July 25, 2024
Strolling Hell, Strolling the Biosphere: An Interview with Timothy Morton
Timothy Morton is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University and Director of the Cool America Foundation. They are the author of more than twenty books, including Hyperobjects, Dark Ecology, and Ecology Without Nature. Morton has collaborated with Laurie Anderson, Björk, Jennifer Walshe, Susan Kucera, Adam McKay, Jeff Bridges, and Olafur Eliasson.
An Oxford-educated scholar of Romantic poetry, Timothy Morton’s first extensive engagement with ecocriticism, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics, appeared in 2007 and was followed by The Ecological Thought in 2010. Morton emerged as a thinker of object-oriented ontology (OOO) with his 2013 book Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Hyperobjects enjoyed an enthusiastic reception among artists, and Morton soon began to collaborate with artists such as Laurie Anderson, Björk, and Olafur Eliasson. Morton’s subsequent monographs, including Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (2016) and Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People (2017), have underscored his achievement of becoming a (or perhaps the) leading ecological thinker among those at work today.
And now with Columbia University Press appears Morton’s Hell: In Search of a Christian Ecology (2024). To call this work ambitious would seem quite an understatement but also misleading: the text is driven less by ambition than by a project of love, humility, and care. Yet Morton also exhibits deep learning in literature, literary criticism, biology, psychoanalysis, philosophy, and theology. Only a polymath could have written Hell, but what is this book? An angelology? A demonology? A musicology? A pharmacology? An existential psychoanalysis? A treatise on the pedestrian sublime? A committed anarchist political intervention? In some ways, Hell is all of these. It elaborates a startlingly post-anthropocentric phenomenology of the interface between the sacred and the biosphere with the goal to search out an ecological religion, an Abrahamic one, specifically a Christianity.
Robert Savino Oventile: I suppose that in many instances, human infants, could they do so, would vociferously exclaim, “No! No!” in response to their own birth. However, Hell engages another mode of birth, irreducible to yet inseparable from biological birth, which solicits a joyous “Yes! Yes!” How would you introduce Hell’s study of these births in their entanglement with each other and with the biosphere to readers unfamiliar with your previous work?
Timothy Morton: I love this question. So here’s another one. God created the angels, and one of them became Satan, and led a rebellious army against the others. God got a “B” for his first attempt, as it were: Satan was a definite possibility, as when I started to rouse myself out of a year-long depressive episode, and horrible, self-wracking doubt and fear plagued me. So why the heck would God then say to himself, “I’ve got it, by Jove! Now I’ll aim for a C, and create a physical universe, replete with mortal beings!” And then, to cap it all, “Now I’ll really go for it and aim for a D, by having those two guys kicked out of Eden.” When John Milton says at the end of Paradise Lost that Adam and Eve have “A paradise within thee, happier far,”[1] was he just smiling through the tears of despair?
Physical beings are up a level from incorporeal ones. Gnosticism has it upside down. We aren’t spiritual beings trapped in a world of matter. We are physical beings trapped in a universe of terrible, oppressive ideas: subject and object, male and female, masculine and feminine, active and passive, master and slave. That last one is the basic template, a relic left over from that war in Heaven.
One of William Blake’s most mysterious and alluring images is from “The Tyger”: “When the stars threw down their spears / And water’d heaven with their tears.”[2] It seems obvious that the tears are much better than the spears; physical things are an improvement over the so-called spiritual ones.
It is mysterious because it gives body to what giving body is. The mystery, the silence of God, is embodied far better in the physical universe than in the ideal one. That things are mortal and opaque is the still small voice of calm.
