What but the wolf’s tooth whittled so fine
The fleet limbs of the antelope?
What but fear winged the birds, and hunger
Jewelled with such eyes the great goshawk’s head?

Robinson Jeffers, “The Bloody Sire”

Those ancient subcortical brain systems are […] the foundations upon which the beauty and ugliness of life has been constructed.

Jaak Panksepp and Lucy Biven, The Archaeology of Mind: Neuroevolutionary Origins of Human Emotions

In the dark, Red Squirrel dreams. The ground outside has thawed, but his winter-dreams linger a while longer. In winter, Red Squirrel dreams sightlessly: Red Squirrel is his self-smell, and he dreams his self-smell. His self-smell soaks the ground and the bark of trees and the latticework of branch-paths, thickening at the center and around little nodes throughout. Red Squirrel is two hundred meters wide, from the looming Scots pine to the copse of rowan beyond the brook and laced through the high canopy. He dreams hazily of three dreys—two he built himself that fall, wove them around himself like a cocoon or a death mask; one he found unoccupied and marked as his own—and some six thousand small hoards of nuts from the great pine, marbling the forest like fat through muscle. He dreams all this, all at once. In the dark of winter, Red Squirrel is the contemplation of his self-smell.

But tonight, over the thawed ground, comes a new dream. Red Squirrel’s spacious, sightless winter-dream narrows to a thrusting point. Red Squirrel dreams of movement for the first time in months. He swims free of his two-hundred-meter lattice of scent-memories through new, heady, sticky-sweet smells. He dreams a drunk delirium of mating-smells and the dizzy memory of twitching plumes. He spasms and stirs in his sleep.

In the dark, Pine Marten is warm. She coils around three trembling little bodies, all fumbling over her and searching her fur with their toothless mouths. Her heart quickens with the delight of them, of their clumsy imperiousness—of their need for her, which her body knows is brief. One wanders too far; she closes her jaws gingerly around its neck and drags it to her teat. Her milk lets down and she wriggles briefly against the taut sting of it, but it slackens and her body settles soft. A kit’s tiny claw catches in her ear; for now, this is tolerable.

When the probing paws begin to irk her, it’s as an itch, a signal from her own body, rather than an intrusion. The little ones are half her smell and half their own, which means they are not yet other than herself. Their hunger is her hunger: when they feed, they pass the hunger-pangs to her. The hunger of three kits is thick, muscular, and rich. It makes the summer hunger—the hunger of an empty den, which beetles and berries satisfy—seem water-thin.

For hours, the kits drift between nursing and sleep, never quite all at once. Pine Marten feels the weight of her hunger growing, and nervous agitation with it. At last, when all three kits are sleeping, she threads her body over them, stretches her limbs long, and shakes herself out. Their presence pulls her to stay, while the brisk liveliness of the night calls her to liberty and conquest. Her stir-craziness and the heaviness in her belly win: she snakes through a passage to the mouth of her den. She spies the world nose-first. It is hers to take.

Red Squirrel’s dream is overtaken by a tide of birdsong. A spear of sunlight thrusts him from sleep. He blinks and twitches, still curled around his tail, before shuddering upright. The dream is gone and instantly forgotten. He is all vivid wakefulness. The drey is still. He feels the pine by sound and scent. A thousand details arrive at once, and he is already moving.

With shotgun force, his legs hurl him outside the drey. He twists, anchors, draws himself up. Claws find foothold in fissured bark. His tail steadies him as he thunders, full of sharp instinct, up the trunk. He stops. Clings to bark. He senses: bark quivering, birdsong, cool air. Another shot up the trunk and out into space, onto a high limb. Red Squirrel is two hundred meters of sound and scent.

The background static of feeding instinct. To claw, to snap, to gnaw—find some sweet seed. Back down the trunk. Stop. Machine-gun salvo of goshawk’s call. He braces cold, ready; cranes his head to track a pair of wings. Only a crossbill; neighbor. Goshawk still a hundred meters out. Safe to descend.

Lingering winter-instinct sends Red Squirrel to a cache of pine seeds—one of a scant 1,912 remaining—between the pine and a lichened rock. He stops short; takes in a waft of some new savor. Year’s first fungus. He bristles with anticipation. Wind misdirects; nose leads him slightly astray before finding it: meaty cap bursting from log. He trumpets with joy, takes it between his paws, turns it, smells it. Fresh straight through. He gnaws it with delight.

Urged by the delicacies of spring, he ranges on. For months, Red Squirrel has been a ruminant, an archivist, a gentle pulse through the tissue of his scent-territory; spring has loosed him like an arrow. A sense memory: there are birch beyond the brook, just past his furthest scent-markings, that flush with catkins when the first mushrooms come. He shoots toward the fragrant greenness of catkins.

River rocks are risky; dark hollows everywhere, water covers scent. He crosses the brook by air, making three great leaps to a tree on the other bank. The run of birch is large, and for hours he sports figure-eights among the birch trunks, grazing on catkins. At noonday he catches a heady, animal smell and follows it. Fiery agitation stirs him. He chases it for ages. Deep, deep in the birch, everything smothered in the scent, he hears her. Kuk-kuk-kuk—a coy summons. There: the twitch of her plume high in a birch bough. He sees it and rushes to win her. Red Squirrel is tremulous hunger for chasing.

Pine Marten descends the trunk and leaps into her forest. She prowls the edge of her scent-domain; sprays, patching holes in its fabric where she finds them. Her eyes track movement against a placid field of gray luminance. Her forest shimmers with little agitations: bony, feathery. A twinge of instinct readies her to snatch one, but the weight of her hunger overcomes it. Some bigger, faster tree-thing—blood-rich muscles fit to match her in the fray. But this is her territory; nothing worthy of her would linger here. She needs to press beyond it.

Something this way. She thrusts herself up a sapling. It sways under her weight; she rides its undulations. The trail thickens upon an aspen bough and she leaps to follow. Here: old layers of life-smells. Something robust, territorial, like her.

Down the trunk, past a great old pine. Fresh traces this way. The ground is disturbed where a bright, hot scent-marking was laid. She follows the gradient to patches of musk that are brighter still. This way? No; traces here are older by hours. Up trees, under logs. Running water: a void of scent and sound. Did it cross or turn back? The trail runs up a tree at the edge. Crossed the brook through the canopy. Detour. She wades straight through; shakes herself on the other bank.

