Lucky Man

"No, wait ... I'll tell you something," said Zaphod. "I freewheel a lot. I get an idea to do something, and, hey, why not, I do it. I reckon I'll become President of the Galaxy, and it just happens, it's easy. I decide to steal this ship. I decide to look for Magrathea, and it all just happens. Yeah, I work out how it can best be done, right, but it always works out. It's like having a Galacticredit card which keeps on working though you never send off the cheques. And then whenever I stop and think -- why did I want to do something? How did I work out how to do it? -- I get a very strong desire just to stop thinking about it." -- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

It's just after 6am when I pull into the gas station about a mile from our apartment complex. It's a two-hour drive to where I'll be teaching for the day and it will take a tank of gas to get there and back. I don't mind the drive; seasoned road warriors know there's a serenity to the open highway, and I have podcasts to pass the time when that serenity eludes me.

It's the kids' first day back at school, and I've left Dawn with most of the morning routine, except for Willy's morning pills and whatever we were able to do the night before. It's still hectic, and I'm on the road before the real chaos starts.

We spent Labor Day getting everything ready -- school supplies, clothes, lunches. We made lists and charts and schedules. We drilled the kids on their routines and responsibilities until we couldn't stand any more eye-rolling. Everything went off without a hitch, except Dawn got to work and realized she didn't pack a lunch for herself. Such is a mom's life.

Dawn and her ex moved to the same apartment complex after they separated, which means there are three of us around for parental support (and supervision). They've remained friends and he pops over now and then for a beer or dinner or to pick up some leftovers we've saved back for his lunch on the night shift. I joke that it's a very postmodern arrangement, and I've thought about pitching the premise to Fox as a sitcom. We just need a couple of catchphrases and some canned laughter.

Because of the move, however, the kids are too far from school to walk and outside of the district to be bused -- except for Willy, who gets bused regardless. That translates into three kids needing to get to three schools at three different times via two different means of transportation around three different work/sleep schedules. I'll spare the details, but the logistics are such that even with the three of us on task we still have to enlist the help of one of our neighbors. It takes a damn village.

The truth is, though, that things are going remarkably well. Amazingly well. Almost uncannily well, as if orchestrated by cosmic forces. Things have fallen into place with refreshing regularity and we're grateful, even if we're a little fuzzy on where such gratitude should be directed. This is common, of course -- what couple doesn't feel their love to be fated in some way?

I'll take well-worn clichés for fifty, Alex.

On the one hand, it does feel like that, even in a more general sense: we've both lived lives that have pretty much just worked out, beyond our ability to orchestrate them. I have applied to and attended exactly four schools in my academic career -- I figured I'd go somewhere and I did. I can only think of one time where I was granted an interview but didn't get the job, and it's hard to shake the feeling that in most cases just the right job showed up at just the right time.

This feeling is not uncommon. Daniel Quinn called his memoir Providence, and it narrates what is for him the uncanny process by which he arrived at his life's work. Kelsey Grammar, in his memoir, describes his own sense that the universe was somehow making his path straight.

I recently heard an interview with David Sedaris in which he confesses his belief that the right thing will come along if we are but patient and hard-working, and it worked for him: he kept plugging along writing articles until one day a publisher called him to see if he had a book they could publish. "I've been waiting for your call my whole life," he said. "I have one in my drawer."

The Tao te Ching adjures us to wait until the muddy waters clear and the right action presents itself. The Taoist concept of wu-wei describes a kind of flow, rolling with life's changes in the way that a good surfer neither fights the waves nor succumbs to them.

It's not hard for me to see each life as having its own genius, one that we are to lean into and go where it takes us without regret or triumphalism.

On the other hand, neither of us really believes this. We'll say it was "meant to be" but we do so with the irony of those for whom "meant to be" isn't really a thing. It's too hard to reconcile with a world in which there are brain disorders, tsunamis, and only one season of Firefly. Providence, if that's what we're going to call it, might narrate our experience but I shy away from it as a way of making sense of the universe.

Maybe it's all a matter of perspective, and I simply have a better attitude than some people. It could be that I just stumbled independently upon the power of positive thinking. Metaphysical musings aside, it's become almost axiomatic that positive people tend to experience the world more positively, and negative people more negatively, with some fuzziness as to which way the causality arrows are pointing.

But what about all those people in situations where positive thinking isn't going to help them? There are millions of people in the world in situations that are simply and abjectly cruel if part of a cosmic plan, and putting a positive spin on that isn't going to do them any good. If I take any part of my own experience, make it normative, and extrapolate from it a path to success and happiness, I'm a tube of hair gel and a good dentist away from being Joel Osteen.

No thanks.

More likely, it's a matter of confirmation bias and selective memory. We humans have a predilection for pattern recognition, even when the patterns aren't really there. Add to that some dumb luck and some underacknowledged (or even subconscious) machinations on our part, and it's no wonder our lives seem charmed.

In the end, "meant to be" is an affirmation, a way of calling something good. It's a way of saying we believe -- not in fate or cosmic forces, but in us, in our own future.

I get home around nine and Dawn has saved some salmon for dinner. "How was the drive?" she asks.

"Uneventful," I say. "Just like I like it. How was your day?"

"Let me tell you," she says, her smile weary but content, "the morning was crazy..."