Like this answer, Hell is quite a surprise for readers. But you’ll see that really these thoughts have been implicit in all my work. Milton was a poor scholarship student at the same school I also attended as a poor scholarship student, a very poor one; I won the Milton Prize for a story I wrote, twice. I’ve been reading Blake since before I was a teen. My dad had a huge, beautiful reproduction of Blake’s The Ancient of Days resting in front of a white marble fireplace in a purple-carpeted living room with emerald walls, things he paid for with the money he had made from working with King Crimson, the Beatles, and Mike Oldfield. He also sexually abused me. I’m me because of all these things. Everything I wrote previously was a symptom of this. I’m just looking at it head on, in this book. But while writing the book, a series of amazing coincidences occurred that caused me to return to one of the worst times of my life: around 1982, when I was confirmed as a Christian in the basement of St. Paul’s Cathedral (my school’s church), but felt like the devil because of the things that had happened to me, and blamed that feeling on my intelligence because of PTSD denial. The brain is very protective.
So I went on this huge journey that encompassed Buddhism and Jacques Derrida and Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, via Carl Jung and Acid House and drugs and alcohol. But when a surgeon cut me open five different ways in March 2023, it was like Lasik for my soul and suddenly . . . So you can expect more of this. For my next trick? A book called All Heaven Broke Loose.
The real surprise was how the ecology-loving (since the age of four) parts of me connected so deeply with the Christianity-smitten parts of me. Writing Hell disclosed to me a wild and awesome idea that is so simple and obvious, it’s like 1 + 1 = 2 once you see it. And you can’t un-see it. It’s about the physical world, our biosphere in particular, and its relation to the divine.
RSO: Another subtitle for Hell might be: “Dealing with Ambiguous Overlaps of the Very Worst with the Very Best.” Does that seem right to you?
TM: It really does. Thank you for that. Ambiguity is a signal of accuracy. When you’re at the optometrist’s office, it always gets down to a choice about the strength of your glasses that seems impossible to decide: “Is it number one, or number two . . . number one, or number two?” And you give up at that point, because you and your money and your doctor and the equipment and optometry have run out of rail tracks. You have exactly one ambiguous choice: a very exact one between at least two equally good interpretations of your vision. Either way you’ll have good glasses. What does it mean? You have an accurate prescription. Taken to a certain limit, this implies that it is possible for “true” and “false” to overlap; for what you’re calling the “worst” and the “best” to overlap.
The worst and the best overlap because of our physical precision: we are precisely these and not those beings. We are humans, not fish forks. At some point, our ability to discriminate gets in a tangle, and our eyes and our brain and our education can’t tell anymore whether what we’re looking at is squiggles or letters. The difference between meaningful and meaningless starts to break down. If you are considerate and smart, that is. If you have been poisoned by QAnon, you already know what everything means in advance. You know that I’m a pedophile lizard from space who drinks baby blood. But when you learn to read poetry or study science, you’re really learning how to not read or interpret for as long as you can . . . how to let the wall of data be ambiguous and opaque for as long as you can. This is called being nonviolent.
So terrible things might overlap with wonderful things, and you’re missing out if you have a wonderful-thing template you impose on everything. In fact, it could be worse. If you think you’re the smartest, or worse, if you think you’re the goody, you might be the very embodiment of evil. Fascists are people who are certain that they are goodies.
The phenomenology of Christianity appears to follow the Passion. If you let things get so terrible that you can barely stand up, you’re crawling around on the floor in terrible pain, your head burned to a cinder, it’s right then that you find God was always there. It reminds me of a lovely passage in the lyrics of a Yes song by Jon Anderson, which didn’t quite make it into the final draft of Hell: “Turn around and remember that / When it gets so low / As you finally hit the ground.”[3]
In esoteric Buddhism, they say that the very depth of the Dark Age is when the idea of enlightenment becomes as obvious as the light switch on your bedroom wall.[4]
Or in Blake’s age of revolution (the American, French, and Haitian revolutions, for example) and terror (the Reign of Terror in France, for example), when in England you could get imprisoned in the Tower of London if you were chatting in a group of more than two people in the street and the authorities didn’t like the look of you. In that world Blake wrote The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Who is getting married? Ideas are getting married to the body (and therefore to the biosphere) from which they grow.
RSO: Hell contrasts demonic angels (bright, polished vectors of malignity) to angelic demons (dark, damaged vectors of benignity). How might readers, in their day-to-day lives, in average everydayness, sense or feel that one or the other of these entities is at work?
