For a while now, sculpture and painting’s preeminence among the plastic arts has seemed a little anachronistic.  Painters such as Richter or Freud who stick to using paint to do two-dimensional figurations, or sculptors like Serra who stick to ‘raw’ materials like steel over the found objects that decorate so much installation art, feel classic or even old-fashioned.  After Pop art, art and photography that mix media became much more common: Gilbert and George, Lee Bontecou, landscape art, Bruce Nauman.  More recently, the materials of plastic art keep getting more worldly.  Witness the Young British Artists:  Rachel Whiteread (plaster casts of negative space), Chris Offili (dung), Marc Quinn (blood), the Chapmans (figurines), Tracy Emin (household materials and furniture).

While the world has been intruding into art’s materials, and art has been escaping the gallery (as with street art), I’ve been thinking about another development lately, one which leaves plasticity behind altogether: the use of computers, not just to create art, but as the subject of art as well.  For two or three years this field has been gathering momentum, and it feels like a generational shift.  There’s now a group of people approaching thirty who have grown up in an entirely novel social condition, that of having used computers all their lives, and for whom navigating the programmed landscapes of operating systems and icons is as natural as Wordsworth rambling the Lake District.  This is neither a good nor bad development, it’s history.  Anyway, I don’t believe in being too technologically determinist about kinds of art, but looking at the work of this group is incredibly exciting because the kinds of inquiries they make denaturalize and probe their environment, which in their case happens to be the space of computing.  They add computing to the world, and add the world to computing.

Let’s start with the celebrated Cory Arcangel.  Cory’s work usually uses obsolete game systems, computers, file formats, and other computing detritus as the basis for experiments and invasions.  His most famous work is “Super Mario Clouds,” in which he hacked a Super Mario Brothers cartridge to display only the blue sky and floating clouds, a work shown at the Whitney Biennial.  Other stuff includes a shooting game hacked to make Andy Warhol the target, with Flavor Flav and Col. Sanders the decoys;  matching Kurt Cobain’s suicide letter with ads from Google AdSense; rearranging the DVD chapter markers on ‘Simon and Garfunkel Live at Central Park’ to notate all the moments where they look like they hate each other; and so on.  Are you thinking this stuff is juvenile?  You’d be wrong, but in a way, you’d be right: Cory conserves the open-source ethos of young hackers, to the point of supplying instructions for how to replicate his most famous works. 

Cory’s instructions to “Super Mario Clouds” are a very strange and very fascinating kind of aesthetic document.  (They’re also funny.)  As it turns out, his manic methods are refreshingly low-tech, born of a taste for the ground floor of computing.  He writes a new set of instructions that uses the game’s existing graphics, compiles it (translates it into 1’s and 0’s, or assembly language), and burns it onto to the same chip that the original Nintendo uses (he has a chip burner used by Nissan hotrodders who use it to hack their engines).  Then things get even more basic: he takes the game cartridge, desolders and removes the program chip, and solders in his newly burned chip, cutting a hole in the plastic casing to fit it.  The result is a slightly haunting image of a glowing blue sky and those iconic Super Mario Clouds, floating right out of the collective imaginary.

You might wonder why Arcangel doesn’t just make the image on Photoshop; it would be a heckuva lot easier.   Here are his own learned and excitable words:

“A typical NES Cartridge has two chips. One is a graphics chip, and the other is a program chip. Basically the program chip tells the graphics chip where to put the graphics, and thus if you do this in a interesting manner, you have a video game. When making a “Super Mario Clouds” cartridge, I only modify the program chip, and I leave the graphic chip from the original game intact. Therefore since I do not touch the graphics from the original cartridge, the clouds you see are the actual factory soldered clouds that come on the Mario cartridge. There is no generation loss, and no “copying” because I did not even have to make a copy. Wasss up.”

See, these are the real “factory soldered” clouds, chief.  Surely one of the more bizarre yet convincing determinations of authenticity I’ve seen in a while, Cory expresses perfectly the thrill of using the actual relevant materials to create an artwork.  Simply Photoshopping the image would be fake, clearly, yet it’s hard to explain exactly why, a mark of art that applies itself to present conundrums.  Maybe the physical Nintendo cartridge matters because it’s the real physical object that inflected our world, and it’s important to use it, understand it, and work with it.

