SNC

Turned Into Fire

For each of the classical elements, there exists a mode of burial. For air, there exists a practice called sky burial, in which the body is prepared such that it may be eaten by birds. For water, there exists burial at sea, in which the nutrients of the body are given to the swimming creatures. For earth, there is of course the classic image of burial, in which the body is placed under heaps of Earth: I would probably include being consumed by land animals within this category, as in the end those animals are consumed by the detrivores of the soil. And then, of course, there is burial by fire: cremation.

I have thought quite a lot, since I was a child, about what I would like to be done with my body. Ever since I learnt that I was not one organism, but in fact was filled with microbial ecosystems in each organ of my body, as well as with beneficent viruses, with Toxoplasmosis gondii, perhaps with Dermodex mites, etc. I have been extremely enthused by the idea of decaying. Once my body ceases to produce my consciousness, there is still a whole complex of life to take care of, a whole drama to play out in which internal creatures say their goodbyes and move on to new assemblages through the decomposition of my flesh, meeting with creatures that previously had to be kept outside. For this reason, it struck me as pleasant to be buried, to be given to birds, or to be given to the sea, and so to be decomposed. Life, there, would play out in a new form as I came to be composted. Cremation, however, was another question.

Fire, it seemed to me, is not alive. To be burnt to ash struck me as no better than to be turned into a diamond, or left adrift in space where all the life within me would go extinct—both hideous thoughts to me. It became my priority to make sure everyone in my life knew that, if I died, there were two things I wanted to avoid: to be cremated, or to be embalmed. This latter seemed awful to me as well, as it meant my faithful friends, my living and decaying organs and the multiplicitous life within them, would be destroyed in order to reduce me to the status of an image. On this count, I certainly agree: may I never become a visible thing! If I die and I remain as a wet morass of subtle creatures, beyond perception, single-sensed (as Jains refer to plants and to microbial creatures), then much of me is still alive. But of the mere semblance, it is written, “The idols of the heathen are silver and gold, the work of men's hands. They have mouths, but they speak not; eyes have they, but they see not; they have ears, but they hear not; neither is there any breath in their mouths. They that make them are like unto them: so is every one that trusteth in them” (Psalm 135:15–18). Therefore, let me never become aesthetic!

Fire, however, requires more investigation.

What is fire? It is unclear whether it is found within the seven days of creation. There is, of course, light within the days: the light that begins creation, and the luminaries in the vault of the sky. But are these really fire? Here we must balance both classical and modern science. Under classical science, operating under the four-element system, it is possible to speak of the fire of the Heavens. Under modern science, however, we must recognize that fire is an incredibly rare phenomenon in terms of celestial bodies: it requires not only heat, which the stars certainly have, but also sufficient levels of oxygen and of combustible material, both of which are the products of biotic life. This is a difference very similar to that of whales being classed as mammals under modern taxonomy and fish in Biblical terms. And as in that case, I would describe myself as a partisan of both statements in a certain context.

There is a valid sense in which whales are fish. Fish, in the Biblical sense, are animals of the fifth day, inheritors of the waters that were divided and made distinct from the heavens on the second day. They are the counterparts of birds, inheritors of the skies: the mode of life of fish, swimming, is how the element of water is given over to the enjoyment of flesh, while the mode of life of birds, flying, is how air is given over. The Biblical term for mammals, “beasts,” exists within a different dynamic: that of the sixth day, in which the walking beasts and the crawling insects are created as the animal creatures of the earth, with humankind among their number. The earth, for its part, was made distinct from the waters on the third day. It is crucial that there is a means, given by God, by which animals enjoy the waters and the skies, just as it is crucial that there are two means, walking and crawling, by which animals enjoy the earth. These are charisms given by God to creatures, and signs of the inheritance of love that all creatures have in common, and so to be respected.

