Such an Abyss

Gabriela de Mendonça Gomes

“A human being is such an abyss,” Saint Augustine of Hippo writes, addressing his creator in his Confessions.  The word abyss is a Greek compound of the prefix a-, meaning without, and -byssos, bottom.  In Genesis 1:2, the Abyss refers to a deep watery chaos in a state of uncreation: “In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth – and the earth was without form or shape, with darkness over the abyss and a mighty wind sweeping through over the waters.”  Over this primordial ocean, God brings order by way of light, sky, and land: “Then God said, Let there be light, and there was light.  God saw that the light was good.  God then separated the light from the darkness.” 

From biblical beginning, then, the abyss is a place or state of ultimate darkness and downwardness––one dissociated from God, order, and heaven.  In his Meditations on First Philosophy, after René Descartes razes all his beliefs to the ground, he finds himself in a state of metaphysical uncreation, his description of which unsurprisingly echoes Genesis.  He writes, “I feel like someone who is suddenly dropped into a deep whirlpool that tumbles him around so that he can neither stand on the bottom nor swim to the top.”  As with Augustine, Descartes’ introspective abyss comes when trying to philosophically unravel the knotted web of his Christian convictions.  Both writers want their theistic beliefs to align with their metaphysical rationalizations about the universe and its interworkings.  “It’s easier to count [someone’s] hairs than his moods or the workings of his heart,” Augustine writes; “However,” Descartes responds, “I shall force my way up, and try once more.” 

The abyss’ directionality of down is important; a cursory investigation of our language-use summons an abundance of associations of up with good and down with bad: heaven and hell, upwards versus downwards spirals, feeling uplifted as opposed to feeling down, being in a peak state of life in contrast with hitting rock bottom.  The abyss is thus a place we seek to avoid because, ultimately, it can be said that, in broad strokes, we seek happiness––an existential state associated with the higher echelons of being.  When Augustine writes that a human being is such an abyss, he means that our psychoemotional workings are themselves in ‘low’ states of formlessness and shapelessness, things without order or name, things in darkness primordial, beyond our understanding necessarily bound to that which God, Order, Universe has illuminated. 

Nietzsche famously wrote that “if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”  That seems to ring true for the process of self-perception.  After you finish reading this, go find a mirror.  Set a five minute timer during which time you are to simply look at yourself, dead straight, in that mirror.  By minute two or three, you will recall this newsletter, because you will probably feel unsettled already, might want to turn away, might never want to do that again.  Looking at ourselves in a mirror, the things that we know to belong to ourselves––abysses, if we are to follow Augustine’s logic––become foreign in their familiarity.  This remains true for non-mirror-dependent introspection, too.  Looking into ourselves, we may find abysses of words and thoughts and actions and beliefs that we no longer identify with but that are yet still present, still contained within this thing we see as Self, as I. 

The first, oft overlooked, sentence of Nietzsche’s famous abyss aphorism is: “He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster.”  In describing his revelation and conversion to Christianity, Augustine writes “when this profound pondering drew up all my misery from the bottom of the mysterious abyss and heaped it up where my heart would see it, there arose a tremendous tempest bringing a colossal downfall of tears.”  Gazing into the abyss, we encounter things we may have previously omitted to encounter in the grazing pastures of our minds.  Indeed, denial and delusion are powerful forces; embodied in ancient Greek tradition by the goddess Atê, even Agamemnon in the Iliad blames Delusion rather than his own prideful selfishness for clouding his judgment and taking Briseis from Achilles, motivating the latter to let hundreds of men die as he seethes in his ship.  A monster is a creature, typically large, ugly, and frightening.  What is it but the potential of seeing ourselves as such monstrosities that we see when we gaze into the abyss of the self?  What is it but the facing of those facets that we avoid when we cling to Delusion?  

Is the self an abyss because whatever means we use to approach it, we can always get close but never find ourselves truly there because this there is not a place in the way we tend to conceive of place: boundless. Heraclitus says that everything is in constant flux, always changing. Couldn’t also the lack of stability, the impossibility of stasis, be considered an abyss?  Because a bottom means an ending, a stopping of changing, and, as we know, abysses are bottomless, boundless.  Is all human experience as something that can only happen in the present—even when that experience aims its eye forward or backward—subject to this abyss-ness?  And how far in can you even see?

In the opening scene of the 18th-century German novella Lenz by Georg Büchner, the eponymous protagonist wanders dispassionately through the mountains; “he felt no fatigue,” Büchner writes, “except sometimes it annoyed him that he could not walk on his head.”  To walk on one’s head entails a reversal of orientation; as poet Paul Celan claims in “The Meridian,” walking on his head means that Lenz experiences the heavens as an abyss below him.  Büchner inverts Lenz’s orientation to establish his protagonist’s groundlessness, to foreshadow his inability to walk and talk and be the way it is socially accepted, which unravels and culminates tragically in the haunting novella. But perhaps it’s not even necessary to summon a geographic reversal to see the heavens as an abyss.  If the heavens are infinite, and thus bottomless, and, by definition, an abyss is something without a bottom, aren’t the heavens then an abyss? Aren’t the heavens unfathomed and boundless, the other denotations of ábyssos? Aren’t they beyond all human understanding of space and time?  As such, if the human being is “such an abyss,” don’t we then contain the bottomless within us? To go a step further, the bottomless heavens within us? Doesn’t the Bible in Luke 17:21 even say “the kingdom of God is within you?”