The first Palm Pilot was exciting to lots of computer geeks because its tiny memory meant ingenious little games were invented and shared, as they were in the initial stages of personal computing.  (I remember writing simple BASIC programs for my Atari 400 and saving them on cassette tapes, which I excitedly played to hear the “sound” of my code, not that I was ever a dork or anything.)  Arcangel returns to the obsolete technologies of his childhood, not as nostalgic fixations (he claims never to have liked playing Mario), but as an aesthetic embrace of the real.  Surrounded by these things, he developed an entirely artistic fixation with changing them, interfering with them, transforming them.  His work, over time, keeps getting simpler, showing how little it takes to get into the cracks of things that appear seamless, like hardware and operating systems.  He takes on challenges for the sake of curiousity: he recently calculated where the exact Manhattan center of Starbucks gravity is, and explained how.  What’s implicit is how just paying the right kind of attention keeps the world interesting, fully alive and of the moment.

The official art world has already begun to sanction this type of work, as the Whitney Biennial makes pretty clear, as well as a recent show at the slightly old-school Pace Wildenstein gallery, curated by Patricia Hughes and featuring Arcangel, Brody Condon, the collective Paper Rad, and others.  Another feature they seem to share is an eclecticism with respect to materials and genres: many of them make music as well as art, and all seem to be feeding off of the whole range of waste-products of consumer obsolescence, rotting eighties junk that begs to be categorized and indexed.  Underneath a lot of this work is a desire for mastery, for lost comprehension, that’s so hard to satisfy in the present condition of unprecedented epistemological overload and confusion.  Cory again:

“We [BEIGE, Cory’s art/music collective] started using fixed architecture machines, computers which are no longer being developed, at this time because it is impossible to keep up with commercial software and hardware. Imagine trying to play Bach on the piano if they switched keys around every few years … and charged you for it! Plus the limited capabilities of these computers allows us to understand every aspect of the machine.”

Hence the attraction to precisely the limitations of older systems.  To take another recent example, have a look at this short animation from Michael Bell-Smith, entitled “Keep On Moving (Don’t Stop).”  The use of the squarish graphical template of early role-playing games has a similarly aesthetic, as opposed to nostalgic, motivation to that of Arcangel’s work.  It’s got the immersion in music too: yellow is color of sunrays.  The cheery quest followed by the recursive, fractal surprise at the end – trapped! – suggests the computer game as a new locale of the culture industry, appropriating all attempts to escape.  Adorno would have liked to have predicted it, but here the feeling isn’t as dour, it’s more pragmatic: we’re stuck with this world, so let’s transform it.  This topos isn’t chosen because of fondness, this is part of the air, part of the world and how we represent ourselves now.  And because computer avatarship is inescapable, it’s all the more important to subject computing to an aesthetic investigation.  I’ve seen works by the macro-photographer Andreas Gursky and the miniaturist painter Shazia Sikander that use computer animation, but this current group goes further.  They make art, not just using computers as a engineering tool, but out of and delving into computing as a cultural form.

See some more Dispatches.

Professor Robert Langdon, hero of Dan Brown’s The DaVinci Code,  is a well-known symbologist, American, and bachelor.  In the space of a few days in Paris and London, Langdon is accused of murder, seeks the Holy Grail, and gets the first date he’s had in years.  He’s a classic bumbling hero, roused from a hotel slumber to meet Bezu Fache, the captain of the Central Directorate Judicial Police who is hell-bent on arresting him; Sophie Neveu, a cryptologist who believes Langdon can help solve the mystery of her grandfather’s murder; and Sir Leigh Teabing, the world’s preeminent Holy Grail scholar.  Dan Brown doesn’t give us too much personal information about our hero, preferring instead to let chatty Langdon provide most of the historical exposition, but we do know that he has had but one love in his life, a woman named Vittoria who drifted away a year before The DaVinci Code picks up.  Langdon, like most every other character in the book, is looking for a lady.

