Eternally Whirled Round In the Maelstrom of God's Glory

A conversation with Natasha Burge

“Man-sized mountains lining the dirt path, pyramids of frothy pink rose petals interspersed with smaller piles of orange marigolds, pale jasmine, and more besides, indigo and cerulean and inky burgundy, towers of color waiting to be crushed...”

—Natasha Burge, Drifts

Note »

Natasha Burge

is a writer from the Arabian Gulf. Her work has been published around the world, anthologized, nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and translated into Arabic, Chinese, and Japanese. Her excellent substack

Florilegium

is beautiful and very worthwhile, as is her book, Drifts. I was delighted she was up for having this conversation with me, and I think we went somewhere with it.

Enjoy!

-g

Graham ▼

Natasha, your writing is its own lovely force of nature—water cycle, moon cycle, rock cycle, earthquake, tectonic crashing, blasting of Jurassic sunlight—something! Because it's how reality really is:

On a swaybacked table outside a shop there is an assortment of dazzles: a hot pink alarm clock in the shape of a mosque to wake you with prayer call, Fula dolls in indoor and outdoor fashions, a basket of agate rings, a basket of geodes, a basket of baskets. I pass a garden wall topped with crushed glass and a palm tree that lists out over the street, reaching, reaching. The rain has stopped but its leaves are still spangled with condensation. If I tilt my head and catch the canopy in the proper light, the street around me sparkles, revealing its true self. (Walking Autistic With Skoliogeography) 

I mean, I love that—I'm there with you, I can see it all in such intensely burning polychrome:

After the uniformly pale mud buildings of Riyadh, the boys are dazzled by the medley of color in Ta'if—buildings of dark stone with pale green, dusty blue, and soft yellow highlights all jumble next to one another. In the souq, unveiled women dressed in the colorful patterns of the Hejaz sell apricots, pomegranates, and dates, while men in blue thobes sell goat hair cloaks and stacks of firewood. (Drifts)

And smell it too:

...The boys find themselves on a road flanked with juniper and scrubby brush. They smell the famed roses of Ta'if before they see them: man-sized mountains lining the dirt path, pyramids of frothy pink rose petals interspersed with smaller piles of orange marigolds, pale jasmine, and more besides, indigo and cerulean and inky burgundy, towers of color waiting to be crushed and boiled. In the center of this field of color, there is a wooden shack... (ibid.)

My college roommate, very dear to me, was half-Swiss, half-Jordanian: Overhearing him talk either to his Swiss mother or Jordanian father in either Swiss German or Arabic was a treat, because both languages are both fluid and guttural—the human version of a mountain stream.

Reading your English work aloud, it's got the water-like lilt and flow of your Arabic. Apart from of course interspersing it with actual but non-italicized Arabic words, it's as if you've Arabicized English, made it into an angelic language—I love that!

But I get the sense that you hear the world this way—a kind of ethereal, transcendent onomatopoeia of the banal, like the word dishdasha: A word where you can hear the sha-sha-sha of a man walking in his white linen across the sunlit sand, and it makes you want to start walking with him into the sunlit sky…

Natasha ▼

…This is how reality really is! For many years I was stumped when people called my writing strange, uncanny, or surreal, because I thought I was doing a decent job of conveying straightforward existence. When I was diagnosed with autism at 37, and particularly when I learned about autistic perception and autistic linguistic traits, I finally understood why people had made those comments.

“A kind of ethereal, transcendent onomatopoeia of the banal” is exactly right! It is polyphonic exuberance, a Technicolor tidal wave of color, scent, sound, and motion that passes straight through the skin to take up residence right inside of you – all of it, even the most mundane, almost too glorious to handle!

This kaleidoscopic exchange happens between human languages, as well, which is why I enjoyed blurring the line between Arabic and English in Drifts. As someone who is a native English speaker and a slapdash speaker of shambolic Arabic, I love the way here in the Arabian Gulf it is commonplace to hear languages splash against one another. But it goes well beyond human languages. It is also in the torrent of rain rushing through the wadi or the burbling speech of wild parrots in the palm tree or the shiver of street cats during a shamal. For autistic people, this conversation of the more-than-human world can be much louder than human conversations. And, as Martin Shaw has said, sometimes the land and its denizens tell stories through us. In Drifts that was a hope of mine, to tell the stories of this land that I call home.