Live and Let Die

It's Saturday, and I have to work, so I ask if there's anything I can pick up. Since I'm stocking shelves at grocery stores, it's easy for me to grab something on my way out.

"We need drinks for the pool party tomorrow," Dawn says.

"Okay," I say, "what should we get? Do you like piña coladas?"

It's an innocent question at first, but I immediately know where I want to go with it.

"Oh, sure," she says.

"And getting caught in the rain?" I deadpan.

"Absolutely," Dawn replies, without missing a beat. "But I'm not much into yoga."

I'm not into yoga, either, but I've been practicing something recently I call "bolus judo." "Bolus" refers to the way we feed Will, using an open syringe as a funnel and letting gravity do the work. Another option is to use a pump, but that option has been precluded by Dawn's discovery that she can't substitute her laptop charger for the pump's power supply.

The bolus feed is precarious, as I explained in an earlier post, because it involves an open syringe of formula in range of limbs akimbo. What I've discovered is that I can put the side of the bed down and swing my own leg up to block Will's arms. I'm not really pinning him -- my leg is draped over him with my foot on the far side of the bed -- but it does keep his arms out of the way.

Will's summer school is with the county school district rather than the city proper, so it's a different facility. It's also a much more robust facility for special needs, with a dedicated full-time nurse, a pool, great equipment, and a high teacher-to-student ratio.

These are the people who fixed his wheelchair, and his teacher regularly texts pictures of his activities and progress. This is not to slight the teachers and aides at the city school, who were fantastic; they just didn't have the same resources. We're looking at keeping him with the county school for the next school year and beyond.

The hitch is that the county school won't recognize the Do Not Resuscitate order, or DNR, on file for Will. Not without a court order. The director is sympathetic; there's currently a family pursuing such an order, and the school has helped them find an appropriate lawyer and has generally been cooperative and supportive. It's less a rancorous clash of wills than it is a collective attempt to jump through the proper hoops.

The decision to put a DNR in place is fraught and complicated. It means leveraging our ability to prolong life against the quality of that life as well as the life of the rest of the family. It's an alarmingly real-life variant of Lifeboat, involving not just real people but your own children. Put the most starkly, it requires sussing out the conditions under which you are willing to let your child die.

There's no clear line for this. There's a point at which prolonging life is inhumane, but that point is by no means obvious, and sorting that out is different for every family and every situation. There's no appealing to what is "natural" (a long-deconstructed notion anyway); in completely "natural" terms Will wouldn't have made it nearly this far -- but then, neither would many of the rest of us. "We're already keeping him alive by feeding him through a tube," Dawn points out.

To go through the arduous process of coming to such a decision -- consulting with doctors and family, wrestling with the ethics involved, starting into the abyss of mortality -- and then have that questioned a priori by a board policy can be demoralizing. For the board, it's a matter of liability; for us, it's a matter of parental rights.

Dawn and Todd didn't come to the decision to establish a DNR for Will lightly, and it is intended to represent their wishes in those cases when they can't be present to make those wishes known. Almost the only time Will is not with one of us is when he's at school, meaning that the one place a DNR is most likely to be relevant is one where it's not going to be honored.

It's the same ticklish, ironic structure as being on hospice. This seems to pop up everywhere. I'm reminded of Zaphod's reaction in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy the first time they use the Infinite Improbability Drive, whereupon they miraculously (or, rather, improbably) pick up Arthur and Ford seconds after the latter are ejected from a Vogon airlock: "Is this sort of thing going to happen every time we use the Infinite Improbability Drive?"

"I'm afraid so," comes the reply.

My understanding is that while the DNR is legally valid, it's not legally binding. It effectively establishes parental or guardian wishes but does not obligate anyone to follow those wishes. That, apparently, takes a court order, and the University of Michigan's Advocacy Clinic has agreed to represent us. They're trying to work out co-plaintiff status with the other family, otherwise we'll have our own case. Either way, we hope that it sets precedent for other families. Surely the board doesn't want to get sued every year.

It's especially frustrating because Will's previous school was receptive to the DNR without any legal wrangling. Again, that structure: the better facility for special needs is the one fussier about a legal detail common among special needs families, especially involving terminal conditions like Will's. Does this sort of thing happen a lot?

I'm afraid so.

The piña coladas were a bust, so I tried my hand at making a Bloody Mary. The end result? I won't be trading in the coffee and papers for bartending anytime soon.

But I'm going for gold in bolus judo.

Stuck in the Middle with You

I pull into the Meijer parking lot at 2:30 and punch in on my Blackberry (yes, those still exist). For my Coke job, I'm on the road, going from store to store stocking shelves. The Blackberry is how we clock in and out and how get our route and keep track of what we've done at which location -- how many cases we pulled, whether or not anything is out of stock, etc. It's also our only contact with the office, by email (usually) or phone. I haven't been to the home office in months.

The first thing I do is check the coolers in the checkout aisles. These we stock with 20 oz. single bottles of our main products, and they're the first thing the higher-ups would check if they visited the store. Stocking the coolers is a little like having your towel with you in Hitchhiker's Guide:

A towel...is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can

have.... For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitchhiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitchhiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitchhiker might accidentally have "lost." 

Basically, if the coolers are stocked, the supervisor will assume you've got everything under control and simply haven't gotten to the other bits yet, whereas if the coolers are a shambles this will cast something of a pall over the visit.