TM: These are beautiful questions that follow one another so fluidly. Thank you. Unfortunately the demonic angel has to have some kind of accident to wake up, to get back into their lovely, opaque, ambiguous, physical body and cease their war in the heaven of ideas. They know they’re the goody, you see. So if you find yourself getting snarled up in something—the place of “wailing and gnashing of teeth”[5]—the very pain of it might be so absorbing that you stub your toe. Hopefully it’s a minor accident. Or it’s that you can’t use a certain feature on your phone. The Devil starts messing with you, because you’re messing with the Devil.
Then you realize you’re a bit wrong, a bit evil, a bit stupid, and you start to smile. Congratulations: you have snapped out of demonic angel mode, and you have remembered you’re an angelic demon. Just one more angelic demon, trying to make a difference.
Think about it this way. Feeling like a rubbish student is how being a good student feels. Feeling like a bad parent is how being a good parent feels. Feeling like a kind of terrible country is how being a great country really feels. Admitting to the legacy of slavery is step one of how you get over it. Feeling a bit “evil” is how being good feels. It’s the best thing in the world, like the few minutes after you’ve thrown up, whether from food poisoning or grief.
RSO: The historian Dipesh Chakrabarty has stated that the situation of anthropogenic global warming, which pushes the Earth system out of its most recent configuration (the Holocene epoch) and confronts humanists with the distinction between socioeconomic globalization and the planet as the Earth system undergoing rapid transformation, calls for a new “philosophical anthropology.”[6] Would you consider Hell to be a contribution to a new philosophical anthropology for an ecological age? If not, why? If so, how?
TM: Yes, I would. I really would. Chakrabarty is a friend of mine. He has a deep, ontological, spiritual side to his thought. The polysyllabic sociologistics of his thought only disguise that spiritual component if you haven’t read a lot of his work, or if you have never talked at length to him about it.
Desperate times call for desperate measures, and talking sciency hasn’t met Joe Average, or Joe Truck Driver (as I like to call them), where he’s at, not one little bit. So just tactically speaking, talking Jesus would be good. Now this is the place in the interview where you really have to brace for impact, because what I’m about to say is the controversial core of my argument, namely that scientistic language is not phenomenologically scientific. It is biblical, if anything. Scientistic language is the language of revenge: it says to its addressee, “You’ll be laughing on the other side of your face when you find out the science was right, you stupid evil fool.” Unfortunately, mercy trumps revenge. Everyday mercy is better than revenge. So lamentably, sciency language is less good than “Jesus loves you anyway,” the dumbest version of which inoculates Joe Truck Driver against accidental hellfire and brimstone.
Jesus is about mercy, because life is about mercy. Life is the physical, chemical universe of revenge (this molecule eats that one) having mercy on itself, for a moment. Slowing it down. We live in a quantum universe, not a mechanism, where genuinely new things can happen, such as quantum random numbers that can never be predicted. The future is safe from the past on a fundamental level. Time is jiggling: there’s no forward gear at the bottom. At the ground state. And life is an expression of that mercy. And humans are an expression of that life. And Jesus is an expression of those humans.
When you subtract the obviously idolatrous white European heretical version of Christianity, which was a blasphemous war against the Holy Spirit in the form of settler colonialism, you find that Christianity is one of the most ecological paths.
RSO: Useful for stating wishes (“I wish I were in . . .”), the subjunctive grammatical mood in Hell takes on a more than grammatical importance. You move the subjunctive away from merely denoting something counterfactual: “We hear subjunctive as ‘nonexistent’ because of prejudices about what exist means. We think exist means ‘to persist in constant presence’.”[7] Rather, you write, “The real is subjunctive: mediation and illusion are inscribed in the real.”[8] Belief, the sacred, and meaning become matters of the subjunctive touching on the virtual. How should readers understand the stakes of the subjunctive in Hell? Does the inscription of the subjunctive in the real short-circuit attempts to sort Christians into fake versus real, inauthentic versus authentic?
