WEAR YOUR INSIDES OUT: Remember how I promised you a post about how God’s like a killer mutant cat? This is that post!

I can’t now find the post at Secular Right which triggered this response, but I recall it as an ingenue, even a gamine, in which the author asked why theists so often assumed that the atheist worldview was bleak or depressing: How can we feel bereft when there is Mozart and springtime?

And yeah, I’m really sympathetic to that view. I used to believe that people generally chose the worldview whose position on the afterlife was hardest for them to accept, because that was what I and my godfather and several other people I knew had done. Mozart and springtime can prompt astonished feelings that reconciliation has happened, somehow, when we weren’t looking.

Perhaps some of the reason I reject that view comes from a difference in temperament. But I’m more interested in exploring whether my difference with this atheist-amid-cherry-blossoms worldview is based on our divergent approaches to the relationship between beauty and meaning.

One could view beauty as its own meaning, in the same way that it’s its own justification. I… don’t actually know what that would feel like, or look like, because I don’t do it, but conceptually it seems possible.

But to me beauty is always an arrow, always points beyond itself; it’s always lack as well as presence. It’s always both two faces, and the vase in the negative space between them. When I’m most present to beauty, it seems to me that I can hear the blood pulsing beneath the skin, the life and vulnerability and horror beneath the musculature. Samuel Delany–maybe in Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand–? but I think actually in Babel-17–anyway, he described a man’s muscles as “like snakes in milk.” And the glamour and danger of the snake deepens the beauty of the man.

Which brings me to The Uninvited! Badmovies.org summarizes its plot with, “A killer mutant cat that hides inside another cat.” And a) that is one of the most awesome things I have ever read, but also b) that’s pretty much what I think beauty is. A cat, with all the reality and life of a cat… but inside the cat’s skin, there’s something else, something more powerful, something more real. When I talk about “meaning,” which I should do less often (it’s an easy crutch for the theist), it’s this killer mutant cat-within-the-cat which I mean.