There is also a valid sense in which whales are mammals. Taxonomy has many haters, but I am not one of them: to recognize how creatures are related to each other by common descent is to recognize something of great beauty. There is, among these classes of creature, the story of how spirits took on various roles within the creation: how the ancestors of whales took on the covenant of beasts by degrees from the covenant of fish, and then the covenant of fish by degrees from the covenant of beasts. It is a matter of intense beauty that the kinds of creature—whether the kinds of animacy or of inanimacy, of mental or of corporeal existance, of subtlety or apparency, of air or water or earth or fire—are not fixed boundaries, but niches in which the spirits of the world have come to dwell and at times shifted between. However broken and violent this creation may have become, these covenants, niches within the walls of the temple where creatures come to dwell, are given in the beginning not as bonds but as gifts of love. One is not to reimagine the use of a prison chain but it is wonderful to reimagine the use of a gift. Living things have done just that, and to recognize whales as mammals is to recognize that they have done so.

As for fire, there is a valid sense in which the luminaries of the heavens are taken for fire. God’s words on the fourth day are that the luminaries are to be taken for signs, and if their heat and light are taken as signs for fire, they are used according to the charism that is gifted to them. In fact, this sense is only heightened if combined with the modern observation that, properly speaking, fire requires the work of living things. If the luminaries of the heavens are taken as signs of fire, and fire is taken as the work of biotic things, then the heavens blaze with signs of life. This observation combines with the Biblical description of the luminaries as being for the setting of times. If fire is something made possible over time, as oxygen accumulates and combustible material is made, then the pre-pyric light above is a sign of things to come, and a witness of that which has not yet played out.

The Hebrew word for “fire” does not appear in Genesis 1, unlike water and earth and air, and for this reason the four-element system may be taken not to be Biblical. If light is taken as a sign for fire, however, then there exists a beautiful connection with where fire eventually does emerge. The first Biblical mention of fire, as the word esh, is a sign of God, in the strange depiction (Robert Alter calls it a “haunting mystery” and “wonderfully peculiar”) of God’s appearance to Abram. As Alter translates: “And just as the sun had set, there was a thick gloom and, look, a smoking brazier with a flaming torch that passed between those parts. On that day the LORD made a covenant with Abram, saying, ‘To your seed I have given this land from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates.’” The sun, the sign of fire, has set, and the luminaries have been covered in gloom, and in their place appears fire itself, the disembodied brazier, the sign of God. Of course, there are other, more famous images: the burning bush, or God as a “consuming fire.” But this is the first, where fire, before signified, now joins the other elements through the word of God.

Last year I read “The Body’s Grace,” the famous essay by Rowan Williams. My girlfriend was going through a kick of readings into Christian theory of sexuality, including, through my grandparents’ recommendation, André Guindon, whom she now views, like my grandparents, as cruelly persecuted by the Catholic church. I think her interest into these topics was and is noble, and yet I have been unable to connect in the same way. In fact, for reasons I do not consider to be the fault of Williams or Guindon, exposure to this content has generally made me feel profoundly upset. In my comments on “The Body’s Grace” to my girlfriend afterward, I said, “I felt very hit by the phrase, ‘Grace is not discovered by all.’” The ideal of experiencing sexuality as a means by which one “enters into the body’s grace,” in which one discovers that the body “can be the cause of happiness to her and to another,” felt like a form of imprisonment between an abstract thesis and its negation.

I have talked at length about this kind of halted dialectic in Toxic Yuri Aufhebung, where I do not talk about sexuality per se, but certainly about the “‘difficult’ possibility of loving a person” instead of “being aroused by the impossiblity of an image.” I think the task of Williams and Guindon is this same task, and so I do not have a disagreement to make with them. But for some reason, even the mention of sexuality as integral and wholesome within this process causes me to feel as though I am posed with a vast and horrible abstraction, and inchoate ideal that forces me to run between it and its hideous negation, hoping beyond hope to find some sort of door beyond it. Certainly to hear so from a Christian guided by the Genesis pronouncement—“be fruitful and multiply”—causes me an intense form of terror. Even if, as Williams suggested and Guindon was condemned for asserting, fruitfulness is not a matter of mere heterosexuality but involves a fruitfulness of the encounter, with which I certainly agree, I find myself stricken. All I can read are those words, again and again: “Grace is not discovered by all.” “Grace is not discovered by all.”