TM: “Let there be light.” I rest my case.[9] No, but really, the subjunctive is so underrated. Microsoft Word has been telling us for ages that it’s no good. But the realm of “might be” is the realm of the future, the real one, the one that is safe from the past, safe from what Blake calls Satan’s “Watch Fiends.”[10] When you talk in subjunctive mode, it’s really powerful: “I have a dream.”[11] Martin Luther King Jr. had won already, when he said that. He opened up the gateway. He gave white people a “might be” off ramp for their racism, as well as Black people a vision of a genuinely different age. “Things might have turned out otherwise” is quantum-theory true, and it’s the little grain of heavenly sand in the lake of pus of a terrible moment in your life.
My wife Treena is a huge reason why I was born again. Just before the surgery, I had started talking with her in earnest—we weren’t married yet—and she declared herself “very religious” and told me her mother and brother were pastors, preachers, teachers. In Montego Bay, Jamaica. We had this huge conversation and it went quiet, we were texting, she was in Jamaica, I was in Houston. And it went really quiet, and she said, “An angel must’ve flown over the house.” Two days later, I was a Christian. One day later, I found my long-lost stepfather—my real father—through an agency, and wrote to him. He’s also Jamaican.
The subjunctive mood is an angel flying over the house of language. “Subjunctivity”—the title of an essay Treena wrote with me[12]—is an angel flying over the house (Greek: oikos) of our ecological world. Our house in the largest and wettest sense.
RSO: Gnosticism often describes the creation evoked in Genesis, burgeoning, flourishing, and teeming with lifeforms, as the botched, abject realm of a fumbling demiurge, to which the gnostic has fallen and from which the gnostic yearns to escape by returning to a state of timeless and full completeness. Hell proposes a “flipped Gnosticism.”[13] How does this notion of a “flipped Gnosticism” relate to the book’s description of consciousness, sentience, the self as belated in relation to the biosphere,
a “self” that arrives delayed a fraction from the nerve signals that announce, say, the soil that a worm is tunneling through; a negative image of that tunnel, like noise-canceling headphones. Without this proprioceptive hollow the worm would get stuck, unable to distinguish themselves from their tunnel. . . . The sense of self at bottom is a hollow, a product of environment-canceling headphones, a ghost of a ghost that arrives always later than the actual biosphere that triggered it. The sense of that biosphere is phenomenologically (in) the future, because the sense of self neurologically derives from it![14]
TM: I said some of this in my answer to your first question, in my typical motor-mouthing, jumping-the-gun way. So think about that answer, and add this amazing science from neurology. Sentience basically means that you can make a sort of photocopy of your environment—a worm can feel the tunnel it is digging. (If a plant is sentient, that would mean it can feel the earth it is rooting into.)
But the worm would get stuck in the tunnel if sentience could not also do the following: be sentient of itself. Which at bottom is just an inverted photocopy of that environmental photocopy. Like environment-canceling headphones. The basic sense of self—not the highfalutin concept of ego or ātman, just this basic refrain of “head, shoulders, knees and toes, knees and toes”—is a silhouette of the biosphere it is in.
The backup “image” of the environment around us arrives later than the actual one, because nerve (or otherwise) signals take time to propagate. So this actual world, the real one, is tantalizing out of reach. Phenomenologically speaking, the actual biosphere is (in) the future.
And this is especially true because the “image” of the environment is also (in) the future of the image-canceling headphones that represent the sense of self. The strange feeling that we are just around the corner from Paradise is accurate. Eden was just a couple of milliseconds ago.
Which means that what is called religion is what it feels like to be a sentient lifeform (and I think that’s a tautology). We aren’t some kind of nasty mechanical porridge at the bottom of a cheap metal saucepan in Richard Dawkins’s kitchen, or for that matter in the vision of a random gnostic. That gnostic imaginary, often neoplatonic, edits out the Jewish body and uses insulting parodies of Jewish names to build its case for the world of matter being evil and corrupt. Reductionist scientism and QAnon can’t have my body, or the lilies of the field.