I say this as if such a visit has actually happened, which it hasn't. I also haven't seen any of my supervisors since training. But the effect is real; if I go into a store and  the coolers are in good shape, I immediately assume the stop is going to go well in general, even if that happens to not be true. Someone told me that sales from the coolers alone pays everyone's salary but the truck drivers, but this strikes me as a tall tale. Unless that includes vending machines; that might actually be plausible.

Today the coolers look fair but they need some attention, and I am just completing my perusal of them when the day guy catches up to me. A typical route is four or five stops with the same Meijer outlet as the first and last stop. That means that sometimes I run into the day merchandiser when our stops overlap.

He tells me that the bad news is they've cleaned us out of two liters and the coolers need to be hit, as I've already seen, but the good news is he's got the backstock all organized and ready to go. We talk shop and a little gossip and he heads out.

I head to the backstock area -- and it is nicely organized -- and load up an L-cart with 20 oz. singles, which we just call "cooler pop." I'm in the middle of stocking the coolers when my phone rings (my regular phone, not my Blackberry). It's not a number I recognize, so I just answer "Ted Troxell," in case it's a student (I'm teaching an online class) or something official. Usually it's a telemarketer.

This time it's not a telemarketer or a student. It's Will's teacher.

"Hi, this is ____ from Will's school." I'm immediately on edge: I've never gotten a call from the school before, but he's in summer school now and this is a different facility. She immediately puts me at ease.

"Everything's fine," she says, but she wanted to let me know that their resident MacGyver had fixed Will's wheelchair by using one of the ankle straps, which we don't use, to repair the lap belt, which was broken. She wanted to make sure that was okay, which had me wondering in what kind of scenario that wouldn't be okay.

Will's been on hospice care, which has been a great boon. An aide comes out to give him a bath twice a week and a nurse and social worker come out every other week. Most of his care is coordinated through this one service and they do a great job. He's managed to avoid any major hospital stays and is, in general, healthier than he's been in a long time.

There are some downsides. He has to show signs of regression in order to keep qualifying. If he makes too much improvement, he'll get kicked out of the system and we'll be navigating things on our own. It's the medical analog to the welfare recipient who gets a job and then no longer qualifies even though they still need the help.

Lately he's been having trouble with seizures and chorea (erratic involuntary movements) and even as we're trying to address those issues we're also secretly glad that this might be enough to secure his place in hospice a couple more months. It's an odd world to live in, where you simultaneously want your child to be healthy and to regress enough to qualify for hospice, precisely because it's hospice care that's doing the most to keep him healthy. It's not just a catch-22; it's Derrida's pharmakon inverted.

Another artifact of being on hospice is that we only get about two weeks of Will's medication at a time, so it feels like we're constantly running low. The idea is that a patient in hospice is dying, and not just in the Sylvia Plath/Eastern philosophy sense in which we're all dying. Ergo, they don't need a stockpile of drugs.

(It reminds me of a scene in Brighton Beach Memoirs. Eugene's mother sends him to the store for a quarter pound of butter. He complains that she sent him just that morning for a quarter pound, so why didn't she just have him get half a pound then? "And suppose the house burns down in the afternoon," she says. "Why do I need an extra quarter pound of butter?")

It also means that the insurance company won't cover both hospice and repairs to Will's wheelchair (it also won't cover prescribed modifications to the chair, like a headrest that would keep Will's head from flopping, or additional equipment like something to sit in besides the broken wheelchair). Dying people don't need to be secure in their wheelchairs, apparently. They're dying anyway, right? It makes a certain kind of sense, in a systemic corporate logic kind of way, but not on a human scale.

"Are you kidding?" I tell Will's teacher. "Of course! Thanks so much." We exchange pleasantries and hang up. It's just a wheelchair strap, but somehow I feel lighter, like for awhile I might be able to believe in humanity. It's the little things, I guess. I text Dawn to let her know, and then I have to get back to work.

These coolers aren't going to stock themselves.

A Day in the Life

"Will you feed Will?" she asks me.

"Of course," I say. "I was planning on it."

"Do you think we could crack the window open? I want to hear the rain."

"Sure," I smile. "I'll close it when I come to bed." I open the window and adjust the blinds so the air can flow.

"I can hear the crickets."

"Actually, they're probably peepers."

"What?"

"Spring peepers. Frogs."

"Oh."

My pedantic side is showing; who cares if they're crickets or frogs? I roll my eyes at myself in the dark.

I'm home a little early from my Coke job. My schedule is 2:30-11 but some nights are slower. I worry that I won't have enough hours to pay child support, but I also get paid mileage for going from store to store and that should compensate. Plus last week I worked a warehouse shift, which pays a lot more and I worked five hours of overtime.

It's time for Will's last feeding. Will is ten years old and has lissencephaly, a disorder in which the surface of the brain is smooth, lacking the ridges and crevices (technically gyri and sulci) which ordinarily characterize the brain's topology.

The result is, among other things, cognitive impairment and chronic seizures, requiring a cocktail of drugs which would kill most of us just to keep things somewhat regulated. The prescriptions all say x amount x times a day "for seizure control" but I'm learning quickly that "seizure control" is wishful thinking at best. It seems more like a dark joke that's not very funny.

