🦠 [01] Face Masks: The Forgetting of Air
#CoronavirusBible ~ Theological Vignettes
“Prophesy to the breath; prophesy, son of man, and say to the breath, Thus says the Lord GOD: Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe on these slain, that they may live.” Ez37v9
TL;DR 😷 [01] Face masks make us conscious of air-as-air. [02] Face masks augment the experience of breathing. [03] Face masks filter pollution: both inhaled and exhaled. [04] Face masks change my face and so alter my social persona. In all, the face mask is spiritual warfare: emblematic of a defensive stance against an ephemeral omnipresent enemy that threatens our identity.
[1] Face Masks: It’s Airborne
What is air?
“..air does not show itself. As such, it escapes appearing as (a) being. It allows itself to be forgotten..” Luce Irigaray - The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger
💹 We, Moderns, have divided body and spirit, nature and grace, mind and matter. All around Modernity has found great profit in abstracting the world by means of these dualisms. It has wrestled the material cosmos and won, allowing that people can be free spirits and all the world an open cast mine of fungible material.
🧠 Modernity has desecrated the material through economic abstraction and its inevitable environmental exploitation and this as a logical extension of philosophical gnosticism. In a similar way, Modernity has denigrated the physical through digital virtualisation - so much of my identity is accessed wirelessly from a repository in the cloud, I’m a brain in a vat managed by Amazon Web Services.
🦾 The antidote to this cyborg cerebrality has been to focus on the haptic phenomenology of embodiment and the mortality of my meat vehicle. This reattachment to the physical thinghood of things is a good, but it is rendered widely as a mere breathless, airless, idol of a thing: I am my body. Embodiment alone does not properly apprehend that we are necessarily aerobic creatures ceaselessly dynamically engaging intercourse with the atmosphere - in the very practical and biological sense, but also in the allegorical sense that we exist in perpetual dependent metaphysical communion with an unseen realm.
🧖♂️ So, an agnosticism persists, oscillating as to whether, in this Material World, we are Spirits (Sting) or Material Girls (Madonna).. And, there is a modern irony that whilst All that is Solid Melts into Air (Berman/Marx), we have also Forgetten Air (Irigaray).
😷 This global pandemic of a respiratory condition has forced the question of our relationship with air. Air is now unready-to-hand in unprecedented ways, and more than any other artefact, the face mask has made this visible.
🌬️ So, I intend to sketch a speculative theology of air, atmosphere and breathing - with the ambition to persuade you that Covid-19 teaches us more than mortality, but rather vitality ~ and so to let everything that has breath know what that breath is for.
Air can be forgotten, ignored and denied.
Air fills the fullness: There is no void, no vacuum, no airless space.
1 - Air can be forgotten.
“..Can a virgin forget her ornaments, or a bride her attire?..” Je2v32
Yes. It seems, she can. I can. We are amnesiac as a culture, willing to forget, longing for the deniable oblivion of ignorance’s bliss. However, if there is air, if it is conductive, if it can carry good and evil, then we have a responsibility to remember, and an opportunity, in this moment, to make memories.
😷 Face masks are memento mori, lest we forget, air is now broken. But, more richly face masks are a remembering of air and the process of life.
[This is an unfinished triad of thoughts on the remembering of air ~ there is a danger in PPJ’s arguing by association that these [CSL/Irigaray, Heidegger/Irigaray, Gen3] are allided or equivocated unhelpfully. Apologies.]
“..C.S. Lewis in his second letter to me at Oxford, asked how it was that I, as a product of a materialistic universe, was not at home there. “Do fish complain of the sea for being wet?” Or if they did, would that fact itself not strongly suggest that they had not always been, or would not always be, purely aquatic creatures?..” Sheldon Vanauken - A Severe Mercy
“..air does not show itself. As such, it escapes appearing as (a) being. It allows itself to be forgotten..” Luce Irigaray - The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger
💧 [1] We can no longer be oblivious on account of our immersion, we are no longer fish in water, we are no longer at home in the atmosphere we previously took for granted. The seasons changed and we have become alienated from air.