RSO: From the philosopher George Santayana (1863–1952) we receive the dictum about remembering the past rather than repeating it. This comes from his book The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress. Santayana links this dictum to his notion of progress:
Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.[15]
Yet Hell recommends sipping the waters of the Lethe, the river of forgetting. How might the quote from Santayana, indeed with its invocation of progress and its slur against indigenous peoples, contrast with Hell on the question of Lethe (forgetting)?
TM: Gosh, I’m flummoxed. I don’t know! I love not knowing. Perhaps it’s like this: “Forgive and forget” is based on “forget and forgive.” There’s that moment in a terrible fight with someone when you think “Wait, why am I doing this? This is dumb . . .” This is the atomic structure of mercy and forgiveness, the basic ground state. Revenge taking revenge on itself, in a loop. Holding back from that ensuing whack.
At that precise moment, you “re-member.” You don’t remember something, you are literally back in your mortal, quantum-theory body, the one that repairs itself, for a time, because time can jiggle backward, and your living body is a life-o-graph of that basic fact of our universe. Impermanence means you can heal. You can re-member. It’s spontaneous if you let it.
Remembering really means forgetting to forget. Life is cheap, in a good way: evolution is a cheapskate. Forgetting is the basic sentient mode, the “Huh?” moment that makes your eyes cross when you wake up from a dream. This is the atom of remembering. When your ideas of goody and baddy get confused, that’s when you can be kind.
RSO: Does Hell imply a “history of religions” in which Christianity is somehow more consistent or resonant with the latest science, and with Earth system science, than other traditions of the sacred might be?
TM: No, because that’s the teleological story that the idolatrous blasphemous version of Christianity, namely white European Christianity, has been selling as it ravages indigenous cultures and other lifeforms on this Earth. In the name of Heaven. In the name of Heaven on Earth, white Christians created Hell. The new name for Hell is Exxon, a truly demonic name. Blake could not have done better.
Christianity isn’t “better” than something else. At some point, you can’t really think this through, or straight. At least I can’t. But I know that the practice of Christianity, moment to moment, second to second—now that I know it’s not about a kind of idolatry of thought or action where you are fixated on an idea or a way of feeling or being—has to be about being the worst, about failing, about falling to the ground and weeping. And in that moment, you are deprived of the capacity to wink at yourself and go: “Isn’t this just the greatest religion in the world?” Your God forsakes you. The idea that God is yours has totally evaporated. Jesus is the one who saw this through to the end, the end that is the real and genuine precise opposite of atheism. Yes, Slavoj Žižek, my friend, I’m looking at you here.
Think of it this way: If at any point Jesus had winked at someone in the crowd on the way up the hill to the place of crucifixion, as if to say “Hey hey hey! Just you wait, this is gonna be good! I’ll show them in the end!” If he had done that, would anyone have wanted to follow him for even one second of their life?
RSO: If I understand correctly, object-oriented ontology emphasizes the real and distinct singularity of any given object. Readers of your previous works might assume that polytheism all the way down would be more compatible with object-oriented ontology than any monotheism, perhaps especially rather than a monotheism like Christianity, which has tended to reduce other deities or divine beings to prefigurations of the one Christian god and/or to the deceptive entrapments of Satan. Given Hell, it seems that such an assumption of OOO’s resonance with polytheism and its incompatibility with monotheism must be mistaken, but how? For example, does the Christianity Hell pursues imply the simple inexistence of Athena?
TM: The opaque, object-oriented universe, where to exist is to have an underworld, is a distinct improvement from the swirl of crazy ideas in (as) God, just like this book, as my creation, is much better than me. Why would God want to make something worse? The world of unique and mysterious things expresses God in the same way that “hush” can sometimes be the most apt way to talk about something. The Word in Paradise Lost is “Silence . . . peace.”[16] Milton understood what he was doing. He was a poor boy with access to three mega operating systems: Latin, Greek, Hebrew. He was living in a time of revolutionary upheaval on the inside and on the outside, in the wake of a dramatic rise in literacy rates (Puritans reading the Bible silently). This keyboard, this bathroom countertop on which I’m balancing my computer, that is God saying “Shhh . . . ” The word “mystery” comes from the Greek muein, which means “to close the lips, go mmm.”
