​Aesthetic Theology: Or, How Leviathan and Behemoth Got Their Asses Kicked

Political Theology is a fairly esoteric field, popularized by the German 20th century philosopher Carl Schmitt. Put in its simplest terms, it’s the idea that certain knowledge can be derived from religion and applied to politics and metapolitics. Schmitt’s main interest here was geopolitics, and how the megafaunal cryptids Leviathan (the sea monster) and Behemoth (the land monster) could tell us certain things about nations. Land-based powers like Russia were tellurocracies (Behemoths) and sea-based powers like the U.K. or U.S. were thalassocracies (Leviathans.) This affected how these nations saw themselves and the world and dealt with other nations. It also, especially, affected how they fought and what kind of wars they preferred to engage in. 
Nobody talks about Schmitt much anymore, partly because he was a member of the Nazi Party, but mostly because a lot of his stuff is very dense.  It also helps to read Schmitt in the original German, and to have some grasp of Greek as well helps in the appreciation of his concepts like Nomos. Most people understandably have other, more pressing things to do with their time.
I, not being most people—not having much of a life to speak of at all—can afford to think about this stuff. I can even afford to mull over if I might be able to derive my own secular philosophical insights from the Bible. Not being overmuch into geography, but still trying to give this writing thing a go, I’m more inclined to find aesthetic rather than political uses for the Good Book.
So how about it, then? Aesthetic Theology?
There’s a quote I found from the Bible. I didn’t stumble over it while reading the Good Book, (though I sometimes do) but rather while perusing another book I keep in my basement bathroom.  This book is a collection of metaphors and aphorisms along with the author’s insights and ideas on metaphor’s contribution to thought and creativity. It’s cleverly titled Metaphors Be With You.
The quote I stumbled across was on the subject of Humility. 
It came from the King James Bible, the Book of Matthew: “And whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted.”
What’s the relation of the above quote about humility to aesthetics, though? Isn’t the point of art to be the exact opposite of humble, to try to harness some Promethean fire and play God, if only figuratively in one’s work?
The brilliant German philologist Bruno Snell in The Discovery of the Mind even argues that poets, in trying to praise their gods, discovered man’s godlike potential via linguistic abstraction.
I think creation can be an exalting pursuit—and cathartic, and liberating. Likewise can it produce all kinds of negative feelings like frustration and inadequacy and jealousy at the skillset of one’s betters. But the best work, for me (at least as far as writing is concerned) seems to come from those who know how to subordinate their egos, to forget themselves.
There’s more than one type of good writing. There is the kind of good writing that, as one reads it, they recognize as such. We read and feel how the writer was carried away in the throes of composition. We’re grateful for the pleasure of being able to ride along with them on their flow of words. Sometimes, if they’ve really caught a tailwind, their words can even surprise or please us enough to get a small physical reaction, a laugh or sigh. The buzz they achieve somehow becomes one they lend to us in that moment.
Athletes call this state being “in the pocket,” and people in other fields sometimes refer to it as being in a flow state. It’s those moments we all work for, when the frustration and inadequacy and being tongue-tied or blocked or otherwise thwarted by fear or circumstance melt away.
I’m reading a book right now by the journalist John Colapinto, which is very well-written, but consciously and meticulously crafted. All of its metaphors are well-chosen, never overextended, and when a big, seldom-seen word is introduced, it has an exquisite flavor, a perfection that feels unobtrusive. His style is showoff-y and calls attention to itself, but his skill as a wordsmith is undeniable. Words—which so often fail their users—become a malleable putty in this man’s hands.
It induces admiration along with a twinge of jealousy to which I’ll readily admit. That so much of Colapinto’s book (and the previous novel I read by him) deals with jealousy only makes it all the more ironic and exquisite. This is a man who knows he has talent and knows also that more talented people exist, and that they experience their own agonies and insecurities, too.