I have sometimes played my repulsion from sexuality for jokes. I can remember many times where I became deeply distressed by realizing that, throughout the world, there were millions of people engaged in intercourse—which is a rather funny thing to feel, I think! And yet true. Although I do not call myself asexual, I would readily call myself sex-repulsed, in a similar way to how I have historically (though I have been successfully training this out by considering the goodness of all creatures) been utterly repulsed by animal waste. I cannot really say why. There was not really a fall from grace, in which my naturally positive relation with sexuality was destroyed. Sexuality just came into my life as a hideous and nauseating intrusion, and it I have never figured out how to make it feel otherwise, though I have blunted the edge somewhat. This is, I think, why I have been so repelled by any image of sexuality as a good creation of God which I must experience as such. It feels like an unconcretized ideal—I might even say that it feels kitsch. A blog I was recently introduced to has described to, in a discussion of Christmas carols, introduced me to the definition of “kitsch” as “the absolute denial of shit,” or in other terms, “the ‘categorical agreement with being.’” Christianity must navigate, deftly or not deftly, a relationship with kitsch because of “the idea so central to the monotheistic traditions (and alien to the Buddha) that being is good.” Even as I have literally been in the process of coming to view literal shit as in some way good, the Christian description of sexuality as good still feels unsustainably kitsch to me.

This point might be illustrated through what I consider to be my favourite movie, and certainly my favourite Christian movie: Love Exposure. There is no question in Love Exposure that sex is absolute shit; in fact, it is because sex is shit that the movie itself is also shit (though not kitsch). Through the lens of the principal of its three main characters, Yu, Love Exposure is a story about the transcendence of a state of original sin through love. Yu begins the movie in a state of original sin, a state that he recognizes. Desiring to be loved by his widower father—a priest who utterly fails to love him at every moment in the film—he sets himself to the task of sinning in order to provoke a reaction in confession. Eventually, these sins take the form of taking panty shots, which his father detests. Yu knows these actions are wrong, and they truly are wrong: they are sexual violence. What he is doing really is shit. But he has nothing, in the beginning, to establish why it matters that sin is sin, that shit is shit, and that one ought to do anything else. He does not yet have love, and the film is a story of how his gradual encounter with the love in its fullness allows him to pass beyond this dynamic, through an enormously complicated, and at many times violent, process.

But the character I love most in Love Exposure is not Yu; neither is it Yoko, his love interest, who goes through an entwined process of coming to recognize love. It is Aya, the primary antagonist, who has recognized, like Yu, that she is in a state of original sin and yet is never able to transcend it. For Yu, sexuality is both a state of sin and a door to grace: the panty shots through which he sins eventually become a means by which he finds “his Maria,” Yoko, and through her finds love, and through love finds an end to sin. Sexuality is on his side. For Yoko, who has been sexually abused as a child and continues to be abused by Yu, it is more complicated—and it is only, in the end, when she is faced with a disempowered Yu deprived of all sexual authority over him (and made into a woman himself) that she is capable of recognizing love through him. But for Aya, there is no moment of liberation. When she witnesses love, it is Yu’s love for Yoko, and all it does is send her into a violent and fatal despair. Aya has herself been abused: physically and spiritually, like Yu; sexually, like Yoko; and more intensely so than either of them. Neither physicality, nor sexuality, nor spiritually acts as a door to grace for her. She has no route out of shit.

Grace is not discovered by all, even though Aya wants it. Aya spends the film in the company of a parrot, who was present during her abuse and suffered collateral damage from it. She whispers to this parrot something she was instructed to say during her abuse: “Give it to me.” This line appears sexual, but “it,” in context, is “a soul”: having been told that she was soulless for her “obscene” body, she was told to beg God for a soul. It is, then, a prayer, a prayer which marks her last words, but it is never granted. Frankly, I kind of hate Sion Sono, the scriptwriter and director, for this. There are other things to hate him for, given that he is an abusive director who leveraged his authority for sexual benefits, a context which makes Love Exposure, as I have said before, a shit movie. But while the forsakenness of Aya—much profounder than Job’s, since it is a deprivation of love rather than of worldly things, and is never remediated—bothers me intensely, at the very least I cannot say it is kitsch. It may make the movie shit, in the way that this world in which justice and mercy are extinct is shit, but it does not deny the problem of evil. I might hate the movie more if it was, if it denied to Aya the right to hold the unredeemed position that she does:

