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.