office and Theresa May’s first? I don’t mean to suggest that their work is comprehensive, much less to sound reductive. (For example, a writer like Zadie Smith comes to mind as adding something important they’re missing.) I more mean the question as a comment about the sheer expanse of James’s and le Carré’s respective powers of social observation, and the way in which the changing mores of the day reveal themselves in the little details strewn across the dialogue and narration of their stories.

That brings me to my second question, posed on Twitter in June 2019:

Of genre authors working in the second half of the twentieth century, who wrote the best English prose? On the Mount Rushmore, I think P. D. James and John le Carré are nonnegotiable. Who are the other two?

Addendum: By "genre" I mean the fictional sub-groups typically thought of as cheap paperbacks for thrills: crime, fantasy, SF. (Westerns are tough—I'll say no for now, though I'd allow a counter-argument.) Re time frame, I mean *flourished* in final 4-5 decades of 20th century.

In other words I'm framing the question this way because genre is often thought of as non-literary and thus not literature proper, and thus not deserving of literary analysis or praise. But some genre authors write gorgeous prose. Who are they?

While it’s still up, you should go check out the replies. There were a bunch, and some of the suggestions were fantastic. (Everyone seemed to agree with me about James; less so le Carré.) Some of the proposed names included le Guin, Ross Macdonald, Rex Stout, Patrick O’Brian, Charles Portis, Shirley Jackson, Octavia E. Butler, Brian Jacques, Ishigiro, Ballard, Ligotti, Gene Wolfe, Samuel Delaney, and many more. The truth is that any Mount Rushmore is going to be subjective. But perhaps there could be loose agreement on (to switch metaphors) the bullpen from which one would call up this or that writer for the honor.

Twitter loci communes

One of these days Twitter will be no more. Or at least my Twitter account. Whether that future is distant or near, it will happen. I stopped actively tweeting or even retweeting anything beyond links to my published work a couple months into the pandemic. That was after resuming “normal” Twitter activity following a self-imposed months-long hiatus. During that whole period of time, across the last two years or so, I’ve seriously contemplated deleting my account more than once. I’ve come very close. But I haven’t quite been able to quit having an account, even if I’ve successfully quit replying to mentions, liking tweets, retweeting, “engaging” in “the discourse,” etc. I also don’t scroll the feed—ever. I spend 5-15 minutes per day on Twitter, by which I mean, unless I’m sharing a new publication, I check the same 3-6 writers’ accounts the way I “follow” RSS feeds on Feedly. I’m more or less happy with my Twitter usage, then, though I continue to think the platform the purest of poisons on our common life. If I had a button to destroy it tomorrow, I’d press it in a heartbeat.

So. Since I’m not “on” Twitter in a strong way anymore, and since I’m confident neither the site nor my account is long for this world, and since before I stopped being an active user I had some pleasant conversations and wrote a few fun threads, I’ve been thinking about how to maintain, or transmit, some of that. Here’s my answer.

Twitter loci communes.

The Latin means “common places.” What I’m going to do on this blog, intermittently and with no plan of action, is reproduce topics and threads and lines of thought I developed on Twitter sometime in the years since I created an account in 2013. Not by embedding the tweets but simply by copying and pasting them here, either as normal prose or in block quotes.

In fact, I’ve already done that twice: earlier this year in response to ACU’s upset of UT in March Madness and a couple weeks back on the feast of St. Monica. We’ll count those as TLC #1 and #2. Next will be #3, whatever and whenever that may be. But I’ll link back to this page for future posts so that folks know what it is, and I’ll tag all TLC posts (including those two retroactive ones) as such, so anybody who’s interested—all two dozen of you—can track them down.

Twitter may not be all evil; perhaps it’s only 99%. This little side project is a way of preserving the 1%, if only for myself.

Saint Monica (TLC, 2)

Today is the feast of St. Monica, the mother of St. Augustine of Hippo. St. Monica is (if you will allow it) my self-appointed patron saint. She is an inspiration and a sacred exemplar of Christian fidelity, maternal love, and undying hope. A couple years back Matthew Rothaus Moser, a theologian at Azusa Pacific, wrote this on Twitter:

Theology hot take: *Confessions* is less a narrative of Augustine’s search for God than it is a narrative of the efficacy of Monica’s prayerful tears.

I retweeted that with the following small thread:

Print this out and plaster it on every mirror, wall, and doorframe of your house. God help us parents to pray with one percent of the blood, sweat, and tears of St. Monica.

This supposed hot take should be so cool as to be frozen solid. St. Monica is the human hero of the Confessions: the exemplar, the faithful one, the stubborn widow pestering the judge, Abraham haggling with the Lord: tear-stained incarnation of irresistible grace in fallen form.

