2. Deep Calls to Deep
Radical Theology
A suitable location had to be found for the construction of an esoteric vagina that would center the cartel’s ritual attentions on the enigma of the feminine libido. There were copious options since available housing was abundant, but there were two key considerations for the location of this state-of-the-art cult. One, it had to be spacious so that the erected vagina’s girth could accommodate the entire body of the each of the initiates (one at time) literally crawling through its entrance into the symbolic underworld, including Michael, who was six, six and a little over three hundred pounds. And two, it had to be hidden from some of the more narrow-minded inhabitants of the zone. Someone had been clandestinely planting the flag of the Vatican where the cartel gathered for their sex magic, which kind of ruined the vibes, but not in the way you think. The flag must have been the gesture of pietistic reactionaries of whom the cartel had previously been unaware, but whoever they were, the cartel must have properly scandalized them for them to try to spook them with the Catholic standard. And at first that pleased the cartel because it added a special taste of lasciviousness to their holy debauchery that had been missing since any sort of authority had left the area. Perhaps the Church was returning for a great battle to take back the zone, but the Church would lose because the cartel’s faith was stiff and inflexible. But then it dawned on Ishmael, that it might be the Church’s imprimatur, and once he told the others, a pall of impotency was cast upon the penises of the members who had them.
The thought of the Church approving of their indecency enfeebled them. It was typical of those perverted voyeurs to enjoy the enjoyment that belonged to others, but a certain, fruitful shift in thinking about enjoyment was effectuated through this improper transgression of the cartel’s transgressions. The phallus had to be moved from those members with penises to those members without, so that the phallus was now the vagina, and the group was reconfigured as those that had the vagina and those that did not. But this move could not be effectuated intellectually, it had to be enacted ritually. The penis havers could not grasp intellectually that they didn’t have the phallus because they looked down and saw that they did, but as they had all become impotent in the revelation of the Church’s witness, they could now see that the biological penis and the imaginary phallus were noncoincidental. How do you get the phallus out of the line of sight of the Christian perverts? You hid it where they would never think to look for it, within the hidden enjoyment of female genitalia.
The body could not be remapped with thought alone. Although, it wouldn’t take too much work to move the phallus to somewhere within the labial folds because female enjoyment was already hidden there in the form of the clitoris. Philosophy had been established to think without the taint of the body. And this decoupling had accomplished many things, particularly the decoupling of philosophy itself from the ultimate bodiless-ness of the third-person, view-from-nowhere called “science,” which had now pronounced its birth mother, philosophy, “impotent.” “Religion” had been the “re-binding” of praxis before it had become the profession of intellectual propositions. Faith had been a performance of the body and not of the brain. The cartel had read about many secret orders who had tried to bring vital “liturgy,” which translated from the Greek was “the work of the people,” back into religious observance, but it now appeared to Ishmael that the mistake of each had been the phallic structure of their praxis, which was the presence of the penis within the temple. The holy of holies was the presence of the absent phallus, which in Ancient Near-Eastern temples was represented as an empty throne in the inner sanctum, or the bull without a rider (unjustly mocked in the golden calf incident at Mount Sinai), or the giant footprints found leading to the doorways of Canaanite temple ruins. Each represented the divine’s presence as an absence.
The morning that the cartel set out, three vaginas and four penises were present. The expedition to locate the sacred site of the vaginal phallus was in the middle of a what had been a swelteringly hot summer. They had spent most of it hidden in the shade discussing the new theology, but this morning, it was cool and overcast and delightfully ominous. They came to call the new project, “Project Kenosis” because it was to be the incarnation of emptiness. Soon after their debilitating realization of the Church’s go-ahead, Julian had serendipitously stumbled upon “Radical Theology” in the stacks of the library, and the title was obviously ineluctable to her. After she emerged from one of her well-known periods of intense study, she brought the group a boon. She explained to the rapt gathering, each of whom were in love with her, that Thomas Altizer’s Radical Theology centered on the self-emptying, or “Kenosis,” of the divine presence. The divine presence had vacated the heavenly throne in an act of extreme self-limitation, including human fallibility, teaching people who don’t listen, and an ignominious death on a cross. The term “Kenosis” was the Ancient Greek word for “self-emptying” that Paul had used in his letter to the Philippian's to describe how God had abdicated the “Throne of Power” to come in weakness in the “form of a servant.” Altizer had seen that Christ’s death on the cross was the actual death of God. In this masterful move, he had gotten out of the line-of-sight of the “Christians” by believing more deeply than they did. For Altizer God was dead because that’s what the Bible said, and his bodily resurrection was as the body of the Holy Spirit present wherever two or three were gather in the name of the dead God.
