on clarity
These days, there is a sense of flimsiness to the shell of my life. I graduated — officially, for real, diploma in my hand and all — about a month ago, and had been done with my exams and classes for another month before that. Since then, I have meandered. I had been desperate for slow days, for a long rest, months or years of indulgent nothingness. That’s what I thought the flimsiness was at first: growing accustomed to having time. I have what I wanted, and I can’t seem to relax. A few months is nothing. A few months is eternity. A few months is enough for guilt to set in, if you’re a certain type of person. I’ve been turning a lot of ideas like this over in my head, and then setting them aside before they can hurt me. I’ve been trying to ignore the guilt. I’ve been catching up on the stories I missed, while I was busy, away, muddling through the intricacies of probability theory.
One of my favourite storytellers lately has been a Youtuber and Twitch streamer called OwengejuiceTV. He’s done a lot of roleplay; I’ve watched nearly all of it. His characters mesmerize me. Some number of months ago, I told a friend that I think the thread that connects all of Owen’s characters is a kind of velocity, a terrible and beautiful clarity that hits you like reaching into a mass of writhing foam and finding an unbending line of metal at its center. They feel like people poised in the moment before a car crash, and like any disaster in slow-motion, I can’t bring myself to look away.
Take his character on the Outsiders SMP, for example. There, Owen tells the story of a man who wakes up with no memory, but cannot stop his hands from fashioning a bow, cannot stop his body from knowing how to draw and fire. He tells the audience in a soliloquy-like aside that this must be an indicator of his past, that he must have been a soldier, an archer, a hunter. This man will go on to repeatedly inflict cruel and pointless violence on the people he woke up in this place with, and he will believe every step of the way that his actions are a true and worthy continuation of that forgotten self’s purpose. Or consider the story Owen tells of Sparrow, from New Life SMP, who wants nothing more than to be greater than himself, who gives himself over to an ancient and terrible power for half a chance at being something special. The power takes him, and Sparrow insists, as he turns on the people who reach out to him, as he kills them with ruthless ease, that this is necessary. That this is right. And then he kills himself, and that is a necessary thing too.
The fact of the matter is that Owen makes characters propelled by forces they do not entirely understand and feelings they cannot entirely articulate, but they are nevertheless sure of themselves, of the rightness of their knowing of the world. There is a sense that these characters are hurtling headlong through their lives with a piercing clarity of vision to guide them. There is a way the world works and I know what it is, Owen’s characters say. Here it is. There is no doubting it.
For years now, I have found myself jealous of factory machines and angels. Owen has played one and not the other, but I’m sure I would recognize myself in the angel just as vividly as I do in the machine: following orders, breaking down, desperate for command. Last Lunar New Year, my cousin and I sat together at dinner. We talked of our futures, because that’s the kind of thing you do on the first day of a new year. He told me his future is already laid out for him, every beat of it. Med school, he explained to me, is like that. You just do the next thing asked of you, over and over, like the thousands before you who did the same. He told me even if he’s rejected this year, he only needs to try again. His parents would be happy, he said, to give up any amount of money to pursue this path. It’s what they want, really: just for him to keep trying. I said, not quite meaning it, “It must be like believing in God.” He agreed with me, actually. We looked at our parents across the big circular table and pretended we weren’t talking about them.
I don’t believe in God. Let’s be clear about that right now. But you have to admit He has a gravity, if not literal, then cultural, metaphorical, narratological. So I find myself listening to this podcast called All Miracles Are Strange, at a recommendation’s recommendation. It’s a podcast about… saints. Suffering. God, probably. Host Lizz Hamilton talks about people called upon by something they call holy to experience unspeakable pain. To devote themselves utterly to, I suppose, the lord on high. She tells a lot of pretty gruesome stories. A teenage girl rotting inside her own body. A sainted woman torn to pieces and forever captured in art touching the very wheel she was tortured with. A different woman who was not actually really a saint, but knew God had chosen her to travel Europe, weeping endlessly, until even the clergy were frightened of her.
The story from this podcast that sticks with me the most, however, is the one Hamilton tells of privileged young women in America who want to become nuns. They have, by all accounts, everything they need and most of the things they want, but they’d give it all up for the simplicity of a life devoted to God. I once looked up one of the articles Hamilton cites. I read it late at night, kept awake by some hollowness I could have called hunger. Some of these women get a taste of that life and waver, maybe turn back. Some don’t. I got to the end of the article and clutched my phone to my chest. Then I rolled over and tried to get some sleep. The clarity of total devotion. Give up everything else. Worship. Do good.
I know I oversimplify. I am not a reliable narrator. I know people struggle with their faith for many reasons. I have read accounts of people who became Catholic later in life, instead of being born into believing. They talked about knowing something perfectly, more perfectly than they have ever known anything. The truth of God. His calling to them to follow Him. Some people converted because they were tired of allowing others to speak over their own reality, to hear from those who didn’t understand that they were mistaken about the truth of the world. Others because there could be no earthly explanation for that unending, undeniable desperation for something bigger than yourself. That’s God. That must be God. You know? I don’t not get it.
And to do this, to choose that kind of faith, to hold that kind of divine truth in your hands, you have to wrestle with it. You have to figure out how to reconcile it with your history and the world’s history. It becomes necessary either to ignore centuries of deplorable actions undertaken by religious leaders and institutions, or to perform the unenviable work of accounting. How do you account for every wrong done, the world over, in the name of God? I cannot in good conscience give myself to Him, for this and other reasons. But these people have the true thing, and nothing will turn them from it. No one will pry their fingers from this belief. No one can make them let go.