She is weary with hunger when she finally arrives. The smell is so thick here; the trees are wreathed in it. Her nose leads her gaze. She spies the twitching, throbbing of two plumes in the canopy. One follows the other. They are strong and swift. With patience, their strength will exhaust itself. She can be patient.

Red Squirrel has more than matched his quarry. He aches—his gripping muscles, the pistons of his legs—and his heart thunders in his limbs, but the pleasure of forest-prowess tested outweighs all pain. He finds a perch on a low branch and comes to a semblance of rest. The heat of his blood cools a little, but he’s still dizzy with exhaustion. His wits are dulled. From another bough, his new mate barks: kuk-kuk-kuk. Hasn’t she been well-answered?

A smell. In a terrible instant, all his powers snap back to coiled readiness. The acrid scent of alarm, like the unexpected smell of burning from another room. His mate shoots from her perch. The sound of her retreat shudders through the branches.

Dance of thick paws; forest floor. Five meters out already. He surges for the trunk, to soar up, to find some branch too thin for it to follow. Too close. He is faster, nimbler; he can outpace it. Circles the trunk. Heaves himself around it. Limbs burn.

They are perfect enemies, concave and convex, and a hundred thousand years of battle has trained the virtuosity of his body for their striving. The bark speaks to him by feel and subtle sound: he tunes himself instantly against every thrust of marten-claw and shift of weight. Like wrestlers grip-fighting, they feint and feel for openings. They act on cues too small to reckon. Red Squirrel circles the trunk again and again and again. He could exhaust it doing this, but his strength has already been discharged. A back claw slips.

Red Squirrel’s hind legs are spent. They spread behind him, and he feels one break, caught in a crushing vice. His other leg strikes blindly, heroically, landing a spiteful blow, lancing some soft piece of his foe’s face. In one great snap, he is wrenched by the caught leg and thrown from the tree, falling—snatched, suddenly, by the neck. First stabbing pain, then shattering pressure. Thrashed once. Pain drowned by the sudden flood of bliss-numbness. All silence.

Pine Marten hops steadily from stone to trunk. Blood-smell clings to her. She is heavy with milk but full of new vigor. She blinks a stinging, sightless eye, but even this does not slow her. She scales the pine nimbly, and the first scent of her brood draws her up quick, quick. She buzzes with warm eagerness for them. She pushes into the mouth of her den. Stillness, as her self-smell blankets her and the sound-world of the outside is muted by twigs and downy moss—hers now, though some squirrel wove it, years ago, around himself, like a cocoon or a death mask.

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2.1. The Zhuangzi is the world’s only pro-samsara manifesto. Look at this, from chapter 6 (trans. Watson):

Master Ssu, Master Yu, Master Li, and Master Lai were all four talking together. “Who can look upon nonbeing as his head, on life as his back, and on death as his rump?” they said. “Who knows that life and death, existence and annihilation, are all a single body? I will be his friend!”

Master Yu falls ill:

Master Ssu went to ask how he was. “Amazing,” said Master Yu. “The Creator is making me all crookedy like this! My back sticks up like a hunchback and my vital organs are on top of me. My chin is hidden in my navel, my shoulders are up above my head, and my pigtail points at the sky. It must be some dislocation of the yin and yang!”

Yet he seemed calm at heart and unconcerned. Dragging himself haltingly to the well, he looked at his reflection and said, “My, my! So the Creator is making me all crookedy like this!”

“Do you resent it?” asked Master Ssu.

“Why no, what would I resent? If the process continues, perhaps in time he’ll transform my left arm into a rooster. In that case I’ll keep watch on the night. Or perhaps in time he’ll transform my right arm into a crossbow pellet and I’ll shoot down an owl for roasting. Or perhaps in time he’ll transform my buttocks into cartwheels. Then, with my spirit for a horse, I’ll climb up and go for a ride. What need will I ever have for a carriage again?

Master Lai, too, falls ill:

Gasping and wheezing, he lay at the point of death. His wife and children gathered round in a circle and began to cry. Master Li, who had come to ask how he was, said, “Shoo! Get back! Don’t disturb the process of change!”

Then he leaned against the doorway and talked to Master Lai. “How marvelous the Creator is! What is he going to make of you next? Where is he going to send you? Will he make you into a rat’s liver? Will he make you into a bug’s arm?”

Master Lai said, “A child, obeying his father and mother, goes wherever he is told, east or west, south or north. And the yin and yang—how much more are they to a man than father or mother! Now that they have brought me to the verge of death, if I should refuse to obey them, how perverse I would be! What fault is it of theirs? The Great Clod burdens me with form, labors me with life, eases me in old age, and rests me in death. So if I think well of my life, for the same reason I must think well of my death.”

Whether this passage is describing rebirth, properly speaking, is besides the point. The Zhuangzi affirms a wandering—this is what “samsara” means—through birth and death and across transformations of form.

You can, apparently, decide upon a positive valuation of this process! Religious apologists are right to point out that the sheer variety of human beliefs has no logical bearing on whether any one of them might be true, but exposure to this variety does destabilize one’s sense of which aesthetic and moral valuations are obvious. Look at the possibilities we’re meant to delight in: not taking the enviable body of a prince or priest, nor only animals that attract sympathetic anthropomorphism, but “a rat’s liver” or a “bug’s arm.” A conventionally desirable outcome is beside the point. This unalloyed amor fati was and is a human possibility!

But, again, not obvious everywhere. In Natality: Toward a Philosophy of Birth (2023), Jennifer Banks quotes the Sūtra on Entering the Womb: the fetus is trapped “amidst a mud of feces and urine... unable to breathe.” The Buddha says, “I do not extol the production of a new existence even a little bit; nor do I extol the production of a new existence for even a moment. Why? The production of a new existence is suffering.” The First Noble Truth is considered empirically verifiable through meditation on the body’s gross elements, its generation and decay. In other words, early Buddhism treated the unseemliness of gestation and birth (and, in a sense, of life itself) as self-evident. It’s hardly alone in this intuition—Banks catalogues parallel texts from much of the Eurasian world.

Natality takes its name and starting point from a concept Hannah Arendt develops in The Human Condition: that because we are born, we are always capable of beginning something new, and that this capacity is “the miracle that saves the world from its normal, natural ruin.” Arendt’s natality is political and philosophical but largely abstracted from the bodily experience of birth. Banks extends and corrects that abstraction by excavating a countertradition of thinkers who attended to birth as a philosophical occasion in its full material and experiential weight. The organizing principle here is Banks’ insistence that “there is little evidence that birth was ever the foundational experience that any culture organized itself around.”1 Unlike mortality, which might be philosophy’s most ancient preoccupation, natality has to be excavated from obscurity.

