Matter

In one sense, Part III’s focus takes us to the point furthest out from modern Western and Christian conceits to the forces gargantuan and minute that shape and mentor us from within and without. Chapter 6 waxes both galactic and microscopic in continuing the turn away from human narcissism and self-fetishizing that exercises these essays to ask about “matter” as ultimate mater. Here the interlocutory reference will be contemporary notions of “wholeness” or what the biblical tradition apostrophizes as “salvation” (from Latin salvus: “hail, hearty, whole”). Yes, as we shall consider, we are entangled with stone and metal in our embodiment and need to bring such actively into our wrestling with Spirit. But in actual fact and in great mystery, just what is it that enwombs and “mothers” us and all of reality? The entire dance of thought here entertained hallows a primal hollow (or “hole-low”) as the “aperture underneath” the level of either certainty or math—and within even rock and steel—that gives rise to all that is . . . and ever has become. In such an excursion, it is not only Land as primal matrix or mater that refocuses our attention, nor the great Ocean Mother and the amniotes who 350 million years ago first carried Her waters ashore as birth-wombs inside animal mothers. But even further back and deeper down, we honor the micro-cleft at the heart of quanta as indeed the macro-throb of Black-Hole-vacancy that births the magic we call “matter.” And this wide-angle tracery also waxes a bit more self-confessional—in a confession tracking away from self-fixation—to insist that wholeness is never a gestalt convenable inside a body, whether individual or galactic. My own white male middle-class formation, crosscut with supremacy and settler-colonial inanity, is not only “hollow” in virtue of a history of theft and predatory plundering of what belongs to others. But even in the prospect of some kind of radical “healing” (or move to “wholeness”), I would still need confess a necessary centering in what is finally a mysterious void around which flux muons and Mars alike, neutrinos and neutron stars. The chapter traces such an itinerary across historical “hollows” as traumatized and halo-ed as inner-city Detroit at the hands of global capital and first century Galilee under the Roman boot, the Great Lakes Strait stripped naked by settlers and Transjordan wadis crosscut by nomad water battles. And then probes the “Halloween Cave” and Holy Well (“Holy Hollow”) mystique of my own Irish-Celtic ancestry to sketch a “creative riffing”—both spatial and seasonal—beyond the edge of everything substantial that neither oppression nor temporary realization (as a living body or rocky cliff or crystalline lattice-work) has ever yet subdued. What might it mean to re-imagine “wholeness” as ever-and-always improvisational, temporary, and interdependent—and in human form, especially, symbiotic with all else in a given local eco-zone and echoed with greatest magnificence precisely where struggle has been most trenchant and reprehensible? And all of it emergent from and disappearing back into a mothering void?