Actually there's a cognate of gallows humor that's part of the discourse of special needs families. "Willy's talking back again," I'll say to Dawn, who'll reply something like, "Probably we're not spanking him enough." Or the time I told Dawn that I had to take his driving privileges away because he was burning out the clutch.

[Don't judge me; I just had that clutch replaced.]

I'm new to this. Not just to the procedures and routines, but to the life-world of having a special needs child. I'm sure it's cute to the veterans: the noob's first blog post. Isn't he adorable? I've tried to jump in with both feet; Dawn sometimes seems amazed that I want to jump in at all.

There's a lot of philosphizing and theologizing in these circles. A lot of theodicy. This makes sense; we're face-to-face with some of the most challenging aspects of life. We're tempted to wonder why, and to speculate, but I think we also intuitively know there's no answer. To me it's just life. Nothing more, nothing less.

In my case, I'm choosing this life, but I don't actually see it any differently than if Will were born to me. Ignoring for the moment the extent to which it feels like this life chose me –  a sentiment that is phenomenologically viable but metaphysically suspect – there was no cost/benefit analysis with Will on the minus side when I decided to start a new life with Dawn.

In fact, pardon the salty language but that's a shitty way to look at it anyway. Will was and is simply part of the constellation of things that make up this life, and I feel I belong here. So yes, I'm up at 10 o'clock feeding a child with a terminal brain disorder, and that's not tragic or admirable or even all that remarkable. It's just life. "Was that life?" Nietzsche asks at the end of Thus Spake Zarathustra – "Then once more!"

Will can't properly chew or swallow, so he gets fed through a gastric tube, or g-tube. There's quite a bit of terminology to learn here; Dawn was proud of me recently for using the phrase "rescue meds" in a Facebook post. I'm still trying to sort out the taxonomy of seizures. Anyway, his pills get crushed and suspended in liquid and delivered through the tube via a large syringe.

In another attempt at "seizure control," Will's on a ketogenic diet –  think Atkins –  and can't have the liquid drugs because most of them have sugar in them. This means crushing the pills in a mortar and pestle, pouring the powder into the syringe, putting the plunger in the syringe without the powder shooting out the other end (a rookie mistake, and yes, one that I've made), and then pulling water into the syringe to create the suspension.

This is then injected into the g-tube and followed by three more syringes full of water. This happens three times a day, each instance followed by two feedings an hour apart. In the morning, for instance, he gets his meds at 6, then feedings at 7 and 8. At night it varies, and on this particular night he needs one more feeding before we're done for the day.

His food, such as it is, is some sort of keto-friendly protein shake. Sometimes we just call it formula. It's supposed to be vanilla, but it ends up smelling like cake batter with a hint of Parmesan cheese. Like cake batter made with sourdough starter or something. Sickly sweet, with a hint of sour, and not in a good way.

I turn on Will's light and he's awake and alarmingly alert. I say "alarmingly" because a) he's supposed to be sleeping and has had some trouble with the whole day/night thing lately and b) because when he's alert (which is, on the whole, a good thing), feeding him becomes a matter of dodging fidgety limbs that seem precisely calibrated to knock your hand and splash his food everywhere.

It's like he waits for it. To feed him, we attach a plungerless syringe to the line and use it as a funnel for the food. He doesn't have much motor control, but his hands instinctively grasp, and he could conceivably grab the line and yank out his g-tube, which introduces a host of problems.

More likely, however, you'll have his arms contained with one of your arms, feeling clever with your other hand holding the syringe out of reach, and a knee will come out of nowhere in some kind of ninja move and douse you with formula.

Did I mention the sickly-sweet/sour smell?

I mean, theoretically, of course. It's not like this has actually happened to me or anything.

Ahem.

Tonight I'm onto him. I watch the arms and the legs and the feeding goes on without a hitch. I change his diaper, and give him a pad and a second diaper because he likes to gunnysack on us, saving it all up for a massive flood in the morning. We do a lot of laundry.

I situate him on his side, with his stuffed bear and a pillow between his knees and a blanket. "It's sleepy time," I say, hoping he'll take the hint and get some sleep. In the morning we'll start again with pills and the morning feedings, along with getting him ready for school. I'll have some papers to grade, and around 1:30 I'll get my route from Coke.

I check Facebook, and think about a snack but it's late and I'm not hungry. I brush my teeth, close the bedroom window and blinds, and get in bed.

"Did Willy get a blanket?"

"Of course," I say, and kiss her forehead. I'm not even sure she's really awake.

In about five minutes, I'm not either.

Drive My Car (A Reluctant Lenten Reflection)

In a gesture toward what I like to call "involuntary poverty," I gave up my car for Lent -- or rather, my car gave me up. There's a joke being played on the atheist forced to observe in this way, even if there's no one there to play it.

Lent, as a season of fasting prior to Easter, has been part of liturgical life longer than Christmas has, and for some reason, even though I'm not a terribly devout observer of Lent (or terribly devout in general), I like that it exists.

Eugene Peterson, in Reversed Thunder, writes that one of the good things about church is that it goes on without us. Whether we pray or not, people are praying. Whether we're even there or not, people are gathered. Somehow this is comforting. I feel that way about Lent.

I'm not sure why this is. My friend Daniel, a Catholic convert, told me, "I think it is interesting to see the attraction Lent has for my non-religious, atheist, agnostic and even Jewish hipster friends. Of all the things within Christianity that is culturally accessible I wouldn't have chosen Lent to be it."