Here’s my contention: rather than a philosophical road-not-taken, natality is where the Chinese intellectual tradition starts. Specifically, it foregrounds gestation as a core metaphor, as richly illustrative of its metaphysical intuitions, and this has “natal” ethical consequences. I chose to open with the deaths of Masters Yu and Lai precisely because it seems like a poor example: the narrative is about death, not birth; it has a “compensatory-theist” surface; and it leans on the imagery of craft. In fact, it continues like so:

“Suppose now a great smith is casting metal. If the metal should leap up and say, ‘I insist upon being made into a Mo-yeh!’2 the great smith would certainly regard it as inauspicious metal. Now suppose I, having been cast once into a human form, should say, ‘But I’m a man! A man!’ The Creator and Transformer would certainly regard me as an inauspicious sort of person. So now I think of heaven and earth as a great furnace, and the Creator and Transformer as a great smith. Where could he send me that would not be all right? I will fall off into sleep and then wake up refreshed.”

All this, and I still don’t think I’m forcing a faulty generalization!

2.2. That the Chinese canon turns to images of gestation, motherhood, and birthing in roughly the same contexts that the Platonic and Biblical traditions tend to speak of divine craftsmanship is almost a trivial observation. Here’s the Daodejing (trans. Ziporyn) on cosmogony:

DDJ 1: 有名萬物之母 — “[The Dao] determined with a name: ‘the mother of the ten thousand things.’”

DDJ 6: 玄牝之門，是謂天地根 — “The gateway of this obscure she-beast: the root of heaven and earth.”

DDJ 20: 吾欲獨異於人，而貴食母 — "I alone, unlike the others, see no value in anything but feeding at the breast of the mother.”

DDJ 52: 天下有始，以為天下母 — “That all in the world has a beginning—take that itself as the mother of the world.”

Compare with the Timaeus, Genesis, Isaiah, etc. Where the Daodejing describes artifacts, as in Chapter 11, it’s the emptiness of the wheel, the vessel, etc., that makes them valuable. Where it presents workable material, as in the uncarved block of Chapter 28, it is specifically the unworked state that is valued. The priority of natural generation—of maternity in particular—over craftsmanship could not possibly be more clear. The Daodejing values precisely those things that distinguish the fetus’ hidden growth from the manufacture of an artifact: spontaneity, obscurity, lack of deliberation or technique.

I read these images as an important template for the subsequent tradition’s ethical and metaphysical emphasis on continuity. This emphasis can be bracingly carnal. It seems to me that the early tradition simply makes no assumption that a child is ever totally differentiated from her parents and ancestors. The famous line from the Xiaojing, cited in justification of the Confucian practice of leaving the beard untrimmed, shows the intuition: "Our bodies—to every hair and bit of skin—are received by us from our parents, and we must not presume to injure or wound them.” Your body is an index of continuity, the family tree in motion, rather than a discrete entity. Much is made of Song Neo-Confucianism’s reliance on Buddhist intellectual machinery, but its fundamental ethical axiom, that the human being shares “one body with heaven and earth,” strikes me as nothing but a radical elaboration of this instinct.3

Bryan Van Norden characterizes the Zhuangzi, Huayan, Chan, etc. as “monistic,” and I suspect this is defensible, but their monism is peculiar by western standards. Eleatic monism emphasizes the priority of stasis and treats particular phenomena, with their apparent transformations, as illusory. Chinese “monisms” emphasize almost precisely the opposite: continuous, generative transformation. The transformations of qi in the philosophical and medical canon, for example, are patterned but constantly and irrepressibly productive of novelty. Huayan, by an investigation into causal continuities, dissolves the distinction between particular and universal altogether. The logic of bodily reproduction is the logic of everything.

2.3. Back to the Zhuangzi passage I opened with: its point is that “life and death, existence and annihilation, are all a single body.” As I said, however, this passage foregrounds all those features I’ve been saying the Chinese tradition excludes. The Zhuangzi on the whole is surprisingly empty of maternal imagery and is instead saturated with death and with craft. It’s worth looking at a couple of significant passages to get a sense for what it’s doing with those devices and why they’re philosophically natal.

In Chapter 18, Zhuangzi’s wife dies. Huizi finds Zhuangzi “sitting with his legs sprawled out, pounding on a tub and singing.”

“You lived with her, she brought up your children and grew old,” said [Huizi]. “It should be enough simply not to weep at her death. But pounding on a tub and singing — this is going too far, isn’t it?”

[Zhuangzi] said, “You’re wrong. When she first died, do you think I didn’t grieve like anyone else? But I looked back to her beginning and the time before she was born. Not only the time before she was born, but the time before she had a body. Not only the time before she had a body, but the time before she had a spirit. In the midst of the jumble of wonder and mystery a change took place and she had a spirit. Another change and she had a body. Another change and she was born. Now there’s been another change and she’s dead. It’s just like the progression of the four seasons, spring, summer, fall, winter.

"Now she's going to lie down peacefully in a vast room. If I were to follow after her bawling and sobbing, it would show that I don't understand anything about fate. So I stopped."

Death and birth are, to reuse an image, the concave and convex surfaces of a single, continuous plane. Death is the push; new life is the pull. This quite concrete symmetry is the basis of their mutual affirmation.

The Zhuangzi’s best-known description of craft, for its part, sees technique becoming less conscious as it becomes more virtuosic:

Cook Ting was cutting up an ox for Lord Wen-hui. At every touch of his hand, every heave of his shoulder, every move of his feet, every thrust of his knee — zip! zoop! He slithered the knife along with a zing, and all was in perfect rhythm, as though he were performing the dance of the Mulberry Grove or keeping time to the Ching-shou music.

“Ah, this is marvelous!” said Lord Wen-hui. “Imagine skill reaching such heights!”

Cook Ting laid down his knife and replied, “What I care about is the Way, which goes beyond skill. When I first began cutting up oxen, all I could see was the ox itself. After three years I no longer saw the whole ox. And now — now I go at it by spirit and don’t look with my eyes. Perception and understanding have come to a stop and spirit moves where it wants. I go along with the natural makeup, strike in the big hollows, guide the knife through the big openings, and follow things as they are. So I never touch the smallest ligament or tendon, much less a main joint.”

The Way “goes beyond skill.” His virtuosity is like nature’s virtuosity: unconscious, nondeliberative, moving in obscurity. He’s not imposing a preconceived form on compliant matter. He is, in other words, more mother than demiurge.