🐟 In one rendering, air evades capture, and air is comfortable with the obscurity of hiding in plain site. So too the ruach that whistles as god through the gaps forgetably ubiquitous as common grace. The fish analogy works to show the tool-being of any spirit-of-the-age or any enviro-cultural condition we have evolved to endure or to exploit. CS Lewis believes we are immersed in the depths of materialism and, unlike fish, we complain of the wetness of our materialist water, because, in fact, our species is intended for a more metaphysical and supernaturalist habitat.
🤿 So Covid-19’s face masks are as snorkels on fish, conspicuously a complaint, and an affront to natural order. Ostensibly, as the air becomes polluted or scarce, the hammer is broken, and consciousness this creates is a strange remembrance of air-as-air and that we are air-breathing animals. Further, where we had become oblivious to our mortality, the performative piety of face masks is a memento mori, a looking death in the face. But perhaps at a step further symbolic, face masks problematise the spiritual status quo, they call bluff to the synthetic air of surrogate spirituality of everything in late-stage post-Christendom that we had come to take as normal.
😷 Face masks alienate us from our immersion: the shock that life is not airless.
“..When we fill the jug, the pouring that fills it flows into the empty jug. The emptiness, the void, is what does the vessel's holding. The empty space, this nothing of the jug, is what the jug is as the holding vessel..” Martin Heidegger - Poetry Language Thought
“..The bridge gathers to itself in its own way earth and sky, divinities and mortals.. ..Thus
the bridge does not first come to a location to stand in it; rather, a location comes into existence only by virtue of the bridge.” Martin Heidegger - Building Dwelling Thinking
🙈 [2] We can no longer will forgetfulness, we can no longer deliberately obscure air.
🏋️ We were self-made men. We quashed air to become heroic anaerobic asteroids in an airless infinity. The very fluidity of air was an affront to modern man’s hegemonic devotion to the uncaused unmothered thinghood of solids. The rugged individual and his spaceship-self constructed high-rise capsules as hermetic dwellings which bore testimony to conquering space, vanquishing the void and being unflinchingly toward death.
🗻 We were all Howard Roark, bronze, statuesque, viciously stark, forbiddingly aloof, and bone dry: “He stood naked at the edge of a cliff. The lake lay far below him. A frozen explosion of granite burst in flight to the sky over motionless water. The water seemed immovable, the stone flowing. The stone had the stillness of one brief moment in battle when thrust meets thrust and the currents are held in a pause more dynamic than motion. The stone glowed, wet with sunrays.”
🍶 In the ontology that we had authored, air was supplanted by a void and the denizens of this universe were thinkers-in-the-void, rather than agents within a fecund contiguity. We were not so much forgetful of air, we denied it. Our jug contained nothingness, our bridges spanned the void and forged place out of nothingness.
🤰 To permit air, would be to permit preexistence and to allow the ambiguity and contingency of all those fluid and invisible elements which pass in, over and through us as porous beings. What an unpayable debt being born of water is! What strange sexed horror an air-filled cosmos presents the pores with! It was, we thought, better by far, to paint ourselves in earthy essences.
😷 Face masks war against our denial of aerobic dependency.
“..Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together..” Gn3v7
🍀 [3] We can no longer claim innocence, we are not naive to air, we must become responsible, gravely.
🏚️ Called forth into self-consciousness and the awareness of our nakedness, we are east of Eden now, individuated but depraved. This state is both a curse and an adventure of faith. What is lost of naivety is now a canvas of sotoreological potential.
👙 Face masks are fig leaves, particularly in their present, hastily adapted, crude and make-shift form. Further, perhaps only tenuously related to a theology air, and less about nakedness, per se, but regarding the shock of a new norm in attire. Note subsequently God makes garments for Adam and Eve Gn3v21; and that in a later (plague preceded) exodus to a later wilderness God sustains garments Dt29v5. Progressive providence that iterates and sustains physical and symbolic environmental protection is part of the adventure with God.
