These Wilds Beyond Our Fences

by Bayo Akomolafe

  With my Walkman, I was part of the resistance, tuned in to frequencies that skirted the expedient, just a beckoning inch away from the extraordinary. At night, away from television, I reached out and groped for those signals from home. Dake’s Appalachian drawl would crackle, burp, and snap into place, against a constant hissing background noise of rolling tape. I didn’t mind. He would reannounce God’s eternal manifesto, the original innocence of Lucifer before Isaiah saw him fall … like lightning. There were hundreds of thousands of cross-references and annotations in my father’s giant gold-rimmed Dake’s Bible; I read every one of them, underlined most of those side notes, and even accidentally burned a few pages one night when I fell asleep by a glowing candle, while serving with the paramilitary youth corps for Nigerian graduates.

  Many things Dake said were quite fringe, unknown to the larger population of churchgoing Nigerians that I belonged to, but this only endeared me even more to his message. His teachings had the right dose of controversy, eccentricity, eloquence, and rational unimpeachability I looked for. When I learned of the pre-Adamites who lived in the thin space between the very first verse of Genesis and its second, or about the Millennium, or about the Nephilim, giant offspring of a perverse time when angels left their first abode and lusted after the daughters of men, I felt I was being initiated into an elite group of apologists—those who had peered through the breach, and whose eyes were undone by the beauty on the other side. His conversational sermons and booming voice only added to the sense of authority I felt when he spoke about “God’s eternal plan.” Moreover, he was a white man. He had to know what he was talking about.

  Listening to the cassette tapes, all forty of them, milky-brown and stoic, dwelling on different topics (from “The Simplicity of the Bible” to “New Heaven and New Earth”), made me feel closer to my father, who at one point in his final years nurtured some hope to be a preacher—you know, of the more intellectual sort. We both shared a repulsion for the “dancing, sweating, devil-chasing” clergyman, whose displays of fervency had a funny way of emptying surrounding wallets. Dad wanted to retire from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and open up a church. I dreamed of him serenading his flock with cool, persuasive commentary, with dictionaries, and with a head full of hair and books—and no convulsing sips of Holy Ghost juice or its symptomatic glossolalia. If he lived long enough, he might have been like Dake.

  It was simple, really: the songs and messages that flowed into the privacy of my hearing offered me a simple way to make sense of that which seemed to resist sense-making. I had always known the stories and doctrines of our family’s faith, but for the first time, in the troubling years following my father’s passing, I needed them. I needed ground—a point I have already stressed. And so the world was reduced into a thin timeline that proceeded from the initial, splendorous appearing of all things. In a burst of the divine inexplicable, God created the sun, moon, and stars. Crickets, cats, and cows. “He” made them all. The Bible didn’t say he created dinosaurs, but I figured they were referred to in the old book of Job, where God urged his wavering disciple to “consider Leviathan.” Everything was accounted for. Everything was “good.” Until something went wrong along this appointed line of emergence.

  Sin.

  The Fall.

  Eve listens to a snake, and indulges her desires to taste the succulent fruit of a tree—the very one God expressly forbade them to eat from. She later brings her “treachery” to Adam, the first man. Though all of creation becomes cursed, the first man is absolved of his complicity and is made to be the hesitant accomplice in this cosmic tale of degeneration. The blame for everything gone awry sits squarely at the feet of those with bodies like yours, my dear. Woman. Eve. Her punishment? She must ache and squirm and scream in the unutterable pain of giving birth to another human being.

  I came to believe this, among other things—and, more importantly, to trust that a divine plan of complete restoration was afoot. That one day, I would have reasons to dismiss my abiding pain, and that because the Christ promised a home in the heavens, a place of many mansions and thrones, dustless realms, I would finally feel the mustachioed kiss of my father’s lips on my cheek again.

  In the same way they were part of dad’s arsenal of sanity, those tapes became my refuge. My map. I listened to them, wore them out, and broke some of them from overuse. With each listening, the emptiness felt a little less empty. Home resumed its song, its dutiful and lofty soprano above the carnal tenor of the world. I listened. Hard. Biding my time like a soldier of a spectacular ending imprisoned by the meantime. Stuck in the edges in the middle. Awaiting rapture.

