60 for 60: Squatter in the House of the Lord
By Zachary Erickson
To a certain extent, much of 20th-century thought was taken up by argument about religious faith’s relevance or irrelevance, and this affected literature. T.S. Eliot, for example, wrote that poetry needs a religious tradition behind it in order to flourish. As I’m not a theologian—and I also don’t want to jump to any premature conclusions about the present century—I’ll leave that argument to one side. Since I’m a poet, though, I would venture to suggest that a writer runs a terrible risk if attempting to eliminate all non-rational belief from creative work. I would even recommend a healthy respect for superstitions. I don’t mean we should return to burning witches; but I do mean that a world without Halloween or its analogues would be rather boring. At least metaphorically, writing is a kind of magic, and anti-magical poetry would probably be an unsustainable gimmick.
The thirteenth issue of Columbia Journal (I presume not accidentally) included a special section on superstitions. This section featured an essay by American humorist Ellis Weiner titled “Squatter in the House of the Lord.” It examines the fine line between religion and superstition and the latter’s relevance to a post-religious (?) world. Weiner provides a good-natured reflection on a persistent question for those artists that ask themselves about such things.
Squatter in the House of the Lord
Ellis Weiner
Naturally, sensible empirical materialist that one is, one disdains “superstition.” The broken mirrors regarded with panicky dismay, the umbrellas kept scrupulously unopened indoors, the ladders skirted, the black cats avoided: puh-leeze. But “disdains” isn’t quite right, is it? Deep down—or, rather, deep up, in the heart of brightness at the core of the mind—one deplores superstition. One might even hate it.
But of the many fine, quality hates available to us today, often the best we can do for superstition is one of those queasy, murky, mitigated hates, the kind we reserve for the too-rich, the too-successful, the too-attractive. While in other circumstances hate can ripple through the body and resound in the soul with a pure reverberant bell-ring of subjectivity, when it comes time to hate superstition we get only a dull, lifeless clank.
What muffles the tone is envy. Oh, superstition is intellectually beneath contempt, and we dismiss it out of hand, and all that—but we’re just a little susceptible. If only it were true, the St. Christopher’s medal nonsense and the rabbit’s foot bushwa. We’d comply, taking the requisite steps to avert the bad in order to court the good. Who wouldn’t pack the water-pistol equivalent of an Uzi, the better to blast black cats into next week, if he knew for certain that knocking on wood would pay off big?
But three hundred years of the scientific method has convinced us otherwise. The Force, rather than being with us, is us: but it is impersonal, not-intelligent—like a species of pantyhose, sheer energy. The Universe doesn’t necessarily hate our meta physical guts, but it doesn’t much care if we are nice, either. In the interaction between us and what we may call, for want of a better hyperbole, Ultimate Reality, something, alas, is missing: that personal touch that means so much. We are acted on at every moment by the strong force, the weak force, electromagnetism, and gravity, but not by Heavenly Grace, Divine Mercy, Providence, Fortune, or any other agency formerly supplied gratis to our world view by what someone I read about once called “the Judo-Christian tradition.”
As every schoolchild knows, science, having dethroned religion in the course of its routine business, has found itself (and perhaps colluded a bit in the process) hustled up onto the big chair as dead God’s replacement. After all, science (despite the occasional coy disclaimer in books with titles like Democritus, Heisenberg, and Jerry Lee Lewis: A Physicist Looks at His Thumb) offers Truth. And none of your bleeding-heart, wishy-washy, culturally-relative truth, either. Physics, chemistry, astronomy, and the rest serve up trans-historical pix and fax not subject to fad or fashion, objective stuff a secular humanist can sink his teeth into. Science, God bless it, stands apart from the messy multiplicity and aggravating contingency of human experience, a serenely eternal complex of self-sufficient abstractions.