I also think there are many ways to be transcultural. I write about two of them in Drifts, growing up between cultures here in the Arabian Gulf, and being autistic in a neurotypical world. But lately I’m beginning to consider the ways in which Christians are called to be transcultural, or even ex-cultural - outside of culture - altogether. Jacques Ellul argued that Christians should never become assimilated to any particular political party or movement because this is a form of capitulating to the world. This stance, paradoxically and contrary to current mainstream ideologies, is not one that primarily advocates for a specific set of actions, but for a special mode of existence that exists at the point between two currents - the will of the world and the will of God. Ellul said that Christians are not to pick and choose from various political movements but to be a sign in the world as salt, light, and sheep among wolves.

Graham ▼

Yes, exactly—not an ideology or a stance, but a liberated, loving way of life, free-flowing this way and that at the confluence of two ways of existing in the world, both human and divine: If that's what Christianity is, no one can pin it down, not even Christians—perhaps especially so.

The latest thing Christians are supposed to be about now is “reenchantment” – ironic, because, if anything, the early Christians were supposedly of the opposite school, “The great god Pan is dead” being their rallying cry, summing up the death (in their eyes) of the entire enchanted world, with all its fascinations and all its terrors: Who cares about the spirits inhabiting trees and hearths, when a brown-haired, brown-eyed peasant from Nazareth has just celebrated the end of history, feasting with lepers and prostitutes on tables of grass in the wilderness, like some kind of vagabond Sky-King from Daniel 7, but wearing a crown made of thorns and ascending an execution stake as his only throne of rest.

If God is the Fountain of life, the Fountain was there, man—in him—the earliest Christians saw that—and who cares about tree-spirits and hearth-geniuses and all the usual human, all-too-human enchanted religious kitsch, when you see, suddenly, that all Divinity is in a guy like that?

Which is not to dismiss the idea of God being present in everything else also—of course not. But this language of “enchantment” and “disenchantment” and “reenchantment” makes it sound like we've done something to the holy universe in the West; like we've depleted its “magic”...and now, if we can only get all of our little metaphysical notions lined up just so again, we'll bring the magic back, somehow: Tinker Bell will overfly the dead castle of the world; everything will sparkle again.

Forget adding “magic” to the supposed grayscale world of matter—it's already completely overwhelming. Take the most whatever-thing imaginable—asphalt road, as you did above, after it rained—that, too, is a manifestation of God, in the same grungy, utterly egoless and unflashy way that the Nazarene was —which is already way too much! Please, please let's not overload with glittery religious imagination something which already surpasses the human mind with beauty when it does nothing but stand there, as exactly itself.

Natasha ▼

Yes, the word “reenchantment” is quite wrong because the world never stopped being enchanted, it was us who forgot how to recognize it. The scientific and industrial revolutions brought an abundance of very real benefits to our lives, but they also settled onto our eyes a kind of blinder that trained us to view the world from the most narrow perspective. As CS Lewis wrote, these revolutions ushered in a time of “new learning and new ignorance.” For the first time in history the world was not seen as saturated with divine meaning, but as a meaningless machine. Lewis believed this disenchanted worldview ultimately eroded even the possibility of rational thought because it claims there is no such thing as objective truth, that every thought, every moral value, is only subjective opinion.

I was raised immersed in this worldview, which said everything – including myself – was a meaningless accident, that life has no purpose, that there is nothing beyond the material world. And the longing for transcendence we feel? It needs to be dismissed as superstitious nonsense. And what religion we have left is reduced to a moralistic therapeutic deism, often no more than a vague spirituality that is, above all, about being “nice.” This is how many of us were raised so that today it is common for people to wander through a secular wasteland yearning for something that can no longer even be named.

You write in Sunlillies (23) “The Living God is all around us, but all we feel is God’s absence, our sense numbed by the anesthetizing cocoon of self-constructed worlds.” This, as you point out, might be our current normal state, but it is by no means our natural state. As CS Lewis suggested in his Weight of Glory sermon

you and I have need of the strongest spell that can be found to wake us from the evil enchantment of worldliness which has been laid upon us for nearly a hundred years. Almost our whole education has been directed to silencing this shy, persistent, inner voice; almost all our modem philosophies have been devised to convince us that the good of man is to be found on this earth.

