“Are you a materialist?”

And everyone has a heart and it’s calling for something

And we are all so sick and tired of seeing things as they are

Horses are just horses and their manes aren’t full of fire

And the fields are just fields and there ain’t no Lord

-Nick Cave

A few days ago a friend I’ve known since high school asked me that question: Are you a materialist? It was asked in simplicity, genuine curiosity, and zero judgment by someone who has more than once been through the throws of a fundamental shift in belief. So I answered it in kind. My response struck me as another ‘report’ of my current experience that might be important to share. Certainly it marks for me an ad hoc and felt position that I will be able to look back upon for the tracing of developments. So here’s what I wrote to them, only slightly edited:

That’s a slightly complicated question for me. Up to a year or so ago I think I would have responded with a resounding NO. My innate bent toward something beyond materialism feels almost genetically determined. Like I have no choice but to be ‘spiritual’ or whatever—in a more-than-materialist way, I mean. (Materialists can, of course, be ‘spiritual’ in a strictly materialist sense, ‘spirit’ merely denoting something like consciousness and actions within a materialist framework.)

That innate bent toward the more-than-material¹ remains. Yet it’s not as solid or continuous as it was. Mainly because my personal circumstances have felt so pointless. (Longterm unemployment, poverty, and isolation will do this to you.) Due to this, I have finally had the experience of looking to the world for its sacred dimension and finding it to seem empty, devoid of anything more than matter.² I’ve literally never experienced this before in my life. It’s a pretty fucking lowdown feeling. (At least for someone like me. I suppose others would find it liberating.)

It is,  however, accompanied by a compensating ‘grace’ of sorts. I now more fully understand Nick Cave’s lyrics about faith as something tentative at best and which sometimes seems not real at all. (Cormac McCarthy expresses something similar.) This is a genuine comfort and even something nearly of a joy. I always understood and deeply respected that ambivalent or wavering point of view. But I didn’t know it truly from the inside. I mean, I’ve wavered on the existence and nature of ‘God’, but not on there being something more-than-material about existence itself. Having genuinely experienced the wavering at that deeper level, I now feel a part of the ‘crew’ of half-believers without ever having wanted or pursued membership. I feel a certain camaraderie. I feel I’m in a company of holy fools who are only half the time (at best) able to believe there is any such thing as the holy (again, in a more-than-material sense). I am a nobody in that company, of course. But it still feels like a scrap of blessing in the darkness to be on the edges of their campfire.

Another ‘benefit’ is that it has raised the stakes of my ‘all bets are off’ stance (to mix metaphors). I feel freer than ever to explore all options. I’m open to anything. Because I have to be. I can’t help it. In some ways I’d rather not be open to strict, closed materialism—I mean as anything more than an intellectual position to fair-mindedly investigate. But it has become a genuine existential option for me. Perforce. I didn’t choose it anymore than I seem to have chosen my previously impervious bent toward non-materialism.

He is ‘buffeted by every wind’ the naysayers will say. I think only people who’ve never truly suffered life’s storms can throw that accusation so blithely. 

A Sustack-filtered variation of Tom duBois’s bright and amazing cover art for Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds’ 2019 album Ghosteen. This swampier, reptilian, deep-time paradise I can get behind—though not to the exclusion of brighter, cheerier assays.

My friend replied that though he no longer embraces ‘certainty’, he simply assumes the ‘absurdities’ of faith in a practical daily way. He further remarked: ‘God is an assumption based on a supposition. I shrug, “I don’t know, but hope for God’s mercy… whatever that is.”

I responded as follows:

That makes complete sense to me and is very similar to how I operate on a daily basis. The christian god assumption/supposition is undergoing thorough deconstruction, and to some degree even rejection, for me. And the holes that leaves behind are becoming a patchwork influenced by Native American spirituality, Chinese spirituality and others (including materialist philosophies like Marxism!). Of course, I’m always in danger of appropriating these other spiritualities rather than truly understanding or embracing them from the inside. Just another reason I feel like an incurable outsider. It’s not something I want. I’m sick to death (in the full Kierkegaardian sense) of being Outside. I want in. I’m dying out here. But what can I do? I’ve tried everything. I’ll just continue to huddle round the trashcan fire at the gates, hoping for kindnesses passed through the bars.

So there it is. Further to this point, I will (if I feel up to it) reflect on the new album Wild God by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds in a forthcoming piece. That incredible album encapsulates a deep irony for me, for where I’ve got to and where Nick has got to marks an unexpected criss-cross. I will try to explain.

More reports to follow.

1. Perhaps it would be more precise to say something like the material-saturated-by-its-excess.

2. I.e., in these moments it seems that material processes completely describe existence.