There’s nothing more terrifying to me than the proposition that the universe is whole, complete, and entirely available for scrutiny.
The thought that we might one day figure it all out, master the elements, and convene the tides to script the tales of our magnificence shocks the air out of my lungs. I struggle to breathe in the face of such an ideology not merely because it strikes me as troublingly hubristic, but because I am immediately crippled by a claustrophobic sense of capture. By the image of a universe frozen still under the clinical gaze of the human. Nothing hurts me more than the idea that I might inhabit a world so “little”, so flat, so unremarkable, so familiar, so known, so habituated, so conservative, and so without surprise or enchantment.
You can imagine then how I felt while reading this report of a cyborgian sibling’s odyssey through the outer regions of the galaxy. The James Webb Telescope, a distant cousin fabricated with steel and story, drifted past a cosmic anomaly. It focused its lenses. An image was produced; a message sent to our planet, quick as Hermes. What lies at the edges of what we know? The answer that materialized in the laboratories of certitude was a taunt: the curvaceous form of a question mark amidst an unspeakable palimpsest of other cosmic systems and orders.
Don’t try to talk me out of it. I have already yielded to the temptation. The question mark is beautiful. It speaks of a cosmos unfinished; it questions our prying gaze; it sidles and disrupts the phallic quest to quarantine the universe away from its wildness and into the civilizing hygienic clearings of the Anthropos. The question mark, which I shall now christen ‘Selah’, reminds us of the insufficiency and radical non-completeness of ontology. It is the shape of your soul. To the question of what lies beyond, it responds: “Well, that depends.”
In a spirited attempt to protect my faith, to rid it of the pestilent questions that had stolen into my once innocent mind, my childhood pastor reminded me that “God created everything.” I responded, “But ‘everything’ is just a small part of what I am interested in.” Somehow, somewhere, God herself, chuckled at that joke – and her lips stretched out into the unmistakable shape of a question mark.