💨 In all, we cannot now claim to be naive about the air we are in.
😷 Face masks are fig leaves to cover the shame of our forgotten nakedness or they are foreshadowings of a redemptive arc toward our final adornment. Church vs World - who wore it better?
“..For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks intently at his natural face in a mirror. For he looks at himself and goes away and at once forgets what he was like..” Jm1v23-24
🙊 [4] Forgetting is the difference between apprehending and enacting, between mere faith and measurable works. So, by contrast with cognitive assent, breathing-qua-doing is an unforgetting - and the face mask is its mnemonic device - in a category with the cilice and rosary beads and TMS cards. Christians, appreciating body memory, should consider wearing facemasks as a memory aid.
🆚 Over against [1] Subsumation [2] Denial [3] Naivety we are brought to consciousness of air by the visible signifier of face masks, cognitively. But we are only brought to proper consciousness, by breathing, and that, through face masks. Invisible and ineffable, air is really only apprehended by breathing.
So, what are you breathing?
And, how are you breathing?
And are you, Christian?
2 - Remembering Air for Being: there is no void; everything contains.
“..there are no unsacred places, there are only sacred places and desecrated places..” Wendell Berry How to be a Poet
“The world is charged with the grandeur of God..” Gerard Manley Hopkins - God's Grandeur
“..you may be filled with all the fullness of God..” Eph3v19
😷 A face mask gives closure to the interior topology of the human frame as a vessel. Crudely, a face mask is a lid to the lungs, a seal of interiority, a capstone to the arch of my being - pointing both to the existence of air-to-be-contained and to the universal ubiquity of all things as-containers-of-air and containers of unseen potential.
🪆 Being-as-containing in a non-airless universe is not tautological, not semantic, and non-trivial. This consciousness is a baptism-by and filling-with holy spirit, it is the beginning of realist magic and a re-enchanted cosmos. This is an ontology that wars against notions of persons as mere wireframes, point nodes, flat images or lumpen biology.
If face masks, then air, and I’ll look to consider:
If air then vessels - human-as-container ontology
If vessels then enchanted - a thick universe
Vesseling vessels by verbs: forming and filling
[1] If air, then vessels.
Before even considering what a face mask is filtering out, we need to depth out the conception of humans as containers. In the vein of Irigaray’s “Can man live elsewhere than in air?” and “Is there a Being without breathing?” we must self-understand pneumatologically, and if so, we must understand the volume and air-tightness of our containing selves. Christianity, in this way, is a study fluid dynamics.
🍶 We are vessels. We are clay jars 2Co4v7 formed by a potter Is64v8; clay jars for variable uses Rm9v21; clay jars of variable strength 1Pt3v7; containers to be filled and poured out defilingly Mt15v11; cups cleaned on the outside and inside Mt23v25; liquid spirit containers Ev36v27, would-be reservoirs of substance stored up in temples containering the Holy Spirit 1Cor6v19-20, in a domestic volume built to be occupied by Holy Spirits, or else! ~ see even supernature abhors a vacuum Lk11v24-26. By contrast with the hypocrites of surface, image and Baudrillard's ecstatic 'communication', you are to be depthed deeply, a well of potential, filled to overflowing.
🍶 We are vessels. The quality of a vessel, the jugliness of a jug, its Heideggarian thinghood, consists in the pregnant volume sculpted by the potter. By contrast with the notions of a human person as:
🍖 a solid lump of biologically dense matter
🕸 a hyperconnected node in a data point cloud
🎞 a 2 dimensional image of a projected surface.
🍶 We are vessels, cavernously depthed, 🕳🕳 peer into the eyes of an other and see a chasm fathoms down. There are forces which rupture that vessel, to split wineskin and to shatter cup. When we fail to contain, we fail to be, we are de-vesseled and unthung.
🍶 We are filled. We are vessels remade to be refillable, new covenant vessels, elastic and tonkable, no longer the card prototype of a human, no longer the dry-run dress-rehearsal prop, we are now the real deal. We have to be, and everyone you know has to be. Grace's superabundance will overwhelm your frail frame unless it is fundamentally reengineered. The split wineskin is such a vivid visual of superabundance, the effervescent liquid which presses up and bubbles out of a person.