But I’m stuck. I can’t say that this is monotheism, what I am talking about here, so I can’t say whether it is better than polytheism, or even different from it. At some point theology becomes weaponized as philosophy and starts to be “right” in an aggressive way. In writing this book, I’ve had a wonderful conversation with my editor, who is decidedly polytheistic, or rather Wiccan, to be precise. And I would’ve thought myself this way, a lot. Avebury and Stonehenge are my go-to destinations in England. Buddhism starts to dissolve into the shamanistic Bon tradition of Tibet, the more you study it. And I have made a powerful case for animism throughout my work.
And I still am. “Animism,” a European pejorative term, is where the Holy Spirit became visible to a conquering white mindset . . . as a ridiculous and abject enemy. The fact that I can’t think this through is a symptom of my whiteness.
RSO: How does Christianity, or the Christianity Hell articulates, help to challenge racism, sexism, and class oppression? Paul, for example, seems to suspend or erase what readers today call race, gender, and class differences via a Platonic androcentric oneness, or is there another logic at work in Galatians 3.28?: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.”
TM: I love that bit. The bits about subjugating women and keeping slaves are kind of horrible, and that is an understatement. Erasing things never seemed as good as multiplying differences though to this Derrida fan, so I love the “neither . . . nor” logic in the quote by Paul here.
Thinking all this through—and acting and loving it through—is how we reach a truly ecologically just future. I said it in the first paragraph of Ecology without Nature, in the form of a dog whistle, and no one but the fascism-lite adherents of ecocriticism really noticed it. But those guys did see it, and as a consequence I got death threats, was stalked, and so on. Since then, I’ve been getting louder, and louder, and louder about this. How humans treat each other is how they treat the biosphere.
RSO: Certain threads in Hell deal with auditory phenomena, especially with voice and music. How would you introduce readers to the importance of the sonic in Hell?
TM: I love music so much. I love it. I love dancing. I came of age in the second “Summer of Love,” in 1988. And the DJ with whom I came of age, David “Pump Up the Volume” Dorrell,[17] ran the first club I ever went to. It was called LOVE, and one of his flyers is the frontispiece of my book.[18] It’s an image of the Virgin Mary. I got to know Dorrell in the course of getting permission to reproduce the image, and now we are very close friends. It turned out he’s a fan of my work. How incredibly wonderful is that. I just made friends with his friend Sally, the singer of A Man Called Adam, one of the most important groups of the Ibiza/Acid House/Rave scene. This is truly Heaven on Earth.
Dancing is one of the main ways I engage with this actual physical gorgeous world. And so is music. Music opens me up so much that when I play music—I mean, play the violin or bass guitar, or sing, or play the synth (I do all those), or compose music on my computer—something very heavy happens. I used to say that making music teleports me to the outer moons of Saturn, that is to say, it puts me far, far away from my idea of myself, it buries me in the biosphere, and my freaked-out mind interprets that to mean that I’ve wandered far from (the idea of) Earth. How ironic is that.
So music is more than an example of something. It’s my meat and potatoes. My lectures and my writing all draw on this secret superpower.
A few weeks ago, a friend tweeted, “What is the best single second of music for you?” And I could answer at once: the first second of Prince’s “I Would Die 4 U,” the downward guitar swoop like an angel reaching down and rescuing you with a lovely swipe of pleasure. A song that made me weep (in a good way) even when I thought I wasn’t a Christian.
RSO: Thank you very much for taking the time to do this interview. Here’s my last question: who are the top five musical artists you would recommend readers should play in the background while they read Hell?
TM: How funny. I keep answering questions before you ask them. Laura Mvula (anything of hers! She’s a genius), Prince (The Lovesexy album, try it), Fred Hammond (“No Weapon,” “Philippians 4:7”), Donald Byrd (“Love Has Come Around”), Mr. Fingers (“Can You Feel It: Martin Luther King Mix”). But there has to be a sixth: A Man Called Adam (“Easter Song,” “Love Forgotten”). Okay, seven, you asked for it: Maze (“Joy and Pain,” live).
