journal 3

i’ve been thinking about sin a lot lately. probably for the last 6 months or so really, but specifically, for the last few months, reading bataille again, although i’m not currently reading anything deals with the nature of sin specifically, reading l’impossible, i’m still reading it within the context of sin. when he speaks of despair, anguish.

i’ve been contemplating the nature of failure. and it’s relationship to sin. because, while there’s always been a moral component to sin, in the judeo-christian sense, it’s very easy to conceive of a kind of sin that, while perhaps still moral… there is perhaps a kind of sin that is more about failure. i’ve regularly used the concept of sin to lend weight, especially rhetorically, to the idea of transgression.

in the story that i still haven’t written and am still working on, on like draft 5000 i suppose, the line lept out at me, “there is no grace of man but sin” …but where does that really leave all of this?

what i guess i mean is that man’s only true potence in the universe that i’ve noticed, at least “as man”, is his capacity to transgress, to do other than which he has been commanded, instructed. to choose do that which is counter to a task given. now this, in and of itself, is not magick. simply sinning is not magic. but, it opens itself to a kind of thought process that is magical.

consider for a moment though, i’d like to return to the idea of failure, because i have recently gone through this myself, experienced this myself. i have, for most of my life, not failed. i’ve, by and large, found ways to succeed, to convince myself, however fleetingly, that i was immortal, that i was without blame, without flaw. that all of my failures, that all that i had ever done that did not work out, was in some sense a success, that it taught me something. i retrained my thought process to take from experience what it could, and retask it as something that fed in to my ego-sense of non-failure, of constant success. i needed to always be the victor, even now, when it becomes obvious that i’m not, when things work out significantly less than favorably to me, i still find a way to restructure in my head and in my life as a kind of success, and this, i think, is because if you have never failed, you are still blameless, you simply change your ideas of what failure means, then you’ve never sinned.

i was not actually ready to cast off god, no matter how heretical the things i was saying had been, no matter how much i might have rejected him in my ideas, i was not ready to have those strings cut, i needed him to give me a sense of self, a sense of identity, so while i did not want to be beholden to this very limiting notion of god, i still needed a way to find myself blameless, to structure sin, and failure, to re-narrativize and reintegrate them into my life, so that i could forever remain blameless.

now none of this was conscious, of course, i thought i was growing and changing etc. i’m not negating my last few years of experience, i’m simply realizing that some of the progress i thought i had made was just… a lie to myself, sure, but that’s so simple… i had, in some senses, pulled back my conception of the ultimate, and repurposed it to a smaller, more approachable horizon. because i still needed sin, and failure, to mean something, to be able to be avoided, i still needed to be able to look at myself and find myself blameless, faultless. and sure, i would have admitted that i was incredibly flawed… but if you had pointed to any one of my failures, anywhere i missed the mark, i could have explained to you why it was not actually my fault, it was not actually a failure, that i had learned something, that something had changed for me, that it was still, somehow, a success.

why is that? what is so… what fear of failure do i have that has allowed me to so entirely overlook large portions of my life, or simply to avoid, to face the fact that i am fallible.

this is where the next recent realization has come about. failure is, in some senses, a kind of dying. a kind of acknowledgment of… failure points to death. in much the same sense that failure points to a boundary, it points to a place at which i stop, i cannot extend to everything if i have failed at something, simply because everything encompasses… the extent of me, if it went on to infinity, it would have already encompassed and absorbed the potentiality for success.

an interruption in that success, in that chain of yesses… at what shockingly near horizon do i end? and if i find a place where i fail, no matter how remote from me it might be, and in many cases not so remote as i might like, i must acknowledge an end of me, an extent beyond which i have not yet crossed, and perhaps i may grow beyond it one day, but the point is that with failure i have to acknowledge that i end, an extent beyond which i am not capable of passing, and i know that… the admission of an end, an extent, psychologically speaking, is tantamount to admitting the existence of all limits, the admission that you’re going to die.

the extent beyond which you cannot go… (immortality, factoring in the ideas of multiple selves, what does the cataclysmic change of death do the the sense of self, to these many selves… interesting and unavoidable questions, but not to the current point)

