The Measure of God

(draft thoughts)

I am sad. It is difficult to write about because my relationship with myself both precedes and transcends language. Derives, says my intellect, from the fact that I am individual in all of time, and words are for sharing meaning, for anything that is not individual. How could there be words to describe the depth and color of the affection I have for myself, even for my sadness? That affection exists nowhere else in the universe, between no one else and himself, and no other people, it is wholly mine and it cannot be expressed because the meaning of it is locked up within my being and my be-ing.

The Japanese word for life purpose is ikigai and in the United States, we treat that word kind of like pumpkin spice(d?) lattes. But on the island of Okinawa, allegedly, they have really invested in ikigai and have some of the longest lived people in the world. Unsure why living the longest time is a measure of something big, but Okinawans self report that part of ikigai is belonging to a social club. Members pay dues every month, some of which go into a fund for helping members when they’re in need, and the rest of which goes towards paying for shared meals and activities. These social clubs are strong ties that give life purpose, ikigai. I picture myself with a floating ball of light in each hand, on the one side my be-ing, and on the other, shared meaning that was built with care and is gently carried by us, the ties that give life purpose.

The book on ikigai,  Ikigai : the Japanese secret to a long and happy life by Hector Garcia and Francesc Miralles, also discusses Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, in which Auschwitz survivor Frankl writes about a form of therapy he developed called logotherapy. This therapy is aimed at helping patients discover purpose. It happens that I have read that book after a professor dropped it off at my house unexpectedly in the middle of the pandemic (picture me in my pajamas opening the door to the professor who was on a jog). The premise that discovering a purpose will reorient you in a good way is not a bad one, but the idea that it can save you from things like the holocaust really gives me pause. I have to imagine that a number of people with a strong sense of purpose died at Auschwitz, because when gas came out of the shower head, that was that.

I come back to my initial doubt that surviving is the measure. I think perhaps we have confused the length of time one lives with the experience of time. In that sense - and it is a radical one - surviving is not the act of outlasting something, it is the experience of living through something, and still applies even if you do not outlast it. Thus, every victim of the holocaust is also a holocaust survivor. But this word and this meaning are too pat - like many of Frankl’s anecdotes - and they only achieve any kind of real meaning at the individual level, where they promptly explode into before-and-beyond-language, incommunicable in a blog post or a book, and untouchable by a Nazi. Yet - it must be said - were this to pan out beyond my fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants drafting, and turn out to be steadfast truth, even so it would not be enough to do what I think Frankl and ikigai are trying to do: find the rule that gives anything the potential to be okay, if you just have the right mindset.

Looping this all the way around, I draft the notion that not only is it impossible for everything to be okay, since you should send not to know / for whom the bell tolls / it tolls for thee, it is in fact impossible for anything to be okay. I have rejected both the claim that everything happens for a reason and the reactionary response that sometimes, things just happen for no reason, because both seem immediately false to me. A pattern I recognized initially through my own relationship with myself, I draft here as a possibility that comes closer to something true - everything that happens happens before and beyond reason, it thus cannot happen for a reason or for no reason, it does not subject itself to reason in the first place. What is the measure? I think perhaps we have confused the reason for happening with the experience of happening. This theory of happening - and it is a radical one - is that happening is your experience of your relationship with anything that is not you. I picture myself with a floating ball of light in each hand, one the one side my be-ing, and on the other, my happen-ing.

Why is okay the measure?

**
Ira Glass has a whole shtick that people were waving around earnestly in 2010-ish, where he basically says that the gap between your idea and your expression of that idea does not make you an impostor. It was annoying then as it is annoying now because the purpose of expression is not to meet a standard of elegance, it’s to finish something that begins in the primordial ooze of the soul. Expression is probably actual sorcery. No, I really mean it. You could probably create a wizard school in real life based on the idea that expression is spellwork and be fairly successful. What brings this to mind is that I think the gap is partially, at least, natural and inherent. That is, there’s no amount of experience, creativity, awareness, empathy, education, intelligence, capability or skills you can have that will leave the thing you express untransmuted by your expression. That is why you need to have a relationship with yourself that isn’t just a mechanic for expressing yourself to other people. The purest experience is not expressable, it is only experience-able. Transmuting the raw material of one’s existence - that is experience - into something that affects reality is a very traditional definition of sorcery.

