In my time on Earth, I have read a great number of books. Many are inconsequential. Some are impactful. A select few are able to rip my soul so completely asunder that it summons forth tears from my eyes. Among these works which I so deeply revere I count Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus, Eliot’s The Hollow Men, and Fisher’s The Weird and the Eerie.
Each of the above works though, merely contain brief strikes to the consciousness. They strike fast and hurt for a moment. Then, their touch lightens.
More than a year ago, I had the opportunity to work and meet with some very esteemed scholars in the fields of philosophy, literature, and religious thought. I worked closely with them, and I consider myself fortunate to be able to call them friends. One of them, a professor well-regarded in philosophical/theological studies, asked me, “What are your religious beliefs?” Now, as a philosophically-minded person, I never minded being asked the question. But it certainly was a moment of surprise at the question.
If my memory serves, I said something along the lines of:
“It is not a wholly scientistic belief, but certainly also not a theological one.” I then went on to speak at much too great a length about Parmenides and Spinoza and how my thought is some kind of synthesis about the One.
At the time, it was an honest answer, if not completely fleshed-out. It had been a very long time since someone earnestly asked what I believed in. It felt nice that someone who undoubtedly is much more well-versed in matters of God and self would care about what I believed.
Last week, I met with them again for the first time in a while. We had a pleasant dinner, and then went for a cup of coffee. They invited me to join them at a conference at Cambridge, UK. Many of the leading theological minds would be there and I, of course, was ecstatic to be included. This matter of conversation naturally led to a discussion of the attendees and their positions on matters of faith and ethics. Now, I certainly do not look like someone who particularly belongs at a theological and philosophical conference. Being transgender with many piercings and face tattoos, I made a wisecrack that I would not be particularly welcome at this event. At this each of these people turned to me with faces as if I said that their dearest relatives had just died.
I was given a short, deserved lecture about how one of the foremost thinkers in philosophy, ethics, and religious thought was actually one of the most important figures in the advancement of queer people in the church. That he was a saint, and that even those who disagree with him on all fronts consider him holy. This gave me much to think about.
A few days later, we met again for dinner, and had a conversation about literature. I was introduced Notes from Underground by Dostoyevsky, A Short Story of the Antichrist by Solovyov, and The Body’s Grace by Williams. Each of these texts piqued my interests in different ways. A Short Story of the Antichrist for its apparent relation to Peter Thiel, The Body’s Grace because I could respect a straight theologian who wrote about gay issues in the 80s, and finally, Notes from Underground.
Notes from Underground differs from the texts mentioned at the beginning of the present text. The text does not build up to punchy conclusions or witty aphorisms. It was not a work of disembodied poetry or non-fiction. It represented an incessant literary assault on my entire mode of being. Never before has a text so instantly gripped my mind and driven me to tears. In extra-textual analysis of the work, there seems to be mostly discussions of the political context and the rejection/promotion of contemporary philosophical ideas by Dostoyevsky. I do not, I cannot apprehend the text in this manner.
Indeed, this text continually forces me to look in a mirror.
“…what was the chief point about my spite? Why, the whole point, the real sting of it lay in the fact that continually, even in the moment of the acutest spleen, I was inwardly conscious with shame that I was not only not a spiteful but not even an embittered man…”
“I got to the point of feeling a sort of secret abnormal, despicable enjoyment in returning home to my corner on some disgusting Petersburg night, acutely conscious that that day I had committed a loathsome action again, that what was done could never be undone, and secretly, inwardly gnawing, gnawing at myself for it, tearing and consuming myself till at last the bitterness turned into a sort of shameful accursed sweetness, and at last—into positive real enjoyment!”
“I was lying when I said just now that I was a spiteful official. I was lying from spite.”
Seeing so much of myself in a text someone wrote in a different language more than 150 years ago gives me pause. To think about how this is how other people see me makes me sad.
Perhaps I should start going to church again. I don’t want to write more from “Underground”.