(why do i always say ‘you’re going to die’? do i simply prefer the rhetorical strategy of you, or am i in some senses sidestepping the issue? i am going to die. there. now it’s said, just in case.)

sin, and transgression, are in some senses best captured, best effected by failure. if the only thing that gives man any kind of potence is his capacity to sin…

i am here not speaking of sin and capacity for transgression not in the place of some moral free will. (nietzche has perfectly well demolished the idea of a moral free will anyway). what is the distinction between these two though… this capacity for transgression can take part in any valuative structure, that all sin… in the sense that man is made up of three components (self that believes itself to be self, flesh and the outer manifestation of action, and the social self that is the manifestation of the world’s affect on the self and are involved in constructing and being affected by the world). each of these are structured together, not necessarily by the same valuative set, but by interlocking and overlapping valuative sets.

sin is the capacity to transgress these boundaries by any piece of the self, any of the three selves can transgress a boundary. can extend beyond certain preset boundaries. i do not mean this in a counter-nietzcheian argument. what i’m arguing instead is the capacity of man… and to ignore boundaries, to cross them and break them.

sin against the self to say you will not do something, but do it anyway, to sin against others by much the same, to break socio-psychological boundaries…

it’s easy enough to call a belief in the immortal soul a fear of death. not the only way, but definitely worth considering. this is why.

failure is an acknowledgement of death. sin is a valuative acknowledgement of an extent, of an inability, of your mortality, of death. desire then, to be cleansed, to be blameless of sin, is, a desire for immortality. it is the eternal soul that is always in need of salvation. to sin is to cause a blemish, a tarnish, a filth. to acknowledge an extent, to say there i end, there i was incapable of going beyond, that is the extent of me, to acknowledge that end, that you are not everything, that you are finite, is to acknowledge you’re going to die. we don’t know that the infinite doesn’t die, but we assume it doesn’t, because we *know* that everything that is finite, does. our entire conception of immortality is based on the infinite, simply because the infinite may not die, because it is larger than we know ourselves to be. it is only the hope of something greater that might not end. if we have extents and ends, we aren’t capable of going beyond everything, if we have to acknowledge our own fallibility, then we have to acknowledge we’re going to die.

world religions chart endless lists of saviors that have died in our stead, that we might not die. but since the fact of death seems inarguable, we have taken this “hope of nondeath” and transmuted it into the conception of the eternal soul, something that is beyond or eternal, something that never fails, makes mistakes, that is functionally infallible. because then the flesh is allowed to be weak, it is acceptable to sin and to fail… the conception of sin is an abstraction over the top of immortality. the knowledge of the gaping, unanswered abyss of death… that all failure can be ignored, and salvation can be hoped for by some meta-human aggregation of this eternal infallibility. the hope to be saved. the hope to be cleansed.

what then does it mean to fail? i mean, i have. plenty of times before certainly, but in the construct of being reinterpreted as some kind of learning experience and success. i have, not until recently, allowed this idea of failure…

in failure there is the possibility of both crippling condemnation and guilt, and the possibility of liberation. accepting that one has failed… to feel liberated from the boundary that was causing the failure, or you can feel some kind of condemnation and guilt for that failure. the delicate point here is that while one may seek to feel liberation, if one does not have the capacity or has not already undergone even a moment’s worth of condemnation or guilt for that failure, then one is not actually accepting the failure, not actually feeling the failure as failure, you are in the early stages of simply reinterpreting as success… because to transgress a boundary and to sin or fail, you must have first owned, acted on, or granted energy to that boundary. if you truly want to fail, if you want to sin and own that sin, and not simply find a way for that sin to become yet another success, you must first accept that end, you must accept that you’re going to die, accept that your failure marks an extent beyond which you did not pass. and if you can accept that extent, acknowledge your own ending, and not run from it and fear it, try to avoid it, then… a chance… of some kind of liberation, a kind of liberation that only sin can allow us. until you have acknowledged your extent, until you have accepted failure, until you have known yourself incapable, until you know you’re going to die, you will forever labor under the impossibly heavy burden of blamelessness.

if the ‘burden is easy and yoke is light’, one must ask, why bear them at all? …until your own death is as a mercy, caught in this trap of blamelessness.

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~ by downandin on January 14, 2008.