Yet, “heaven”––something that, according to most religious doctrine and common-sense, is not what we have on Earth, in the quotidian––seems again to point to something beyond our rational power.  When we gaze into a mirror to look at our selves as a part of this world, we use our vision, our sensory faculty, which is notably very unreliable, yet encompassingly unescapable.  We do not look into the abyss of the heavens in the same way.  There is no physical mirror that we can put in front of our souls and see what’s inside. Moreover, although a mirror can appear to be the most direct means of physical self observation, it is, in the end, only a mere reflection, bound to already possess distortions that take away from ‘really’ seeing our selves. Only through faith, or prayer, or sex, or meditation, or manifestation, or transmutation can this heaven possibly be experienced--perhaps only glanced at in moments and through things like that convey a sense of this abysmal abundance. The non-rational obliqueness of these methods is important, for this heaven is unfailingly and exclusively accessible through something that cannot come from the limited, ordered progression of human logic. Logic has limits, that is clear. We use its boundaries and frontiers to discern the quality of an argument or thought.  As Kierkegaard says, “faith begins precisely where thinking leaves off;” that’s why we ‘leap” towards it.  Indeed, faith is beyond logic.

To that point, Büchner only allows Lenz to find this abyss after he has lost all guiding force in his life––Christian, poetic, and otherwise. All things that pointed him on paths of certainty and clarity have evaded him. By this point, Lenz has called and called upon God, but God has not responded. He does not say anything to Lenz as he does “in the beginning,” does not create order or light for him with His voice. And out of the abysmal silence, Lenz hears a “chorus of Titans,” alluding to Tartarus, the deepest, primordial chasm of the classical underworld to which the Titans were banished after their loss to their godly Olympian successors. It also holds monsters and mortals condemned for their severe offenses against the gods. It is the place where, according to Plato’s Gorgias, souls are judged after death, and where the wicked ones receive their rightful punishment. Hearing this chorus, Lenz “was now standing at the abyss, driven by an insane desire to peer into it over and over, and to repeat this torture.” 

Lenz is beyond the light of reason and godliness and order. He launches himself towards the shadowed corners of metaphysicality that gesture beyond limited conventional consciousness. He looks into an abyss––an abyss established a mere eight lines into the novella––he looks into his self, he looks into his godless, chaotic hell-heavenand. And he can only do so by way of an “insane” desire. It is torture because he is constantly bringing himself away from a world and worldly conceptualization to which he believes he must tether himself in order to live. To find himself in a non-deviant existence entails the ability to stay ‘within,’ to not attempt boundlessness, to avoid the abyss and the “insane” desire to keep peering into it, this beyond.

Augustine, full of tears during his moment of revelation, “hardly knowing where I was or what I was doing, I sprawled under a fig tree and gave my tears free rein [and] rivers burst out of my eyes” was guided by a singular voice: “the voice of someone––a little boy or girl, I don’t know which––incessantly and insistently chanting, ‘Pick it up! Read it! Pick it up! Read it!’” After which he returns to his house and picks up Paul the Apostle’s letters right where he left off, and the mirror-abyss of the text told him to remove his clothing of feuds, drunkenness, and immorality, and to instead clothe himself in Jesus Christ. 

Both Augustine and Büchner emphasize the beyond rational-ness of their abyss-peering; both protagonists––Augustine himself and Lenz–– hear voices that push them further and further into chaotic internal states that lead them to vital, yet antithetical revelations relating to God, the former metamorphosing into a Christian beneath the fig tree and the latter lapsing into a spiritually catatonic state after discovering His absence. Prying the abyss open showed Augustine that at the formless foundation is God, for he could not know it nor anything else without Him; by contrast, the viewing showed Lenz that the thereness of God is deferred, that the utter formlessness is the ultimate truth.

Both Augustine and Lenz find themselves at a crossroads, one heading upwards towards his conception of divinity and the other downwards, towards an inverted, seemingly infernal, divinity.  We can find explanations both secular and religious as to why they’re each on the path they’re on, but I think that the more important point is that the crossroads and the directionality we linguistically and conceptually associate with their divergent courses are, in fact, just metaphors bound to the limiting, dualistic linguistic filter through which our minds allow us to understand them.  Up and down, good and bad are abundant in our language, but they are mere images that our logic assigns to categories of existence; the abyss, by its nature, is formless.  It lies beyond any rational categorization.

And if a human being is really “such an abyss,” we are mediating our existential instantiations of formlessness. We are an abyss between one abyss above and another below, yet that are all really one and also none. And it doesn’t make sense, and it doesn’t have to. Because for as much as I try to pontificate on the meaning of it, I am relegated to the conclusion that as beings formed in the image of a boundless universe beyond our understanding, I’ll always be here grasping at the number of hairs on my head and the moods and workings of my heart without realizing that’s it’s all changing anyway.