Doomsday

Misunderstanding the Apocalypse

When presented with a text, a commentary on the text and a critique of various commentaries on the subject of the text, it is easy to blindly believe in what is written. However, when the subject in question is as controversial as the Apocalypse, the luxury of faith in others is withheld. While thorough exploration of more commentaries might help one create a solid argument, what is clear at the moment is that humanity has displayed a trend of exploring and misunderstanding the Apocalypse.

As Lee Quinby found out while writing Millennial Seduction, all that we do is tainted by our own bias. This means that with every translation, such as from Hebrew to Greek to Latin to English, brings minute changes to the text until eventually the text is transformed in a manner similar to a sentence used in a game of Telephone. Each translation also carries the cultural elements of the translator, which increases the changes made. In order to fully accept a text, one must also accept the possibility of misinterpretations as well as the eventuality of counter-interpretations.

Even if one’s ideas on the Apocalypse might be contested, one is in good company. The various theories that revolve around the Apocalypse are notable for their authors. As Frank Kermode explores in Sense of an Ending, contributions to the library of interpretations of the Apocalypse come from figures such as Newton, Shakespeare and Dante. They, amongst others, have tried to reach through time and space to predict the coming of the end. However, almost all who have tried to put a date to this glorious demise of humanity have been proven wrong and the rest remain unproven. Thus the trend of misinterpretation continues.

The cause of these incompatible views center on the Book of Revelation, and even that text is contested. The world at large fail to even agree on who wrote the text—whether it was Prochorus acting as scribe to St. John or John himself who wrote down the word of God. If the origins of the text cannot be ascertained, what hope is there to truly understand the text, and the culture that spawned it.

Perhaps vagueness is part of the beauty of the Bible. Perhaps confusion and uncertainty creates a fascination with the subject. Perhaps the planet will cease to spin when the meaning becomes clear. Perhaps mankind was meant to misunderstand the Apocalypse.

One of my guiltiest pleasures is Supernatural, a TV show featuring two brothers who fight demons and other supernatural monsters in the name of good every week. I can’t even say it’s better than it sounds, but it’s fast-paced, the actors are eye candy, and the good guys usually win. Most of the plot of Supernatural is taken directly from traditional apocalyptic canon – i.e., the Book of Revelations. Last season featured seals breaking, a war between the angels, and the Devil-figure escaping from a bottomless pit to wreak havoc on the Earth (Revelations 5:1, 9:11, and 12:7-12:9).

Supernatural also plays in to the “apocalyptic gender panic” described in Chapter 6 of Millennial Seduction. The show’s two strongest female characters were “calculating and murderous [women] whose defeat” literally carried “apocalyptic urgency” within the context of the show (Quinby 105). Both of these modern reincarnations of Jezebel were highly sexualized, used as outlets for the boys’ lust, but never pure enough to be legitimate love interests. Both women refused to submit to the brothers’ authority, were self-serving, and ultimately violently killed off in ways that suggested they got what they deserved.

The millennium may have passed, but textbook apocalypticism is still alive and well in pop culture today. Last season, the Supernatural premiere drew 3.96 million viewers. Supernatural is on The CW, a TV network whose target demographic is women 18-34 years old. Why are all of these young women buying in to such a graphic depiction of “the fulfillment of masculinist desire” (Quinby 112)? Guilty as charged, as a representative of this demographic, I can offer no real defense. I can only say that while I wish Buffy and Xena were still around to serve as role-models, on Thursday nights at 9PM, my better judgment loses out to my desire to feed my “insatiable…apocalyptic appetite” (Quinby 9).

As I start to recognize the pervasive apocalyptic Jezebel stereotypes in this show and others like it, and the accompanying negative consequences for women and their self-image, I also begin to see the link between millennialism as a cultural fascination and millennialism that “interfere[s] with the goals of democratic societies” (Quinby 5).

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.

As a child I created a system of rules, a moral code of awareness, in which any false step could mean my end. I devised simple rituals that became almost second nature. I had to hit the wind chimes every time we pulled into the garage. Jiggle the doorknob. Tap on the table. If I didn’t something bad was going to happen. I am the product of an atheist upbringing, yet left to my own devices I had concocted a theology of sorts. These actions were an innate part of my daily life. I felt not only compelled to perform them, but also, perhaps, commanded. I was living in what I realized to be a state of continuous change, and any moment could bring the end. Thus my list of performative actions helped guarantee, or at least aid in, my survival.

In his lecture “The Sense of an Ending”, Kermode remarks in his discussion of fictive literature that “we cannot… be denied an end,” and he is right to realize the extent of our desire for an ending (23). It seems that this need for finalization is an inherent aspect of life itself. The idea of a beginning, a middle, and an end is everywhere. We are born, we live, and we die. I have often thought that religion arose because of a need to answer the plaguing question of what comes next. My childhood fantasy provided a way to deal with not having any answers and to help alleviate the pain of not knowing. Yet, perhaps what I was struggling with was something more basic, with my inability to understand the control of time itself.

For it is time that we cannot understand. It passes, and we are born and we die. Is there no reason for it? No explanation for how we divide it, and chop it up – creating systems of measurement around “what many concede is an arbitrary date” (Quinby 21). A song by a noise band, Negativland, has the repeating lyric: “Do you know how many time zones there are in the Soviet Union? Eleven. Do you know how many we have? Four.” Now time is a mode of comparison – who is bigger and therefore better? And yet the irony is in the constructed reality with which all things time related are fabricated. So that talking about now is really talking about the past as I wrote it. The structure of time measurement is ridiculous, and yet we base all aspects of our lives around blocks of measured time.

The question of time demands an answer, and so we create elaborate fairy tales to predict the end. To guarantee that the world as we know it can be contained, bounded by a start and a finish. Is it fair then to ask us to be more skeptical? And is apocalyptic understanding completely devoid of skepticism? Can I be a rational skeptical believer? Whether one believes the end will take us by a great ball of fire or a growing epidemic of sterilizing STIs, is it possible to ask us to stop believing? And what then would this mean in dealing with the question of time itself?