The DaVinci Code is a competent thriller, but it takes more than that to sell over 40 million copies and nearly $200 million worth of movie tickets.  Dan Brown’s genre elements – murder, escape, conspiracy, romance – exist first in the primary plot starring Langdon and company, and finally in a more famous plot starring Jesus Christ and his disciples.  Murder, escape, and conspiracy are all familiar Biblical elements, but romance?  There’s where the 40 million copies come into play.  Robert Langdon’s newest manuscript asserts that the Holy Grail is the sarcophagus of Mary Magdalene and documents that trace her bloodline into the present day.  Why Mary?  She allegedly married and bore the child of Jesus Christ.  This is more than Biblical gossip though, because Dan Brown’s Catholic Church has suppressed Mary’s claim to the church (ie, the sacred feminine) and seeks to destroy the Grail and murder Christ’s living descendents.  The DaVinci Code is ostensibly a book about restoration of (or failing that, reverence for) female power – so how come there’s only one female character in the book?

If Dan Brown doesn’t tell us much about Robert Langdon, he tells us even less about Sophie Neveu.  At least Langdon’s ramblings and manuscripts are evidence of his own passion and intellectual life; Sophie’s interest in cryptology is attributed directly to the design of the grandfather who raised her. If Sophie had a love at one point, he doesn’t get a name – we know just that she is lonely.  She’s useful to the search for the Grail only because of her hazy childhood memories.  Sophie is a human code, and she needs Langdon to help her read herself.  There’s nothing inherently wrong with a lonely repressed lady cryptologist, but Brown isolates her in a world where female power has been lost, and encourages only the men to reclaim it.

When Langdon informs his lecture hall of the “mind boggling” “concept of sex as a pathway to God” held by the early church, he fields a question from the crowd:

“Professor Langdon?” A male student in back raised his hand, sounding hopeful.  “Are you saying that instead of going to chapel, we should have more sex?”  Langdon chuckled, not about to take the bait.  From what he’d heard about Harvard parties, these kids were having more than enough sex.  “Gentlemen,” he said, knowing he was on tender ground, “might I offer a suggestion for all of you.  Without being so bold as to condone pre-marital sex, and without being so naïve as to think you’re all chaste angels, I will give you this bit of advice about your sex lives.”  All the men in the audience leaned forward, listening intently.  “The next time  you find  yourself with a woman, look in your heart and see if you cannot approach sex as a mystical, spiritual act.  Challenge yourself to find that spark of divinity that man can only achieve through union with the sacred feminine.”  (310)

What’s interesting here is that Langdon responds only to the “gentlemen” in his class.  He perceives the question – a misunderstanding of his lecture – to be fundamentally male, and assumes either that women already have an appropriate attitude toward sex or that perhaps they don’t need that appropriate attitude if the man has it.  There’s no space in his treatment of the sex act for female sexuality except as a conduit for a male experienced “spark of divinity.”  Sophie Neveu is positioned similarly in the narrative – there’s no space for her experience of the murder or Grail quest outside of what it means for her late grandfather and her male companions.  She is the portal through which the academics finally make tangible their theory.  Her agency is only as great as the extent to which Langdon and Teabing exploit her.  Dan Brown offers few clues, in a 454 page bestseller about the suppression and celebration of the ‘sacred feminine,’ as to how a woman might negotiate her own intrinsic divinity.