This colors how we should see the Creator of Master Yu and Master Lai and why, I think, we should read their account as plausibly “emulative-atheist” and as thoroughgoingly natal: this Creator’s project has no ideal model, no terminus, no standard of perfection. It does not prescribe purposes. It “manufactures” only continual newness, excess, and surprise. Everything is pregnant with its own indeterminate possibilities, and a sage is only someone who sees this and affirms it.

2.4. Banks’ clearest engagement with the metaphorical content of craft and gestation is in her treatment of Mary Shelley. Shelley lost her mother in childbirth, lost three of four children, nearly died from miscarriage. She meditated intensely on the bounties and pains of bringing life into the world. Frankenstein is a product of that reflection—its composition took nine months; Shelley called it her “offspring.” Victor’s failure is his demiurgic rather than maternal relationship to his creation (emphasis mine):

He meticulously plans every detail in his workshop. “I had selected his features as beautiful,” he says. “Beautiful! Great God!”

The moment his creature comes alive, Frankenstein sees that he is not beautiful. He is hideous. His dream of beauty dissipates, and breathless horror and disgust fill Victor Frankenstein’s heart. How could his beautiful form become a monster the moment the miracle occurs, the instant life enters the body? What does this say about life itself? The creature is a motherless human life engineered by ambitious male inventors, born without lineage, language, or any tradition. What ancestry would such a being think back through? There is none of Virginia Woolf’s fertilizing of female and male energies in his creation, no unique sexual charge. He has emerged from the singular chamber of a male mind.

Frankenstein rejects his creature because it falls short of the archetype of his intentions. What he wants isn’t really life, which exceeds and supersedes us in its coming-forth, but an artifact.

Last October, Andrew Rakich of Atun-Shei Films produced an impressive video essay on “The Sexual Politics of Frankenstein.” Rakich argues that the novel is not principally about scientific or creative hubris, but about the abdication of parental duty. For Rakich, however, this is mostly about socio-political exclusion. Whatever the merits of this reading, and whatever its proximity to Banks’ reading, it leaves vast swathes of existential territory unexamined. He reproduces, in fact, the very judgments that damn Frankenstein. Towards the end, Rakich includes a coda about his vasectomy:

The truth is that whenever my friends and family members get pregnant—and I’m in my early 30s, so that’s happening a lot these days—I get a horrible weight in the pit of my stomach. Often I’m genuinely happy for them. Sometimes I can even look them in the eye and say, “You’ll be a really great father,” and mean it.

But there’s another part of me that can’t shake the idea that in nine months another American will come into the world—another ravening cannibal who will spend the next better part of a century burning fossil fuels, housing cheeseburgers, and ignoring homeless people at traffic lights.

[…] And you can say, you know, “I’ll bring up my kid to share my values and they won’t do those things,” and I can respect that—but that’s a hell of a gamble, right?

[…]And that’s all assuming that your kid grows up to be a kind person, which is also a hell of a gamble. A lot of bullies and dumbasses walking around out there in the world. A lot of rapists, too. What if my pride and joy grows up to be somebody else’s abuser? If I give birth to a baby daughter, then there’s a one in four chance that she’s going to be raped. I don’t like those odds.

I’m not troubled by Rakich’s decision not to have children, nor even really by its ecological rationale. But I do think think this posture toward the world, which seems, the more I look, absolutely ubiquitous among my politically-motivated family and friends—this insistence upon illegitimately weighing each human birth against an abstract ledger, of asking whether a life makes the world better or worse—is perverse. It’s not only a perverse assessment of birth, but of life as such. To look at your neighbors and see “bullies,” “dumbasses,” “cannibals,” “rapists”—to see only your determinate judgments of their unworthiness for life—is hatred for life. Life is not something other than its risk, its indeterminacy, its uncertainty. Life justifies itself or it is not justified at all.

And a conditional affirmation is no affirmation at all. Life and its uncertain future cannot be consistently affirmed on the promise that things will turn out the way we want. When Master Lai asks where his Creator could send him “that would not be all right,” he’s not resting on a hope that, like the Apostle’s, would leave him “of all people most to be pitied” if disappointed. He’s not expecting that things will turn out, come to a final rest, at all! Rather, he sees life for what it is and asks: “what would I resent?” The great lesson of the natal tradition, to my mind, is that this attitude was a real possibility. It remains a possibility for us if we want it.

cont’d

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1.1. Once, when my wife was pregnant with our youngest, she marveled that she wasn’t “doing anything.” She was, by most measures, doing an awful lot. Caroline is a craftswoman, however, with a mind for technique and the arrangement of details, and she meant that there’s no gestational art. You can grow a human being without knowing a lick of cellular biology.

I was made suddenly aware of how scarcely my own body is available to conscious experience and voluntary action—obvious, perhaps, but systematically unappreciated. If the body is reason’s unruly servant, as I’ve been trained to imagine, reason is an out-of-touch master: more properly, the tippy-top of a colossal iceberg, immersed almost wholly in abyssal darkness. Gestation confronts us with the fact that our bodies come to be, in some sense, without us, and persist in the same fashion. Where, in your awareness, is the filtration of your blood or the pruning of your synapses? Not only will you never consciously divide a cell, but you could go your entire life ignorant of the hourly turnover of your gut lining.

1.2. Scripture rushes to overlay the language of craft—“you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb”—but this takes the most legible face of experience and assimilates to it precisely those processes that most resist the description.1 Whether God is a projection of human subjectivity or its genuine archetype, it’s hard not to feel that the craft metaphor is question-begging: in the only mind we know directly, sovereign agency is swamped by dark metabolism. We speak rightly of the body's pre-verbal wisdom, but “design” and “craft” are secondary impositions on something that, even in our own experience, precedes and exceeds it.

, writing on “simulationism” in February 2022:

Every epoch finds itself tempted to take its shiny new tools, its latest technologies, and to hold them up not just as marvellous inventions, but as the clavis for understanding all of reality. In the seventeenth century significant advances in the horological art quickly translated into bold claims that the universe itself is a great “clockwork”. This is such an intro-level history-of-science fact that presumably even the most presentist technophile knows it, yet somehow it is still easy for some to imagine that twenty-first-century analogizing from artifice to nature holds a greater hope of transcending its historical moment than any comparable exercise of the early modern imagination.

But why is the pattern so durable? We might go further and acknowledge that all traditions make use of cosmological metaphors, but some are more fixated on metaphors of artifice than others. Reality has been variously imaged (per Smith-Ruiu) “as a ‘book’, as a ‘chariot’, as a ‘loom’, as a ‘temple’, as a ‘horse’”—but elsewhere, I would add, as a mountain, as a tree, as a womb.

