(Under)Passing Salt

Music: The Cult: Sonic Temple Last week the news broke that the Virgin Mary has appeared--in some accounts, embracing Pope John Paul II--beneath an overpass/turn-off area on the Kennedy Expressway in Chicago. The television news media have been subsequently reporting the sightings in "curiosity" news segments (I was alerted to the event by the Today show).

It goes without saying events like this intrigue me. But they also sadden me: so desperate are some individuals for the supernatural, for the arrival of a divine limb to "fix" whatever is broken in their lives, that salt deposits oozing out of a slab of concrete have become tokens of a divine grace yet to come. Waiting for an end that never comes is a source of hope for many. It is a true pity that Lefty secularists have not figured this out to aid them in the contemporary political scene; somehow the apocalyptic tone of The Communist Manifesto has been expunged from materialist efforts on paper and in "real life." Derrida's teaching, that Communism is a ghost that is always yet to come but that will never arrive, has been much too safely put to rest--along with his interred corpse.

Reactions to the loss of the sense of yet-to-come (usually blamed on a post- this or that) have been characteristically pragmatic in tone (and, therefore, dangerously atheistic) or abjectly revolutionary (and, therefore, tempting the label of "trouble-maker," "outlaw," and/or "asshole").

As I've suggested elsewhere, one can understand the "faith" in seeing Jesus Christ in a cornflake as our inherent tendency to attribute pattern to the seemingly random, a phenomenon one philosopher terms paradolia, akin to seeing circus animals in the clouds ("you say Virgen de Guadalupe, I say Vagina!"). The profound sense of lack motivating such attributions, however, seems to be increasing: Jack Van Impe and his companion, Rexella, continue to haunt UPN television stations everywhere, but at earlier and earlier hours; Revelations is a hit on NBC; and apocalyptic thrillers continue to top best-sellers lists.

Isn't there something the Left can do to channel supernatural anthropomorphic desire? Indeed, there is: Slavoj Zizek: The Movie! I suggest we make a pilgrimage to Ljubljana (or wherever he is in the world at present) to sit at his feet. Perhaps we can insert small candles of homage in his unkempt beard to mark out the faces of Marx and Hegel that we find.