Indifference Would Be A Relief

On Victor Lavalle's "The Ballad of Black Tom" and the great big bastard in the sky.

This entry is coming in late, and for good reason. I wanted to take my time, because I wouldn’t be able to forgive myself if I brushed the obvious under the rug: these past two weeks, I have seen every ugly thing that’s crossed my field of study over the last several years metastasizing and claiming real, human lives as it goes. One of the hardest lessons I ever learned is that theorizing risks losing sight of the real people ruined by the things we try to study; and yet theory at its best aims precisely at saving lives. What’s going on across the country right now is nothing less than a symptom of absolute political failure, the inevitable result of an iron fist realizing it can never fully close over that which it claims to grasp. Under a system that constantly calls their lives into question, people do what they feel they must.

But I’m loathe to say much beyond that. I will anger some by getting cagey here, but there are too many things happening too fast and it’s not like I can write an expose about it here, presuming my own voice mattered that much or added something special; believe me, I’ve tried that before. So I acknowledge, I grieve over it, I pray—because that is, after all, the kind of person I am, and I “pray for tears,” no less. I can do that much while insisting on my right to be wrong.

But I don’t have to comment on the news, either. I can do the other things I’m good at; I can connect things and draw maps in places where I have some expertise (and part of expertise is acknowledging that those territories are very, very small).

So I can at least talk about how Victor LaValle’s novella The Ballad of Black Tom handles the question of theodicy, and hope it adds some eerie light instead of throwing shade.

Jesus is Just All Right (Your Honor)

So, Theology Twitter is a real thing, and as a flaky participant I get all sorts of nuggets across my feed. This recent one has stayed with me (and anyone who wants to look up more of Amaryah’s work would not be disappointed):

For the uninitiated, theodicy is a branch of theology that deals with the so-called “problem of evil,” or squaring the existence of a benevolent God with the realities of suffering. Since it asks why an all-good, all-powerful God would allow the existence of evil, theodicy—as a branch of rhetoric and philosophy—typically justifies God’s decisions in permitting evil to take place for some unseen “greater good.” Etymologically though, it literally means to place God (Θεός, Τheos) on trial, or under judgment (δίκη, dikē).

Liberation theology—with which the aforementioned “black theology” shares many roots—doesn’t take kindly to theodicy. This school of thought believes that religion’s primary purpose is to rectify social injustice and provide for people’s basic needs; in black theology, this means taking the black experience as a privileged point of departure for thinking about the nature of God, justice, and other ultimate concerns. Many in this tradition believe God commands believers to the rectification of evil as a genuine enemy; that God requires—by law or by need—human participation in the formation of a just world. As such, “justifying” God in the face of evil is a pointless work, and the energy wasted on its logical knots is better spent partnering with God in the eradication of suffering.

It all comes down to one question, really: is the world currently as God wants it to be, or not? One approach is to ask just who we think we are to stand in the way of God’s righteous will, even if it includes our (or rather others’) suffering. Such theodicy often justifies believers in leaving the world as it is and not working very hard to change it; worse, it even secures a kind of heavenly consent when it comes to tyrannical leaders as “God-ordained” in some inscrutable (but righteous) mystery. But if this world is always “the best possible world,” being whatever God wants it to be right now, doesn’t it make sense to furiously pound on heaven’s door asking if God knows what’s happening to the poor, the sick, and the brown all over the world? For this reason, many theologians believe that God’s will for a just world can only be realized through human action and choice… But if God himself can’t make the world that he wants, what does that ultimately say about God?

You’ll notice that I haven’t yet entertained the possibility that God might just not exist, to which I only have one ready response:

… I mean, you’re still reading, yeah?

I basically earned a PhD just so I could earn the right to say, baldly and without much fanfare, that I’m just not all that interested in assuming God doesn’t exist. As my friend Jonathan Heaps says, “Whether or not God exists isn’t an interesting question. Whether or not God is an asshole is an interesting question.” I’ll let the French philosopher Francois Laruelle put it in more academic terms:

"[T]he true atheism is not as simple as philosophy imagines it to be. It occurs in two stages: the banal refusal to believe in a God is self-contradictory and satisfies those who think little, but the refusal to believe in a good God is the true rebellion. There is always a God lying in ambush, preparing his return in whatever negation is made of his existence, even a materialist one, but it is important that it be a malicious God, a thesis that only an  ‘ultra’-religious heresy can face" (A General Theory of Victims, 21).