The imaginative leap to a clockwork cosmos was primed, of course, by the innovations of the sixteenth century, but what about the theological category of “creature?” Machines are artificial, telic, perhaps deterministic—there’s more continuity with Augustinianism here than rupture with it. The deeper assumption is that purpose is imposed by the sovereign craftsman, and even once we shed teleology and determinism, human beings stepped into the craftsman’s role.

1.3. It’s typical of a writer to overestimate the power of metaphors, but I think the way this constrains our political imagination is clear. Every fight between culture-war hobbits and Prometheans (each well-represented on both the left and right!) is a fight over whether nature is fixed and determinate on the one hand or infinitely violable on the other. Is the meaning of your life decided for you by institutional and metaphysical authorities, or is it yours to impose by will and technological force? In either case, the centrality of control remains constant. Conservatives like Wendell Berry or Paul Kingsnorth aren’t free from this fetish of control, but are merely inclined to masochism rather than sadism.2

Berry’s famous line that “the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines” is the dialectical trap in miniature. “Creatures” and “machines” resemble one another far more than they differ!

But the living thing is a self-sufficient concept.3 Nature offers it to us directly. Nothing is more primary to our experience. Why, then, do we reach for metaphors? Life, gestation, germination, ripening—these suffice as metaphors for non-biological processes, not vice-versa.

1.4. Again, it’s easy to lose sight of how many assumptions are held in common by enemies within a tradition. Brook Ziporyn’s recent work has taken this on directly.4 Ziporyn proposes a four-quadrant taxonomy of responses to the question of supervening purpose:

• Compensatory Theism affirms that a single, purposive will rules the world, and exhorts human beings to surrender their own purposes in response to it. Its motto is “not my will, but yours be done.”

• Emulative Theism affirms that a single, purposive will rules the world, and exhorts human beings to become as rational as possible in imitation of that will.

• Compensatory Atheism denies that a single, purposive will rules the world, and exhorts human beings to become as willful and purposeful as possible in response to its absence. This is secular utopianism, Sartrean existentialism, etc.

These three are well-represented in the western tradition. What they share is the preoccupation with control and the imposition of purpose. One quadrant remains neglected:

• Emulative Atheism denies that the world is governed by a sovereign purpose, and exhorts human beings to be similarly purposeless. Unlike the other three, “it alone views conscious purpose and control per se as ‘less valuable’ than purposelessness and noncontrol, not just for human beings but for the cosmos as a whole.”

An idiosyncratic and capacious form of atheism, not least because its expressions are frequently religious.5 This quadrant has a small handful of western representatives, but Emulative Atheism, Ziporyn argues, is the underlying assumption of China’s “orthodox” philosophical traditions. Just as western philosophy is mostly characterized by its acceptance of what he calls the “nous-as-arche” thesis, Chinese philosophy is characterized by its rejection of basically that thesis.6 It might be argued that Daoism and Confucianism are best understood as the liberal and conservative wings of a single tradition defined by its opposition to the coercive political theories of Mohism and Legalism. Even while contending with one another, Daoism and Confucianism both affirm the ethical and (meta)physical priority of generative non-doing. They begin with the observation that unforced gestation, germination, and growth precede the purposive impositions of art and artifice. Furthermore, any art that achieves true virtuosity becomes more spontaneous and less forceful: a real dancer, musician, fighter, or cook returns to the non-deliberative virtuosity of nature—the virtuosity of the womb and the sprout.

1.5. Ultimately, I’m trying to demonstrate that our metaphors of artifice are contingent: they’re not obvious, and other traditions have chosen differently. Most saliently, I’m proposing the metaphor of gestation as an extant (in the Chinese philosophical tradition, etc.) alternative.7 The second part of this series will examine that metaphor and what it makes possible (specifically, a more robust account of what Arendt called “natality” than the western tradition has managed), but I want to linger on the problem for just a moment longer.

In Summa Theologiae, Supp. Q.81, A.1, Aquinas concludes that all bodies will be resurrected to the same biological age:

[M]an will rise again at the most perfect stage of nature. Now human nature is at the most perfect stage in the age of youth. Therefore all will rise again of that age.

[…]Man will rise again without any defect of human nature, because as God founded human nature without a defect, even so will He restore it without defect. Now human nature has a twofold defect. First, because it has not yet attained to its ultimate perfection. Secondly, because it has already gone back from its ultimate perfection. The first defect is found in children, the second in the aged: and consequently in each of these human nature will be brought by the resurrection to the state of its ultimate perfection which is in the youthful age, at which the movement of growth terminates, and from which the movement of decrease begins.

Some of his sources are more cautious on this question, but Aquinas is nonetheless synthesizing a point of broad patristic consensus: Christian authorities agree that the body will be raised to the age of the “perfection” God intends for it—thirty years old, more or less. Infancy, childhood, and old age are all either not-yet or no-longer relative to that ideal, and will be corrected when the project is finished.

I think about this constantly because it so closely parallels one of my failure modes as a parent. Whenever I think of my children as not-yet rather than as complete, when I instrumentalize their childhood in light of their becoming “real people,” when I think of these years as preparation for something else—or alternatively, I bemoan the way I let time “slip through my fingers,” as if it were something I could hold—I’ve smuggled in the logic of artifice. I’m pulled away from the real child in front of me by the fantasy that their perfection lies elsewhere. I’ve misapprehended what it means to be a living thing.

Rather than “creatures” or “machines,” we might consider our position as children. Unlike either, a child is defined not by its parents’ purposes, but by a relationship of supersession and excess, and one without terminus. I am as much my parents' child now as I was at three, and my children are no more “not-yet” at four than they will be “no-longer” at forty—they exceeded my purposes from first breath. Where determinacy is death, this excess is called life.

cont’d

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I’ve never had trouble making friends. This isn’t a brag: it might be the only thing I’m good at, and while I won’t balance the account by listing my professional and academic failures, you’re free to imagine them. This is to say that I read contemporary writing about adult male friendship with estranged sympathy. Even sincere and thoughtful essays read like field notes—like attempts by men who have heard about friendship to reverse-engineer it from first principles.

