As I was saying about the connection between Atheism and Technism, Del Noce’s coinage for the fascination with gadget solutions to whatever ails you. ‘Is there an app for that’? As with the secret of Mont Saint Michel lurking at the bottom of a microscope even works of fiction, dramas, shows on tv have that belief that there is a final answer to be given by a sage scientist. This is evident in the rather, for the most part, excellent and imaginative show ‘The Leftovers’ put out by HBO in ‘14 - ‘17.
Its more than a riff on rapture. Heidegger might have been consulted for it, I jest. Much of it has an underlying theme of the ultimate precarity of life and how facing that anxiety can either destroy us or demand authenticity. ‘That’s a lie’ is a constant refrain being said by all the characters in the 3 season show. John Murphey will burn your house down for that. All that is good and we accept the symbolism, shamanistic travels to other worlds, the bureaucratization of sudden departure, the scamming angle, the cult of the Guilty Remnant that adopts smoking as remembering. All of that is brilliant, deep, metaphysically profound, obscure, and simple as death. Then however it goes awry in the third season when they bring in the scientific solution, let’s call it by its true name, a one way teleporter between the two worlds that of the leftovers and that of the departed. Really they ought have, like Iris Dement sings in the theme song of the second series, ‘Let the Mystery Be’. Live in Keatsian Negative Capability.
II had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke, upon various subjects; several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason—Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. This pursued through volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.
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