In My Beginning is My Spiritual Hologram...

“We are nothing without our image. Without our projection. Without the spiritual hologram of who we perceive ourselves to be, or to become, in the future.”

Amen. Thus spake the seraph aka Lady Gaga in the new-libertine creed. And forthwith the scoffers wagged their heads at “spiritual hologram” and gnashed their teeth at the po-mo superficiality of venerating the image. But wait a minute; isn’t there some ancient text that actually refers to as image, as the image of God?

And are we so sure that the glamour-gloss of Andy Warhol’s diamond dust shoes and myriad Monroes are quite so banal as arching [high-]brows, critical of mass culture would tell us.
What if Gaga has a point?

Subtly introduce the more acceptable language of imagination and it all starts to sound a little like contemporary theology. And if it’s conceded that the age of the photograph and silent film took to pieces the aura of the work of art, then high speed broadband
must surely be the death of all romantic notions of the original, authentic work of art. Perhaps we are all copies, and copies of forgeries, and counterfeit plagiarisms of copies of forgeries, and if we truly did make it to becoming perfect images then we might avoid that pernicious Augustinian originality.

Roaring introduced me last year to Martha Beck who has a lot to say about “starting from the end.” About imagining how you want a situation to resolve itself before you find yourself 1000 miles from home hacking your way through the Mekong Delta. This means a literal imaging/imagining a future that might bring you a little closer to who you are. And if my beginning can be found in my end, and my end in my beginning, this might give us an authentic spirituality which can be achieved by copying and forging ahead. But, as every successful school-girl/boy knows, the art of successfuly copying is to give it a twist, or, as Warhol would have it, a myriad of copies in negative, high contrast, technicoloured hyper-reality.

So let’s all imagine lots of lady bishops and gay bishops and see what spiritual holograms we can uncover that are unfettered by all the reactionary boredom of people with little imagination.

We are nothing without our image.