In a 2023 essay in The Hedgehog Review, an unusually literate instance of the genre, distinguishes friendship from love:

Passion means to suffer, to be set upon. This is not to speak ill of love, but only to observe that since friendship is more freely chosen, it rests on unstable ground. Romantic love holds us together through mutual awareness of our neediness, but friendship does not arise from any need. [...] Family members, even those in a family you have some choice in forming, are the same type—“kin.” But the friend is some “other,” a stranger I have come to prefer.

Aristotle says there is no justice between friends: We owe them nothing, and true friends do not consider who owes what to whom. Friends as friends therefore do not need anything from you besides your friendship, which is one reason why friendship presupposes leisure. People fall in love in an instant, at a glance, but friendship always takes time.

Take it from an expert: making friends is exactly like falling in love!1 It’s often more like falling in love than falling in love is! In my experience, it’s a prerequisite.

Aren’t they, in fact, continuous? Friendship blossoms from the recognition in another of some sensibility, taste, or perspective that has, until now, alienated you from others. There’s an erotic charge to this experience—“this at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.” It doesn’t require complete accord, but just enough to make friction interesting.

Dinan’s broader point is that friendship involves mutual imposition, a real encounter with otherness, that distinguishes it from kinship. Unlike blood relationships, he says, friendship requires a posture of sustained openness, made possible by leisure. Is this really anyone’s experience? Parental and sibling relationships can demand positively heroic patience and openness. On the other hand, I’ve found true kindred spirits in the grind of restaurant kitchens and warehouses.

Dinan argues that men, who are accustomed to self-assertion, find this posture of openness difficult. I suspect, rather, that men who struggle to make friends in adulthood are not discerning enough, not self-asserting enough: that the sensibilities, tastes, and perspectives that make recognition of other-selves possible are underdeveloped in them. I see men in their thirties looking for friends in general-purpose social spaces—MeetUps, athletic clubs, gaming groups—as if possible friends were distributed evenly throughout the population. There’s real value in this kind of sociality, but I don’t think it’s any more fertile a substrate for friendship than work, which produces the same proximity without the abundance of leisure. What I’m saying (and the reason I’m picking on this three-year-old essay) is that “openness to alterity” is an intelligent articulation of precisely the strategy that seems to be failing people. Friendship is the recognition that some people are more your people than others. Well-socialized adults treat this instinct with suspicion. An interesting predicament!

I’m here, ultimately, to defend gatekeeping. I owe gatekeeping my life. Everything I loved in my youth required long, slow apprenticeship to subcultural judgements and points of common reference. It’s not merely that I loved those objects themselves: I loved the very gauntlet of apprenticeship, and I loved earning access to the glittering caverns beneath the sunlit world.

The promise of heavy metal in particular was an outsider humanism. Rendering heavy metal legible required not merely musicians’ names and landmark years and charts of stylistic phylogeny, but a deliriously broad thematic vocabulary: medieval demonology, the Napoleonic Wars, botany and mycology, Mesopotamian religion, cosmology and astrophysics, Nietzsche, Lovecraft, Goethe, Tolkien, Goya’s black paintings, Indo-European linguistics. It met my desperate hunger for humane learning, specifically for “rejected knowledge,” as Wouter Hanegraaff describes esotericism, and it treated this material as fuel for intensity of life. School was always a disappointment in comparison.

Metal is wildly, romantically, sophomorically preoccupied with discerning the “true” from the “false.” With apologies to Manowar, my favorite (decidedly non-humanistic) version of the formula comes from Brazil’s Sarcófago:

If you are a false don’t entry

The nuclear drums will crush your brain

Because you’ll be burned and died

The material is challenging, in other words, and if you can’t stomach it, you’re better off elsewhere. We don’t have room for tourists or dilettantes.2

I love that stupid phrase: “a false.” It’s reaching for something that isn’t readily articulable in English without an archaic-sounding substantive (e.g. “false one”). It’s a bizarrely philosophical distinction, or maybe a courtly one. Is “false metal” taxonomically false, like the false morel or fool’s gold, or is it “false” like an adulterer or turncoat? I don’t think the ethical slippage is accidental. “False” elements, insufficiently committed to its initiatory structure, betray the subculture somehow. They sell it out. If the doors are wide open, if the barriers to entry are low, the subculture loses its viability as a sorting algorithm.

I’m belaboring this weird point because a shocking supermajority of my friends-at-first-sight, to whom I’ve been fixed by a kind of erotic gravity, have some biographical relationship to heavy metal, or to a neighboring gatekept subculture. What those friends share in common is a capacious literacy, a discriminating instinct, and a stomach for challenging material. They’ve also proven “true” in all relevant senses: well-established in their sense of self, faithful to themselves and others. Crucially, the subcultural material itself is seldom what sparks the recognition of kinship, though it may have sped us toward it. I’m talking here about subculture as subject formation, as aesthetic training, and emphatically not as a source of community. “The scene” is basically worthless, all personal dysfunction and dull incuriosity, but the apprenticeship in practiced illegibility, the assimilation of a canon, and the refinement of taste has proved enduringly valuable as a way of sniffing out my type.

The distinction I would draw, then, is not between friendship and kinship, or friendship and love, but between friendship and community life. I’m not arguing against the sociality of churches, clubs, and civic organizations—the deeply needful and similarly imperiled affirmation of one’s common lot with neighbors who may not be of the “same type”—but arguing for something in addition, which we denigrate to our peril.

This is of a piece with ’s “interrogation of the proper limits of the egalitarian project” in All Things Are Too Small: “The logic of justice, proper to the political and economic domain, has infused the whole of contemporary existence. While economic disparities remain fundamentally intact, we insist on equality in love and art, on order and proportion in our minds and houses.” There are two different logics at play: one of justice, pertaining to the public sphere, and one of eros pertaining to the private. There’s a feral amorality, irrationality, to the latter. Here’s Aristotle’s “no justice among friends” again, in a different light.

It’s clear to me that community and friendship are both necessary, and not even competitive with one another in practice, but that they are somehow incommensurable and unassimilable in principle. It’s flatly contradictory to insist that all people are “your people,” that your sphere of ethical concern has no limits, and that you’re nonetheless bound by a special affinity to some people in particular. To be frank, I don’t think there’s a single, higher-order ethical principle that accounts for both, and I challenge anyone to suggest what such a principle could be.3 They’re still, somehow, both true!

I suspect that we’re hamstrung by our attempts at integrity. When I examine myself, I find an irreconcilable infinity of needs and desires and principles of action, and when I examine the world, I find little proof that the good life follows from letting one of those drives rule. Happiness might be giving each their due. To be a little infinity is not an ignoble thing.

