The Monster at the End of This Essay
meaning, give us a place in the grander scheme of things. But the project
snaps—from the stress of the colonial conquest, from the tension of the real and
inescapable finality of death. The natural worldview does not save us.
He turns to boards and nails. To the edifice of the Church, the
crucifixion, the martyred carpenter. Nailing our sins to the cross, the last
vestiges of Adam’s Fall removed from us—from Christ—and a new covenant
cast. The monstrous flesh is put under control once and for all, the monstrous
end of the flesh now avoided. Fashioning His own cross, board upon board—to
be nailed up, nailed down, nailing together the past and the future, nailing
together the last page and the page yet to come—Christ builds His Church and
His story. In preparing for His death—one He wishes He need not face, one He
fears and begs His father not to bring about, not to turn the page—Christ makes
himself into that which cannot die. And so we turn to boards and nails; but the
fear still lingers. The new covenant does not stop the turning of the pages. It
does not end death so much as explain it away as nothing to worry about
because the good stuff is really what comes after. But we worry. We know that
the book has an ending. Our revelations bring things to a close.
He turns to brick. To the mortar and the manufactured stones of science
and humanism. To the perfect geometry of the rectangle, the angle, a fortress of
our own techne that can save us from our future. We construct defenses all
around. We no longer tie together past and present, nail together yesterday and
tomorrow, but instead build a wall in the here and now, declaring the here and
now all that matters. We do not use stones, because they are natural and thus
imperfect. We mix clay and sand and water and bake red bricks in steel molds at
a thousand degrees Celsius, turning out perfectly identical mass-produced
building blocks. We burn out the impurities of this world, bum in the strength of
the fire. We erect monuments to our genius, constmct mausoleums to hide our
tombs, pave streets to move us. It is the same mentality that gives rise to
vaccinations, antibiotics, and the quest for eternal life: a wall around us that
keeps time from passing, a wall constructed by our own science, our own
ingenuity. And with time, it all inevitably crumbles.
He turns to begging.
This is where we all end up. After nature, after God, after science. We
face our monstrous death on the next page armed only with a please. And when
the page is turned, our greatest fear confronted, what do we find?
We find, in T. S. Eliot’s words, that “the end of all our exploring/Will
be to arrive where we started/And know the place for the first time.”"^ We find
the same monster with which we began, the same impossible living and
impossible death. We find a self-portrait ra ther than an image of the monster,
though the two are the same.
It was the self-portrait, too, that fascinated James Joyce. In their
discussion of Jacques Derrida’s Memoirs of the Blind, Pascale-Anne Brault and
Michael Naas remind us that