proximoception | (no subject)

A trouble I have with agnosticism: If you just mean you can never be certain that you are certain, and need people to take special note of this, why not just write that on all your shirts under a big asterisk and then--since everyone's now aware of your qualm--live your life making the necessary or most appropriate assumptions, including ones pertaining to whether or not God is a lie? This kind of agnosticism applies to every question at once, after all. You don't just not know about God, you don't know about ice cream or Uruguay, about knowing, about not knowing. If, on the other hand, your agnosticism finds God to be a special kind of metaphysical question: why? Why the special treatment? Because of what people have said? Because they say it's a category to itself, as prior to other questions as those of knowledge's nature and possibility? Once you're age, say, six, you should probably have figured out that what you're told needs to be screened, i.e. subjected to criteria of logical consistency and empirical appropriateness. Not that you'll know those words for a while, or yet realize they should be applied to what you've already soaked up as well as what's incoming. I can understand universal doubt (though not going on and on about it), but specific protests of doubt are always loaded. You're enclosing something. The six-year-old missed a spot.

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Yes, I think I agree with this. I always want to say to agnostics, and even some Unitarian types, Come now, you do not believe in God and you're sure of it. And thinking that there is an Immanent Will or a force that through the green fuse drives the flower is not at all the same as believing in God. You can think you perceive these things and still call yourself an atheist.

I think one explanation for the popularity of agnosticism is the prominence in the media of atheists who are bigots about it, who act terribly superior (Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Madeline Murray O'Hare back in the day). People, rightly, don't want to associated with them.

And P.S. If I may recommend, I think you might appreciate M. John Harrison's The Course of the Heart, which I wrote about (poorly) here (http://www.livejournal.com/users/commonplacebook/2005/10/31/). China Mieville, when I interviewed him, said that in his experience most people rather neatly divide into those who love M. John Harrison and those who love John Crowley. The Course of the Heart covers some of the same thematic territory as Little, Big, but it's a lot darker and tougher (though also a lot shorter). Mieville says it's about the frustration of the fact that the numinous always leads right back here where it started from. A very painful book, but not cheaply so; I almost feel bad wishing it on anyone, but you might get a lot out of it.

Hopefully the Triumph of Life/Young Goodman Brown/Lost Ones sequence has innoculated me against real-life overflow of visionary despair. I'll look for this.

I glanced at one of Mieville's books recently. Seemed very much in the shadow of my teenage favorite Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun (which in turn had touches of Crowley's Engine Summer in it, I see in hindsight, as well as half-digested elements of most of the High Lit tradition from Homer to Proust). Presumably less confused cosmologically. Wolfe is also a favorite of Gaiman's, I believe.

Because of Gaiman, I've read one book by Wolfe, Peace, which was, in a word, extraordinary. And that means something coming from me because I don't usually enjoy unreliable narrators. Maybe Wolfe can't digest the Homer-Proust sequence, but he had no trouble at all turning Nabokov into manure. (But then I hate Nabokov.) Of course, it was pretty Catholic, which somewhat sucked, but also leant it a visionary edge along with a kind of naive conservative/agrarian anti-capitalism that, um, redeemed it.