I wouldn't have chosen to give up my car, either, and I do hope I get it back before Easter. About a month ago (before Lent began, actually) it broke down on the way out of Ann Arbor -- I hadn't even made it out of the city -- and has been stranded there ever since awaiting an engine replacement.

I'm learning to appreciate, however, the way this forces me into a discipline I did not choose. I'm walking more places, obviously, and to be honest I'm enjoying the exercise: except for some rudimentary (and sporadic) calisthenics, I don't work out. A 20-minute walk can do wonders for the otherwise sedentary, and I've enjoyed quite a few 20-minute walks.

It also throws me upon the mercy and generosity of others. The illusion of independence is shattered and I am forced to both ask for help from others and allow them to help me without the pretense that I'm going to be able to meaningfully pay them back. There's a certain paradoxical charity in allowing others to be charitable without trying to reciprocate (cue Derridean reflections on the gift).

I see this more generally as well. I'm staying during the week with a younger couple, and I try to be the model houseguest. I'm quiet. I'm neat. I also have an almost obsessive-compulsive need to be helpful: I do the dishes, or fold the load of laundry I find in the dryer when I do mine.

I sometimes notice, however, that these efforts also have the potential to subtly rob my friends of their opportunity to offer me hospitality. I'm not saying I shouldn't do them, but it introduces an element of payback. It hints at a calculus. Sometimes I duck out of the house on foot before I can be offered a ride; there's just a whiff of passive-aggressiveness about it.

There's a lesson to be learned here, and a balance to be sought. Maybe I'll find it. Maybe, on the other side of my reluctant Lent, I'll have grown in some sort of discipline of receiving charity.

Or mabye I'll just have killer thighs. Either way.

Bohemian Rhapsody

Marvin stood at the end of the bridge corridor. He was not in fact a particularly small robot. His silver body gleamed in the dusty sunbeams and shook with the continual barrage which the building was still undergoing. He did, however, look pitifully small as the gigantic black tank rolled to a halt in front of him. The tank examined him with a probe. The probe withdrew.

"I'm afraid," said Marvin, "that I've been left here to stop you."

"What are you armed with?" roared the tank in disbelief.

"Guess," said Marvin.

"Errmmm ..." said the machine, vibrating with unaccustomed thought, "laser beams?"

Marvin shook his head solemnly.

"No," muttered the machine in its deep guttural rumble, "Too obvious. Er ... how about an electron ram?"

This was new to Marvin.

"What's that?" he said.

"One of these," said the machine with enthusiasm.

From its turret emerged a sharp prong which spat a single lethal blaze of light. Behind Marvin a wall roared and collapsed as a heap of dust. The dust billowed briefly, then settled.

"You're thinking along the wrong lines," said Marvin, "You're failing to take into account something fairly basic in the relationship between men and robots. I'll tell you what they gave me to protect myself with, shall I?"

"Yes, alright," said the battle machine, bracing itself.

"Nothing," said Marvin.

There was a dangerous pause.

"Nothing?" roared the battle machine.

"Nothing at all," intoned Marvin dismally, "not an electronic sausage."

"Hell that makes me angry," bellowed the machine, "think I'll smash that wall down!"

The electron ram stabbed out another searing blaze of light and took out the wall next to the machine.

"How do you think I feel?" said Marvin bitterly.

"I think I'll shoot down their bloody ceiling as well!" raged the tank.

It took out the ceiling of the bridge.

"That's very impressive," murmured Marvin.

"You ain't seeing nothing yet," promised the machine, "I can take out this floor too, no trouble!" It took out the floor, too.

"Hell's bells!" the machine roared as it plummeted fifteen storeys and smashed itself to bits on the ground below.

"What a depressingly stupid machine," said Marvin and trudged away.

-Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe [edited]

In case you haven't noticed, I've spent the last few months wrestling with the work of John Milbank for a dissertation chapter, and I still haven't recovered. I may never recover. This is the wonder of Milbank. His regular whipping boys are the apostles of what he calls "postmodern nihilism." Basically, for him, all those postmodern/poststructuralist thinkers in the wake of Nietzsche, all those darlings of cultural studies -- Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, Deleuze (especially), and even Levinas -- they're nihilists.

They're like the robotic tank in the above passage: having lain waste to everything, they have nothing left to stand on, no purchase for undertaking any kind of radical politics -- never mind the extent to which they get employed in the service of such a politics. It won't work, Milbank feels, and in characteristic fashion he tells us that orthodox Christian theology is the only thing that will. It's a little more complicated than that, and more of the story can be found in the chapter "Ontological Violence" in Milbank's Theology and Social Theory.

I bring this up because it is Milbank who has convinced me that I am a nihilist, and it is my love/hate relationship with Milbank and his project that has goaded me into embracing that with something akin to enthusiasm. I want a T-shirt that says "I'm the postmodern nihilist Milbank warned you about." 

(Or maybe not.)

What I'm trying to do is accept Milbank's premise -- yes, this is in fact a kind of nihilism, and we should admit that -- without accepting his conclusion that we should therefore either embrace orthodox Christianity or just give up and acquiesce to capitalistic excess. This strikes me as a much more sophisticated but nevertheless equally spurious version of the argument that atheists, having abandoned God and therefore any basis for morality, should just become axe murderers and call it a day.

