The shape of our mind, is formed by the shape of our environment. “If you don’t know where you are, you don’t know who you are” -Wendell Berry
“But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, fancy to reality, the appearance to the essence…illusion only is sacred truth profane. Nay, sacredness is held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness.” - Ludwig Feuerbach
If the Manhattan Project was the hermetically sealed ritual that demolished the metaphysics of the old world, 2001: A Space Odyssey played the cinematic role of presenting the public with a right of passage into a new vision of the future, merging man and technology and reversing the meaning of Apocalypse. Both events served to propel the imagination into a reality beyond the senses, proposing an explosive potential within every micron, and dreamlike worlds beyond the firmament of our common experience. It wasn’t the bomb, or outer space that mattered. It wasn’t even matter that mattered anymore. The narrative was king. And the in order to bring in the new narrative, the old had to be destroyed.
The old world screen was the sky, decorated with incomprehensible beauty; the firmament holding the waters of divine infinity at bay. Instead of looking up we now look down, at the firmament phone holding the demonic infinity at bay.
During the premiere of 2001 in 1968, audiences on LSD flocked to the film, returning for multiple visits. After noticing the trend in viewership, the studio gave the movie a new tagline: “The Ultimate Trip” advertising it as the Homerian epic of the 20th century, a siren call towards a new worldview; calling the ship of our “old beliefs” towards the sharp, fragmenting rocks of a disincarnate vantage point. The movie didn’t just serve as an escape from the decline of the West, it attempted to project the entire psyche of western man into a living scientific fantasy.
The movie deserves a much more thorough unpacking of the myriad layers of symbolism and propaganda. Buried within every frame of Kubrick’s prelude to the moon-landing is an entire essay of commentary. But this article is really only about one element of the film, and primarily what the film itself represents: the screen.
By 1968, America, and most of the West was already living within a scientific world. The “bomb” had been dropped, the wars had been fought, the Machine was churning, identity was crumbling. Yet religion still crept in the minds of men, seeking a home to haunt. 2001 was science giving birth to its own religion. A religion of mixture, fluidity, quantum leaps, self-authority. The religion was called: globalism. Now so overused that we don’t even blink. No one told us this, it crept in on little cat feet, an invisible fog that began to intoxicate all who dared inhale.
In 1969, a year after the biggest movie of the century was released, we “landed on the moon” and Americans were given a massive peek at the icon of the new world,🌎 a shiny globe, on the new icon screen: the television. ‘69 was the perfect year to invert reality. Up became down. 6 became 9. The spectacle replaced the evident. The Earthly experience became something we could stand outside of, at least hypothetically.
Ever since Descartes put the horse in front of himself and Kant skeptically thought himself into a prison of his own thinking, we’ve been edging towards a complete renovation in our understanding of the world “out there”. Not just “out there” in space but even the way we perceive the sun coming through our windows.
“[With the globe] meaning does not lie in the relational context of the perceiver’s involvement in the world, but is rather inscribed upon the outer surface of the world by the mind of the perceiver. To know the world, then, is a matter not of sensory attunement but of cognitive reconstruction. And such knowledge is acquired not by engaging directly, in a practical way, with the objects in one’s surroundings, but rather by learning to represent them, in the mind, in the form of a map.” -Tim Ingold
What Ingold is describing here is the apotheosis of the Kantian worldview. The world become the construct of imaginary forces relayed into our brain machines to produce hallucinatory qualities. The map becomes the territory.
“Thus, as cosmology gives way to technology, the relation between people and the world is turned inside out, so that what was a cosmos or lifeworld becomes a world – a solid globe – externally presented to life. In short, the movement from spherical to global imagery corresponds to the undermining of cosmological certainties and the growing belief in, and indeed dependence upon, the technological fix. It is a movement from revelation to control, and from partial know- ledge to the calculated risk.” - ibid
The Cross….getting to the point.
The crucifixion as a central event in history, both literal and mythological, transcends history itself, fashioning itself as the incarnational hub of all existence, sucking every sober conscience towards its unending mystery. The Word Himself died on the cross so that everything unreal could be destroyed: since everything unreal is asleep, dead, static, dark, pointless. The Cross is the elephant in the room that shatters the room itself. The Cross is the real atomic bomb that destroys both space and time, smashing our idols and breaking wide open the way towards Life.
When we turn from this event, this Cross, away from Christ, reality becomes a screen, an avoidance of our true calling. We stop participating with Christ, and avert our eyes towards simulacrum. When we turn away from metanoia, (the turning towards Christ), we turn away from making ourselves truly present. Here becomes “out there”. And so does our home. Earth, strangely an anagram of “heart”, becomes all head, discombobulated and wobbling. We become untethered, disincarnate, distrustful of our everyday senses and more trusting towards our smooth and shiny devices.
In Nietzsche’s words:
The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. “Whither is God?” he cried: “I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods to decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.
Our engagement in the transcendent meaning of life cannot come from mere attention of things and events, but in participation with life. The difference between attention and attending is profound and teleologically infinite. Understanding this difference is in fact tantamount to our own view of salvation. Even the demons in the story of the demoniac were aware of Jesus Christ as the Lord of the Universe, they were attentive to him but they were not participating with, attending with Jesus Christ as the Lord of the Universe. They are not joined with him at the eternal banquet, they are watching him on Zoom.
Attending has been replaced with attention. Such a tiny difference might seem trivial, but the implications of this gap is the anti-mustard seed which grew the tree of forgetfulness and has thrown us out of the garden of our senses. We no longer attend paradise, we pay “attention” to it because we are outside of it, submerged into the oblivion of a parallel digital world. And this parallel world came to a head in the middle of the 20th century when the buildings we live in harkened towards the monolithic copies of the devices we were to scroll on.