I understand that my understanding is superficial. I am sorry if I have disappointed you with it. It’s just that I’ve been thinking about this for a long time. I’d stand at bus stops, on my way to or from school, chanting to myself that I can’t believe in God, that Hell isn’t real, that the thing I long for is far more earthly than that. I think about Christianity sometimes, not as a serious prospect, but with the sort of desperate grasping in the dark of a coyote thinking how to free its leg from a trap. I know I cannot allow my own belief. I know I can’t justify the harm. Under a paradigm like that, any action I take would become a damning one, and to believe that would be to absolve myself of needing to try. Somewhere in the faithless hollows of me, I am convinced holiness looking into me would find me wanting. For all that I am certain I must reject it, I am desperate for it. I am flimsy facade, all the way down.
I don’t really think I’m a good person. I think it would be self-centered and silly of me to really think I’m a bad person instead, though. I lie awake, or wait for the train, or organize my belongings with the open window letting in sun, and the thought is there like a mantra or a knife’s edge. Deciding I’m evil is giving up. Deciding I’m good is growing complacent. I hang in a moment before collision and find it does not satisfy. I tell myself, This is not a question of deserving. This is a question of necessity.
During my final semester of undergrad, my attention span shattered into a million pieces and hasn’t quite recovered for reasons I still haven’t figured out. On occasion, during those months, I would pass the time by reading bad romances too thin to hide their authors’ longings, writing done by people desperate for someone to say to someone else what they wished another would say to them. Often, the message was You deserve kindness. You deserve to live a gentle life. I found them frustrating. I’d hold my criticisms under my tongue during unbearable lectures and let the bitter taste of them fill my mouth. I wanted to shake someone. Don’t you get it? Being alive isn’t a matter of deserving. Things don’t happen to people because of deserving.
And when that got boring, I would put in my earbuds and listen to The Silt Verses instead. It’s an audio drama, telling the story of a world where everything is built on bodies, a world where gods are small, miserable, ravenous things that must be fed with flesh. It is not, you might notice, a world terribly different from our own. The part I love most of The Silt Verses isn’t quite the gods themselves, though. The part I love most is the people talking about their gods. Their voices take on a dreamy quality, sometimes adoring, sometimes trusting, always faithful. And there are a lot of gods, each of them with a gaggle or a legion of worshippers waiting to proselytize to you about them. The Cairn Maiden, for one: she who walks after you for your whole life, patient, forever on the horizon, knowing you will come to her eventually. Someday, say her followers, you will lay your body down at her feet and go to sleep for the last time. She will be your end, no matter what you do, no matter where you go. It sounds restful, doesn’t it? Her followers would say so.
There’s a nameless god of love, too, who calls from the side of the road in one harrowing episode, begging through the open window of a passing car for its occupants to lie down with it, to come home. I remember it when I cross the street: that’s your lover, calling for you to rest, to stop, to forget all else. What could be more important than returning to the open arms of your greatest love? In the fiction, it’s framed as an act of war, something that pierces your every defense, promises you something final and perfect, and ends in an incredible, squelching work of sound design. Everywhere, every character is worshipping something, gods available for every situation. I’ve been thinking about that too: the sermons, the certainty. Even among these little squabbling cults, you have your god. You have what you will give into, you have what will inevitably devour you, but you will be glad to do it. Do I have a funny idea of divinity? If I do, The Silt Verses does too. Give in to what will eat you. Be relieved to do it. You’ve done your part. Lie down. Give up. Let your god devour you.
I should probably say I don’t long for death. I have caught myself half-aware at three in the morning desperate for it, sure, but I wouldn’t ever have opened that door of my own accord. I certainly don’t want to die now; I have more to do. But there was something distantly reassuring about knowing someday there would be a definite end. When my future stretched out too far in front of me, too infinite to settle into comfortably, I would reach for the idea of death and touch it gently, like brushing my pinkie against the handle of a knife.
I’ve read about how one of the symptoms of anaphylactic shock is a sense of impending doom. Not the nervous jitters of what if, but the cool, clear conviction that you are going to die in this place, at this time. Knowing that death is not merely on its way, but already here. People who have experienced it describe being eerily calm — even those well-accustomed to managing extreme anxiety emphasize in their accounts that they’ve never felt anything like it. And I don’t want to go into anaphylactic shock either. I don’t want my organs to fail, I don’t want my death to be so imminent my body gives up on me. I don’t want to be a well-trained dog or a half-formed angel or a decent complication of machinery for the rest of my life. But I’m telling you I think about all of these things often. I think about fictional characters with hooks in their hearts because you need an engine to make the story run. I think about commandments and programmed behaviours. I think about randomized algorithms, which I hated because it was always probabilities on probabilities and computing them all was exhausting.
I know that whatever I am looking for on my horizons is a mirage. It wasn’t fair to nudge my cousin and whisper to him that I’m jealous of our parents, who always seem so sure of what they must do, so deeply embedded in them is their sense of duty, even if he agrees. I’m lying to myself about how much they know, and how much meaning I can ascribe to the certainty they project. I graduated middle school in the summer of 2016, and started high school three months later. I graduated high school in the summer of 2020, and started university three months later. A thin, silvery string of obligation kept me upright like the wires that lead puppets. Really, I was jealous of my cousin too. My cousin watched me pull out my phone, throwing together some last minute citations for a paper due later that night, and told me no one should ever be jealous of me.