This is Western Coffee—notes on building the creative body. Last time: Luck. The whole series is here. Please share this email; you can sign up free below.
Happy Thanksgiving. This essay came about some time ago, from within my now-deceased belief that I “couldn’t” be a runner. In that sense, the last two years have brought me, impossibly, into the heaven that I imagined. I’m grateful for this. And it’s time to share this writing more widely.
Change is never out of reach—not least because it’s inevitable—and when it comes to humans I do believe that change of any kind tends to start in our words.
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I have a few theories about heaven.
One is in the Talking Heads school: Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens. John Donne was thinking along similar lines, I think, when he described a place “where there shall be no Cloud nor Sun, no darknesse nor dazling, but one equall light.” This is my favorite vision of heaven. It sounds like lying on the beach with your eyes closed, half asleep, ears lush in the thrum of waves, feeling as if you’re glowing from the inside out.
Then there is the Mormon conception of heaven, the one I grew up with, in which heaven is like here—actually, it is here, here in the continental United States—only here in its exalted form, glorified, celestial. In that heaven, recognizable humans walk around in the presence of their recognizably human God, ignited to sublimity within but also bathed in a Sun that saves its brightest light for the righteous. (There are two lesser heavens; going to either of them is like squeaking through, pass/fail.) This heaven has the appeal of being just halfway ineffable: mystical within the realm of the familiar.
Another notion of heaven came to me recently during, for some reason, a concert at the Bowery Ballroom. “Heaven is another chance,” I typed frantically to myself on my phone, trying to jam open a window of clarity. “That’s the whole point of heaven. It’s another chance at everything you missed.” In this heaven, it’s not that nothing ever happens. It’s that everything happens again, and this time you know what to love about it. Like when you listen to a song you’ve heard enough times to remember but not to be sick of. Your endorphins know right when to pave the runway for the best part of the song—two wheels, two more, no bounce.
And then today I was on the subway, listening to Edward Elgar’s “Enigma” variations, wave on wave on wave of orchestration, starting small and swelling with each return of the theme. You think the waves can’t get any bigger, and then they do, and then the last wave breaks. But what if it didn’t, I thought. What if the waves never stopped coming and never stopped growing? What if that were eternity? The waves of music getting bigger and more graceful and bigger and more graceful and bigger and more graceful.
Love is heaven. “So there I was jabbering at her about my new job as a serious newsman, about anything at all,” an infatuated Steve Martin says in L.A. Story, “but all I could think was, ‘Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, wonderful and most wonderful and yet again, wonderful.’”
Bliss evokes incanted repetitions: Heaven is, of course, where angels veil their eyes to the presence of God as they chant “Holy, holy, holy”—praising, without pause and for eternity, the being whose face is too awesome for them to behold.
A couple of months ago, I set out for an appointment uptown from my office. My body excretes too much calcium, a condition that went undiagnosed until I had broken quite a few bones; by the time I knew I probably wanted to be a runner, I couldn’t. As 57th Street came closer and I prepared to turn left, heaven beckoned ahead from the startling low line of green where Sixth Avenue stops and Central Park starts: It said that I would stop walking, the pain gone from my hips and knees and ankles, and start to run.
Heaven is a lie. Heaven is impossible. Heaven distracts from what we owe ourselves most: to accept things as they are.
It is also the bridge between the terrible and the possible, between the night and the day. It is the imagination of a child, brought to our relief.
Is New York City heaven? Obviously not, and less so all the time—ask anybody. But think about it. The city is impossible, like heaven; it is a lie. It’s a dream, and it is awe, and it is love. It’s wave after wave after wave. It’s certainly another chance, and yet it’s also where nothing ever happens. (These same pink wisps of cloud have floated from building to building in a faint blue sky for decades.) Most incontestably, it’s here.
The philosopher David Chalmers has argued that consciousness—the interior subjective “what it’s like” phenomenon that accompanies the brute machinery of cognition and stimuli—isn’t a feature only of the human brain: Any causal system that meets the right criteria could generate consciousness, to varying degrees of richness and complexity. (Be nice to your thermostat.)
If that is true, might not seven billion intricate consciousnesses give rise to a consciousness of their own? Might not such a being be aware of us even if we were not aware of it? What would happen to rank on rank of angels if they were to approach it and open their eyes?
Coming Tuesday: Light.
Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com. And say hi on Instagram, or let’s Peloton together: @leggy_blond.