I am penciling in the possibility that the “something big” we are trying to measure is this inexpressable, pre-and-post-reason ooze of the soul, the experience so pure it is inaccessible by any other means than experiencing it. The measure is not whether it’s okay because it is both okay and not okay, it is everything and its opposite, it is God.

By the time we ask questions like “why is there suffering,” “what is my purpose,” “what is the meaning of life,” “what is God,” “why do we die,” and “why do bad things happen,” we have already mediated that purest experience. These questions themselves are attempts to measure the inarticulable. They attempt to subject that which has transcended rationality to reason. But I don’t think it will be tamed by explanation, I think it cannot be known this way. Moreover (move over), I don’t think it ends up being true that say, good wouldn’t exist without evil, or light wouldn’t exist without darkness. That is to say, opposites do not constitute each other - rather, they are both contained in something greater.

So we diverge: some of us go full Eastern Religions Bro, some of pray at the altar of atheism, the true worshippers of rationality insist on agnosticism, academics squeeze every drop of wonder out of it all, many people are into the Abrahamic stuff; some people declare themselves humanists, defining themselves against theists. What we are left with are questions that can’t be asked with words and answers that are too big for us to conceive. Yet in some way, each of these is the same mistake- each process, each organization, and each institution is an example of post production editing.

Trying to codify God is such a predictable flex, and so pointless, except that sometimes it allows some people to help each other, to feel less alone, to feel more connected to something bigger than themselves - this is no small thing. Arguably, the primary reason for rationality is the social benefit. Of late, this same rationality is often attacked as “white,” and I think that there are a lot of people out there using the trappings of social justice to ask whether God is really so square, without realizing that this is their question. Just drafting the notion that while corporations may get a lot out of demarginalizing the rights of minorities to give them money, what’s in it for the person on the street — what deconstruction does in some part at least is get you farther from the rational and closer to God.

But it’s a bad idea, probably, I think, deconstruction I mean. I get into this when I think about Adorno and poetry sometimes, that a poem can only come from the bottom up. Top down, a poem is fascism. But it’s understandable, like who wants to be reading an email that starts just circling back when they could be having an experience so mindblowing that it is literally inexpressable. So that brings us back to Frankl and ikigai and Eastern Religions Bro because what you can’t do is just forsake reason. There can’t be a prescription. God operates on a level of coherence that is too large for any one of us to understand, but not too large for any one of us to experience, and not too large for any one of us to be humbled by simply when it is pointed to (that’s art). We are enamored with coherence, and things that point at it.

So we can’t fathom God, but we can understand that we can’t fathom God, and it wipes us clean; we are vessels before God, because we cease to fathom.

Frankl and ikigai, they argue for cohering your life around a purpose. But I do wonder. When I am motivated, there is always purpose, but when I am not motivated, there is no intrinsic purpose to discover. Which is really better for the Jew in a concentration camp: to have his purpose, or to stand empty before God? A purpose is an idea that a person can cling to, whose existence depends on the cling. But God is something that persists regardless of how close or far we walk from the fact of the unfathomable, the Great Coherence. This may be the key. You cannot say it is a reason for anything, or that it alleviates anything, but you can be sure that it is more unfathomable than any horror, that it folds every horror into it, as it folds everything else, rational and irrational, you, me and my sadness.

I am sad and my fathomable sadness is collected into something. In small part, it constitutes the unfathomable; in this way, the only thing that can truly be said — the critique of God (a Kantian view of limits) — is that nothing is okay, and nothing is wasted.