PART I – Chapter 1: The Apocalyptic Moment

I once described In Good Faith thusly: 

. . .[a] book [that] began, in a way, as a novel —no, no, as poetry and prayers, in drug-fuelled nights dreaming and terrible moments scheming suicide, in lots and lots of tears and love. It’s the synthesis of paranoid nightmares and apocalyptic ecstasies, of doubt, faith, faith in doubt, remembrance, and an inescapable, infernal rage. Guilt and desire. Invisible chains and unanswered cries for justice. It arrived in the form of corpses, choices, and the realization that there are still possibilities of who and what to become…

In Good Faith (Original Version)

I think this captures the apocalyptic nature of this work in a deep way, and expresses much of the struggles that have birthed it (if you haven’t read the post on the “Introduction” yet, I recommend checking it out HERE). To begin, I’d like to mention some of my personal experiences of apocalypse: the visions I had of the world ending in numerous ways during my episodes and the highly-manic and self-aggrandizing belief that I had a role to play in it; my specifically Bipolar mysticism (featuring continued oscillations (both long term and short term) between faith and doubt, Heaven and Hell, madness and reason; my emerging queer and trans identity; my personal apocalypses (loss of relationships, addiction, becoming a social pariah) and our collective apocalypses (the rise of fascist tendencies in the political atmosphere, social tension and division, perpetual violence). If you know me personally, you probably know that I was on a semi-psychotic path of non-duality during my episodes that, as you can imagine, left lasting pain in my heart and mind as well as put formidable strain on my personal relationships. If you’ve been in the world at any point since 1492, it is arguable that you too have been a part of what I describe as the “Apocalyptic Moment”. 

While I will argue throughout this work (and shortly in this post) that we have always been in an apocalyptic situation, whether you measure it from the beginning of time, the birth of the human species, or any other significant point in history (many of which I will trace throughout IGF), I want to suggest the date of 1492 — the birth of Modernity/Coloniality — as the marker of import. Additionally, I argue that the Apocalyptic Moment has reached an important turning point in what Rosi Braidotti calls ‘the posthuman convergence’, the alignment of the death of ‘Man’ and the critique of anthropocentrism. It is my thesis that this moment in our shared history is a crisis of immense significance, an opportunity for what is the real definition of apokálypsis, “an uncovering”. In other words, the Apocalyptic Moment is an opportunity for realization of covered over potentials, whether they be historical, artistic, spiritual, philosophical, and/or political. 

The Apocalyptic Moment can also be understood as the series of transcendental (spatial and temporal), existential (social, racial, sexual, personal, spiritual, geopolitical, etc.), historical, ecological, economic, theological, mathematical, scientific, technological, linguistic, psychological, chemical, and categorical crises whose strata have converged as tectonic plates of conflicting dualisms. A cataclysmic event in which locations, figures, and historical points are like so many volcanic vents along an aionic (in other words, eternal) Ring of Fire. There have been watchwards who have run down from the mountains to warn us in many times and places of our current and historical explosions. The only difference now, it seems, is that we can identify the ring and begin to chart the “Moment”, which is understood aionically — in other words, in perpetua et unum diem (“into an endless and single day”) or hodie ad sub specie aeternitatis (“today under the aspect of eternity). Today, the 21st century, we are in a place that is both untimely and prescient: the end of the world is knocking at our doorstep and we can choose “good” or “bad” faith (which I will define later in this post).

Before that, however, I want to address some of the many reasons to claim that time and space are an apocalyptic mode of existence. First of all, the cycles of birth, death, and rebirth — the possible states of all matter and energy — are the immanent conditions of time and space, what all beings must pass through in the flows of becoming. Additionally, it is the process by which all desire comes to express itself: expression, consummation, and repetition (life, death, rebirth). Desire is immanent to all creation and therefore is at the heart of the world itself. Furthermore, if we understand history as the process of matter, energy, and desire through time and space, we may begin to realize that there is a particular arc to our story: one in which the revolutions of the past are born again, more potent, more vibrant, and more visionary. In other words, “uncovered” or “revealed” in an eternal day that comes out of and through an Apocalyptic Moment. Finally, we can see that we are in a historical period of death and rebirth, a paradigm shift beyond the past 500 years (Modernity/Coloniality), the past 2,000 years (the birth of Christianity), the past ~200,000 years (the birth of humanity), etc. The earth is dying, the division between the ruled and the rulers is ever-widening, and catastrophe and violence dominate our life-worlds. Injustice is the law of the land, masquerading as divine decree in the form of priests, politicians, police, and the military, secularized and reified, made into the “common sense” notion, ala Hobbes, that the world is cruel and evil, something to be avoided, something to be destroyed. But how will we respond?