But if Milbank is correct that this is a form of nihilism, he's also correct that it is difficult to get a coherent politics out of it. I'm critical of Milbank not because I think there's a better way to arrive at a radical politics (or any politics for that matter) but because I don't think Milbank's project is going to work. It's very interesting theology, and has made quite a splash, and that's good for Milbank but I don't think anyone in the political world is going to make a hearty go of it and I don't think it would produce the desired results anyway. Of course, since it won't be tried we'll never know. Or as I like to say: history might prove me wrong, but I don't think it's that motivated. Nihilism FTW.

Milbank's articulation of a postfoundationalist milieu in which the apology for Christianity is its ability to stave off nihilism cannot, no matter how earnest Milbank's belief itself might be, fully escape the irony of the postmodern nihilism he laments. At that point it's already too late. Postfoundationalism is a nihilism, not in the sense of abandoning meaning altogether (as if that were possible) but in the sense of being forced to recognize that our attempts to create meaning don't rest on anything solid, and can't. If it's hard to get a politics out of this, then Milbank is in the same boat. On one hand, he's done it -- but then we should be able to recognize that others can, too. On the other hand, well, see above.

This might seem depressing, and that makes sense to me, but strangely I find it all invigorating. In fact, embracing that has been what I think has been a very helpful response to my own depression. This keeps coming up lately. Once again, there are three witnesses, three conversations that on their own might have made me think, and have demanded my attention all the more by ganging up on me with the rule of three.

The first conversation came on the heels of my last post: in the midst of various cross-postings and roundups I was introduced to another blogger. His work intrigued me, especially inasmuch as he was offering a bit of a critique of mainstream atheism mainly, it seemed to me, on the basis that it didn't fully own up to being a nihilism. This intrigued me, since that's my critique of a lot of things. But when I brought it up, the conversation fell apart on two levels.

First, my interlocutor felt that my attempts to connect him with schools of thought familiar to me constituted a form of rhetorical violence and that I was failing to see past those associations and engage the real person. This apparently warranted a bit of lecturing on his part. Second, he didn't feel I was taking the conversation seriously enough, and that I was treating his own seriousness as something to be mocked. He approaches such conversations, he told me, as if everything was at stake, and faulted me for approaching it as if nothing was at stake and this was just fodder for making snarky jokes. Which is true.

To the extent that the bit about labels was a critique of representation I'm quite sympathetic; there is a kind of rhetorical violence involved. But think rhetorical violence is only the issue if by naming something we assume we are identifying its essence and thereby gaining some sort of mastery over it. I don't think there is an essence to name. I just rather automatically look for associations and connections; what I am identifying is not an essence but a possible family resemblance. His earnestness surprised me coming from someone whose writing evinced what I thought was nihilism, so maybe I was wrong about that. But I don't know why he couldn't have just said "no, I don't think this is nihilism, and here's why."

As for the other, well -- guilty. I apologized for this, but pointed out that I did admit to being a nihilist, and as problematic as the label might be for him, I might have meant something by it. It's like the swordfighting scene between Jack Sparrow and Will Turner in Pirates of the Caribbean: Turner says "you cheated!" and Sparrow shrugs and says "Pirate...."

I tend to not take things seriously, I admit. Humor is my default. I'm a cynic, but I'm a happy cynic. Even when I'm curmudgeonly it's all schtick. My blogger friend wrote that if everything wasn't at stake, suicide would be preferable. I confess this baffles me. Suicide just doesn't seem that interesting.

The second conversation came during an independent study. One of our graduate students is doing some work with anarchist theory and wanted more background, so the department gave me the go-ahead. This has been fun because it's given me a reason to dig into to some of the history, and especially some primary sources, that I'd neglected up to this point. We've been chomping at the bit, however, to get to the postanarchist stuff. This is the intersection of postmodern/poststructuralist thought and anarchist theory, and we're geeked out about it.

Todd May is my favorite, but he has trouble arriving at a specific politics, even though he tries to do so and he wrote a whole book on practices. Still: what does a postanarchist actually do? That seems to be a difficult question. My counterpart, frustrated with May (and me sometimes), prefers Saul Newman. So I'm May and she's Newman. "We should develop a comedy skit based on that," she told me, "Except only three people would get it...and they're in the UK."

Newman's politics is more promising, but he gets there by sneaking some universals in the back door. I think this really is the central aporia: in a world where nothing really matters, what is politics? Does it do any good to critique the philosophy that tells us there is no starting point for not being a good starting point? To me, the problem is ticklish. To my grad student friend, it's a bit depressing, though she's hardly suicidal.

The third conversation was with a friend of mine who, like me, is sometimes visited by depression. We have similar personalities and wrestle with similar issues, but he has a more developed sense of justice than I do and greater sense of affront when that justice doesn't present itself.  I'm more cynical, but I don't want to take  that sense of justice away from him and I don't presume my own path to be normative. He's tempted to think that things might not be worth it without meaning or justice; he's actually had some suicidal thoughts.

I want to take that seriously, but at the same time it's a part of his experience I can't relate to. I chalk it up to narcissism: my own life is so interesting to me that if I ended it on purpose I'd be missing out on what happens next. Hey, it works: don't hate me. I also think it's precisely my nihilism that leads me to have lower expectations of the world and thus less chance for disappointment (and depression). Defense mechanism? Sure. I don't think that is unusual.