Having larded all that praise on Colapinto and his book, though, I have to admit that this kind of great writing is not my favorite kind. This is writing that exalts itself, and while it doesn’t suffer some kind of humbling defeat as a result, it has its limits, and its downside. This being conscious of the writer behind the work at all times—if only to admire him—keeps the characters and the world on the page at a remove.
It reminds me of an old quote by SF writer Orson Scott Card, which I can only roughly paraphrase after all this time: You can either have people admire your words, or believe your story.
Card further states that poetry is supposed to have its effect on the mind consciously, that it’s okay to actually read a poem and say, “Damn, that’s well-written!” Fiction is more often about achieving its ends through sleight, a dexterous subsuming of one’s urges to make their presence known, to receive attention. The clinging to one’s identity in the midst of creating characters (essentially other people, however fictitious) keeps the story from being fully transporting.
This can work fine, mind you, and is actually preferred, if one is writing about the doings of their alter-ego. Author John Fante’s alter-ego Arturo Bandini and later Bukowski’s alter ego Henry Chinaski gain their reality partly by reflecting their creators’ desire for recognition. The desire to be recognized, to be praised—loved, seen, etc.—is a pretty natural one, and probably no sin in and of itself, assuming one believes in sin. Fante’s wife Joyce said that his greatest fear was to be known as a “‘Hey you,’ guy.”
I don’t want to judge this kind of writing too harshly, partly because I myself am guilty of it, and often. Indeed, that my writing calls attention to itself is perhaps my main authorial flaw.
What about the other kind of writing, though, the kind that, thus far, has been durch Abwesenheit glänzen, as the Germans say, literally “glowing through its absence?” This is the kind of writing that happens when the writer manages to subsume their ego as completely as a human can. These moments usually come when one is not concentrated on ethereal concerns like the Muse or mundane concerns like how the work will be perceived by readers. Such moments don’t just come with a buzz, but an eerie sense that some kind of veil that otherwise remains in place has been pulled back. The Muse isn’t just gracing you with her touch; she’s letting you peek up her toga.
These moments usually come after writing “one word at a time,” as Stephen King so humbly put it in his memoir On Writing.
It’s in such moments that the hands move across the keys like the planchette on a Ouija board seemingly shifting of their own volition on a stormy night. It’s scary, but it’s also sublime.
And it seems to happen, for me at least, most when I “throw myself on the mercy of the court,” so to speak. When I start out writing slowly, pretending I’ve never written a word before. Sometimes I’ll even say the words as I type them, like a child phonetically teaching himself to read, unembarrassed and undaunted. Such moments of going slow allow me to exceed my usual hedonic limit of buzz to be had via composition. Rather than going from perhaps thirty to sixty, I get to go from zero to sixty, and sometimes all the way up to 120 mph.
But it's only because I began in that spirit of humility that I get to feel that high.
Sometimes at least.
“Aesthetic Theology...” How about it?
Maybe it’s total bunk. Or maybe it’s something to which you can add your own observations of how the Bible (or any holy book) impart not just moral lessons, but aesthetic techniques, too.
 

There are few scientific concepts as misunderstand or misrepresented as that of Schrödinger’s Cat. In fairness to those who fuck it up (myself included), it is a mindboggling concept. It only grows more mindboggling when one realizes it’s not just a concept or principle, but as real as gravity. I almost wrote “as observable” as gravity, but gravity is mostly observed by its effects, not by itself.
In the simplest terms, Schrödinger’s Cat is a way to visualize quantum “superposition” in a way that even the layperson can kinda sorta understand it. Superposition holds that the rules of matter are easy to understand provided we’re dealing with atomic matter. Get down to the subatomic and things get weird. A subatomic particle, in fact, exists in a state of superposition—both/and—until directly observed or measured.
In other words, the subatomic particle is doing two things at once until the scientist actually takes a look at it.
In real life, a cat trapped in a closed box where a boobytrapped phial of poison may or may not have been opened is either dead or alive. The idea that it’s both alive and dead until its state is observed or measured is supposedly just an atomic-sized metaphor for subatomic particle behavior.