I appreciate Owen Barfield’s thoughts on this idea that the inner human experience of life dramatically shifts over time. So, over long historical epochs, we are pulled in and out of a felt experience of the divine. The Reformation ushered us into the current period of withdrawal of participation. This form of consciousness sees a cultural wide enhancement in the consciousness of being an individual, improvements in social mobility, and an emphasis on freedom of thought. It also includes the “disenchantment” of the world and human life, a mechanistic view of nature, a narrowing of science into scientism, and a widespread feeling of nihilism and alienation. But we can see this as a phase that will one day allow us to move again into reciprocal participation with even more intention. Like a cosmic dance taking place over eons, spinning out across the galaxy, we can return Home, but go even deeper this time because of what we have learned during our self-imposed exile.

Graham ▼

Yes, exactly—and I think of a quote I love, maybe you love, too, or at least can recognize within yourself, from Jack Kerouac's Dharma Bums:

The closer you get to real matter, rock air fire and wood, boy, the more spiritual life is. All these people thinking they're hardheaded materialistic practical types, they don't know shit about matter, their heads are full of dreamy ideas and notions. Look, there's a pigeon...

Which I see very much as a kindred spirit to your project:

Skoliogeography is untranslated autistic experience. It lives in the crackling electricity of the skin, where it can exist shorn of motive or framework. It is autistic consciousness on the page, but it is a consciousness that is, at all times, emerging. As an aesthetic, it is bound by liquid borders and accessible to all. Skoliogeography seeks out of the fundamental beyond the plastic bustle of the crowd. It is a shout that beckons the world to witness the ethereal, the ecstatic, the transcendent. Skoliogeography is not just seeking the marvelous in the mundane, but expecting it. (Walking Autistic)

And that's not just walking around, dumb grin, dazzled by it all—it involves real suffering. You talk in Drifts how, contrary to the assumption built into the word itself, autistic people are not automatically self-absorbed, just because they're called that, unable to feel compassion or empathy for others; instead, they often experience compassion and empathy to the point of debilitation:

...it can make it difficult to function, to explain, to even leave the house because it is inevitable you will see horrors in the world—like the pigeons dead on the road, their soft gray feathers, discolored by the wheels of the cars who drive over them, ruffling in the wind, and you know this will make a pain in your throat like a clenched fist so that you cannot breathe and cannot speak and cannot think. This kind of empathy is transfiguring; it makes you into an other...

Which to me sounds so much like our Abba Isaac of Syria:

What is a merciful heart? It is a heart on fire for the whole of creation, for humanity, for the birds, for the animals, for demons, and for all that exists. By the recollection of them the eyes of a merciful person pour forth tears in abundance. By the strong and vehement mercy that grips such a person’s heart, and by such great compassion, the heart is humbled and one cannot bear to hear or to see any injury or slight sorrow in any in creation. For this reason, such a person offers up tearful prayer continually even for irrational beasts, for the enemies of the truth, and for those who harm him, that they be protected and receive mercy because of the great compassion that burns without measure in a heart that is in the likeness of God...

Natasha ▼

I consider Kerouac to be one of the “patron saints” of skoliogeography so I’m thrilled you sense a resonance between our work! He wrote between languages and between cultures, and I see his body of writing as a mystical project, born of a longing for union with God. Today his writing is often dismissed as juvenile, when it actually reflects a sophisticated attempt at literary experimentation. His spontaneous prose technique was a tool to create an ecstatic state of mind that would allow the self to dissolve into the divine. When asked by an interviewer why he never wrote about Jesus, Kerouac snapped: “I’ve never written about Jesus?... All I write about is Jesus.”

To return to his quote you shared, I am forever entranced by the notion that God is the realest thing there is. I’ve written before that during my atheist years, I assumed that religious life must feel like abandoning logic and reason to live in a world of fairy tale. What has been astonishing to me is how it has been so much the opposite. The more I pray, the more I feel like I’m reorienting myself to reality. Everything else is revealed to be fluff and flimsy, of no lasting importance, while this thing I once thought of as a fairy tale, is the realest thing there is.