🍾 We are overfilled. The idea of an active and expansive liquid captures my imagination: the gospel is champagne, ready to pop, take the muselet off the bottle, it must be preached Ac4v20 Je20v9.
[2] If vessels, then enchanted.
👻 Initially, I am making the very limited, some-might-say-self-evident, claim that face masks betray the truth we are aerobic creatures in a cosmos that is non-static. But I would call us to the much more arduous enquiry - of what-then? Of, how shall we then breathe? Because if, by remembering air, we allow invisible beings to influence us, and we give to metaphysics an inch, we fling open a pandora’s box wherein all things are vessels, all things are content-bearing vehicles, and where benign and malign substances port through the pores of a closely more intimate infinity. The opposite of an airless world is a world filled with the fullness a transcendent presence that pervades all, that broods on the waters and calls to the deep. More than merely God-haunted, or God-addled, this cosmos of substances is God-saturated ~ frighteningly so.
🕳️ The intrepid Christian subject, venturing outside the friendly fellowship of man, peering over the brink of the non-human domain, is presented, seemingly, with a stark choice: arid subjective anthropocentricism or terrifying goopy animism. Unless there is a third way?
🦙 What is it to consider all other creatures-that-have-breath also as vessels?
🌵 What is it to re-apprehend the mineral and vegetable world likewise?
💨 For those with ears to hear, etc, face masks do not ask if the universe is pervaded by a transcendent presence. No, that is a given. They demand an answer to the question, what transcendent presence is it that dwells in the vessels of the cosmos?
✂️ In unforgetting air, we cannot any longer go on whoring sister nature as a mere inflatable doll summoned by a human subject’s whimsical partiality and neither can we carve up infinity into marketable parcels of sacred objets and their offcuts. There are no offcuts. There are no leftovers. There are no jug-voids which are secondary, subsidiary, auxiliary props to the thinghood proper of a physical world. There are no unsacred places.
🛰️ My very strong longing to re-enchant our sense of the universe, springs most viscerally from the horror wrought in design by the ideologically escapist, spatially rattly, nervously detached, urban grain of architecture-as-sculpture-in-the-void. The forces which generate the sort of comparative figure-ground diagrams above are complex and owe a not-small debt to contemporary technological possibility and the expedient demands of modern transport - but it is made philosophically plausible and considered socially desirable, because we believe in ‘space’.
🏘️ The analogy is indirect, but, I consider the centrifugal forces of the Great Divorce:
“..All the people you've met were living near the bus stop: but they'd taken centuries-of our time-to get there, by gradual removals.. ..They've been moving on and on. Getting further apart. They're so far off by now that they could never think of coming to the bus stop at all. Astronomical distances. There's a bit of rising ground near where I live and a chap has a telescope. You can see the lights of the inhabited houses, where those old ones live, millions of miles away. Millions of miles from us and from one another. Every now and then they move further still..”.. ..“Then the town will go on spreading indefinitely?” I said.” CS Lewis - The Great Divorce
🌌 And I contrast this with the angelology of the Space Trilogy which speculates a thickness to the universe, so very much so that, by comparison, known solids appear more rightly as subtractions by comparison:
“..They were falling out of the heaven, into a world. Nothing in all his adventures bit so deeply into Ransom’s mind as this. He wondered how he could ever have thought of planets, even of the Earth, as islands of life and reality floating in a deadly void. Now, with a certainty which never after deserted him, he saw the planets—the ‘earths’ he called them in his thought—as mere holes or gaps in the living heaven—excluded and rejected wastes of heavy matter and murky air, formed not by addition to, but by subtraction from, the surrounding brightness. And yet, he thought, beyond the solar system the brightness ends. Is that the real void, the real death? Unless . . . he groped for the idea.. ..unless visible light is also a hole or gap, a mere diminution of something else. Something that is to bright unchanging heaven as heaven is to the dark, heavy earths..” CS Lewis - Out of a Silent Planet
🕳️ An urban grain analogy is quickly limited - there are prudent circumstantial reasons to leave and cleave, and put land and sea between you and peculiar momentary hells of other people. But. Prevailingly, the demise of nearness is ideological. The disparate sociality of the buffered self and the environmentally egregious improximity of human sprawl is a self-sufficient spatial attitude of wanton entitlement that has been aided and abetted and incentivised and lubricated by an airless ontology which has permitted unsacred space and so rendered relational community and its host environment pockmarked with conceptual voids, barren non-places.