It is my argument that we face two possibilities: that of bad faith (as explicated by Jean-Paul Sartre) and good faith. “Bad faith”, in this context, can be regarded as a lack of authenticity in regards to the task of living one’s existence as a free agent. The denial of absolute freedom and thus the denial of any form of existential responsibility. Being-in-itself. Sartre’s famous example of the waiter who pretends to be a waiter, plays at being a waiter, yet knows that he is not just a waiter. In other words, he makes himself into an object in order to make due. In regards to this book, this would mean one does not choose to face the radicality of the Apocalypse, which holds the raw power necessary to free oneself of objecthood. “Good faith”, on the other hand,  can be understood as recognizing that ultimately, despite the raw determinism of calculated life, one has absolute freedom as a being-for-itself. An existential (subjective) responsibility which is also a transcendental (absolute) responsibility. Confronting the Apocalypse within and without means that one may embrace an absolute subjectivity, an affirmation that can affirm all “bad faith” posturing as masks within an eternal dance of the I AM. I may be a waiter, but I am also all names in history. This apocalyptic moment, which stretches back to the beginning and infinitely forward into the future, is my responsibility, whether I have to play the role of a waiter or not.

This is the essence of what I mean by proceeding with “good” faith: to be awake to both the eternal and contingent, the ever-lasting and the contextual, the spiritual and the embodied, both the beginnings and ends of the journey while living in media res. It is the issue of both living the revolution and negotiating tactics and strategy at the same time. While whites may just be waking up to the apocalyptic scenario that our ancestors have created, the fact that “Apocalypse been in effect”, as Public Enemy announced on their 1988 album It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, is more than evident to the vast majority of people of color. As Mark Sinker writes, comparing the genocidal and enslaving monstrosities that occurred from 1492 onward to alien invasion,

The ships landed long ago: they already laid waste whole societies, abducted and genetically altered swathes of citizenry, imposed without surcease their values. Africa and America—and so by extension Europe and Asia—are already in their various ways Alien Nation. No return to normal is possible: what“ normal” is there to return to?

Mark Sinker, “Loving the alien in advance of the landing—Black science fiction” (1992)

In this sense, the Apocalyptic Moment is an event which is inherently social and political. To pretend that we can simply return to a better time and place without uprooting the structures of Modernity/Coloniality, an Edenic vision which is inherently reactionary, is to live, in my argument, in bad faith of our collective histories. That I believe there is a spiritual, even mystical element to this project should be evident from my previous posts. Re/un-covering indigenous traditions, stories, and worldviews is inherently part of any decolonial revolution, and this also means that whites as Europeans and Euro-Americans must re/un-cover their radical roots, many of which were stamped out by imperial Christianity. Paganism, esotericism, witchcraft, and mystical Christianity can be revolutionary, but if we leave them in the past they will remain ignorant of their healing possibilities and continue to be reactionary forces.

So what would a radical spirituality of aionic space-time within the Apocalyptic Moment do for the revolution? It is my argument that, as I will express in later sections of the book, we will be able to create a congregation that transcends both the limits of space and time through connecting to figures of the past (and those of the (un)imaginable future) and archiving their teachings and stories. To find inspiration and community across time and space would serve to do what almost all religion has claimed to be after: the eternal life of the spirit. This eternal life is one which, ultimately, has to be lived immanently, within the flesh, in the here and now, though with a wisdom that stretches back into the deep past and forward into the deep future. To return the revolutionaries of the past to present consciousness and to gather the revolutionaries of the future in order to open imaginative possibilities for that very present is to breathe life into the revolution, to reorient ourselves beyond the limited, confined world of secular neoliberalism. 

While we live in these bodies of finitude, we have the opportunity to open up to the infinite here and now, before and beyond. It is this journey into an endless and single day in which all souls are gathered that I believe best describes the apocalyptic uncovering of this Apocalyptic Moment. 

For this gathering to be possible, however, we must continually pass through the dark night of the soul of our current crises (see the next post, “The End of Days: Capitalist Realism, Coloniality, and the Anthropocene”). I will stake part of my hope on the work being done in the posthumanities, which I will explore in “The Posthuman Convergence and Critical Posthumanism”. Finally, I will elaborate further on my conception of eternal space-time, the Aion, in “The Aion: Ancestral and Futural Communities”. These three subsections make up “The Apocalyptic Moment” chapter and set up most of the scaffolding for the rest of the book. I will be updating posts regularly so that mentioned chapters or subsections will be linked as soon as they are posted. I also apologize if this section is a bit messier or confusing than the previous two — I wrote it at a very late hour from several different, ambiguously-related notes. For any readers I’ve gathered so far, I thank you. I look forward to any and all feedback as I keep throwing my thoughts down.