I am not Aya. My experience of sexuality is not an injustice done to me; it is just shit, and apparently untouched by grace. Combined with the internet, my “sexual awakening” as a pre-teen was so disturbing to me that I only stopped obsessing over it to the point of nausea when I spoke to a priest about the matter in confession fully ten years later. I have never felt at home in my body as a “sexed being,” and whether before or after transition, the idea that I have “sexual organs” has filled me with both genuine incomprehension and hideous distaste. It is almost impossible to see how my sexual feelings could be a means of grace. They have an overwhelming form, which has filled me with unbearable neurosis, and an underwhelming form, insufficient to engage in real encounters of loving intimacy with other human beings. The only real positive development I have been able to make is to decide that my sexuality is not an external alien to be treated with hostility but is part of me, all the time, even during the vast majority of time when it does not touch my phenomenal experience, and that we belong together, just as much as the contents of my colon are with me at all times.

I think this is a fairly common experience of sexuality. It is how many homosexuals have experienced their sexuality—fewer, thankfully, nowadays, thanks to different social conditions. There are many deviant sexual fetishes which guarantee this experience. This is a controversial matter, but I believe it is sexologically established that there are people who, for reasons no one really knows, develop a pedophilic or zoophilic or necrophilic sexuality involuntarily, which they can never morally partake in and which is often a matter of intense angst for people who never wanted this. I am not part of any of those groups, but I can certainly sympathize with what it means to just be dealt a shit hand. There are many other cases of people having obligate fetishes which simply cannot be actually fulfilled, either morally or practically: rape, bug chasing, murder and cannibalism, extreme bodily transformation, affairs with religious celibates. But none of this is required either. It is possible to have a far less “weird” sexuality and still have it never work for you, to consistently feel alienated and broken in your body and in your relationships with other people. You can be attracted to consenting adults and still be mired in incredible frustration trying to fit your body and feelings to the ideal, trying to be satisfied with any possible situation, trying to make anything work out. Perhaps there is a road out, and if there is, it is a wonderful thing! To say it is not a wonderful thing to somehow solve this situation would be to deny that it really is shit. It is good to be Yu or to be Yoko. But nevertheless, the body’s grace is not discovered by all.

And yet, this is in part a problem of the ideal. When I was fixated on readings in second-wave feminism, I was struck profoundly by a line that I believed was from Wittig but I think may actually have been from Irigaray. The point of the line was to ask why certain body parts were considered sexual organs and certain were not: to paraphrase, “Why are the breasts a sexual organ, but not the back?” This struck me so hard because I have always had an incredibly sensitive back: as a teenager, I can remember a moment where I traced my fingers lightly on my back and felt a wonderful tingling, and I was nearly brought to tears because I had not realized the body could create such a spotless form of pleasure. Part of the pleasure, for me, was that it was a pleasure that had nothing to do with sex. My mother has stroked my back, just as her mother stroked her back—it is not a category of proscription, even though it is also a romantic form of intimacy. It is on some level the fact that the back is not a sexual organ that has allowed it to be a means of grace for me, by which the human body is something that opens up under the touch of skin to new experience. But it is also because the back is not a sexual organ that this experience in no way alleviated how irredeemable the sex organs seemed to me, and so did not make its way all the way to the depths of my relation to my body, to how I feel in my skin across all domains of life.