The decline of architecture and the decline of the mind are one and the same. We don’t just dwell on things, we dwell in them. The architecture of our thoughts reflect itself in the shapes of our buildings.
Just look at the dwellings that our culture has vaunted over the last century and you will find a correlate in the thoughts that have been promoted. As a mind needs a body, so an idea needs an architecture. Thus, as our architecture proclaims with pride: we are living increasingly in a world without context, an unmoored existence with no set of coordinates for meaning. In the world we left behind all things, whether intellectual or physical exist within a space, a gestalt that gives each thing a right relationship to everything else. To take something out of its space, to remove the context is to take away its relationship with life itself.
It’s as if a giant black artifact from science-mythos world is attempting to take over our ability to participate.
Likewise, the things of this world, when they are removed from a relationship with their creator, promise a deceptive fulfillment that they are incapable of delivering. The story of the Garden is the archetypal echo of the story we continue to play out day after day in this eighth millennium. Far deeper than a finger wagging, moralistic fable, the Fall is an ontological event, showing the timeless impact of a choice to place our attention on ourselves, even to worship ourselves, rather than God. The sap from the tree is still stuck on our thumbs, as we endlessly scroll our devices, seeking an infinite other than the Infinite Himself. Our attention has not corrected course, it has multiplied into a care for the 10,000 things, as we all stumble around with our heads bowed towards the bitten apple in our hands. Man’s original purpose was to be the mediator between the Earth and Heavens. We still carry this calling, but we are more distracted than ever.
The Way is alone in the Garden. Long ago, in the beginning, He had been abandoned by man in the Garden: Man had turned away from Him, Departing from the primal Simplicity, Fragmenting his nature, Scattering himself in thoughts, imaginations, and desires. - Christ the Eternal Tao (Chapter 13)
A dead battery on my phone is a blessing, an opportunity for repentance, to return to the sanity of stillness, towards the cross, that North Star of incarnational attention. But I admit, as one ruled by my worst desires, I instinctively plug it back in. I act from a foreign center, and awaiting the reassuring glowing fruit. My precious! Maybe, if I put my ear to the dead screen, I could hear the tormented phantoms of distraction, dying beneath a lack of attention. The tricky elves in the machine, surface as shadows alongside the memory of our forgetfulness, combining to reveal a stench buried deep beneath calloused garments of skin. And we, rubbing our eyes, are just beginning to smell the puss from an ancient wound flooding into our world. Many, including myself, are willfully oblivious to the flooding of the cultural ship. The waters have reached the neck. If it weren’t for the brilliance of ancient theology, more specifically, for the vision of ancient Christianity, I wouldn’t have anything valuable to say here. If it weren’t for those who cast off the world to follow the cross, we would all be lost. If it weren’t for the smell of roses, we wouldn’t know the stench of sin.
In my essay on the return of the flat earth, I attempted to demonstrate the distorting effects of living within a dis-embodied cosmology, and that the things our modern culture labels as ‘crazy’ might be bringing us a medicine. The essay was something I’d been trying to frame for a while, namely, the connection between our senses and our sense of the archetypal. There seems to be an interface gap between our sensible reality and the intelligibility of what lies beyond. The reasons are legion and the history of the widening of this gap goes back millennia, arguably into the Garden of Eden where we first chose illusion over Reality.
Student: “How did Adam think? What do the Fathers say his state of mind was?
Blessed Seraphim Rose: “It was a state called sobriety: nepsis in Greek. In other words, he looked at things and saw them the way they were. There was no double thought…in our fallen state ‘imagination’ becomes mixed up with double-thinking: looking at things and imagining something else.”
Everything is symbolic.
The problem with modern thinking is that it applies the symbolic on top of reality, as a glossy finish. My argument here is: The symbol is reality itself in its fullness. This slight aberration of frame, the one that views the symbol as a veneer of meaning, has led to enormous consequences for the quality of our perception. It has exacerbated the “globalized” thinking that turns the world upside down, spins it around, and strips the meaning from words like “up” into psychological orientations, far fallen from their original meaning as architectural orientations of our cosmology.
But there is good news. The answer to this conundrum lies in ancient cosmology, in the way our forefathers understood the world not as distant observers on the outside of the world, but as active participants within the world. As Alexander Schmemann describes in his essay Sacrament and Symbol: “To be ‘symbolical’ belongs thus to its ontology, the symbol being not only the way to perceive and understand reality, a means of participation.”
For most of my life I’ve stared at two kinds of screens. As a UX designer in my twenties, I had no idea that an icon was anything else than a pleasantly shaped, clickable logo, with a well designed gradient. Had I traveled back 1000 years, I would have found a completely different experience of icons. For the ancient cultures, (primarily the original Christian Orthodox tradition), the icon, portraying a saint or sacred event was bathed in gold, usually found in a church. Instead of tapping on these icons with our thumbs, we kissed them with our lips, venerating the saint depicted, communing with the Archetype of Christ as a window into heaven. These icons were, and still are, windows into the sacred, manifesting the events, objects, and people who display the fullness of what this entire experience of human is oriented towards.
Let’s consider that we’re always staring at an icon screen. In fact we are each a moving icon, a walking kingdom of heaven, attending to Creation, kissing or scrolling, we are always participating with something, the eye of our heart is always gazing. How easy it is to bow our heads to the wrong screen. How hard it is to be still. To be silent. May God help us.
More on that later.
Which way modern man?
Great piece. Thank you
Did you wrote it on 9/11 because of the true 2001 or just the providence happened?