Cocoron's Corner

The need for miracles

(I'm REALLY tired and I might tidy this up later, but I just wanted to get my thoughts into words before I forget about them.)

I was talking to a new friend about music and of course I had to mention SOPHIE and the poster of her that I have on my wall. She lives on the wall facing my computer, so I like to tell people that when I'm on a Zoom call her nipples are out full force, although the truth is the girls are covered up with some blutac and smiley stickers.

When I talk about this poster it always strikes me that I have a photo of a dead woman I've never met in my room. I believe that this is in a way some kind of veneration. Outside of purely documentary reasons, a photo of a dead person, by being put on display, becomes a kind of shrine, no matter how simple or austere the arrangement. On that same note, although I always loved SOPHIE's music and felt a connection to it, after her passing the same songs moved me even more. Just by being close to death art gains an emotional weight. What was this strange tendency? Was it some kind of habit enforced by a culture that implores us to never let the dead fall into oblivion?

When I ask myself these kinds of questions my mind naturally turns to the communion of saints and angels, and the commitment of the dead to Heaven through canonisation. Why are people only beatified after death? What does it feel for a community to lose a saint? I think a community of any kind goes through saint-death eventually. SOPHIE's death felt like a terrible blow for many trans people. The comment section for just about any SOPHIE song on YouTube is full of people pouring out their hearts, giving us little fragmentary insights into the vissicitudes of life like votive prayers for intercession of the saints at a novena. SOPHIE's music, along with her death, moves people to reflection.

The same can be said for Nick Drake, or Nujabes. Van Gough's art provokes the same reaction, as does the poetry of Boris Ryzhy, or the writings of Sylvia Plath. All of these people died too young. That is another element. There is something about death, especially tragic death, that gives the artist's work an emotional resonance. Does it feel like they're calling us from the other side? Is this kind of depth limited to artists? When a loved one passes that great threshold, they attain a mystical quality.

One of the powers shared between art and religion is the capacity to evoke a sense of eternity. Art and religion, in their strongest forms, endow us with transcendence. To experience a piece of music or poetry or painting or whatever is to experience a momentary lapse in being-in-the-world, to feel a fleeting detachment from the nowness of daily living. Music in this way can serve as an escape from a disappointing life-world.

This constant need to feel exceptional is a universal desire. This urge to escape the mundane and to not be so deply embedded it in is a universal desire. Some of us channel that urge into religion, others into art, others still into the relentless pursuit of wealth and fame. The more we strive in these respective fields, the closer we feel to achieving apotheosis. One of my favourite writers, Erich Fromm, summed it up well.

But what happens in communities where people don't have near unlimited access to media? Those same communities are not likely to be subject to the modern emphasis on the individual artist. What evoked in the rural pre-modern peasant that same sense of escape and perspective that SOHPIE's music does for me?

The answer most likely lies in religion of course. But I find it hard to believe that mass, wits regularity and its rigid ceremony and its deep embedding into daily life successfully evoked the experience, at least not by itself and not reliably. Transcendental feelings are exceptional feelings. They are disruptive.

This is where the appeal of the miracle comes from. A miracle is a fleeting suspension of the mundane. When a miracle happens, a little pocket of the eternal bubbles up to the surface of reality, all laws are suspended and everything becomes possible. They serve as proof and reminders that this life isn't the only one, and that this worldly order, in all its sorrow and iniquity, is on borrowed time.

The appeal of religion is not the promise of eternal pleasure or salvation from eternal damnation. The appeal lies in the answer "yes" to the question, "is there more to life than this?" Although organised religion is losing its death grip on some parts of our world, that same question is felt as strong as ever.

What do we do with it?