Joy, as Spinoza has explained it to me, is the apprehension of an increase in the powers of existence, in which one is surprised by what one’s body can do. And I have repeatedly been delighted by what my body can do, especially in conjunction with other creatures. Having my back stroked, and stroking another’s back; hugging and cuddling those I love, whether family or romantic partners; kissing has certainly, at its best, been a wonderful specifically-romantic experience. I have loved giving blood, becoming a system of flows by which, in an unconscious way, I fulfill the commandment to “visit the sick.” And then there are the subtle communions, that have so delighted me since I first learnt of them: chief of all, that I host so many microbes. I am overjoyed by the thought that I survive through countless helpful viruses, passed onto me during my gestation by my mother, and that I am part of how these viruses develop and spread between people. I love the bacteria in my stomach, my mouth, my skin—even in my sexual organs, which normally repulse me, I love the microbiota deeply. I love how I am organic matter, able to be consumed: when a mosquito drinks my blood, or a human does through a donation, I see the picture of how, one day, I hope to be willingly consumed by the creatures of the elements. Of course, all of these communions could be marked by violence. Any means of being touched can be a violation in the right context. Certainly, to be literally consumed can be shit. But there is something more than shit as well, and I have found it there.

Yet there is, within me, a kind of ghastly semblance, an embalmed self. My sexuality has been subject to such an embalming. A sexuality has to seem like a sexuality, and so a heavy-chemical operation is apparently performed on my body and its communions in order to create the sexed body. The embalmed self becomes part of me. There is, I think, a danger to putting it a bit too much like a fall from grace, from polymorphic sexuality to Oedipal sexuality to use Freudian terms. It’s not that polymorphic sexuality, the tactile intimacy of two-lips-touching-all-the-time that Irigaray writes about beautifully in This Sex Which Is Not One, is lost. It is not that one sexuality has been replaced with another: that is the narrative of the embalmed sex, which, phallic, is seen to be “one,” and so sees its predecessor as another “one.” In fact, the whole problem is that the warm-wet-system-of-flows comes to be understood through a kind of speculum of sexuality, through the mirror of the embalmed sex. A divide is made between the sexual and the non-sexual, between that which is one and that which is not-one, as if “one” and “not-one” were comparable forms of objects. The divide is experientially real and non-trivial. It may be a delusion in the Buddhist sense, but it is entrenched within conventional reality such that it requires to be worked through to some conclusion. It simply is the case that the many operations of my body that I delight in do not eradicate the existence of that body which has caused me so much suffering.

I suppose that this is why the “Toxic Yuri Aufhebung” has been a reality for me in the first place. I cannot embrace the embalming, but to run to its negation does not actually move beyond it. So what, exactly, can I do?

“Then the elder stood up and stretched his hands towards heaven. His fingers became like ten lamps of fire and he said to him: ‘If you want, you can become all flame.’”

Sometimes, when I wake up with my girlfriend, she seems to be like the sun, or the moon. That was, actually, why I wanted to write this post in the first place. It is a strange kind of beauty because it is visual and yet it is not. It is a product, in large part, of touch. It happens because I am confronted with the experience of having held her throughout the night, my skin against her skin, and of the subtle implications—the microbiomes of our skin merging together, the exchange of non-sickening viruses, the production of chemicals like oxytocin in response to touch. And yet it really is visual. I open my eyes and I see her as though she were one of the luminaries of heaven, and it feels like I see that which I have not seen, a creature which I do not know according to the mode of seeing, yet which, nevertheless, I see.

There is something that always gets me about that line, “becoming one flesh.” In some sense, there is only one flesh. “Even one who is a dog has been one’s father, for the world of living beings is like a dancer. Therefore, one's own flesh and the flesh of another are a single flesh.” Even just breathing, there is an exchange of microbes between two people, to say nothing of the subtle creatures of thought, the words and grammars and concepts and inflections, the tiny patterns you will never notice you have borrowed. Sadie Plant has pointed this out as the means by which sea becomes hypersea, the sense in which we have never departed from her glorious depiction in Zeroes + Ones of the prokaryotic ocean, which has so inflected my understanding of the waters of the day of beginnings, which I return to all the time:

Those were the days, when we were all at sea. It seems like yesterday to me. Species, sex, race, class: none of it meant anything at all. No parents, no children, just ourselves, strings of inseparable sisters, warm and wet, indistinguishable one from the other, gloriously indiscriminate, promiscuous and fused. No generations. No future, no past. An endless geographic plane of micromeshing pulsing quanta, limitless webs of interacting blendings, leakings, mergings, weaving through ourselves, running rings around each other, heedless, needless, aimless, careless, thoughtless, amok. Folds and foldings, plying and multiplying, plicating and replicating. We had no definition, no meaning, no way of telling each other apart. We were whatever we were up to at the time.