  But it is here, right here in the contested middle that we often learn that our maps, however elaborate, are not the whole picture or the terrain they pretend to represent. And that home is not simply the fixed dot at the end of dashed lines, motionless and given, awaiting the ones who come marching in. Let me tell you the little things that I have come to learn while I still can, right here in these middling places, still trying to reach out to you: everything begins in the middle. There are no beginnings that appear unperturbed, pristine and without hauntings. And there are no endings that are devoid of traces of the new, spontaneous departures from disclosure, and simmering events that are yet to happen. The middle isn’t the space between things; it is the world in its ongoing practices of worlding itself.

  Heaven was my first post-dad vision of home. Paradise. Eden updated. The “shiny city set upon a hill which cannot be hid.”4 The place the Christ offers his disciples, the ones washed of their sins. The place he is urged, by a dying criminal, to bring him into at his end. The itinerant evangelist, Paul, in one of his ecclesiastical letters, narrates a near-death experience in which he visits the “third heaven,” where he hears things too sacred to be put into words, reinforcing the mysterious quality of this place beyond places. This bull’s-eye.

  In the Book of Revelations, exacting dimensions are given of an opulent city made of pure gold descending with “the glory of God,” boundaried by twelve gates, founded upon twelve foundations, and inscribed with the names of the twelve tribes of Israel. The author of the text warns us that none whose name is missing from the Lamb’s Book of Life shall be deemed worthy of entrance into this city of “clear glass,” jasper, and one hundred and forty-four-cubit walls. Talk about immigration control raised to the power of infinity!

  Such an indescribable abode, the prospect of a final destination, open only to the redeemed, and outside the degradation and ruin of the material world, inspired Saint Augustine of Hippo, a fourth-century theologian-philosopher who shaped Western Christianity, to write:

  For we are but travelers on a journey without as yet a fixed abode; we are on our way, not yet in our native land; we are in a state of longing, not yet of enjoyment. But let us continue on our way, and continue without sloth or respite, so that we may ultimately arrive at our destination.5

  Those words were once music to my ears. They gave me a sense of diplomatic immunity or “red passport” status—the kind my family enjoyed when we traveled the world together. I told myself home was far away. I was just passing through.

  Augustine’s longing for “native lands” made sense in the context of his struggles. In his incomplete autobiographical work, Confessions, he equated his body with sin itself, speaking of his battles with concupiscence and “adolescent stirrings,” a godless lust, and how the carnal lump that was his body was his one source of inner turmoil—getting in the way of him and his devotion to God.6 Perhaps more than any other theologian, Augustine was influential in shaping Western attitudes to sex. In trying to answer the question of how sin came into a perfect world, Augustine (along with Irenaeus and other early church writers) helped articulate the idea of “original sin”—the notion that the flesh is depraved, ridden with guilt, sewn through with corruption—an unfortunate yet prolific generativity of despair. Consequently, he longed for release. Escaping the entrapments of embodiment, and finding the unmed
iated joy of finality, figured prominently in his view of a surer home. The purpose of home was the soul’s absolute reconciliation with the ground of being—a daunting task in a material world that is the very breeding ground of alienation. Thus, Augustine looked forward to the purging of the afterlife—the destination that coincided with ultimate arrivals and new beginnings.

  In Augustine’s meditations, I found an eloquent (though provisional) way to voice my longing for a heaven, and spent solitary moments imagining what living there might look like, perhaps much to the chagrin of the flamboyantly suited pastors I pestered with my unsettling questions. I had very practical questions. Is heaven an exalted version of suburbia? How are those mansions allocated, and are there different residential standards—with the most sanctified immortals occupying, say, five-bedroom duplexes, as against the standard issue of three-bedroom apartments? Or is heaven one vast sprawl of identical homes? Perhaps I was going about it the wrong way—maybe heaven was less a utopian arrangement and more of a state of deindividuation, a melting back into the celestial soil whence we came. A returning to soul dust, if you will. But then why take pains to build separate mansions, to fortify a city with multiple foundations and ordain it with exotic stones and physical dimensions if there’s no one around, save an undifferentiated divine soup of cosmic goo?