In the Coen Brothers film A Serious Man, about a physics professor having a crises of faith, he explains it to his student one-on-one thusly. “The cat is just a model for the math. The math is what’s real.” Not to mention important to the kid’s grade. “Even I don’t understand the cat,” the professor says.
There’s a problem, though, with pretending the cat is just a model or metaphor, rather than existing in superposition itself. If you put enough subatomic particles together, you get particles. Put enough of those particles together and you get matter. Whether it’s organic or not is a matter of chemistry.  When exactly subatomic particles behave as particles touches on the concept of flocculence. This is particles aggregating to become bigger things and is best understood by engineers with a strong gasp of good old-fashioned Newtonian physics, i.e. an apple that either falls from the tree or doesn’t.
Trying to figure out when a bunch of “little things” become one big thing—or a bunch of little things is also one big thing—touches on the Sorites Paradox. That’s philosophy.
But you see then that the cat being both alive and dead is in fact, not a just model. It’s just a question of when its reality becomes observable to us, and how. Turns out the professor in A Serious Man wasn’t being humble or facetious when he said he didn’t understand the cat. He was simply wrong in seeing it as a metaphor for the math (or rather, the Coens, like most people who touch the subject, were wrong.)
The cat only becomes one thing in one state—alive or dead—after being observed or measured. And yes, hearing the cat meow or the scratch of its claws against the inside of the corrugated box counts as measurement.
It’s at this point that even the biggest of big brains disagree on exactly how many cats there are, though. Or whether the cat you observe—dead or alive—is the only one left of the original two.
Nobel laureate Niels Bohr believed in collapse of the wave function, a thing represented by this cool little pitchfork symbol, 𝚿, which is just the Greek letter “psi”. Once you opened the cat’s box and saw whether or not it was alive or dead, you turned the superposed cat into a single living or dead cat. At least according to Bohr.
Congratulations, you’re a magician.
Another scientist though, named Hugh Everett the Third, claimed that it only appeared you and your eyes had collapsed those two cats into a single one. Rather than collapsing the wave function, you were simply riding one of the propagated waves. It appeared to collapse because you are just one you at a time. The you who opened the box and sighed with relief to see the cat hadn’t tripped the poison mechanism is just one of you. Another you (with whom you’ll never interact) opened the box and saw, much to his horror, the little butterscotch tabby curled up, lifeless in the box. This other you turned out to be a shitty magician and should also seek therapy from the resulting guilt and trauma of poisoning a cat.
Who, then, among the big brains is right and who is wrong?
For a long time, most people thought Niels Bohr was right and Everett was wrong. Partly this was because they knew about Bohrs’ theory, as he was a well-established and well-funded, much celebrated Nobel Laureate who enjoyed institutional support.  “Everyone,” as the currently en vogue Bin Laden once observed, “loves a strong horse.”
Meanwhile Everett was just an ill-mannered, chain-smoking young man whose doctoral thesis faced many challenges. He was prickly even among a normally contentious and prickly group of (mostly) men not known for observing the social graces. As his academic career floundered and his papers moldered in some Harvard subbasement, he became even harder to deal with. He drank heavily and did R & D work for the military industrial complex, and the secretaries he sexually harassed claimed he had bad BO. He had a couple kids, too, one of whom committed suicide, and another of whom is the lead singer of the popular indie band, Eels.
Scientists, despite the cosmic scope of their remit, can be petty, vain, as given to the picayune vagaries of human emotion as anyone else. Academia is a cutthroat Machiavellian world where resources like tenure and grants are scarce, and fought over more tenaciously than rare oases discovered in the desert. I only survived to get an MA, and every moment I spent on-campus I felt like I was suffocating, my ribcage contracting until my chest hurt.