It's a long story, but I discovered in the midst of a disastrous life crisis that my narcissism can't be trusted with intrinsic meaning. I'm a nihilist for the same reason a recovering alcoholic doesn't drink. At this point you can dismiss my perspective as an artifact of my personality issues, but then I'd just point out that your perspective does the same thing for you, and we're back to the same place. Nihilism FTW again.

But who am I to say that my friend's sense of justice is misplaced or misguided? He might be led to actually do something. I don't think nihilists can go around prescribing what can and can't be done. It's just that we know it's ultimately ironic (particularly in the sense that Rorty calls "ironism"). Simon Critchley is not sending me Christmas cards.

Another friend put it to me this way, describing my nihilism as a double bind: "you feel compelled to treat other people seriously on their own grounds, allow them to define themselves to the extent that it is possible, but you also believe, so to speak, in nihilism: you feel that despite their protestations you know 'what's really going on' even if it's precisely nothing that is going on."

What I ended up telling my friend is that maybe between suicidal despair and a nihilistic cynicism is way of narrating that sense of justice as a call that can never be fulfilled but is nevertheless generative. There are shades here of Derrida's "democracy that is to come" or a kind of Levinasian ethical call; we can respond to that call but we cannot answer it. Can we get a politics out of that? Not a universal one, certainly, but I don't think that should stop people from acting on their desires for a better world. I'd just point out that those desires are always already constructed from choices we've made or choices that have been made for us.

I'm also a lot of fun at parties.

Building a Mystery

I recently referred to myself as a "postsecular atheist," which I think might be fairly accurate if I knew what it meant. I've been wondering about that. Insisting that I'm technically a theological non-realist (or a metaphysical non-realist more generally) seems pointless since nobody knows what that is, either. But the problem with identifying as an atheist is that I'm not the sort of atheist for whom being an atheist is the goal as opposed to an artifact of not believing in God. There is no "right way" to be an atheist, but some atheists seem to act like it, and I'm not sure I pass the test. It's mutual, though: atheism, as a discourse community, is not that attractive to me -- no offense to my atheist friends.

I don't share the (stereo)typical atheist disdain for religion. I don't think we'd all be better off if we just got rid of religion, as if that were even possible. I'm an atheist less by virtue of being certain that God does not exist than by not being able to say what it would mean if God did, or why we should assume there is only one God, or how I should comport myself in the face of the existence of said God. I don't know how we would know those things, which I suppose is more agnostic than atheist. But being allergic to metaphysics, I don't have a framework in which "I believe in God" is intelligible. Redefining God as whatever might happen to be "out there" doesn't really do much work, and neither does redefining God as something I might be a little less reticent about, like the Tao or something (if that worked, wouldn't it make more sense to just be a Taoist?). So, to recap: I don't believe in God, which I think is the definition of atheism. I just don't fit the usual profile. 

This is where the "postsecular" bit comes in. Postsecularity describes the sense in which we're realizing -- at least in some areas of thought -- that what we think of as "the secular" is not something that was revealed when we finally pulled back the veil of religion, but rather a way of thinking that was constructed in response to and on the heels of developments in Christian theology. There are various ways of narrating this, from Charles Taylor to John Milbank to Marcel Gauchet, but the basic idea is that there is no neutral sphere in which we can negotiate the common good without influence from religion or ideology. Moreover, the idea that there is such a sphere is itself a claim about the "way things are" that is already at odds with religious formulations.

It would be silly, for instance, to say that liberal democracy is a religion, per se (though perhaps not that silly) but it does make defacto (meta-)religious claims and cannot avoid doing so. A claim that religion and state should remain separate is still a claim about religion, and suggests that the state, and only the state, should be able to do things that might otherwise fall under the purview of religion. Questions about the common good or how we might best live to together, questions that we assume to be political, are not questions about which religion has been silent. Even the idea that there is a genus "religion" of which a given person's way of constructing the world can be seen a species is problematic -- especially for those ways of seeing the world we tend to call religions. What lies at the core of many people's construction of identity is precisely the thing that liberal democracy says they should bracket.

[Postsecularity is the condition in which we recognize that "the secular" is just some shit we made up. This opens us up to the realization that postsecularity is just some shit we made up in the wake of realizing that secularity was some shit we made up. Basically it's shit all the way down.]

So what does it mean to be an atheist self-consciously in this milieu? I can identify three candidates for what postsecular atheism might look like -- three versions of it -- and I find them all unsatisfying. First and foremost, of course, is Slavoj Žižek. I love Žižek; I don't love how that makes me a lot like a bunch of nerdy post-evangelicals who also love Žižek. And I'm not sure how much I agree with Žižek, especially since most of the stuff he's on about -- psychoanalysis and Lacan and all that -- I really don't have much use for. Still, there's an attraction. Žižek's like the crazy drunk uncle whom you secretly love just because he makes things more interesting. You don't want to emulate him, or take any of his advice, but he's a hell of a lot of fun.