Sophie, though she serves as an object of desire for the bulk of The DaVinci Code, only behaves sexually after she learns herself to be the direct descendant of Mary Magdalene and Jesus Christ.  It’s as if Brown can’t ask his heroine to reevaluate her sex life in the same manner that he asks men, through Langdon, to; instead he fashions Sophie as a blank slate.  She doesn’t endure a reawakening at the conclusion of the novel, but an awakening:

The stars were just appearing, but to the west, a single point of light glowed brighter than any other.  Langdon smiled when he saw it.  It was Venus.  The ancient Goddess shining down with her steady and patient light…Langdon looked over at Sophie.  Her eyes were closed, her lips relaxed in a contented smile…Reluctantly, he squeezed her hand…Langdon felt an unexpected sadness to realize he would be returning to Paris without her.  “I’m sorry, I’m not very good at—”  Sophie reached out and placed her soft hand on the side of his face.  Then, leaning forward, she kissed him tenderly on the cheek.  [Langdon asks Sophie to meet him in Florence the following month, and she agrees as long as they avoid museums etc.]  “In Florence?  For a week?  There’s nothing else to do.”  Sophie leaned forward and kissed him again, now on the lips.  Their bodies came together, softly at first, and then completely.  When she pulled away, her eyes were full of promise.  “Right,” Langdon managed.  “It’s a date.”  (448-449)

This is an unremarkable conclusion to an unremarkable romance plot, except for the fact that Brown offers no representations of female desire not explicitly allied with a Goddess.  If her enlightened sex with Langdon will in fact help her explore her spirituality, why does this probihit Brown from acknowledging her prior sexual impulses?  Jane Schaberg and Melanie Johnson-DeBaufre point out in their article “There’s Something About Mary Magdalene” that female sexuality in The DaVinci Code exclusively “helps men achieve their full spiritual potential,” but they also posit that Brown’s Christianity is one that “appeals to those looking for a spirituality not based in creed or authority, but on knowledge, personal reflection and an embodied life in the world.”  (Ms. Magazine, Spring 2006)  In The DaVinci Code, however, no woman who is not literally the descendant of a goddess negotiates such a spirituality.  Individual women – like Vittoria, who made choices illegible to Langdon – are absent.  Brown keeps women abstract by referring to them only in groups: Langdon’s female students “smiled knowingly, nodding” (but don’t speak to each other as the men do), no female participant in a traditional sex ritual is identified (as Sophie’s grandfather is), an unnamed Parisian academic reminds Langdon of all the simpering women back home, a nun is emblematic of a body of believers, and Sophie’s grandmother represents the entire bloodline of Mary Magdalene.  For the individual woman in The DaVinci Code, there is no “embodied life in the world” if it does not involve a male body – or if she is a part of the literal bloodline of Jesus and Mary.

One scene in The DaVinci Code stands out from the rest.  It’s not included in the screen adaptation by Akiva Goldsman.  In it, Langdon and Sophie take a cab ride through the Bois de Boulogne:

Langdon was having trouble concentrating as a scattering of the park’s nocturnal residents were already emerging from the shadows and flaunting their wares in the glare of the headlights.  Ahead, two topless teenage girls shot smoldering gazes into the taxi.  Beyond them, a well-oiled black man in a G-string turned and flexed his buttocks.  Beside him, a gorgeous blond woman lifted her miniskirt to reveal that she was not, in fact, a woman…Langdon nodded, unable to imagine a less congruous a backdrop for the legend he was about to tell.  (157)

Sophie doesn’t have trouble paying attention; her eyes are “riveted” on Langdon. It’s also worth noting that the women appear in groups here as well.  But the scene’s explicit depiction of a secular shadowy sexual marketplace is unique within the novel. Here a more complex web of connections between individual and temporal sexualities, lifestyles, and belief systems is glimpsed. Langdon himself seems to congratulate his author on the decision.  Unfortunately, the cab-driver’s radio begins to crackle with news of the fugitives, and Langdon and Sophie have to hightail it out of the Bois de Boulogne, and it’s on to a Swiss Bank to search for the distillation of the sacred feminine.

Leonard Cohen’s music first came to me in my early teens. I fell deeply in love, and thought, this will pass, this is an adolescent thing, a phase, an infatuation; time or luck will have me grow out of this.

His words came to me—as many great things come to me, in pathetic or even hideous masks, to test whether or not I am easily fooled by the disguises woven to hide their wondrous nature—in Oliver Stone’s 1994 movie Natural Born Killers. It is a rather dismissible movie, though the soundtrack is amazing (thank you, Trent Reznor et al.), and it did its job of delivering the unexpected, unforeseeable goods.