And if Everett were right, he was basically  putting his cigarette out on Bohrs’ addlepated skull. Not only that, but scientists would have to contemplate the deep philosophical and moral implications of a multiverse, not because they wanted to, but because the math led there.
With the passage of time, though, Everett’s theory has come to be not only accepted, but embraced by many, and not just hack SF writers like yours truly. To those who don’t have to bolster their supposition with mathematical proofs—i.e. artists, screenwriters, philosophers—Everett’s idea is the more interesting, the more savory.
Its implications are definitely more metaphorically resonant, too.
Just remember that the cat isn’t a metaphor, though. The cat is a model for a reality, whether you think that reality consists of branches or a single line. It’s only metaphoric to the extent the metaphor lets you visualize what you can’t understand when written out in equations that span multiple chalkboards. If you’re the kind of person who quails before math problems that involve Roman numerals, you definitely have no business getting near the ones that need Greek letters, too.
Be thankful for the cat.
For myself, the model-metaphor involves another box, and rather than a cat, a man. The box in this example would be the computer screen on which these words are being typed, and the man would be me.
Sitting here, now, I can sense (but obviously not see) the various branches I could take myself on just by typing. I could write a well-written sentence or a shitty one. I could potentially close this MS-word window out now—without saving this document (no big loss) and search the dark web for guns and pills. The fact that I’m even thinking about it (or at least facetiously countenancing it) means on another branch there’s probably a me already doing it. This me is either soon to have an Uzi micro and a prescription bottle of Perc 10s in hand, or is soon to be cuffed by an ATF agent.
Sometimes just thinking about doing something, I’ll feel a little breeze, or at least imagine I’m feeling one brushing past me.
Is that me going off on another branch, I wonder, succumbing to the impulse there while the more circumspect me remains here, riding this spear?
If I reconsider again, and cave to the urge—especially if it’s sinful or ill-advised—I’ll feel the wind again, probably because I’m hopping onto another spear. Call the personal computer hooked up to the net Schrödinger’s Litterbox, then, a kind of container that’s only as pure or dirty as the creature using it.
Some use it to read scholarly articles on the latest development in crater-sited coronagraphs and its implications for direct imaging astronomy. Others use it to watch BBWs wrestle in kiddie pools filled with vanilla-flavored custard. Some—sui generis renaissance men—like me, do both.

There’s a great anecdote in Stephen King’s On Writing, which has always stayed with me. It’s been about fifteen years since I read the book, so my recollection will be a bit rusty. That said, a paraphrase should serve the purposes for my musings on this entry of my ill-trafficked blog tonight. Apologies in advance, though, to King and those fans of his more familiar with the book, if I mangle the story in the telling.
Somewhere in the first third of the book King talks about the writing of Carrie. The book is created under suboptimal conditions. King is working as an English teacher at a local high-school while his wife Tabitha is busting ass at a donut shop. They already have one or two kids (Joe and Naomi?) and they are living crowded in a small trailer. King doesn’t even have a functional desk, and so he types out the novel while bracing his typewriter on his lap. One day, King vows, when I’m more successful, I’m going to get a huge desk. He begins to fantasize about this thing, which he calls the T. Rex. I can’t remember exactly how he envisioned it then, but recalling it now I can see my own version of the desk in question. It’s made of solid lacquered walnut, with an ameboid shape, bowing out like an acoustic guitar at the center. It’s edged in rolled brass that gleams like gold, and takes up two-thirds of the room in which it sits.
Eventually King sells Carrie—after something like thirty-five rejections—and gets an advance of roughly sixty-five grand. The years pass and he goes from being a pulp scribe who stays afloat selling stories to men’s magazines to being America’s preeminent popular writer. He’s richer than Croesus, and while not especially ostentatious, he does get the big house, and more importantly, he finally gets the T. Rex.
Something happens, though, when he settles in behind that large wooden behemoth and starts to type. The words still come, but the thrill is somehow gone, or at least attenuated. Even worse, King, in his isolation, begins to drink heavily and even starts using cocaine. Finally, one day, realizing that this desk is some kind of succubus—malevolent despite its inanimate state—he throws it away.