Julian made the brilliant connection between the abandoned Throne of Power and the flaccid penises within the cartel ever since the Vatican’s planting of their perverse flag. The Messiah’s coming in weakness rather than power transformed the notion of what a messiah was, but most of his “followers” can’t abide a weak messiah, and so, like Peter, they deny Jesus in their constant grasping after the phallus in one form or the other. But Jesus’s juxtaposition of power and weakness, could be emulated by switching the location of the phallus from the penis to the vagina. The impotency of the flaccid penis was just negated presence, but the twice negated potency of the vagina was to present excessive absence, which was the “incontinence of the void,” as Samuel Becket had put it, and which was why the vagina was the true phallus. This sort of power had been articulated before Jesus by Lao Tsu as the power of water’s weakness, which was the absence of rigidity in water’s essence as a flow. The vagina was the true phallus because its dialectic “contained” the absence of the pensis’s rigidity.
Nobody was really following her logic, but they followed her that morning throughout the neighborhood because she was beautiful. They could only walk down the middle of the streets now because the overgrowth stretched well over the narrow sidewalks and made a green wall of sprouting grasses and wildflowers on each side of the street. Julien’s colorfully beaded locks swung and clacked as she gracefully strode into the bowels of neighborhood. She wore a yellow sundress, her hiking boots, and nothing else. Her fulsome hips and ample rear became the barely veiled objects of the group’s adoration as they followed behind her in rapt silence. And when her elegant, sable face turned to them to consider the pros and cons of a particular location, they acquiesced to whatever she said.
Julien paid attention to the insects and often used them as examples for the theological points that she was making. Ever since the remainder had learned how to keep bug bites at a minimum, the insects had become background noise. But for Julien, her deep study of books was only matched by her perusal of the obscene wonders of the lives of insects. She didn’t glean ethical lessons about how to live according to any transcendental principles as Henry David Thoreau had from his famous insect observations; but rather, she looked to them to teach her about the irreducible ambiguity of what is beyond ethics. She had seen how something about the insects withdrew whenever they were reduced to either their biological functions on the one hand or to their symbolic meanings on the other. She called this always withdrawing aspect of their phenomenal presentation, their “irreducible ambiguity” because it was what remained after any attempt to comprehend them. She had come to enjoy the excess of irreducible ambiguity beyond what she couldn’t grasp because it was something like Fredrick Nietzsche's void that stared back at those who investigated it for too long. She enjoyed the terror of the whatever it was that looked back, which was whatever it was that resisted the intention of her gaze absolutely.
The insects within the zone were no different than any, anywhere else, except that no matter how many of them were killed, by whatever method, they always returned to their previous populations’ levels within 24 hours or so. They weren’t resurrected or anything obviously magical like that. Their dead bodies remained where they had fallen, until they were either cleaned up or consumed by the other hungry lives that relied on their dead bodies for sustenance. However, the uncanniness of their constant return had been found to be unacceptable to the former residence of the zone, and so they had left en masse. The return was like an undead drive that unnerved them to their cores because it lacked any definitive explanation. Those that had remained lived with this uncanny lack, as the unconscious background of their lives. They had learned how to mostly keep the bugs from their direct awareness by reducing how often they were bitten by them. The various lemon eucalyptus and peppermint mixtures that the remainders smeared all over their bodies and worked deep into their hair throughout the day sufficed. Everyone had a punchy citrus-mint scent when they first came into each other’s presences, and both the bugs and the bouquet of repellents mostly faded into the background noise of their lives in the zone.