So I’ve got the ammo to say we’re in the middle of an “ultra-religious” social crisis right now and, at this point in the discussion, we’ve not only been assuming that something rightly called God exists, but also that God is something like benevolent: good, in a way that barely makes sense as good (“But whatever, he’s God,” says the theodicist), or else good in a way we can understand, but de-powered—not impotent, perhaps, but certainly not the omnipotent God of “pure act” we might have learned about in Catholic school. But we have not yet entertained all the possibilities—particularly that of pure, divine ass-holery.

… But Victor LaValle’s Tommy Tester certainly has.

Rewriting Lovecraft

H. P. Lovecraft’s inarguable racism has lead many to question his persistence in popular culture, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone characterize Lovecraft’s as a literature of “police brutality.” Maybe you’re a reader of Lovecraft and are even now flipping through an index of his stories. You’ll find that there are, in fact, more than a handful of tales which feature a significant police presence being brought to bear against some kind of occultic craziness: “The Call of Cthulhu,” “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” and “The Horror at Red Hook” spring readily to mind. In each of these stories, the Boys in Blue can be counted on to disperse the wily, unwashed, subaltern masses who are trying to end the world.

This last, especially, is considered one of the worst offenders in Lovecraft’s oeuvre, politically speaking. His contempt for other races—blacks and Jews especially—stalks through his descriptions of Red Hook, New York, veiled thin as a bedsheet ghost.

Lovecraft often has minorities in his stories play troglodytic practitioners of black magic attempting to summon unthinkable horrors. In “The Horror at Red Hook,” they take as their ritual site the basement of a rich man named Robert Suydam, who’s started looking suspiciously young again despite his old age. Enter Detective Malone, who serves as the reader’s eyes into the world. After discovering Suydam murdered and mutilated, Malone investigates his basement and discovers a black magic ritual taking place. Just as he witnesses Suydam being resurrected, the building collapses on Malone. Forever traumatized, he is later dug out of the ruins by a police force come to put a stop to the whooping and hollering of the block’s “undesirables” as their ritual falls to pieces.

Did Suydam gather the lowly poor to summon the demon for him? Did they turn on him in the end, ripping his belly open in praise of their new god? The story doesn’t say, nor does it particularly seem to care. And for all these silences, Victor LaValle chooses “Red Hook” as his candidate for a much-needed rewriting.

In his novella, The Ballad of Black Tom, we meet the imagined African American catalyst of the Red Hook incident: Tommy Tester. Tommy is an ambitious musician who makes ends meet for himself and his father by smuggling strange, eldritch artifacts for unsavory people. Robert Suydam takes note of Tom’s musical gifts and enlists him in a ritual to wake the “Sleeping King,” a being beyond comprehension who will destroy the present world. Suydam, of course, insists that he will see his followers through this apocalypse and be their ruler and prophet in the world to come. But when Tom’s father is brutally murdered in a police raid on their home, Tom decides to take matters into his own hands.

The story twists and turns as Tom plays Suydam’s game just long enough to pull the rug out from under him, ruining the rich man’s attempts at bringing the Sleeping King under his command. Tom is also waylaid by the unsympathetic Detective Malone, who can only bring himself to care about the “law” and a rather narrow desire to save the world (and he doesn’t miss a beat over “the practical reality of moving nearly seventy-five police officers” to attack a single manor known to be a hangout for minorities). Tom, meanwhile, is well aware that ushering in the Sleeping King will not save anybody; but after all he’s lost Tom has little imagination left for “salvation.” Rather, he seeks “extermination by indifference,” an indifference which comes as a “relief” compared to the constant, oppressive attention of white America:

He saw the police forces at the barricades as they muscled the crowd of Negroes back; he saw the decaying facade of his tenement with new eyes; he saw the patrol cars parked in the middle of the road like three great black hounds waiting to pounce on all these gathered sheep. What was indifference compared to malice?

“Indifference would be such a relief.”

“Weird” fiction, or anything building off the Lovecraftian ethos, is inevitably “religious” insofar as it involves the presence of what Rudolf Otto called the “numinous”: the absolutely sublime or transcendent. In Lovecraft, the “numinous” takes the form of mind-breaking extraterrestrial beings whose even marginal presence in our dimension spells certain doom. But though they may be “religious'“ in a sort of pulpy sense, rarely do these stories touch theological themes of justice and justification, and the ways in which humanity lives in the shadow of such transcendent values. The language in LaValle’s retelling is far more loaded than Lovecraft’s, and his story takes on an oblique but pointedly theological turn that deserves some attention—especially in our present context.