Remembering writing Carrie with a typewriter balanced on his knees and doing no good writing while behind the T. Rex, he has an epiphany. “Life is not a support system for art. It’s the other way around.”
It’s a profound statement, one that, while delivered as a fact, is more an encapsulation of King’s personal aesthetic weltanschauung than anything else. It wouldn’t do any good to argue about whether or not the statement is true in some objective sense. It is true for him, which is enough.
Rereading the money quote, it occurs to me that The Shining is a cautionary tale about how things can go wrong when one creates under ostensibly ideal conditions. Jack Torrance, after all, being a writer, should have celebrated having the Overlook Hotel all to himself and his family. There was plenty of natural beauty to draw on there as inspiration, and few distractions. And yet the perfection of the environment seemed to curdle into something hideous, demented. Torrance, like Howard Hughes or Michael Jackson, had become a prisoner of the pristine world he’d sought out, made mad by his ability to shape his environment to his will. His abuse of Wendy and Danny also seems to serve as metaphor for the selfish artist, viewing everyone around him as either impediment to his creation or just another tool.
His paralysis before the typewriter suddenly takes on new meaning in this context. To create is to take something from the platonic and to make it real, and thus imperfect, or at least different, than what one initially conceived. His constant rewriting of the sentence, “All work and no play make Jack a dull boy” becomes a kind of protest against trying to engage Hemingway’s “white bull.” Why even risk it when you’re probably only going to get gored, or at least make at least one mistake with the pica spear? Victory’s all but assured when the entire fight takes place in the toreador’s imagination alone.
The Overlook was haunted, of course (at least in the novel version), and Jack is a recovering alcoholic. But the Kubrick film is more open-ended, more amenable to the T. Rex run amok interpretation. Kubrick—more intellectual and a perfectionist—seemed more fascinated by how the search for perfection and creation under ideal conditions could drive one insane. In other words, how making life subordinate to art—to the point of neglecting life—might drive one crazy, and hurt their loved ones.
 I wonder, too, if the filmmaker would have agreed with King’s assertion about life not being a support system for art? Something in me tells me he would have objected to it, that perfection through pain was kind of the point. It’s not as easy as saying that one man is an ends justify the means artist, while the other isn’t, though perhaps that’s part of it, too.
There is not the sense in Kubrick’s work that there’s a therapeutic dimension, a way to soothe workaday wounds and cope with life’s travails, as in King’s books. Kubrick’s films feel atemporal even when set in the future, removed from daily concern and steeped in the philosophical and theoretical. Full Metal Jacket, while brilliant, is somehow bloodless, as clinical as dissecting a chloroformed frog. It forgoes the primally mad edge of Platoon or Apocalypse Now, for a cold rationalism that suggests a different, almost scientific madness. Small wonder also, that 2001 and Clockwork Orange never really seem to date; or that Barry Lyndon holds up as perhaps the best period piece ever committed to celluloid aside from Once Upon a Time in America.  
It's even less surprising that the film version of The Shining rankled so much against Stephen King’s sensibilities. The conflict between him and Kubrick was not just aesthetic, but deeply philosophical and even spiritual. King believed in an afterlife, and in hell, while Kubrick was more of a materialist-existentialist, who thought any light brought to darkness must be mustered by humanity itself, alone.
For the sake of argument, let’s assume that Kubrick lived long enough to read On Writing and to offer his opinion on King’s theory of art vs. life. Let’s further suppose that he objected to King’s theory. “Life,” Kubrick might assert, “while painful and full of defeats and ultimately ending in death, requires us to make sacrifices. Those builders who labored to create the monuments which stood the test of time were not doing so to make their lives more livable. Indeed, many slaves who constructed the wonders of the world no doubt suffered injury or even died while laboring. Life is something to be transcended by pouring one’s energy wholeheartedly into the labor of creation, of art, even at the expense of life. Life is temporary. Art, if done right, is much closer to eternal. Why not sacrifice one in the service of the other?”