Just try this Spotify playlist I’ve made with David Dorrell, Divine Images: The Remix of Heaven and Hell. You’ll see.
Robert, it’s been an honor and a pleasure. Thinking is a team sport, and I can’t do my work without talking to wonderful people like you.
Notes
Excerpts from Hell by Timothy Morton. Copyright 2024 Columbia University Press. Used by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.
[1] Milton, Paradise Lost, 12.587.
[2] Blake, “The Tyger,” 17–8.
[3] Yes, “In the Presence Of.”
[4] See Morton, “Thinking the Charnel Ground,” 75, 86, and 90.
[5] Matthew, 13.50.
[6] Chakrabarty, The Climate of History in a Planetary Age, 90.
[7] Morton, Hell, 26.
[8] Morton, 175.
[9] Should readers wonder how “Let there be light” (Genesis 1.3) may serve as a gateway to considering the subjunctive as Hell engages that grammatical mood, please consider: yes, “Let there be light” may be read as in the imperative mood, where the “verb form used is the stem” and in “effect the subject is you, but is not stated” (Seely, Oxford A–Z of Grammar & Punctuation, 73): “Hey, you, let there be light.” But in Genesis 1.3, who would the implied “you” be, especially when also considering that the “imperative mood is used to make commands” (Seely, 73)? In Genesis 1.3, to whom would the command (if it is one!) be addressed? Imagine a thirsty person walking through a desert alone and uttering, “Let there be water.” This utterance may be an imperative, yet rather than a command is the utterance not a prayer? The Latinate terms omnipresent, omniscient, and omnipotent tend to confuse the god of the Israelites with a Roman general who, on the way to becoming a dictator, might say, “I came, I saw, I conquered,” and much biblical interpretation casts the god of Genesis as a dictator whose voice is omnipotent. The voice says “let X be” and X is, and so the dictator’s voice has created from nothing something. The Christian creatio ex nihilo interpretation of “Let there be light” comes from the second century CE. What if, rather than a figure of Roman omnipotence who dictates what happens, the god of Genesis were engaged in prayer? In the darkness, this god prays for light and, mercifully, there is light. If the reader imagines this god being utterly alone in the dark, this god has mercy on themselves (this god being non-binary, see Genesis 1.27), so that the creational events following the “Let be” statements are events of mercy happening in response to prayers expressing subjunctive wishes: “And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life” (Genesis 1.20). The “Let be” statements, utterly disarmed prayers arising from subjunctive wishes (“I wish there were life, say whales”), show the first chapter of Genesis to imagine the emergence of what we now call the biosphere as a series of miracles of mercy, life as the Earth system having mercy on itself.
[10] Blake, “Milton,” 23.40.
[11] King, A Call to Conscience, 85.
[12]Morton and Balds, “Subjunctivity.”
[13] Morton, Hell, 3.
[14] Morton, 78.
[15] Santayana, The Life of Reason, 284.
[16] Milton, Paradise Lost, 7.216.
[17] See (listen to) Dorrell’s “Pump Up the Volume” on YouTube, featuring video art created by Vaughan Oliver, the graphic designer who is also responsible for the album covers of the Cocteau Twins, for example their album Tiny Dynamine (1985).
[18] Dorrell, “Love Is a Religious Experience.” Reproduced with permission in Morton, Hell.
Works Cited
Anderson, Jon, Steve Howe, Chris Squire, and Alan White. “In the Presence Of.” Magnification. Eagle Records, 2001.
The Bible: Authorized King James Version with Apocrypha. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Blake, William. “Milton.” In The Complete Poetry and Prose, edited by David V. Erdman, 95–143. New York: Anchor, 1988.
——. The Complete Poetry and Prose. Edited by David V. Erdman. New York: Anchor, 1988.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. The Climate of History in a Planetary Age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021.
Cocteau Twins. Tiny Dynamine. 4AD, 1985.
Dorrell, David. “Love Is a Religious Experience.” Flyer for Religious Experience, LOVE at the Wag Club, Wardour Street, London, 1988.
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