What Would Life Be Then

May 28, 2025

In Against Ethics, John Caputo quickly considers, side-by-side, a number of efforts to make sense of nothing less than (human) meaning and significance in the context of the vastness of cosmic space and time. He begins with Kierkegaard's opening to Fear and Trembling, where K imagines existence without "an eternal consciousness," without some "sacred bond that knit humankind together":

If a human being did not have an eternal consciousness, if underlying everything there were only a wild, fermenting power that writhing in dark passions produced everything, be it significant or insignificant, if a vast, never appeased emptiness hid beneath everything, what would life be then but despair?

This question is enormous, cosmic, but K turns (as he often does) to metaphor. Without such a bond, human life would rise and fall "like forest foliage," like "the singing of birds in the forest," or "as a ship through the sea", or "as wind through the desert" -- and life would ultimately be "empty and devoid of consolation."^[1]

In a weird "best of possible worlds" sort of turn, Kierkegaard concludes that the absence of such an "eternal consciousness" cannot be because... well, because it would be bad. Caputo contrasts this perspective with Nietzsche, who also turns to a cosmic scale to try and understand human meaning and significance, but ultimately takes human insignificance as a given. Caputo uses this excerpt from On Truth and Lying... to illustrate N's perspective, and I think it's worth reproducing in full here:

Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of "world history," but nevertheless it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and the clever beasts had to die.

Caputo glosses on this, with some help from Lyotard, to frame his interrogation of ethics, seeing "obligation" and other human experiences and aspirations as similar to the fate of "knowing" in Nietzsche's passage -- Caputo calls them "such fictions as we require to make it through the day and persuade ourselves of our meaning and significance" -- just a blip in the eons of cosmic history:

"Knowledge," "obligation," "justice" -- these are so many obsolete inventions of the little animals, now useless vapors dissipating in interstellar space.

It is not just these nineteenth-century proto-existentialists that wrestled with the human meaning in light of the cosmos, of course. It is a perennial (universal?) theme in humanity's philosophizing and one that gains particular form and salience throughout the modern period, as the existential fall-out of modern scientific advances took shape. ⊕ Derrida added Marx to this triple threat --- see Spectres of Marx. Copernicus, Darwin, Freud is the classic history of humanity's becoming aware that it is not the center of the world -- but think, too, of modern geology, chemistry, physics.

When Caputo calls nothing less than justice an "obsolete invention," he is inhabiting a very stark version of this understanding of existence and pushing it to its limit. He is doing so to better situate his intent to attend to the nature and meaning of obligation post-Ethics, Ethics being (in part) a means of making meaning and order of an existence that the cold vastness of the universe seems to render null: can obligation survive without ethics, "in so merciless a world as this."

Yes, he replies. Obligation persists. It happens. It happens perhaps in spite of cosmic indifference to our moment and its achievements and its myriad injustices, big and small.

Once,

before this lake turned the color of ripened cherries, before
there was a word for weapon or distance or phone,
a star finished up its nucleosynthesis,
exploded its hydrogen, helium, neon and nitrogen, its sulfur
and iron, all over cosmos town. No one was around,
no one with vision or a craving for lemons.

There is something courageous, almost audacious about writing a poem that pivots on the the vastness of cosmic time and our place in it. Martha Silano's "Once," whose opening lines are above, is indeed an audacious poem.

A few days before I had read that bit of Caputo / Kierkegaard / Nietzsche, I listened to a collective reading of this poem via the podcast Poetry Off the Shelf, performed in memory of the poet. I found it intensely moving, both the reading and the poem itself, and the poem has done one of the things that many good poems do: it has followed me around, popping up when I least expect it, inviting me back into the world, to see that world a bit differently.

Like our aforementioned philosophers, Martha Silano is dealing with cosmic time and our place in it and yet, what a difference in tone and sense! This is not a poem of pathos, or despair; this is not a vision of the cosmos as inherently cold, "merciless."

Instead, Silano's cosmic history feels abundant, sumptuous. This cosmos is generous, its very beginning wrapped up with giving, as "stars and exploding stars seeding the universe" with everything that becomes everything, and that everything feels luxurious.

⊕ Note that the world being created here predates 'a word', not the word -- which, for me, brings logos and biblical/classical origin stories to mind. But like one form of the Genesis narrative, there is also indeterminacy in the nature of this creation. This is not necessarily the absolute creation of everything; this is a once / before, and there is a clear sense of something before this before.

And while there is a linear order at work - there are causes and effects, this comes before and facilitates that - there is no discriminating between each, no hierarchical model that might hint at underlying significance. The universe happens, and human life and meaning is a part of that happening.

All the stuff and experiences of human life on planet earth - taste, work, mouthwash, wine, holidays, human invention, emotions - all of this is something that Somehow, we got out of electrons and quarks and protons and neutrons. And all of this transpires as part of the same world that includes cilantro and minerals and feathers and rain.

No better testament to this than the way Silano's language opens up into a capacious "we":

... Now we are a place
for lace and egrets.

Who is this we? And how are we a place?

There are some terrific line breaks in this poem. Exhibit A:

⊕ This seems like a good spot to highlight the fantastic new word pomegranitic. I am a sucker for made-up words and pomegranitic here is just perfect, almost portmanteau-ish, suggesting shape and texture, flesh and mineral, all in one go.

before it cooled enough for worms and flukes, way cooler
than that instant when everything that would ever be became, though it would be a while before figs and plumage,

than that instant when everything that would ever be / became, contracts this epic into a single moment that contains everything, without regard for time itself. Similar moments of compression happen elsewhere, as the poet turns to phrases like All this, and what else to point to the always-more.

But my favorite line break (and perhaps line) is packed into her description of the end of everything:

It began and it seems, like a novel
by Tolstoy, like it will never end, but one day—zip-zap, zap-zip— the sun will supernova, and we will give back
our copper and plutonium, our aluminum

where It began and it seems, like a novel feels like a mantra that you could chant and unravel for a lifetime. What came first, the story or the story?

The end of the world Silano describes is symmetrical to so much at the start of the poem: we will give back complements the seeding of the universe; contract pairs to the earlier explosion.

This description of the end of everything does not wallow in despair or flail. The end happens as the beginning, in the way that the universe happens: zip-zap, zap-zip. Bittersweet? Sure. And the reflections sparked by this reading may come with regret, may come with sorrow or fear.

But this poem does not depict an apocalypse, nor is there a sense of slightness of the moment of our world. Compare with Caputo's paraphrase of our earlier philosophers' take on the end of our time:

Until at last, weary of its peculiar little local experiment, the cosmos draws another breath and moves on. Then we disappear without a trace.

⊕ Couldn't that list include just about anything? is not meant here in terms of the poetry, the artfulness, but rather the broader meaning. On the contrary, Silano's poetic choices here are beautiful, and the particular items are perfect bridges between the natural world (living, dead) and human experience and invention.

There is no sense, in Silano's poem, that this is a "peculiar local experiment" of the cosmos. On the contrary, this world - our world - is as much a part of that cosmos as anything else. The final list of things that vanish into the end - the calcium in our bones, the fillings of our teeth, wheat, hair - couldn't that list include just about anything? The significance of these items, which inspires a certain catharsis as we reach the end of the poem, comes not from any particular role they play in the enormous cosmic story told here.

The significance comes from them having been a part of it at all.