Contrary to what I mentioned above, about modern religion having been reduced to a vague therapeutic spirituality that amounts to “being nice,” to pre-modern thinkers holiness was understood to mean a super-saturation of reality. In this vein, I appreciate the thoughts of Evagrius on natural contemplation, that if we can quiet our busy minds we can find our way toward a sympathetic resonance with all of creation. We can look at the sky and see it as Sky, we can look at the tree and see it as Tree. And from here it is possible to discern the truth of created things, in other words, to see “rock air fire and wood” as expressions of God’s heart which are, at all times, praising Him in their own way.

Graham ▼

Not to colonize your story or diagnosis, Natasha, or put myself anywhere within a trillion miles of Abba Isaac's radiant holiness, equally in love with the stars as with the mindless lizards, but only to say a another little something to clasp hands with both you and him: I remember as a kid, I'd collect little rocks and keep them in my pocket for half a day or something, going on adventures outside, but remembering to warm them up every quarter hour or so with the touch of a sweaty finger, sweaty palm—then, realizing I guess you're not supposed to just keep rocks in your pocket forever—because, laundry machines—I had to let them drop again to the Earth, having gotten to know them—but I was sad, because it was like having to say goodbye to friends....

No, it wasn't like that...it was saying goodbye to friends!

Natasha ▼

You’re speaking my language!

When I was 7 I took part in a story-writing contest and the prizes were gift certificates to a local toy store. While the other kids ran to the toy aisles, I turned to the shop’s collection of polished rocks and took them home with me - friends they definitely were!

Autistic people often struggle to sustain friendships with other people, but we can find it easy to cultivate friendships with places or trees or rivers or birds. As a child, dogs and horses were my most trusted companions, and places have always been alive to me, with their own personality and stories to tell. But beyond the companionship of the natural world, all my life I sensed something radiant, overwhelming, and cosmic shining through it.

As you write in Sunlillies, “Since God created all things, all things are an expression of his inner life. The swaying of trees is his voice, the chirping of birds is his song.” (47) I think human beings are fundamentally designed to sense this. So to be told that the world around me and all the things in it was ultimately meaningless, just a random product of evolution with zero deeper meaning, was maddening. To borrow a phrase du jour, it was gaslighting!

Skoliogeography is a reclamation of my original childlike perception. To quote Gerald Manely Hopkins, skoliogeography is about humming along on the same vibration with the world’s “dearest freshness deep down things.” What joy!

Graham ▼

Ok, one more thing, my friend, tell me what you think: Whenever Egypt gets too shiny, that means it's Exodus time again—cyclical patterns, cultural integration and disintegration, Babylon's tower as just the cresting wave of a perennial ebb and flow, as we slowly make our way toward God, and God slowly makes his way toward us—exactly as you say, a dance—a very, very, every long one: God apparently is in no big rush, so we needn't be, either.

As much as I've gotten on board with The Machine this, The Machine that, would I go back and rerun Western history in a totally different way? No, not at all; all that was apparently something we needed to go through—just as it's now something we need to let go of, to leave behind.

It's Exodus time: Not back to square one, since we still have with us the experience we gained in Egypt, which matters—it was the whole point why we flourished and also languished there in the first place: Not back to square one, but back to elementals: sand, wind, and sun; the human body; the unreachability of the stars, which the pyramids were trying to reach, and didn't need to; the wildness of a lion-like nomadic God; the centrality of face-to-face community, like a sunlike hearth around which we circle all these ragged, flapping tents of ours on our sojourn towards eternity.

We've all been a bunch of wretched nihilists recently, haven't we? Well, OK, then!—so what have we learned from all this? What treasures are we going to keep, having first been, then ransacked and left, our Egypt of soulless scientific materialism?

One, time and space are vast, far vaster than we once thought.

Two, the more-than-human world is not less than human, just different: It's full of mind, full of language, full of God, but also not something before which we need cower in abject terror—all living things are, together, our home: nothing more, nothing less.

