Doomsday

Pain is inevitable and redemption is uncertain.  Our feet shall kick upon a floor of marbles like Chaplin in a death-act until the very end.

Sleep, a janitor at a camp I once worked at told me, is 1/60th of death.  In PTA’s film, There Will be Blood, Daniel Plainview is woken from his slumber a half dozen times, always to impending disaster.  If he couldn’t sleep-off life, then hating it and fighting it with all the bitter poison his body could manufacture was the next best thing.

This is getting at: as long as you’re alive there is imbalance.  Death is balance.  Balance is peace.  Transcendence is finding peace while alive.  We seek palatable notions about the universe (i.e. “truth” or “truths”) to clear the marbles.

Kermode posits that the beginning and the end are the bookends maintaining our library of stable notions.  “The great majority of interpretations of the apocalypse assume that the End is pretty near.”  If the apocalypse were not near, it would not be palatable and thus its purpose would be defunct.  Kermode explains that this nearness “disconfirms” but does not “discredit” the apocalypse.  To discredit the apocalypse would be to dismiss the natural human tendency to find balance amidst the chaos.  (It seems to me, at least for our purposes, that the apocalypse matters most as a tendency of the human mind.)

A skeptic might say that an apocalyptic end is not balance, or that the idea of an “end” is so abstract that groping for the finale is turning one’s back on transcendence.  Let’s work with something a little more observational, shall we?

In chapter 6, Quinby explains that gender lines are emboldened in the apocalyptic context, for the male rule needed someone to blame.  The enemy/sinner is a nice and stable notion amidst a sword-mouthed Jesus and seven frightening seals.

Male and female.  Alpha and Omega.  A pattern emerges.  The chiaroscuro produces a shelter of context.

Expect contrast in times of doom.  Expect division.  Expect that stumbling blind fool, the human, crazily stomping around for a steady surface while the earth quakes beneath him as it always has.

Humans have always tried to explain the unexplainable, which includes predicting the end of the world.

Both the secular and non-secular world attempts to pinpoint the moment the world shall come to an end. Though many people, both religious scholars and scientists, have made false predictions of when the world will end, we continue to readjust our calculations. As we schedule our lives based on dates and times, we try to do the same with our demise.

There are different perceptions of time, spanning religion and culture, yet we still try to make the imminent Apocalypse fit into our schedule. Millennium and even centuries become triggers for fear, creating “a perpetual calendar of human anxiety,” according to Kermode. “We are only asserting a permanent need to live by the pattern rather than the fact.”

The human perception of time has always been very linear. There is a beginning, a middle, and an end to every story. They parts are only understood in relation to one another. It is argued that God, as an omnipresent and omniscient being, exists in all time simultaneously, therefore predicting the end of days can be difficult.

Mathematicians such as Newton tried to predict the Apocalypse through calculations and theologians tried to predict it using cues from Bible, depending on their own interpretations of signs. The years bookmarked for destruction have come and gone and the world still continues to exist. The miscalculations are seen as just as that. The end is coming but we just don’t know when exactly.

The question remains: Why does man continue to try to understand what cannot be understood. It is because we find comfort in the fact of knowing when the end is happening. We can plan accordingly. In the past, when religion played a far greater role in human lives, the coming Apocalypse was used to scare people to behave in accordance with the Bible. There will be fire and brimstone issued forth by the angels like in the visions of John. Today, the end is seen as something that man plays a far greater role in. Not only will man be judged at the end, he will be the cause of it.

Apocalypse Thought as a Function of the Need for Human Identity

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On the Title
“Sense” – Just occurred to me: See http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sense for the definitions of “sense.”  The title is apt and an excellent summary of Kermode’s main arguments.  I was thinking in terms of sense as in logic and sense as in prediction. Would be interesting for further discussion.

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Kermode assigns a function to fears of apocalypse.   The beginning of time obscured to man and an uncertain future equally dark for eternity, the idea of apocalypse – or the idea that there is some end, some finiteness – serves to orient him within a frame of time and history.  Dividing the intemporal into small pieces of history, however arbitrary these divisions, renders time’s “rectilinear” property manageable to the human mind, or “immanent”.  These so-called saecula, have persisted throughout history, and have traditionally been ascribed great importance.  In each generation, the designation of an oppressor or generalized antagonist serves as the Antichrist, a sign to which apocalyptic believers harken as evidence that the end is near.  Though apocalypse has failed to arrive for millennia, the frenzy endures with “extraordinary resilience.” Through what Kermode calls a “persistence of fictions,” apocalyptic faith ultimately creates a “perpetual calendar of human anxiety.”  Further, apocalypse breeds and is tied to mythology, particularly that of the Empire, perpetuating for it a role in human identity.

Kermode reduces apocalyptic fears to a device for satisfying the fundamental human psychological need for identity.  Remove for a moment all religious associations with apocalypse.  Humans are placed in the muddle/middle of some time-space continuum, unsure where their lives intersect with that of the universe.  Fear of the world’s demise, places each human existence closer to one end of this continuum.  That is, it gives context for the state of human existence.  From this perspective, the short time frame of existence gives a sense of urgency, of mystery and above all, definition.  We take for granted the requirement for an “end” in literature.  All stories, Kermode points out, must obviously have an end.  As a literary device, and if we are to take human existence as nothing more than a grand story, the seeming futility of predicting apocalypse has value in itself.  As in literature, audience expectation, is what allows the sense of peripetaia to be effectively wrought.  It is the reversal of logic that gives the story its satisfying end.  And if logic and science are one, then does this not contradict the the common perception that nature is immutable?  Kermode does not deal with the nature of nature specifically, but only the laws of nature as determined by man.  The scientific method is only a collection of observations and predictions about what we expect to happen based on past experience.  We create laws of nature; if they do not confirm to what we observe, we change the laws until we are satisfied that what we see conforms to some prescription. If cannot break free of them, we must make sense of them.  So, the projection of meaning, in this case, impending apocalypse, onto events coincidental with anticipated apocalypse is no more than the restructuring of time around apocalypse to create context.