I've shared this before, and I always share it whenever I teach the Confessions: Re-reading the book after becoming a parent—sitting in a little YDS second-floor study room—I wept like a newborn baby when I got to the end of Book VIII. God heard her prayers. All grace. Pure joy.

Come by my office, and you'll find icons of St. Monica on my door, on my wall, at my window. (Sitting in my study at home, I'm looking at an icon of her as I write.) When I grow up I want to be like St. Monica.

A few months later, on the feast of St. Monica in 2019, I retweeted that thread with the following appended comment:

A thread from last month for the feast of St. Monica: mother of St. Augustine, soldier of prayer, and my own (alas, self-appointed) patron saint. Jesus spoke of her in Luke 18; she is the persistent widow incarnate.

Remember and celebrate St. Monica this day, and give thanks for her witness and for her tears, which by the Spirit’s grace made her wayward son a son of God. Like Hannah, the one thing she loved most in the world she gave over to the Lord, whom she loved even more; she knew her boy needed the church as a mother, not only herself. And what she gave up, she received back one hundredfold.

Why, after all, did St. Augustine write what may be the most important, influential, and beautiful work of Christian literature in the church’s history? Answer:

My Lord, my God, inspire your servants, my brothers, your sons, my masters, to whose service I dedicate my heart, voice, and writings, that all who read this book may remember at your altar Monica your servant and Patrick her late husband, through whose physical bond you brought me into this life without my knowing how. May they remember with devout affection my parents in this transient light, my kith and kin under you, our Father, in our mother the Catholic Church, and my fellow citizens in the eternal Jerusalem. For this city your pilgrim people yearn, from their leaving it to their return. So as a result of these confessions of mine may my mother’s request receive a richer response through the prayers which many offer and not only those which come from me.

The Confessions exists to elicit the prayers of God’s people in perpetuity, on behalf of St. Monica and as an extension and fulfillment of her own prayers, while she was still on earth. So say a prayer today on her behalf; say a prayer especially for your children, as she did her only son. She’s in heaven now, all her earthly prayers answered, yet still (we may trust) praying without ceasing. For whom? For all God’s children still journeying toward their eternal home.

Dame, ACU, sports, glory (TLC, 1)

Two years ago I wrote the following in a short tweet thread, in response to Damian Lillard's walk-off buzzer-beater to win Portland's playoff series against Oklahoma City:

What's revealed by Dame's buzzer-beater walk-off series-winner, and the hoopla surrounding it since, is something simple but often forgotten in today's analytics-driven journalism: People do not watch or play sports for the sake of technical proficiency. They do so for glory.

What Damian Lillard did was all-caps GLORIOUS. The stakes, the moment, the narrative, the beef with Russ, the degree of difficulty: People watch what is often sheer monotony in sports for a single, once-in-a-lifetime moment just like that.

Paul George's comments after the game that "it was a bad shot, though nobody's going to say it," was true but seriously beside the point. Of course it was a bad shot! If by "bad" we mean "having a low probability of going in," it was definitionally bad. And yet it went in!

Watch the video, and look at the reactions: OKC's, the crowd's, Dame's teammates, and Dame's own. Sheer, stupefying, lightning-struck glory. Athletes devote the entirety of their lives, soul and body, to be ready for a moment like that—and not, say, to finish 4th in MVP voting.

Sports journalism's in a weird place, drawn in a few directions: hyper-analytics; First Take stupidity; Twitter cleverness; athletes-as-celebrities gossip. What I'd love more than anything is a recognition of what makes sports great, and matching prose to the glory of the thing.

I stand by all of that. Every day that analytics makes further inroads not just on backroom GM decision-making but on the whole public culture of professional (and amateur!) sports is a step in the wrong direction. Sports do not exist for "wins," Ringz, or championships. They certainly do not exist for statistical supremacy. They do not even exist first of all for the display of physical excellence and bodily self-mastery and the combat of competition. They exist for people to behold unpredictable epiphanies of human glory. All the other goods of sports are contained therein.

Which brings me to ACU, where I teach. My colleague Richard Beck wrote up a nice appreciation of our "little ol'" basketball team's dethroning—decapitating? horns-sawing?—of the University of Texas in the NCAA tournament. Watching our team upset UT in the opening round, by icing two free throws to go up by one point before stealing the inbound pass as time expired, put me in mind of Dame's walk-off buzzer-beater. Sheer pandemonium, wild release, pure glory: the reason why we do this in the first place. That glory spread like wildfire across sports media and social media alike, and rightly so. How often in your life will you see something like that?

It would have been wonderful for our guys to have won the next game (and the next, and the next...). But that loss doesn't remotely diminish the glory of the initial upset. It happened, it always will have happened, and those players will be the toast of west Texas for a long time to come. Good for them.