Or so many people want. To use another, but still home furnishing-related, metaphor: the thought that the House of the Lord is just standing there, vacant, with no buyers in sight, makes many people nervous. It’s such a waste. And-as long as we’re speaking frankly— it depresses property values here on Earth. Life just hasn’t been the same since God moved out of the neighborhood.
Can’t Science move in? Not to buy, of course-no one will ever be able to afford to live in that style again—but perhaps to lease? Just for the foreseeable future—until, say, the end of the physical universe?
Nowhere is the fervor to make science do the Lord’s work more apparent than in the current uproar over superconductivity. To read the New York Times Science Section on any given Tuesday is to become deeply concerned about the liquification temperature of nitrogen. Somehow, ceramics will save us. “Now we’re getting somewhere!” is the implicit media message. “Forget nuclear power, outer space, cloning, and recombinant DNA. Here comes limitless electricity, and magnetic fields strong enough to throw a horse across Lake Michigan. This—at last—is salvation!”
The point is not whether science can take the place of religion as an arena in which to explore one’s ultimate concern. The point is that many want—or need—something to do so. If not science, art. If not art, money. If not money, politics. If not politics…I don’t know…chocolate.
If not chocolate, superstition—which offers transcendent intervention (“good luck”) and personal redemption (“good luck”) in exchange for ritual observance and a willingness to appease some undefined but immanent force out there in the Beyond. Its method is pre-rational (which is to say, magical), its tenets unprovable and—like Wile E. Coyote, who when chasing the Road Runner out over a cliff, remains safely suspended in mid-air so long as he doesn’t question it, and look down— sustained by nothing more substantial than faith.
Yes, it does sound like Catholicism, now that you mention it—and Protestantism, Islam, and several others of what book clubs call, with not a little presumption, The World’s Great Religions. (Which is a nice name for a rock band, but by what authority does anyone call anyone else’s religion “great”? Religion is the source and ground of “greatness” itself. The term is, for use between systems, inapplicable by definition—like criticizing a dog for being “inhuman.”)
I’m not sure it sounds like Judaism, exactly. Old Testament miracles notwithstanding, the Torah—despite its comprehensive menu of options and features—doesn’t really support transcendent intervention and personal redemption. Oh, we’re cleansed on Yom Kippur, and so on, but about all we get for it is “our names inscribed in the Book of Life.” We want eternal grace; instead, we end up on some mailing list. Redemption it isn’t.
The quasi-religious elements of superstition do, though, suggest another of religion’s secular replacements—psychoanalysis. But then, to some (e.g., Vladimir Nabokov) psychoanalysis is superstition. Clearly, one man’s religion is another man’s science is another man’s baloney.
In such discussion we walk the unmarked, heavily-minded borderline between mind and…you know-the other thing. Spirit? Essence? Soul? Select the least embarrassing, if there is one. Is there? If not—if all nonrational categories are equally delusional and wrong—then so be it. Life is reducible to physics. Are CDs so bad? Aren’t computers great? Go complain.
If, however, there really is some non-rational center in our being, of which religion has hitherto been the inevitable and necessary cultural expression, then even while deriding the superstitious (who commonly include your actors, your athletes, your other intellectually unrigorous types) we might feel a mild pang of…something. Something of which we intellectually disapprove, but emotionally can’t quite fully disown.
Superstitions are the daydreams of reason, the escapist fantasies of rationality. And who isn’t sympathetic to an escapist fantasy, especially when it’s his own? Admittedly there’s some thing…unsophisticated about all those rubbings and knockings and avoidings and tossings of salt over the shoulder. They seem prompted by two equally fundamental impulses. One is the need to appease or ward off bad demons—better not make Mom or Dad mad. The other is the sense that the world should validate and reward our private intuition of our own importance. I should get good luck for snapping off the big half of the wish bone, not only because I followed directions and wrested it away from the other guy, but because I know I deserve it.
Childish responses, both. Still, who doesn’t say “Gezundheit” to a sneeze?