But Julien taught that bringing the background forward was how to enter the near-far. When inspecting each house, she carefully surveyed the resident bug populations within and surrounding it. The warm climate insects had disappeared from the zone because the homes were no longer heated in the winter, except where fires were lit starting with the first freeze in autumn and ending with the first few days of warmer weather in spring. Most of the structures in the zone had been built with working fireplaces because it was a first-tier suburb of the city erected around the Turn of the 19th Century, and there was always plenty of firewood to be obtained after hacking apart the wood from an abandoned house. It was strange to assign a cause to any of the facts of the insect populations of the zone because causes seemed to have an eerily selective efficacy for them. The fact that those insects that had long ago come from far away, tropical places had not maintained their populations no longer necessarily corresponded to the other fact that there was no longer indoor heating. The invisibility of causes, as David Hume had famously pointed out, meant that they could not be fully verified, and whatever invisible force causes once held was loosening, at least for the temperate climate insects within the zone. The fact was that the remainder now observed plenty of mosquitoes, ticks, flies, bees, moths, butterflies, spiders, and beetles, but had not found any cockroaches or bedbugs since the advent of the exodus.
The cartel was careful before embarking on their pilgrimage that morning to check to see if they could spy any hidden representatives of the Vatican lurking in the bushes. And once they had embarked, whenever they could manage to look away from Julien’s quivering backside, they rescanned the terrane. Julien was too focused on finding the hallowed spot to care too much about either their attention to her or to care too much about the attention of the Roman authorities. There was a certain floor plan that featured large family dens sunken behind the front parlors that Julien thought would be good because they couldn’t be seen, or heard, from the street. And because there were stairs from the front room going down into this backroom area. Julien imagined that the initiates would solemnly descend into the labial realm by going down these stairs. She had mentioned before that although it was assumed that mystics were taken up, or that they ascended to meet the divine, just as many descended into their experiences of the holy of holies. But most importantly, in Radical Theology, Kenosis was a self-emptying into the body from the heights of transcendence to the depths of imminence, so that the lower was elevated as lower without lifting it up, which for Altizer would have been the mistake of reoccupying the heavenly throne. Making immanence transcendent is how the divine sanctifies the body through incarnation rather than through purification. The near-far was not high but low.
Julien stopped at a house that they had come to know as being of the right sort for the sunken den. This one looked so well-preserved that they didn’t know if it was unoccupied. They knew most of the people in the zone and where they lived, but they were always discovering clandestine folks who had obscured themselves from view for one reason or the other. The front lawn erupted wildflowers, rogue trees, reprobate bushes and unbroken weeds like the other yards, but the deep green paint on the front porch wasn’t peeled and the maroon front door seemed as though it hadn’t been opened since the exodus. This was always a risky situation since many of the remainders kept guns and would shoot anyone approaching what they had claimed as theirs.
But Julien saw a sign. There were massive ant colonies around the side of the house, and she pronounced the streams of ants, “fellow journeyers into the Dark Night,” because “They descend with boons into the caverns of their vulvic nests.” This was the symbolic world that the cartel had both wanted and feared to various degrees. Ishmael caught himself second guessing the ant logic as too bold a rejection of reason but then admired Julien’s willingness to publicly announce her unapologetic descent into the esoteric world of visions and synchronicities. Why should magical thinking be thought of as crazy any longer when psychosis was the only reasonable response to the increasing madness of their lives. But what was to protect them from the certainty of psychosis? Sure, psychosis could imagine meaning by positing hidden causes, but what about the lack of causality in Julien’s studies of “irreducible ambiguity?” In fact, this was the exact sort of neurotic psychosis that Julien had already envisioned as doubtful belief. If one’s doubt was radical enough, it became an incontinent void.