Three, every human heart is its own universe—most flourishing when in harmony with the universe in God's heart, also—the sun and moon and stars, the tree roots and hyacinth flowers and human faces—but it's possible to be a complete rebel, too; it's possible to fall into a self-made abyss and never stop falling.

These are a few of the many things I think we've learned, which we couldn't have learned otherwise, had we not first built, as it were, the pyramids of our nihilistic Machine—and they are a few of the many things I'd like to hold onto in our cultural memory, even as we seem to be entering an age of wasteland nomadism again, seeking again the homeland which is not in our power to create for ourselves, but only to co-create, to the extent that we're able to listen to and dance with God.

Natasha ▼

I hope this path we are collectively on – in no big rush - takes us someplace much weirder than we can even imagine. Moving into interstitial zones is often like that.

For many of us, we’ve grown up in a world that is immune to the strangeness of Christianity. And while it is rational to believe (and the logical arguments of apologetics indescribably valuable), for me it was just as critical to learn how gloriously weird faith can be. To quote St. Augustine, “If you understood him, it would not be God.” I needed to be hit with the full-force, dazzling weirdness of Christianity, the shockwave of it was salutary to my system.

I’m drawn to the thought that the Incarnation beckons us toward a new way of being, where matter and spirit can be united once again. In Miracles, CS Lewis writes,

Mystics have got as far in contemplation of God as the point at which the senses are banished: the further point, at which they will be put back again, has (to the best of my knowledge) been reached by no one. The destiny of redeemed man is not less but more unimaginable than mysticism would lead us to suppose…

In this same vein, in a recent essay, Paul Kingsnorth relates a conversation he had with a man he met in Romania. This man told him that miracles aren’t a suspension of the natural order, but a restoration of its proper order. I love that. I hope that is where we are headed on this exodus!

Along the way I want to cultivate more curiosity about what a sacramental worldview really is, in the here and now. Something I see today is how much we have let fear take hold on a collective level. It rears its head everywhere, in our daily interactions, in the stories that dominate the media, even in the way we educate children. And I don’t want to be afraid anymore; I want to be in awe.

I find "the machine” can be a helpful narrative framework to broaden our collective perspective when identifying causes of modern issues – like this ambient sense of nihilism. That being said, I’m a cog in the machine. I don’t live in a forest surviving off of rain water and acorns. When it comes to progress and modernity (to use these unwieldy, over-determined words) I think my aim is to try to properly understand the forces behind them.

And I’m not actually at all doom and gloom on progress or technology. I find that many people who are tend to look at the past through rose-colored glasses. There is a danger in that because it makes it seem like the solution is moving backwards, when that is not only impossible, of course, but it isn’t even desirable. As you say, the things we have learned about ourselves and our world during this epoch are not things I want to forget!

And for all the negatives we can find about the modern world, the positives are radiant. Look at us, getting to have this conversation across how many thousands of miles! Even the negatives of modern life can, in a certain light, be cast as positives. As Louis Dupré wrote about the desert of modernity, “Our age has created an emptiness that in the serious God-seeker attains a religious significance.”

Where will we go from here? For a long time I got hung up on political answers, but taking a long view of history shows it has always been the apocalypse every day for someone, somewhere. The answer to that isn’t to be jaded or callous toward suffering, but to go deeper, to grope toward the eternal.

I’ve wrestled with not having a homeland pretty much my whole life, or rather, not having a homeland I could truly claim. As a native-born foreigner in the country in which I was born I’ve long tangled with what the concept of homeland could even mean for a person like me. A situation many can relate to these days.

As much as I think a strong sense of rootedness to place can be a bedrock for human flourishing, in another way, not having that option means I perforce had to reorient my concept of home to something bigger, stranger, more numinous. I’m grateful for that. Seeking a homeland in God could actually be a motto that sums up the last seven or so years as I’ve made this rather shambolic journey to faith.

All of creation is radiant with God and at the very same time between creation and God there is an infinite dissimilarity. Considering this paradox is astoundingly disorienting – which for me is often a sign that I’m approaching something that contains an element of truth. I’m trying to live in this paradoxical space and accept that faith is not a settled thing, but a constant longing to move deeper and deeper into our true Homeland where we will be, as Jan van Ruusbroec puts it, “eternally whirled round in the maelstrom of God’s glory.”