Everything is really about one thing. If it weren’t for the fog of war, you’d know what that thing is. For instance:

The most important thing to understand is that God is a human being. You must understand that God is a specific human being. Don’t weasel your way into airy generalities. You need to see that God is a particular human being, and you need to pick the right one, or your life is wasted. The proof of this claim is its scandalousness. Easy universalisms are a dime a dozen. No other doctrine approaches the singular, shameless particularity of this one.

Granted, it might be more obvious if someone weren’t covering it up. Because he hates you with perfect hatred, and because the surest way to destroy you is to keep you from knowing it, the provisional ruler of this world has contrived innumerable ways of keeping it from you. Because he’s powerful and cunning beyond human understanding, because he’s able to bend your thoughts to his purposes, and because his favorite weapon is the near-truth, you must suspect every stirring of your mind and heart of being a deadly trap.

Because everything is really about one thing, you can find traces of that thing in false religions and philosophies the world over. By all means, read the heathens’ cosmogonic myths and cosmological treatises! They’ll point you in the right direction. Just don’t get distracted. Learn to sift the wheat, to extract the kernel from the shell, to squeeze the juice from the pulp. Remember: the Enemy’s favorite weapon is the near-truth. “Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light.” It’s all a matter of knowing who to trust.

That’s not quite right. Dead wrong, actually. A classic blunder. The most important thing to understand is that God is irreducibly, indivisibly singular. God is eternally and sublimely disincarnate, without child or spouse or peer. All of the major religions, or some of them, used to understand this. God has been diligent about offering reminders, and some of us have been good listeners, but the message always suffers the entropy of history. It gets garbled in the intergenerational game of telephone. You can read their holy books and confirm it for yourself: pristine monotheism is everywhere, except for where it’s not. Where they agree with us, they confirm the primordiality of our doctrine. Where they disagree, they prove their deviance.

The Whisperer—immeasurably cunning, full of bitter jealousy towards us—knows our wandering eye, and he whispers justifications for smuggling in idols both subtle and gross. We’re nudged into the ceaseless invention of avatars and emanations and divine consorts. Hideously baroque pantheons and incarnate deities are a dime a dozen. What I’m trying to say is that the proof of our claim is its scandalousness. Ruthless monotheism is just rare enough to be the truth.

This isn’t to say that it’s a secret. You can reason your way to the core of it, provided you don’t keep reasoning past the point of sense. You can tell your reasoning is sound if it leads you to crisp, austere monotheism. When you catch a glimpse of anything else, you’ll know you’ve gone too far.

It’s all a matter of knowing who to trust. History is a war between those who know and those who don’t.

History is a war, sure, but patriarchal religions are on the wrong side of it. They have been since the first Fertile-Crescent pirate rebranded himself as a landlord. You see it, right? “God the Father,” the “Lord of Hosts”—the cosmos is a manor! A marketing campaign for a system of domination we don’t need to accept.

It matters less and less, though. Centuries of popular struggle have weakened the grip of feudal mystification, but capital is more cunning and adaptable. What the baubles of Axial Age religions once did to order bodies and police desire, the total commodity-form accomplishes without coercion. Every time you pay to watch a piece of mass-market colonial propaganda, you’re volunteering your imagination for capture. The only war that matters is fought on the battleground of your thoughts and desires, and you’re probably sleeping through it

If anything, the enemy has only gotten better at using dissent to its advantage. The infection gets worse when the body tries to expel it, and there’s a word for the virulence of capital under threat: fascism. The pink, swollen reactionaries are right to be furious, and they’re even furious at the right people, but without a veritable theory, they’re cordyceps zombies for capital. It’s all been exhaustively theorized. It’s all a matter of knowing who to trust

No—and it’s telling that you can’t see the irony. There is an international consensus toward which every institution bends, but it’s the program of deracination and subversion. The revolutionaries won. There is no “mass-market colonial propaganda;” these people own Disney! Trust me on this: seeing it for the first time is like waking up from a dream.

Maybe the details don’t matter. If there really is a sinister leviathan looming over history and poisoning the epistemic well, how could you know which leviathan it is? Normal evidence, after all, is inadmissible.

By occult synchronicity, a paperback compendium edition of The Invisibles was released this January, coinciding with the latest Epstein thing. Despite my feverish teenage enthusiasm for Grant Morrison (), I never got around to The Invisibles. This was fortuitous, because its moment is now.

The Invisibles is about the fact that everything is really about one thing. Every institution—the cops, the school board, the record execs, the house of Windsor—is conspiring to squeeze the human species’ vital energy into the mouths of extradimensional demon kings. Every freethinker since at least the 15th century—Lord Byron, Mary and Percy Shelley, the Marquis de Sade, and the series’ cast of anarchist sorcerers among them—has been a participant in an equally sprawling counter-conspiracy. Every bit of intellectual, political, and physical territory on earth is claimed for either riotous liberty or infinite metaphysical tyranny. Every event in history has a final, determinate meaning in light of this conflict. The enemy put crack on the streets. They’ve been hiding an AIDS vaccine since 1978. They put subliminal trigger words in pop records. There may or may not be mind-control implants in the polio vaccine. “Did you know that if you get a map and join up the sites of all the McDonalds restaurants in London, it makes the sigil of the dark emperor Mammon?” “When was the last time you had a thought that wasn’t put there by them?”

In addition to being outrageously inventive and fun, it’s sophisticated and reflexive: sensitive to the failures of counterculture, revolution, and utopianism, and aware of its own contradictory position as an anti-capitalist commodity. Still, it’s a mostly earnest expression of left-wing paranoid style. I’m old enough to remember when “9/11 truth” was “left-coded,” and I’ve still been floored by how much Tucker Carlson was here, already, in a progressive register. The ideas themselves have more currency than ever, but the inflection has changed completely. Morrison wrote The Invisibles to reinvigorate the counterculture and magically alter the course of the 21st century, but it was too successful and escaped containment. The Invisibles, by means of its influence on The Matrix, is the reason your aunt calls herself “redpilled.” Andrew Tate is King Mob’s dark mirror, abortively summoned from the noosphere and into public life. The Invisibles is about QAnon.

Morrison has made some of these observations directly, but once you’ve given the injunction to disobedience, it seems a bit precious to turn around and say “no, not like that.” Paranoia is a universal solvent, and once you’ve opened the bottle and let it out, you can’t decide what it eats through. Anyway, I don’t think it’s possible to argue rationally for a left-wing politics of paranoia over a right-wing one, any more than it’s possible to argue for Christianity and against Islam, or vice-versa, from first principles. Narratives like these are built from accumulated hunches; sometimes from bewildering and destabilizing personal experiences. Normal evidence is inadmissible.

