It is conceivable that the only salvageable moment of the religious life of the species, which will not be simply discarded and forgotten, is precisely the sum of its practical traditions—its material substratum, as it were—congealed and preserved in a constellation of techniques, devices, procedures, expressions, physical arrangements, and rules of thumb appropriate to specific conditions and situations. It is indeed conceivable that the stupidest routines and the most dreadful details of religious performance (and religious labor?) contain the essence of our spiritual experience. An enormous amount of testing, sifting, and refinement of quotidian worship and spiritual survival has already been accomplished through millennia and across the planet. Consider, for example, the very forms of sacrifice and prayer, the temples and altars, the communal singing, the prayer and worry beads, the institutions of monastic seclusion and mass pilgrimage, etc. Also consider the rocking and swaying, the rhythm, the repetition, the dancing, the language of curses and blessings, the masks and symbols… (Could reading and writing be added to this list?) This is not to say that ideological—as well as utopian, for that matter—”superstructure” is irrelevant, but merely secondary, or even derived, and undoubtedly comparatively unstable. This is furthermore not to say that we now need another scientific or professional discipline—a praxeology of religious life, or an architectural vocabulary of prototypical vehicles of faith—which would secularize and thus annihilate these apparently ignoble physical remnants of accumulated wisdom of the species. And finally, this is not to say that here lies buried another panacea. Far from it. My intention is primarily to shift the emphasis, and to point at heaven and hell as material facts of our childhood. (Could reading and writing possibly be construed as unreal or immaterial, that is, unproductive?) And our collective childhood is something we cannot choose ad libitum. Although we could accept, for the sake of the argument, the possibility of alternative histories, ours has been determined and it consequently surfaces as predetermined. The fact nevertheless remains that we have learned something or other, that we have established a correspondence with the unknown, or, at least, that we have stumbled upon the needs and ways of satisfying them that will not surrender to reason. For the “causes” are both too far and too many. The most precious lessons are perhaps already built into our very bodies—into our physical performances, including those associated with language—where they linger unattended. Again, my intention is primarily to shift the emphasis, and to point at these internal ruins inhabited by ghosts of our misunderstanding. The ruins themselves are sacred, as the species is sacred and irreplaceable.

Addendum (January 12, 2005)

I was right, of course. A stroke of genius, this piece. In the early Eighties, I was at least a decade ahead of the groping neuroscientists, who established the link between religious labor and brain activity associated with religious bliss only in the Nineties. But I am not about to continue lauding myself here. The reason for adding a few words to this note is to bring to the fore my parenthetical remarks about reading and writing. These remarks are prescient, too. Indeed, much of my reading and writing can be construed as religious labor. My Residua is my proof, if any is required. The only difference between 1982 and 2005 is that this strange connection is not parenthetical any longer. Neither is it strange any longer. It is up front. In your face. And up your ass, dear reader.