Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
-T.S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton”
As an adult, in a new millennium, I will become an atheist, though gradually and after a detour into New Age mysticism. During this detour I will seek out the apocalyptic (in the sense of “revelation” and “uncovering”) in meditation and psychedelic drugs and esoteric literature. The results will be inconclusive. I will still find the end of the universe interesting to contemplate, though I will have no expectation to be around when it happens. The end of human history, on the other hand, will remain an open question.
The word “apocalypse” does not mean the end of the world, nor does it necessarily have to do with catastrophic destruction. Most people don’t know this, because they either first learn the word at church (if they are Christians) or at Hollywood movies. Everyone is familiar with the scenario: a strange new disease is killing people by the thousands, formerly tame animals are attacking people, a comet is screaming through space headed straight for Washington, D.C. Perhaps mankind must do battle with zombies or aliens or the antichrist or Cthulhu. But these evil forces are not ultimately to blame. No, we are to blame, with our hubris, our wickedness. It’s doomsday. It’s Armageddon. It’s the apocalypse.
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| "Don't Fuck With the Apocalypse" by Raymond Pettibon |
During my high school years in the 1990s, I will begin to have recurring nightmares of nuclear destruction. In my childhood, contemplating the destruction of the world will hold no fear for me; in fact, I will find reading all of this crazy end-times literature an odd pleasure. Children cannot contemplate the future as having a real existence, so this activity will be no different than reading a novel or a comic book. As I grow older, however, I will begin to weary of end-times scenarios, my skepticism will grow, and the apocalyptic part of my imagination will be diverted into film and literature (and even my musical tastes will be affected). I will develop a taste for the future-oriented genre of science fiction, and for visionary poets such as Yeats and Blake.
Well, it’s an apocalypse, a variation on a theme first stated by Saint John of Patmos, who wrote down his bizarre visions of the final battle between good and evil on earth. This became the last book of the Bible, and the template for all of those disaster movies you’ve seen. It was called “The Apocalypse of John.” The word’s etymology is Greek, and it is translated variously as “revelation,” “disclosure” or “uncovering.” I prefer the last word, because it implies that there is a world underneath the material world of our ordinary reality, which acts as a kind of veil; it does not imply any divine messenger necessary to aid in the uncovering. “How do you know but ev’ry Bird that cuts the airy way, / Is an immense world of delight, clos’d by your senses five?” asked William Blake.
In addition to picking up threads of loose talk, I will read one of my Dad’s books on prophecy. It will detail the last days: how the world will become wicked, worse than it has ever been (awful to contemplate, considering the decadence of Rome, the holocaust, etc.), how god will destroy particular cities by fire, flood, or earthquake. There will be no Rapture, however, that smug totem of American evangelicals. The saints must stay on earth and duke it out with the sinners, but they will have the guiding hand of the Church, and its prophetic wisdom. One’s own dreams are not out of bounds, either. My Dad will often recount his prophetic dreams.
There is another word for the study of the end of the world: eschatology. Here is the most convincing eschatological scenario, a prophecy but in no sense an apocalyptic one, from the science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov:
“. . . someday, billions of years from now, our sun will expand and the earth will crisp and sere and vaporize into a gas of iron and rock with no sign of the life it once bore.”
Throughout the 1980s, in my childhood, I will often stay up past my bedtime listening to the adults (my Dad, grandparents, aunts and uncles—though not my mom, who is pragmatic and present-oriented) spinning wildly speculative tales about the near future, interpreting contemporary political events in accordance with scripture and the prophets of the Church. Much of this talk will, under the covers so to speak, be motivated by anxieties about the Cold War, though I will not realize this until later. The USSR will be perceived as a major threat to what will be referred to as “the Free World,” though in fact the Soviet menace will by then already be on its last legs, both economically and politically, and doomed to destruction, though this will not be known until a few years later. (In fact, my Dad will maintain his belief in a Russian/Chinese invasion of the United States, including the Rocky Mountain States, Red Dawn-style, well into the next millennium.) In the meantime, I will be led to believe that I may be part of the last generation to live in the world as we know it.
It is kind of breathtaking, this cold cosmic indifference, and it does give some sense of the awe that apocalyptic visions can inspire (the quote comes from an essay called “Science and Beauty”). But from a human perspective it is somewhat irrelevant. True apocalyptic has to do with the final showdown between good and evil. There is, however, a significant overlap between apocalyptic and eschatology. Insofar as the revelation is a revelation of the ultimate nature of reality, we must also be dealing with the final goal of mankind, when god, or the gods, or nature will pass judgment on us.
In 1981, I will be born into a world of magic and miracles. I will be raised on stories about spirits of the dead which pierce the thin “veil” which separates this world and the world beyond to warn those in danger or comfort the grieving, stories of prophetic dreams and miraculous healings. One of these will be about me, in the days following my birth. My father (in the story) will observe a lack of focus in my eyes, and will conclude that I am blind. He will not consult a doctor. He will consult my grandfather, the family patriarch, who will lay his hands upon my head and bless me with the power of his priesthood, and I will be healed. My grandfather, I will be told when I am older, has performed many such miracles, though I will never see any of them myself. This story of my healed eyesight will first inspire awe and gratitude (in my child’s egotism, for being the recipient of the miracle), and then resentment (in my adolescent rebellion, for seeming to owe a debt to god), and finally mere incredulity (as I write these words, finding no other attitude I am able to take).
“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
-Soren Kierkegaard
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