Again, it’s not a matter of who might be right, but a mere contrasting of philosophies for the sake of a post-midnight Gedankenexperiment on a blog. What, though, might account for the difference in philosophies between King and Kubrick?
There’s the religious aspect, of course. King was raised in New England, with its strong puritanical streak (that shifted from the metaphysical to the political and secular in the 20th century.) Kubrick, on the other hand, was raised in an at least culturally Jewish household, and was still a young man when the details of the Holocaust finally became public knowledge. It might not have taken such an incident, though, to permanently rock his faith in God (assuming he ever had it.) There’s an interview with his sister in the documentary A Life in Pictures, in which she says that FDR was so beloved that his passing spread nihilism among many in NYC.
It could simply be that King’s life was much harder than Kubrick’s. Stanley Kubrick wasn’t quite born into baronial splendor, but he hailed from an upper-middleclass household. His father was a professional and in one of the Kubrick bios I recall his friend saying everyone was awed that Kubrick’s family actually had a house! In Brooklyn! And that Kubrick spent most of his time either playing with his cameras, developing film in his inhouse darkroom, or playing chess in the park.
King meanwhile grew up thoroughly working-class, in a single-parent household, with him and his mother having been abandoned by his father. Because his mom was forced to work (still a little unusual then) he was bounced from aunt to aunt, pawned off, left to fend for himself. Even after he’d made something of a name for himself in the slicks, King was still working a laundry mangle or steam press, or otherwise busting ass at menial jobs. He tells one particularly gross story about cleaning linen tablecloths after a banquet, and getting his hands greasy with drawn butter spilled from the lobster plates.  
There’s no doubt that one creates differently when exhausted, when dispirited and at the end of the day, than when they are able to give all their energy to their work. Raymond Carver not just wrote short sentences—his goal being under ten words each. He wrote short stories because his day job at the sawmill didn’t leave him enough time to write novels.
I’m not even sure that Kubrick ever had a conventional job, that as a teenager he did anything besides take photos for Look Magazine. It hardly matters, though. The human condition is universal (unless you accept the cryonics argument or Ben Bova’s theory of telomeric transcendence.) We live, we age, we watch the people we love die, and then we prepare for our own deaths. And that’s if we’re lucky.
No amount of money—no castle, no lobster dinners, no divertissement with dope or women—can ultimately distract a sentient being from this truth. Which makes me think my theory’s specious. One’s own experiences might not inform their aesthetic philosophy, but rather be hardwired in their DNA like so many other things. Whether we respond to the encyclopedic, dense, postmodern work of someone like David Foster Wallace or prefer the staccato rhythms of Mickey Spillane might be inborn, like eye color.
But still the question won’t quite leave me alone: Is art a support system for life or is life a support system for art? If your life is painful enough, you may throw yourself into your work so totally that you neglect everything else: your family, your other obligations, even your hygiene. But even in giving art primacy over life, you are making your life more livable, by providing this distraction, by the attempt at transcendence. Ignoring your life in the pursuit of your art helps distract you from the pain and problems of your life. Thus making life a support system for art ironically means making art a support system for life.
And then there are those for whom it is not just some posture, a bumper sticker for the car or a pose by some manque: art is, in fact, life. Look at David Lynch, not just giving all of his money and time to the creation of Eraserhead, but literally living on the set for some time, sleeping in a warehouse in Philadelphia.  
Eraserhead ain’t quite the pyramid of Giza, but it was not an easy film to make. But Lynch has been married four times and cites the selfishness required to create his brand of art as a factor in all of his divorces. King and his missus, meanwhile, have been together more than fifty years.
There’s a lesson in there.
Or maybe not, as Kubrick and his wife, Christiane, remained together until his death, and she continues to remain loyal to his memory.