But by then I already, albeit unwittingly, knew these two introductory songs, “The Future” and “Waiting for the Miracle,” from one of my friend Vanessa’s mixed tapes. I just didn’t know who was behind the suave voice. A few years and several album acquisitions later, an acquaintance in Rome asked me what I was listening to at the moment, and it was Cohen’s 1973 album Live Songs. The response so impressed me that I bring it to you verbatim: “Leonard Cohen? Nobody listens to him anymore. We were all listening to him in the late seventies, when we were young and radical and left.” Yeah, I left. I’m fine being told that my tastes are quite yesterday, and I knew this guy probably didn’t get it because he was, well, who he was. He was also definitely one of the numerous Europeans who helped make Cohen more popular over there than in North America by not understanding his lyrics.

Well, to echo the rampant name-calling that follows him everywhere, the Ladies’ Man, the Grocer of Despair, grandson of the Prince of Grammarians, has just published a new old book, titled Book of Longing, and was on the radio three weeks ago chatting with Terry Gross. She did a fairly good job, considering that the usual sort of questions, many of which she tried, really didn’t fit here, and Cohen seems to be no comforter.

Lie to me, Leonard

Firstly, he lied his way through the entire hour. Okay, perhaps they weren’t all lies, and the ones that were lies were committed with some definite * intentions (*I’m at a loss for the appropriate adjective: honest? Low? Lofty? Sick? Sweet? Romantic? All of the above?). The truth is that he can’t help how charming he is, and frankly it’s a miracle he’s done what he has to melt deeply frozen hearts. He had tea on April 21 with his Zen master in celebration of the latter’s ninety-ninth birthday, but immediately backtracks to point out that it wasn’t tea—it was liquor. In his poem “Titles” he reads that “I hated everyone / but I acted generously / and no one found me out.” He valiantly assures the listener that this is true, and equally valiantly contradicts it in song and in print. Plus, I can’t help but suspect that many people have found him out. Is it possible to feign this man’s passion? Probably, but I just don’t want to think so.

Alright, that’s not so many lies. But a lot of interesting things came up. When discussing the idea of composing a poem versus composing a song, Gross asks him about the early sixties song “Famous Blue Raincoat” and which of those two it originally was, to which he replies, “It’s all the same to me.” [Aside: forgive me for sticking to the script here and bringing up the blockbuster songs, when I’d rather fawn over the lesser-known songs like “Teachers,” “Passing Through,” “Who by Fire,” “If It be Your Will,” “Here It Is,” etc.]

A lot of what one might call romantic creation is touted here. Ignoring the famous traits of “despair, romantic longing, and cynicism” alongside the idea that “at the same time, there’s a spiritual quality to many of his songs” mentioned as an introductory nothingness on the radio show, when asked where “Famous Blue Raincoat” came from, he replies, “I don’t know, I don’t remember how it arose—I don’t remember how any of them get written.” When asked why he left the Zen center after five or six years of work there, he replies, “I don’t know… I’m never sure why I do anything, to tell you the truth.” About the creation of “Everybody Knows,” “I don’t really remember…. You see, if I really remembered the conditions which produce good songs, I’d try to establish them,” going on to mention the use of napkins, notebooks, etc.

Then there’s the sheer hard labor of it:

You get it but you get it after sweating…. I can’t discard anything unless I finish it, so I have to finish the verses that I discard. So it takes a long time; I have to finish it to know whether it deserves to survive in the song, so in that sense all the songs take a long time. And although the good lines come unbidden, they’re anticipated, and the anticipation involves a patient application to the enterprise.

Of the early-nineties song “Always,” Gross points out that he’s taken a song by Irving Berlin and added a few lines, making it “suddenly very dark and sour.” His quick reply: “Well, you can depend on me for that…”. His is “a kind of drunken version of it.” He’d like to do a song in the vein of those great American songbook lyricists he doesn’t feel equal to:

I have a very limited kind of expression, but I’ve done the best that I can with it, and I’ve worked it as diligently as I can, but I don’t really—except for songs like “Hallelujah,” or “If It be Your Will,” I think those are two of my best songs—I don’t live up to… those great songwriters….