The Archons of the Outer Church, The Invisibles’ villains, are parasites. They commandeer matter in order to take repulsive, insectoid form in geometric space. Their presence causes humans to break out in cancerous growths. They pollute your thoughts, your dreams, and your appetites. You can be enlisted in their service without your knowledge or consent. The imagery of pollution is everywhere in The Invisibles, and almost everything (cities, language, the future) is a virus.

Contamination anxiety might have a special (and explicatory) affinity to conservatism, but it’s also one of the affective bedrocks of culture in general. For much of our history, living in the sublunary world meant, per Charles Taylor, vulnerability to “spirits, demons, cosmic forces,” just as membership in the body politic meant vulnerability to what we would now consider the private thoughts and habits of our neighbors. Taylor:

[W]e ring the church bells when lightning threatens. Or more fundamentally, the whole community turns out in procession to “beat the bounds” of the parish on rogation days. Carrying the host and whatever relics we possess, we march around the boundaries, in this way warding off evil spirits for another season. In one such rite in England, the Gospels were read “in the wide field among the corn and grass, that by virtue of the operation of God’s word, the power of the wicked spirits, which keep in the air and infect the same … may be laid down … to the intent the corn may remain unharmed, and not infected … but serve us for our use and bodily sustenance.”

Our defense here is collective, deploying a power that we can only draw on as a community, on one level, that of the parish, but more broadly that of the Church in its full extent. So we’re all in this together. This has two consequences. First, it puts a tremendous premium on holding to the consensus. Turning “heretic” and rejecting this power, or condemning the practice as idolatrous, is not just a personal matter. Villagers who hold out, or even denounce the common rites, put the efficacy of these rites in danger, and hence pose a menace to everyone.

This is something we constantly tend to forget when we look back condescendingly on the intolerance of earlier ages. As long as the common weal was bound up in collective rites, devotions, allegiances, it couldn’t be seen just as an individual’s own business that he break ranks, even less that he blaspheme or try to desecrate the rite. There was an immense common motivation to bring him back into line.

There’s something curious about the practice of pre-modern religion that I rarely see acknowledged: a gap between formal doctrine and practical habit. As a matter of doctrine, God (the world’s indwelling cause) and the Devil (a mere creature) are fundamentally asymmetrical. In practice, the world was a neutral substrate to be “claimed or counterclaimed,” as the famous Lewis line has it, for good or evil. Friendly supernatural assistance and demonic attack were both forms of foreign occupation. Individual and community life both demanded fastidious spiritual hygiene.

The world of The Invisibles is what “enchantment” looked like. Enchantment was vulnerability, and vulnerability breeds paranoia, and I sincerely believe that conspiracy theory is the purest expression of re-enchantment available to us. The panicked sense that your thinking can be polluted, that trusting the wrong voice can be fatal, recreates the pre-modern affect in a way that no work of high romanticism ever could. This is part of its appeal! Taylor says “the thick emotional boundary between us and the cosmos” is “now lived as a loss.” Conspiracy theory is a powerful remedy.

The obvious problem is that it makes you insane. Paranoia might remedy a certain alienation of the spirit, but it’s an autoimmune disorder of the mind. If a sinister superintelligence can plant good arguments to deceive you, and if you can spot these by their conclusions—conclusions foreclosed in advance as heretical—normal evidence is inadmissible. In this light, the buffered self is a monumental immunological achievement. I take this less and less for granted every year. I finally understand that modernity is a miracle.

And yet! I’ll try not to spoil too much (though it would be hard to do so prosaically even if I wanted to), but much of The Invisibles’ paranoid dualism is ultimately subverted. The line between friend and enemy—good conspiracy, that is, or bad—becomes disorientingly blurred as the story reaches its climax, and its villains are finally metabolized rather than exterminated.

From The Invisibles vol. 3, #1:

Larval consciousness experiences the introduction of necessary inoculating agents from the supercontext as a form of invasion by hostile, bacterial forces. The inoculation is conceptualized by the developing larva as an invasion of threatening “not-self” material… the confronting and integration of “not-self” being a necessary stage in the development of the maturing larva’s self-awareness—”philogeny recapitulates history.”

If the “buffered self” has immunological utility to thank for its success, it’s surely telling an incomplete story. We contain the world: an uncountable swarm of other influences, visible and invisible. Your friends, your family, and your “generalized other” are exerting a constant, constraining pressure on what you can think, say, and imagine. You’re catching your thoughts from them like a disease. Your enemies, for their part, define the contours of your identity. Man is monster-fighting and abyss-gazing and nothing else. Consider the well-established contagious quality of conspiracy thinking itself! You really are vulnerable—compromised!

As I see it, the only alternative to paranoid porosity on the one hand and naive atomism on the other is to overcome the idea of the “neutral substrate” altogether. It’s mutual-constitution all the way down.

What does this mean for evil, though? There are many hideous conspiracies, even if there’s no single conspiracy, and many conflicts with real good guys and bad guys, even if history itself isn’t one of them, and I acknowledge completely that many powerful predators depend upon their entanglement with the order of things to escape justice. Apocalyptic dualism still won’t help. The most eschatological leftists I know—whose enemy is the great leviathan astride history, whose party is the great tradition of resistance—were the least prepared for right-wing counterculture, and the Tuckerites of my acquaintance seem barely conscious of the realignment at all. The promise of terrible clarity is always a blinder.

Your enemies are a part of you, the convex edge of your concave one, and their push is the other side of your pull. I think it’s possible to respond to evil, to fight it, without succumbing to fantasies about what victory would mean. Nobody ever survives their own victory. It’s structurally impossible. Victory turns revolutionary vanguards into conservative establishments. Instead of imagining that our preoccupations could ever serve as a manifesto for the eschaton, it’s crucial to understand the contingent, contextual quality of the roles we play: that one decade’s King Mob is another decade’s Andrew Tate. You can play your role with gravity and know when a scene has ended.

I’m tempted to say that the only way to think clearly about evil is to acknowledge that we wrestle not “against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places,” but with “flesh and blood”—with mere flesh and blood, with flesh and blood no different from our own. It happens, however, that this flesh and blood contains the whole world. This is enchantment enough.

Images from The Invisibles (Vertigo, 1994–2000) by Grant Morrison. Art by Steve Yeowell, Phil Jimenez, Jill Thompson, Chris Weston, and others.