To suggest that LaValle explores the possibilities of God-as-an-asshole in The Ballad of Black Tom is still a bit misleading: rather, the novella envisions the absolute, purgative “indifference” of the divine encounter with humanity. Where Lovecraft saw this indifference as the ultimate horror, LaValle rewrites it as an opportunity in the face of oppression; after all, the only people who are afraid of destructive indifference are those who—like Robert Suydam—already believe themselves to be important.

Tommy Tester instead sees the power of the Sleeping King as “destituent”: it is violence at its most absolute, razing the old order and leaving nothing behind in its wake, no soil for a new regime to take root. For someone like Tommy, this reality—this impossibility for a new order of power to coalesce—is nothing short of a political miracle, and is perhaps the only hope for black lives in America:

Maybe yesterday the promise of a reward in this new world could’ve tempted Tommy, but today such a thing seemed worthless. Destroy it all, then hand what was left over to Robert Suydam and these gathered goons? What would they do differently? Mankind didn’t make the messes; mankind was the mess. Exhaustion washed over Tommy and threatened to drown him. Thinking this way caused Tester to play a series of sour keys.

In presenting such a power, LaValle also implies something insidious about the theological desire for a God whose good, loving, freeing attention implies a plan of liberation for the poor and the oppressed. The “relief” of the Great Old Ones’ “indifference” equally implies the desire to wriggle out from under the eyes of a God whose ruthless love attentively writes suffering into his own glorious plan of redemption—what, after all, is indifference compared to such malice? Refusing even the subversive potentials of Christianity traditionally found within African American communities, Tom’s preference for absolute, alien “indifference” instead finds liberation through a human posture towards the gods which mirrors the gods’ posture towards humanity: one of “neglect” rather than worship, or, more proactively, of occultic fervor and “use.”

Don’t You Dare Look Away (Boy)

Speaking of his heavy metal project “Zeal & Ardor,” the Swiss-American musician Manuel Gagneux describes an alternate history in which American slaves sang spirituals to Satan instead of Jesus. Belief, he implies, is an act of desperation; it is a fluke of history that black slaves found subversive hope in their masters’ God.

On his telling—and in his retelling through his music—the black motivation for adopting Christianity is not all that different from Tommy Tester’s decision to go along with Suydam until he can co-opt the ritual of the Sleeping King for himself. And, like Tester, Gagneux’s imagined rebels embrace darker, “indifferent” powers who don’t offer anything like “redemption” as part of their bargains: in all their power, these men and women still spend their lives reminding one another that none of them is ever safe; in the end, “A good God is a dead one [and] a good Lord is a dark one.”

But where beliefs inevitably fail, other beliefs—not unbelief, which Laruelle calls “banal”—must take their places to keep the spark of liberation alive. LaValle and Gagneux both, however subtly, comment not only on the “use value” of belief for oppressed people but also on its necessity. When the sovereign God who orders the world turns out to be a keeper of slaves, one has no choice but to turn to other gods, even dark and ancient ones with occultic practices and secrets for making them do what you want, at a price.

These days, many thinkers argue that neoliberal statecraft is the modern, secular version of theology. Law is the justice and covenant of government; the police are militant defenders of its glory. In this sense, among others, the protests currently raging across the country—punctuated by burning streets and broken windows—are the jeremiad of a people who believe their God has failed them. I tremble at the power of these street-sung Psalms of mourning and rage, at the religious fervor stoking revolutionary fires; I also delight in the how it gives the lie to all those who, like Lovecraft, would insist that we have outgrown such things as a species, treating such belief as a mere curiosity of the past even as its effects echo all around us. This lament will not resolve itself in atheism; as Laruelle says, a new God is always waiting to be born from the corpse of the old, and if it is not a God that can be obeyed, then it is a God that will be put to use.

There are, of course, other options. The genre of lamentation—in Judaism especially, but across many other religions as well—frequently shows the divine response to being put on trial as one of strength and love that does not reduce to justification, but restores good faith between humanity and Godhead. Believing this, I must say yet again that I “pray for tears.”

But it is not presently my place to make this God’s case into the noise and the hurt; I am not alone in believing that the God who loves never fails, in the end, to speak for Godself--or through prophetic voices far more keyed to the task than mine. But I also say that I do not blame anyone who presently believes that “indifference would be a relief,” or else that God is an asshole. In fact, these are precisely the circumstances under which we should keep asking these sorts of questions.