  The more I explored my emerging map of home, the outlay of my future abode, the more worried I became. The Judeo-Christian doctrine of an afterlife, even one that Paul suggested we must suppose is beyond our ability to fully describe or comprehend, presented itself with some troubling inconsistencies. For one, this idea of pristineness began to unnerve me. The more I leaned into heaven’s flattering sprawl, the more its eternal foundations seemed to collapse under the weight of its own aspirations. I had questions about the nature of the “soul”; whether people were still enfleshed in bone and skin (and what that meant for Augustine’s arguments against carnality); whether there was normal (or perhaps cyborgian) sex and reproduction and—consequently—an ever-expanding population of humans without the winnowing threshold of death; whether people felt pain, grief, and the bodily limitations that define our earthly lives; and, how long forever was.

  Heaven-as-home started looking suspicious, evoking the same feelings I had watching a particular episode of the animated television series The Simpsons.

  In that episode, called “Brick Like Me,”7 Homer wakes up in an alternate universe and finds himself a subject of a utopian Lego-brick Springfield where “everything fits together and no one gets hurt.” At first, he feels fully at home in this plastic-shiny town without real consequences, where a Lego helicopter could drop out of the sky, and heads could be severed from their bulbous torsos—only to be followed by a cavalier shrug of the shoulders of onlookers. Things fall apart, but they can easily be put together again. In this world, everyone has a place—every step is literally an interlocking of a Lego unit and a planned layout of plastic blocks. There is no room for errancy.

  When Homer starts having disturbing visions of a fleshly world, where his skin is mushy and not smooth, where his hands branch out into squishy tentacular protrusions (or fingers) instead of mechanically efficient claws, and where a “flesh monster” shows up in the mirror in the place of the stenciled flatness that is his face, he panics and seeks help. He learns of an alternate world—actually, it seems to creep up on him, especially in dissociative flashbacks and socially embarrassing moments—where things do go wrong, very frequently.

  Learning he can decide which world to make his ultimate reality, Homer considers the implications of choosing this squishy, messy, and monstrous realm over his safe plastic heaven. In the world of skin and blood and membrane, he’d have to grow old, might lose his job at the factory, and worse, risk losing the affection and attention of Lisa, his daughter. But when Homer realizes in a moment of triumph that “the fact that kids grow up is what makes our time with them special,” and that the reward for a life well lived is the “gentle slumber of death,” he leaves Lego heaven behind.

  Like Homer’s schizophrenic responses to Lego Springfield, you might feel there is something disturbing about a place where everyone belongs and no one gets hurt. I know I did. Could it be an engendered cynicism? A failure of imagination? Perhaps we have lived so long in a world where things go wrong that it is hard—maybe impossible—to imagine one where things go according to plan, without fail. Perhaps we should broach the subject of utopian longings with a good dose of intellectual modesty, and not try to get ahead of ourselves, then.

  And yet even this sentiment of modesty and capitulations, a gesture parallel to Pascal’s wager, proves equally unsatisfactory. Pascal’s wager is an apologetic line of reasoning devised by Blaise Pascal, a seventeenth-century physicist and mathematician, who advises the seeker to trust that God exists, since doing so has more pragmatic benefits (among which is escaping eternal damnation) than disbelieving. It’s the “What have you got to lose?” and “What if you are wrong?” argument. Apart from the fact that Pascal doesn’t answer the culturally charged question of which god we ought to believe in, and proposes a simplistic account of belief that treats it as a simple matter of choosing between beliefs, the wager glosses over the remarkable eventfulness of wrongness. For Pascal, the choice is between zero and one. “Why choose nothing, when you can settle for something?” he asks. But the binary is misleading. The zero isn’t an empty, dank, lifeless gray zone where nothing moves and stirs. There is spontaneity and color and comeuppances and surprise and politics. There is life here too. There is beauty in this meantime.