There’s a lot of things I’d like to do, but when you’re actually in the trenches, and, you know, you’re in front of the page or… the guitar or the keyboard under your hands, you know you have to deal with where the energy is, what arises, what presents itself with a certain kind of urgency. So, in those final moments, you really don’t choose, you just go where the smoke is, and the flames and the glow or the fire, you just go there.

The Ponies Run the Girls are Young

But enough about composition. My favorite bits are where Cohen plays the role of the [not exactly dirty] old man. Page 56 of his new book carries a poem for a certain Sandy, and what girl doesn’t occasionally want to be the Sandy sung to here? “I know you had to lie to me / I know you had to cheat / To pose all hot and high behind / The veils of sheer deceit / Our perfect porn aristocrat / So elegant and cheap / I’m old but I’m still into that / A thousand kisses deep.” Age is very present here, and while he’s sung of so many other mortal weaknesses over the past forty-plus years, it seems he had to wait for this particular one to sink into the bones before it began to permeate his work. In four short lines on page 171 you learn the sorrows of the elderly. Go to page 14 to read my favorite tidbit written to a young nun, speaking of staggered births, time disposing of two people whose generations separate them, and whose turn it is to die for love, whose to resurrect. This one is too beautiful to steal from page to pixel.

Betrayal also comes up. In the end the letter writer who sings about that famous blue raincoat has his woman stolen by the letter recipient. In speaking about such games, his age now seems to save him:

Fortunately I’ve been expelled from that particular dangerous garden, you know, by my age… so I’m not participating in these maneuvers with the frequency that I once did. But I think that when one is in that world, even if the situation does not result in any catastrophic splits as it does in “Famous Blue Raincoat,” one is always, you know, edging, one is always protecting one’s lover, one is always on the edge of a jealous disposition.

Later he specifies that one does not become exempt from that garden, but is just not as welcome. So what are the trade-offs for no longer being welcome? If nothing else, there’s a special voice, which in Cohen’s case is undeniably alluring. He apparently acquired it through, “well, about 500 tons of whiskey and a million cigarettes—fifty, sixty years of smoking…”. I didn’t know tar could be turned to gold.

The Fall

Then comes the most terrifying subject of all, beauty—physical beauty, superficial beauty. We are either enslaved by it, embody it, or attach ourselves to someone who does. He is still oppressed by the figures of beauty, just as he was thirty-two years ago. And here he’s at his most graceful:

I still stagger and fall…. Of course it just happens to me all the time, you just have to get very careful about it, because it’s inappropriate for an elderly chap to register authentically his feelings, you know, because they really could be interpreted, so you really have to get quite covert as you get older… or you have to find some avuncular way of responding, but still, you just, really are just, you’re wounded, you stagger, and you fall.

One feels deeply in love, and thinks this will pass, this is a phase, an infatuation; time or luck will have me grow out of this.

A Monday Musing by Morgan Meis about Cohen is here, and previous Lunar Refractions can be seen here.

What is the legacy of two thousand years of Christianity? What are the specific qualities that the Christian tradition has instilled and cultivated in the minds of men? They appear to be twofold, and dangerously allied: on the one hand, a more refined sense of truth than any other human civilization has known, an almost uncontrollable drive for absolute spiritual and intellectual certainties. We are speaking of a theology that through St. Thomas Aquinas assimilated into its grand system the genius of Aristotle and whose Inquisitors in the Church bequeathed to modern science its arsenal of weapons for the interrogation of truth. The will to truth in the Christian tradition is overwhelming. On the other hand, we have also inherited the ever-present suspicion that life on this earth is not in itself a supreme value, but is in need of a higher, a transcendental redemption and justification. We feel that there is something wrong with us, or that the world itself needs salvation. Alas, this unholy alliance is bound finally to corrode the very beliefs on which it rests. For the Christian mind, exercised and guided in its search for knowledge by one of the most sophisticated and comprehensive theologies the world has ever seen, has, at the same time, been fashioned and directed by the indelible Christian distrust of the ways of the world. Such a mind will eventually, in a frenzy of intellectual honesty, unmask as humbug what it began by regarding as its highest values. The boundless faith in truth, a joint legacy of Christ and Greek, will in the end dislodge every possible belief in the truth of any faith. For the Christian, belief in God becomes—unbelievable. Ergo Nietzsche:

Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in broad daylight, ran to the marketplace and cried incessantly: “I seek God! I seek God!” As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Has he got lost? asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? Emigrated? Thus they yelled and laughed.

