The Consubstantial God/Art/Belief Problem

from No Colony 4 (20??)

I don’t know many artists who believe in God. They are ostensibly, even categorically, around, but most work today seems to vulture around religion rather than indulge its implications.

Religion was already becoming passé when James Joyce started writing, but by the time Ulysses was published, believing in God was entirely uncool. Progressive writers, visual artists, etc. employed Christianity and its faithful devotees as a means for social critique. The pious fledging of modern to contemporary art poses as the ignorant, oppressed figure, not unlike Clarissa Harlowe or Tess Durbeyfield.

In a workshop one morning three years ago, my professor revealed that a popular poet—one who taught at even the same university I attended—was a devout Christian to the collective gasp and reproach of my peers.

I’m not saying I believe in God, or that I haven’t decided whether or not I believe in God, or whether or not it is wrong to hold comprehensive edifying convictions. The greatest pleasure is to be tired all day, then fall asleep and not be tired. The greatest religion is the person who subscribes to all faiths.

I could tell you that the media, the museums, the canon, pornography have replaced religion and then I would be saying what sociological critics have been saying directly or indirectly for whatever how long. I don’t care about what’s been stripped away so much as what remains, will remain.

Skin gets dry all over the country in the winter, but by summer everything’s humid again.

One creed, I’ll entertain, did survive the 20th century. Judaism, in many ways due to the nefarious and scary potential of the Holocaust, as well as the general coolness of marginality, flourished as a means for self-actualization and ascension. Thorough reverence and outright rejection (as well as the waffling in between) became absolute measures of artistic exploration, providing writers like Philip Roth, Hannah Arendt, Woody Allen, Allen Ginsberg, David Markson, Paul Auster, Jonathan Safran Foer, Joshua Cohen and Adam Levin the path to the critical zenith, despite the contestable merit or quality of their works.

I was born Catholic on my mother’s side, converted in a mikveh at the age of nine or ten to assay my father’s. First I was consecrated, then I was bar mitzvahed and confirmed.

I stayed involved in religion to meet girls. They introduced me to alternative music and drove me to cities. I held hands with a girl in the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. I tried drugs for the first time with girls I met in Hebrew school, one of whom became my dealer in the following years. I had sex for the first time with a girl I met through youth group. We talked about Jeff Mangum—he wrote about Anne Frank—and J. D. Salinger—he wrote about secularized Jews. Now we live together in Brooklyn.

Depression, neuroticism, hypochondria were easy enough to write off as cultural traits and became an excuse for my inability to cope with my peers and self. Undoubtedly this contributed to an early fixation on literature.

There are Gore Vidal books on my grandmother’s bookshelf. Her ex-husband disowned his religion. After converting to Methodism, his mother, who died in Boca Raton, refused to speak to him for a decade. He lost money in some bad investments and lives happily in something accurately deemed a hovel outside Sarasota. I haven’t visited this home in twelve years.

Religion, faith of any kind, is still uncool: a Republican or further right phenomenon. Still many of us drink beer and turn to Google as our most personal and urgent catechism.

The Recognitions remains the only near-contemporary book I’ve read and enjoyed that seemed sympathetic with, even in favor of, belief of any kind. The epic scheme re desolation, decline, unbecoming revels in the relationship between art and God, conviction and aesthetics. They are not mutually exclusive for William Gaddis’ characters and one does not necessarily, or likely, sustain the other. I would yield, for similar reasons, that Moby-Dick achieved this a century earlier.

In a 1986 interview with Zoltán Abádi-Nagy, Gaddis alleged, “This is closer to burlesque.”

On the other hand, returning to Joyce’s fiction, the floundering paralysis, alienation, etc. of Stephen Dedalus might inform our understanding of a contemplative realm of rejection and arrogance: the artist’s moments of finest, albeit juvenile, inspiration are those following his closest exploration, or, sure, endeavor, with regard to faith, in—actually—the final chapters of Portrait. Leopold Bloom’s comparative serenity/charm/forgivingness thus may be argued as a result of his openness to belief, human contradiction, development. Neither Catholic nor Jew, he is a testament to all exploration, material and celestial.

A few weeks ago I sat on my friend’s couch in Philadelphia. It was a Sunday mid-morning. My friend slept in the adjacent room with a girl who was not his girlfriend and also not really not his girlfriend. For the preceding weeks I’d been impelled by confusion, despair, levity. I’d begun an infrequent podcast of music, politics and religious dialogue titled “Lapsed Jews’ Views” as a voice and remedy for the hysterical and spiraling patterns to which my dreams and waking thoughts had taken. Here I came to refer to Mormonism, Canadians in the United States during election season and New York/New Jersey residents during Hurricane Sandy as established religious identities.

The day before we had passed a Catholic church advertising Sunday mass. We’d carried on to the liquor store. I urinated out the window a few times that night after the bathroom flooded. I wasn’t able to sleep much. My friend kept the apartment’s heat off; I was wearing my shoes, long underwear, jeans, two flannel shirts and my coat. I avoided the diffuse cat excrement and let myself out, leaving the door unlocked. It was cold and the Church was gray and brown. Inside people sat at the pews. They stood, they kneeled. I followed along. I heard words and moved my mouth. I walked to the front of the church and put a wafer in my mouth. I did not chew the wafer. I drank the wine, but I did not take communion. I took a bus home that afternoon.

I did not take communion. I just wondered for a while about space between people and how sometimes I am hungry and other times I don’t want to eat anything. Why some people believe in God and others don’t seems to me the same question as why somebody writes a poem from the same narrative as a novel. A biblical trope becomes a painting; the painting is posted on the Internet. I’m fairly certain every image has been masturbated to in one form or another.

There is a power in simultaneously believing and doubting—or both believing and not believing. I looked up some of the prayers and they looked like poems. Not unlike the way poems I like to read look. Now, in the process of editing this piece, there’s no longer moss on a tree outside my window.

Today I’ll eat and also not eat.

My sister said she’d have a very hard time taking anyone who believes in the Immaculate Conception seriously. I have a hard time taking anyone attached to anything with certainty seriously. I earnestly believe that.

Consubstantiality is what holds the Trinity in order. Three beings are able to inhabit one idea of eminent holiness. They exist as distinct entities but fail to achieve separateness from one another. Like Joyce’s reliance on Shakespeare, and Hamlet, to further the development and understanding of his characters. Like Joyce’s own entry into the fiction—on the page, his direct address in “Penelope,” his biography embedded in Stephen’s own critical dissection in “Scylla and Charybdis.” Everything must be studied through the lens of its self as its other self. The human consciousness allows its self to invest in dichotomy as uniform. This is, in many ways, the foundation of consubstantiality. It is why the Jews believe Elijah will return to usher in the Messianic Age, which the Christians depend on as the will of Christ’s Second Coming. Instantly they’re both shopping at Whole Foods.

If we have a Wikipedia list of every famous atheist, why don’t we have a page of famous people we’d be surprised to learn aren’t atheists? Agnosticism is inherently, comically incomplete, as is, likely, its Wikipedia page.

I didn’t take communion because you can make something like that up as easily as you can trust me telling you I did really.

A word will probably not emerge to describe the person who both seeks and rejects God.

As much as there was an ant on my girlfriend’s GRE scores, there is no longer the ant. I killed it.

You can write a poem about it even: To believe: / as good / as whatever.