  For me, the idea of heaven cut too cleanly, too firmly, between life and what purportedly comes after it. Cynicism and a critical lack of imagination might have played a role in how I gradually began to shrink away from the bull’s-eye, but who was to say that these things—my cynicism and stupidity—didn’t have genealogies of their own? Did they not come bearing gifts, substantiating the world in different ways, opening me up to other possibilities I hadn’t considered? Is darkness merely an absence of light, and the middle merely the space between two points—or is darkness just as embodied, resilient, and voluptuous as proud light, and the middle just as much a destination as the “end”? It seems to me—even now—that brokenness is generative. Creative. The void speaks. A crack is a different phenomenon, not merely the empty jagged space that has been created by the fracturing of a surface.

  The Japanese understood this as they evolved their ancient art of kintsukuroi, which involved the active smashing of ceramic objects, and then re/pairing the pieces with lacquer dusted with gold powder—producing pieces of ceramic delicateness.

  You’d notice I did something queer to the word repair with the intrusive slash. I mean to point out that something more complex than a mere putting back together again is involved. There is no “return” to pristine conditions—there is only a re/turn, a coming back to the new—which is itself threaded through with the old. But more on this later.

  The ancient practice of kintsukuroi, where a ceramic piece is even more beautiful for having been broken, speaks with the eloquence of the between, and entrusts us with a richer world where cynicism, despair, and failure are not orphaned apparitions of an immaculate world trying to expel its demons, but part of how the world substantiates itself. The practice disturbs the neat divide between wholeness and brokenness, instead making them contingent on each other and co-constitutive with each other.

  What the vaunted city of gold and high walls excludes isn’t all that’s ugly, but other forms of beauty. Heaven is as such irredeemably incomplete—for this much we are told: in heaven, there is no sickness, no sorrow, no regret, no death, no dust. We are missing something in not being able to decay, fade away, or suffer—in not being able to err, fall off the highway, or beat out new paths through fields of barley.

  I often like to think that the Fall—that great mythic rift in the scheme of things, the crack that tore everything apart—was more devastating than we mi
ght think. Not only did it occasion the cursing of mankind but perhaps also the death of God the Absolute—giving way to god experimenting with finitude, with decay, and the “gentle slumber of death.” Maybe the Fall unraveled him so much that the all-knowing is depicted in unflattering circumstances shortly after the deed is done—walking in the garden seeking Adam.

  Then the LORD God called to the man, and said to him, “Where are you?” He said, “I heard the sound of You in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid myself.”8

  Could the Fall event have been so incomprehensibly potent that its effects leaked backward and forward into time, recreating all in its carnal memory, reconfiguring the godhead, and infecting the absolute with its contingency? Could the project of repair, of putting everything back together again, seeded in the redemptive work of Christ (according to Christian theologians), sweeping across thousands of biblical epochs—involving the parting of the sea, the carving of the tablets of stone, the seeking of Canaan, the period of kings and judges, the rise of the Roman empire, the time of prophets, the virgin birth, the incendiary ministry of a remarkable rabbi, the crucifixion of Jesus, the time of the apostles, the repeated failure of men to live holily, the promised purge of fire and brimstone, and the promise of a future heavenly home—could all of this be the masterpiece of a God tired of his eternity? A trickster’s ruse behind which lies a shocking subplot, the details of which suggest that in spite of appearances to the contrary, God isn’t really as interested in saving us from sin as he is in teaching us to immerse ourselves in its ongoing fullness? Could it be that when the forbidden fruit was tasted, the middle spilled through its hermetically sealed container, corroding the beginning and the end, so that it is not quite the case anymore that life flies toward a given destination or home? And, even more scandalously, could the idea be playfully mooted that Eve (and Lilith before her)—in an ironic twist of plot—was all the while God’s partner in his self-redemption from the plastic and dustless Lego realms of the absolute? The thought of it! To think that the “chief cornerstone the builders rejected,” the female, is the one that redeems. And that none less than God himself is the beneficiary of her mischief.