😨 Air-supplanted-by-void in our perception of the world beyond the self is a thermos flask’s insulation, a fire break in the forest of being. I suggest, we have chosen to forget air, because of an innate, preconscious consciousness of having fallen short of the moral and aesthetic character demanded by the presumed transcendent presence that dwells in the vessels of the cosmos. So much safer a cold dark expanse than the prospect of sentience in the air. As, how could such a pervasive, all-seeing, infinite force not hold humanity in contempt?
“..Speak to Him, thou, for He hears, and Spirit with Spirit can meet-
Closer is He than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet..”
Alfred Lord Tennyson - The Higher Pantheism
💨 The Christian-proper breathes easy and breathes mindfully fruitfully under a conviction that the character of the pervasive sacred which fills all things is not an impersonal vague force, not a self-certifying capricious potentate, but a being of supreme self-giving love who, while infinite, is bafflingly personal, with no contradiction.
🎁 The Christ event makes plain not only that that the finite, contingent and en-placed can contain the infinite, but that an infinite God’s love-as-love must be so envesseled, and that as-incarnate.
💗 The Christ event makes plain not only that that the finite, contingent and en-placed can contain the infinite, but that no physical, embodied instance of creation should be denigrated. All things are purposed as parables to image the container and contained of lover and love.
“..Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you..” 1Co6v19
“..And behold, the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom..” Mt27v51
“..For he himself .. has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility..” Eph2v14
“..We are not two, we are one..” The Kinks - Strangers
😷 To take this idea a brief jaunt further.. There are no unsacred places, the holiness of God pervades all as the air we breathe, but. In order to avoid the Kinks’ porridge of monism, of oneness achieved at the cost of twoness, specificity must precede universality. There must be conspicuous vessels so to convey the envesselled substance. In this way, face masks are as curtains to the temple - tailored first to then be torn in two.
😷 We are vessels. The whole world is vessels - to be consciously apprehended as such, to commended and celebrated as such, to be contended for as such. By face masks. Face masks are icons for a spiritual reality, icons destined for iconoclasm, temporary signposts, a microcosm of that macrocosm, perpetual precursors, midwives to proper spiritual breathing.
So, if face masks, then air.
If air, then vessels.
If vessels, then sacred.
If sacred, what praxis?
[3] If Vessels, then Vesseling by verbs: Filling and Forming
😷 The face masks presents as the threshold between the filled and the formed, a vent for the filling, and a lid to the forming, offering an emblem of that complementary asymmetry. I’ve been grateful for the many way Alastair Roberts has prised this into my sense of reality.
🍶 Thusly, if vessels, then there is a creative creativity to the process of dominion. In this way intelligent design is participatory and relies on an ongoing dynamic emergence. To talk of this complementary asymmetry should not, and need not, crudely impose gendered roles, but, in the manner of Irigaray, to consider that where we have forgotten air, obscured breathing, neglected filling, put off natality, and so despised vital femininity. What then? If vessels then we are to be filling and forming reciprocally and the primary dance of a re-enchanted universe.
“..We live in a world of abstractions, shallow, airless and relatively weightless world. Detached from the soil of reality.. ..On the first three days of creation we have acts of forming, naming, taming, structuring, ordering, dividing – these sorts of acts. Then when God creates the man, those are the sorts of acts that he primarily delegates to the man. Whereas on the second three days of creation what we see are filling, glorifying, perfecting, creating life, communion, and bringing the future..”