The edge of the construct

A few brief thoughts on theophany

There are so many films that have captured the popular imagination dealing with what you might call the edge of the construct. Obvious examples are movies like Dark City (1998), The Truman Show (1998), The Matrix (1999), and The Signal (2014). In a sense, of course, any story echoing archetypal storytelling in the vein of Campbell’s hero’s journey deals with a character or a number of characters confronting the death of the familiar world. Still, it is in the obvious examples that the edge of the construct is most explicit. As Morpheus tells the protagonist Neo in The Matrix, “What you know you can’t explain, but you feel it. You've felt it your entire life, that there's something wrong with the world.” I other words: You sense that the world you know—the construct—has an edge. In this sense, flat-earthers are right, even though they fail to recognize their view of the world as a poetic one and not a literal one.

Edge-of-construct movies forcefully represent that universal human sense that ‘something’ is not quite right or perhaps that ‘something’ is missing. This sense is a recognition that what is obvious doesn’t account for itself. The perceptible world feels incomplete. We know, intuitively, that everything is hiding something. As Chesterton’s character Gabriel Syme cries out in The Man Who Was Thursday: “Shall I tell you the secret of the whole world? It is that we have only known the back of the world. We see everything from behind, and it looks brutal. That is not a tree, but the back of a tree. That is not a cloud, but the back of a cloud. Cannot you see that everything is stooping and hiding a face? If we could only get round in front—”

We know this sense of the shadowy, hidden side of being every time we ask the question “Why?”. To ask the question “Why?” implies a number of things. For starters, it implies that we are there in the world to ask the question, that we are witnesses to some inexplicability in the being of being. I mention this obvious truth since it is important to remember that we feel the question while already embedded in a network of meanings, and so we are somehow, mysteriously, and implicitly aware that the meanings we have access to aren’t good enough. There we are, then, reaching out beyond ourselves for an answer. There is humility in the question since to ask “Why?” is already to be directed away from the self. It is an unselfish act, even if selfishness might take hold of it and demand an answer we already know or think we know. People who lack genuine inquisitiveness, who believe they already have the answer, tend to be, on the whole, rather self-enclosed. Still, “Why?” demonstrates a posture of openness to what is not us and to what is not a mere component of the construct.

To ask “Why?” also means that we have a tacit awareness that the single instance of asking is embedded within a totality, and so we must also have a tacit awareness that reality as a whole allows for many more possibilities than the particular reality that we happen to be experiencing right now. To ask “Why?” we must have a tacit sense that, as the old X-Files mantra goes, the truth is out there. It assumes that contact with reality is possible—but that this reality as we understand it is not sufficient to explain itself.

If you ask why you are here, for example, you are at that moment assuming, without pretentiousness, that your own existence is not a good enough explanation for itself. You’re also assuming that to be existent is to be for something, while also being dependent on what is beyond it. If you ask why ‘something’ feels off—why things are not as they ought to be—you are assuming that there is an answer and that the answer can be found. There is even a sense that there is a right answer, even if there is a danger that we may pick the wrong answer as if it is the right one.

It is possible to be so drenched in distractions that we do not sense what Neo apparently sensed in The Matrix, but I’m almost certain that everyone who allows themselves enough silence to contemplate things for longer than five minutes will find themselves awkwardly and even anxiously aware of their own finitude—but also of how finitude calls out for that which can account for finitude. No meaning is self-evident.

In edge-of-construct movies, the force that hides reality is typically depicted as sinister. What is being hidden in such films, after all, is the truth. The back of things that we perceive, it seems, is falsehood. The trouble with the construct—and so why the protagonist and others need to get to the edge of it—is that it is a lie. Because reality has a nasty habit of breaking lies down almost without effort, lies require a certain amount of coercive force to be believed. Lies require a support system.

But it would be a problem to take dualism in the edge-of-construct metaphor too seriously, at least as it plays out in cinemas and on pixellated screens. Often, what is hidden is hidden the way a child hides when playing hide-and-seek. The hidden is not some sinister, dark truth—some aspect of reality hidden by a malicious force. Rather, as even Syme recognized in The Man Who Was Thursday, it is often things that are of incomparable good that hide. What is hiding, like the child playing hide-and-seek, wants to be found. Often, what is hidden is hidden in plain sight. The front of the tree is known but forgotten. The front of clouds is known but we concern ourselves only with what appears and not what disappears.

In the book of Exodus, the prophet Moses arrives at the edge of the construct when he sees a bush burning. He thinks to himself, “I will go over and see this strange sight—why the bush does not burn up.” (Exodus 3.3). He learns that the God of his forefathers is tired of the tyranny of Egypt and that he has every intention to free Moses’s people. It is a profound scene but Moses constantly pushes back—at least, he resists his part in the plan of the divine. It’s as if he says, at least begin with, “I’m happy with seeing the back of things. I’m okay, I’m okay.”

Central to this moment of theophany is that it is, in some ways, nothing new. If God plays hide-and-seek, he eventually shows up like a child who has gotten tired of waiting. “Here I am!” The whole cosmos is a burning bush, burning but not consumed—a massive, inexplicable something that is there without bothering to explain itself. And Moses, although a prince of Egypt, was still nursed by his mother and raised on stories about his ancestors. He knows, in this moment of encounter, at least something of the nature of this wild, invisible divinity who is interrupting a sensible day of shepherding and larking. Yet, Moses constantly pushes back. He wants to stay, in a manner of speaking, within his Matrix.

This is theophany. God shows up, not to negate the back of things but to confirm them. This is what the back of the world looks like, this is what the back of the tree looks like, this is what the back of a cloud of fire looks like, this is what the back of a pillar of fire looks like, and, yes, this is what God’s back looks like—although that last one happens thirty chapters later in the story. But to see the back of things, we have to know of the front of them. We need to know that everything hides a face.

What is the nature of Moses’s resistance? Where is his hesitancy coming from? The answer is at least in part—as it always is when we talk about constructs and simulacra—language. Language is meant to be an intensification of being, a disclosure of what is hidden in plain sight. It is being as it is spoken. But we can quickly get trapped in our own words, as these intensifications of being are removed from the world they are supposed to intensify. This at least partly explains God’s self-naming as something that refuses overdefinition. An important part of naming is unnaming. We need to recognize that even these intensifications of being conceal being from us.

And yet, and yet—we feel, if we will let ourselves, that ‘something’ is not quite right or perhaps that ‘something’ is missing. We feel the fragility of the simulacrum. We feel that the back of things is not enough to explain them. The simulacrum may seem self-sustaining until we take the time to contemplate it and ask: “Why?” It is only then that we stand any chance of getting the hell out of the land of our slavery.