For Žižek, God is the Lacanian "Big Other" we need to do without. The psychoanalysis is over when you recognize that there is no Big Other -- that you are, basically, on your own. To the extent that this speaks to the experience of postfoundationalism, I'm on board. But Žižek doesn't stop there. The twist is that it is Christianity that tells us this. Jesus' cry "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" is this realization, Jesus beating the crazy old man in Thus Spake Zarathustra to the punch by almost 2,000 years.

Žižek and Jesus are like Tyler Durden telling his minions, "You have to consider the possibility that God does not like you, never wanted you, in all probability he hates you. This is not the worst thing that could happen," except that God can't be bothered to actually hate you because he's not there. God the father empties himself into Jesus the son and gets whacked and can now only be found "resurrected" in the Spirit in the form of community. And we all have to enter into this realization. There is no God, no Big Other; there's just us, muddling through, doing whatever we can. We, collectively, are the only God we're going to get.

Two things bother me about this. One, it seems to prescribe a normative (and normatively Christian!) path. If we'd just get over our fixation with the Big Other (God being merely one candidate for this), we could be free and move on to...whatever. And this, to me, introduces a kind of back-door humanism -- that's the second thing -- an emancipatory project presuming a human subject to be liberated.

Another possibility is Alain de Botton's "Atheism 2.0." I'll be honest -- I haven't read the book, Religion for Atheists; I've only seen his TED talk. And I hadn't heard of him at all before I read this scathing review by Terry Eagleton. So my introduction wasn't great and my knowledge is not robust. I may be getting him wrong. Still, Botton is interesting in that he thinks atheists too quickly dismiss aspects of religion that might be helpful. From the aforementioned talk:

Whatever it may be, you know the kind of thing I'm talking about -- people who are attracted to the ritualistic side, the moralistic, communal side of religion, but can't bear the doctrine. Until now, these people have faced a rather unpleasant choice. It's almost as though either you accept the doctrine and then you can have all the nice stuff, or you reject the doctrine and you're living in some kind of spiritual wasteland under the guidance of CNN and Walmart.

Botton's solution? Raid the various religious traditions for ideas, concepts, rituals, etc. (the "nice stuff") that might give us the purported benefits of religion without committing ourselves intellectually or otherwise. On one hand, this seems hopelessly consumeristic; on the other hand, Botton seems to be enriching his particular tradition -- atheism -- with things learned from outside that tradition, much as postmodern Christians might enrich their tradition with the findings of science or the musings of philosophy. Traditions are not hermetically sealed, and most if not all have a history of syncretism and cross-pollination. Nevertheless, I don't much see the point. I really don't see atheists banding together in a parody of religion to feel better about themselves. Or they already do and we call them Unitarian Universalists.

Finally, there's Robert Jensen. Jensen shares a leftist politics with Žižek (I'm not sure of Botton's politics; Eagleton calls him a libertarian), but unlike Žižek and Botton is actually a member of a church. He tells his story in All My Bones Shake: he met the pastor of a Presbyterian church in the course of his political activism and became attracted to the church's collective life and the way it intersected with progressive politics. Eventually he got sucked into that life even though he's not really come around to believing in God as such. The story is a good one, and while Jensen is not the riveting memoirist that Anne Lamott is, it's the best part of the book.

The rest of the book outlines what we might call his political theology, which he sums up in the paradoxical "There is no God, and now more than ever we all need to serve the One True Gods." The construction is deliberate. By "there is no God" he means basically what Žižek means by there not being a Big Other but without that language. What we think of as God, he says, is just a name for mystery itself, which is not something we worship or commit ourselves to.

The "One True Gods" are community (as a concept) and communities (as concrete expressions of that concept), things we must attend to if we're going to survive as a species. This is, perhaps, compatible with  Žižek's emphasis on the death of God and the birth of community in the Spirit. Jensen comes off as a communalist (and something of a localist) with a bit of anarcho-primitivist ecological apocalypticism thrown in the mix, but without landing on anything recognizable as anarchist theory. He's a progressive, which is better than a lot of the alternatives, and his theology seems like a bit of a mainline liberal rehash that at least has the stones to admit to being atheist.

There are also out-and-out Christian Atheists, and Žižek and I have both been branded with that designation. I'm sometimes loath to call myself either one, let alone both. My atheist friends wonder, given my interest in Christianity (and my not-infrequent defense of Christianity as a coherent body of thought) if I'm really an atheist at all. Some of my Christian friends who know of my "status" are holding out a none-too-subtle hope that this is just a phase for me, and that I will come around. It's been over a decade, but there are days I can almost imagine what it would be like to believe again. I don't think they're right, but I can't predict the future.

On the other hand, I'm reluctant to call myself a Christian because it seems like, well, God is kind of a big deal. At any rate, I'm coming to realize that my own admixture of intellectual atheism and social participation in Christianity is largely artifactual, a result of what I call "social inertia": I've been part of the Christian tradition for most of my life. In some ways I've been in and out; in others, I've just been in, with the idea that I could ever be out being largely illusory. These are my people. Many of my friends and most of my family are Christians. I also don't believe in God -- but being an atheist isn't enough of an identity marker for me to disrupt all of those relationship and become "the atheist" in that social grouping. Or become somebody's project, which is what tends to happen.

I'm not, however, trying to combine those things into a cohesive philosophical framework. I happen to be a theologically literate but otherwise nominal Christian, mostly by heritage. I also happen to not believe in God.

This is not the worst that could happen.