Our salad days are probably over. I don't think there's any going back to the summer of 2020. I will never forget those nights we spent shocked up in our bedrooms, lonely and hypermediated, longing of the potential world outside our windows. Everything I learned and felt then will be things I carry forever. But where they come from seems permanently behind us, and I say that with a heavy heart. This is a real loss. There's a reason it feels that way. I hope you know the feeling is mutual.
It would be worse if we were through, like we could have been a few months ago. Luckily, we're still here, friends who are hopefully forever. Our past is ruined, sure - its monuments eternally still and just out of reach, lumbering over us like birds to people before the invention of the airplane. But we're still friends, and ruins are still traversable. We got feet and grit. This would only become our horizon if we were no longer friends. Now, the horizon is whatever we make it. We can walk as far as we want. The summer of 2020 is gone, sure. But we're in the fall of 2023. The spring of 2024 is up ahead, and so is the summer of 2025, the winter of 2026, etc. The response to losing something can't be getting it back. It has to be finding something new. So we must look out for new seasons. Together, we'll still have them, and judging by the way things of been, they can be wherever we want. We may not have the summer of 2020 anymore, but we still have the NAWT and the New Girl Situation. Best of all, we don't have to just yearn for them, either.
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You finding God is absolutely nuts to me. I really couldn't be happier about it. And I paid too close attention to you to be entirely shocked by the move (not to mention having my two closest friends at the moment be relatively intense Christians). But at the same time, I'm still amazed. Life never fails to surprise me down to the bones, especially since I've moved. This is one of a few life-altering plot twists the Writers(1) of my life have thrown at me in the last month alone, most of which I've not spoken a word to anyone about.
E--- once told me that he thinks youth culture taking up Christainity is because of the absence of hierarchy in Deleuze's(2) sense of the word. I honestly have no idea what that means yet, but I figure it has something to do with what I was trying to gesture at by bringing up the thrift stores and Wal-Marts in your last post. Remember what I said about the end of the secular world? That's where I think it takes place. This is what I mean by that in my own, without post-structralist neologisms: I think the kids are sick on the digital, multi-platform, cosmopolitan, consumerist, post-industrial, liberal-democractic Western world. They're sick of products: being sold them, having to be sold them, having too much of them, and not knowing what to do with them. They're sick of entire landscapes being reduced to their production and consumption, of the thought of a landscape being inconceivable outside of that logic. Moreover, they're sick of how they're able to respond to it. Social responsibility in the language of academia, the media, the government, advertising, HR departments, etc. have set up discourses that render critique of institutions a part of their operation, defanging them. Things like land acknowledgements, tone indicators, notions of personal "toxicity," "unlearning," and marginalizing social hierarchies, and even my beloved pronoun tags - once genuinely radical and interrogative practices - become augmentative theatrics to existing power structures of the State and capital. Thus, the ways out of our mess are turned into mirages. This is where I think Christianity comes in. Now, when I say "the kids," I mean middle-class kids. This is a broad category, but think of us, which doesn't make it any less wide-reaching. Perhaps just think of suburbia and the city. Broadly speaking, these are where things like Christianity become segregated among the people that live their and get rendered antiquated by the institutions that they interact with, turning it really sexy and mysterious to their children. Tradition in a world without it starts sounding nice. Icons in a hyperreal world seem tangible and true. Faith uplifts, and God fixes most systems of metaphysics, which the scientist West has entirely done away with. It's as simple as this: nobody actually wants life to be meaningless, so maybe it isn't. At least it doesn't have to be.
I possibly sound like a fascist or a condescending New Athiest, but I want to sound understanding. Nobody can blame you guys if they're looking at this honestly. I certainly don't, even I haven't grown out of my grade 9 pseudo-exisentialism. Perhaps I will, though. My goal right now is to wander around and come as close as one can to being a practicing agnostic. I want to see what the world will give me if I really go out and look for it. Maybe God's out there for me, who knows. Regardless, I'm a traveller. We all are. If you're bored, then you're boring.
For the record, there's few things more patronizing than for some fuckhead from the acreage such as myself to hit you with the "I'm so happy for you, but that's not for me" when it comes to faith. If the last year has taught me anything, one thing is that this shit isn't a trivial personal choice. Sorry, Dave Mustaine, but killing for religion is something I now understand. So this is something I won't meet with mere tolerance for you. I promise this will get the seriousness it demands of me.
(1) "The Writers" were an in-joke Blake and I had. I told you about it a few times, but just so I'm clear, it refers to the hypothetical writers of the TV show of our lives, which we called "The Gang."
(2) E--- has read most of the guy. Anything concrete I've learned about him is through him. I'd include the stuff I've actually read of Deleuze and Guattari because if it wasn't for it, I wouldn't have decided to pick it up.