And then the ending:

To all intents and purposes, we had disappeared.
“Subtly, subtly, they become invisible; wondrously, wondrously, they become soundless—they are thus able to become their enemies’ Fates.”
Sun Tzu, The Art of War

Subtly, the substance in which all modes inhere is there. Subtly, there is fire in everything: a form of life goes extinct like a fire is extinguished. Even the light and heat of the heavens is fire, in the form of a sign. Nevertheless, my proclamation earlier is moot—I have already become aesthetic. And so it is a matter not of eradicating that conventional reality but of bringing it into encounter, of making the flesh matter to the reality which inheres in the flesh. Here is the body’s grace; in the terms of the Lotus Sutra, here is skillful means. Here are the luminaries of the fourth day.

One day I will decompose. It may be by my siblings who are inheritors of air, or of water, or of earth. It may also be by the creatures of fire. One way or another, some entropic process will reduce me to dust. But when that happens, what will have decomposed? Whose body will it be?

It is easy to picture how it might not be my body at all. If I am a semblance, a discrete one, then I am over as soon as my consciousness blips out. If it is to be my body, I must be something less discrete, part of a system of flows, not merely myself but also the world. Then there will be no end to me, because I know that there shall be a world to come, when all this flesh shall return from the dust again. This world will not be the same; its semblances will not be the same; but nothing is ever the same. The microbiota die moment by moment, and the larger things die as well, in their appointed seasons. There shall be a time when the spirits of heaven, parted from us on the second day, shall abide with us as closely as the spirits of heaven abide with us now, as the subtle flux in our bodies and thoughts and in the world around us. There shall be a time when the uncreate spirit of God abides this close to us as well. Yet if I am that which is held in common, if I am that which is held in constant embrace, there is no veil to part me from that world. I am that of which it is said, “My soul is in your hands at all time.”

On some level, this is exemplified for me most of all in the Eucharist. Every time I take the Eucharist, I say the first two verses of the Song of Songs: I say them in Hebrew, but in English they are, “Song of the Songs, which is of Solomon: May he kiss me with kisses of his mouth, for better your loving than wine.” The kisses of his mouth are the host upon my tongue, and the loving that is better than wine is the chalice upon my lips. They work their way into my flesh, into the ecosystems of my mouth and my gut, into my sinews. The body and the blood is within me, and I am within the body and blood. And so, too, is the communion of everyone everywhere, in their incarnate selves: the subtle creatures that are within them, of that which has or will consume them in their burial, joining together with me. This is the whole reason that I say “I know” there is a resurrected world—because I encounter it here, over and over again. To quote my past self: “I do not hold aloof from my fellow creature, but I consume my fellow creature utterly and am utterly consumed myself. And yet there is no violence and there is no death and every tear is wiped away.”

But there is a reason I quote an erotic love poem. That which is received, excelling wine, is the kisses of a mouth, is loving. It must not be made too abstract—it is for this reason that the elements, the bread and the wine and the physical church with its altar rail and its chalice and paten and all the diverse people who are there with you, should not be dispensed with. Likewise, loving must not be made an abstraction. It does not suffice to merely imagine the other world, to imagine love.

I am grateful to have a girlfriend who communes with me, because there is no barrier between the luminary and the fire. There is no divide between whom I hold in this world and whom I hold in the world to come; they occur simultaneously, in a kind of syzygy between the stars. There is still shit to deal with. Even the world to come is not kitsch: I was struck by a friend who wondered whether the “pure river of water of life, clear of crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb” (Revelation 22:1) is composed by the act with which God “shall wipe away all tears from their eyes” (Revelation 21:4). There is a suffering which has long shot through human existence, an open wound, which I think must always be given place. And yet, there is something else. There is my “secret fire” (from Paravalence, which my girlfriend wrote).