The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. “Whither is God? I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers… God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.

His listeners fell silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, and it broke into pieces and went out. “I have come too early,” he said then; “my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men… This deed is still more distant from men than the most distant stars—and yet they have done it themselves.”

God, as Nietzsche puts it, is dead; and you and I, with the relentless little knives of our own intellect—psychology, history, and science—we have killed him. God is dead. Note well the paradox contained in those words. Nietzsche never says that there was no God, but that the Eternal has been vanquished by time, the Immortal has suffered death at the hands of mortals. God is dead. It is a cry mingled of despair and triumph, reducing, by comparison, the whose story of atheism and agnosticism before and after to the level of respectable mediocrity and making it sound like a collection of announcements by bankers who regret that they are unable to invest in an unsafe proposition.

Nietzsche brings to its perverse conclusion a line of religious thought and experience linked to the names of St. Paul, St. Augustine, Pascal, Kierkegaard, and Dostoevsky, minds for whom God was not simply the creator of an order of nature within which man has his clearly defined place, but to whom He came in order to challenge their natural being, making demands which appeared absurd in the light of natural reason.

Nietzsche is the madman, breaking with his sinister news into the marketplace complacency of the pharisees of unbelief. We moderns have done away with God, and yet the report of our deed has not reached us. We know not what we have done, but He who could forgive us is no more. No wonder Nietzsche considers the death of God the greatest event in modern history and the cause of extreme danger. “The story I have to tell is the history of the next two centuries,” he writes. “Where we live, soon nobody will be able to exist.” Men will become enemies, and each his own enemy. From now on, with their sense of faith raging within, frustrated and impotent, men will hate, however many comforts they lavish upon themselves; and they will hate themselves with a new hatred, unconsciously at work in the depths of their souls. True, there will be ever-better reformers of society, ever-better socialists and artists, ever-better hospitals, an ever-increasing intolerance of pain and poverty and suffering and death, and an ever more fanatical craving for the greatest happiness of the greatest numbers. Yet the deepest impulse informing their striving will not be love, and it will not be compassion. Its true source will be the panic-stricken determination not to have to ask the questions that arise in the shadow of God’s death: “What now is the meaning of life? Is there nothing more to our existence than mere passage?” For these are the questions that remind us most painfully that we have done away with the only answers we had.

The time, Nietzsche predicts, is fast approaching when secular crusaders, tools of man’s collective suicide, will devastate the world with their rival claims to compensate for the lost kingdom of Heaven by setting up on earth the ideological economies of democracy and justice, economies which, by the very force of the spiritual derangement involved, will lead to the values of cruelty, exploitation, and slavery. “There will be wars such as have never been waged on Earth. I foresee something terrible, chaos everywhere. Nothing left which is of any value, nothing which commands, ‘Though shalt!’” Ecce homo; behold the man, homo modernus, homo nihilismus. Nihilism—the state of human beings and societies faced with a total eclipse of all values—thrives in the shadow of God’s death. We have vanquished God, but we have yet to vanquish the nihilism that has risen up within us to take God’s place. There is a profound nihilism at work in this world. How are we to deal with this, the legacy of our greatest deed? There is no going back; there can be no going back. We are perched atop a juggernaut; the reins of that sad cart have been passed to us by the four Horseman of modernity—Nietzsche, Freud, Marx and Darwin. Do we heave back on them now? I think not—we must drive them ever faster, until the juggernaut topples and we nimbles, we free spirits, have the opportunity to leap forward and beyond our time. Play more soccer.