Matt Christman on his satori moment and prestige TV
Excerpted from “Better Call Saul? More Like Worse Write, Paul,” April 26, 2020, and lightly edited for clarity and brevity.
Hello friends. So yesterday—I don’t know if anyone watched the stream I did yesterday—I was kind of tripping balls. And at the end of it, after I finished recording, I sat in my little back area, my little fenced-in area, and I looked up at the sky for a while. And wouldn’t you know it, I ended up having one of those legitimate, full-blown satori moments. Actual enlightenment, actual transcendence, like bloop. One second, one with the universe. Whatever you want to call it—ego death, blah-blah-blah—I was there.
I had a moment of complete identification and oneness with the universe, and then of course, the second it was over, I came back into my body and became reincarnated, reembodied as me. And of course, I started falling away from that moment as the rock started rolling back down the hill. I was Sisyphus, and I got to walk down it. And the thing about Sisyphus is, Camus says you must imagine Sisyphus happy. That’s one of those things that just sounds like a zen koan
I understand it now, because happy Sisyphus is the one who gets to the top of the hill as often as possible because being on the top of the hill is fun, and walking down the hill—it's not as fun as being on the top of the hill but it's a lot more fun than pushing the goddamn rock up the hill. So you just gotta increase the circuits. You can't keep pushing the boulder up one long gradient, which is what most people do and what we're cursed to do because of our material realities that constrain us and chain us . . . .
As I was coming back to my body and I was going down the hill and falling away, the first word that came into my mind after—because obviously in that time and space there's no words because language is obliterated. It's not needed because you are one; there's no need to translate. As soon as I came back to my body, the first word, it was an image in the sky of a crashing wave and the word Yes. And I realized that a lot of the stuff I've been trying to get my head around, in terms of spirituality ad theology and questions of body and mind and all these things that I've been working on in my head, and I feel I've been making progress but I've been struggling with—the word Yes cut through a lot of it and it created a symbolic order that allowed me to make sense of everything I've been trying to get my head around. And since my specific orientation as age, race, gender, class background, language, culture, all that stuff—when I heard Yes, the first thing I thought was the end of Ulysses. And all of a sudden, I had one moment of thinking "Oh, that's what it's like to have read Ulysses," and then I was like, "Oh wait a minute," and then I thought, "Oh great, now I don't have to read Ulysses." But then I realized: I have to read Ulysses now, even if it's bad, even if it's a slog, even if it's whatever, because it will remind me of that moment, and doing it every day will remind me of that moment and keep me living in a way that gets me there, or gets me closer to it. It will inform my actions and it will inform my behavior toward the people around me, and it will make them turn toward that sound. So I'm going to start reading Ulysses.
Like I said, it doesn't matter if it's good or not. It doesn't matter if it's worth it. What matters is reading it. The reason that I'm thinking within these terms is, I did a tweet that got a lot of people mad about Better Call Saul, because I said that Better Call Saul, in my opinion, suffers from trying to be a prestige TV show, given the ingredients it has. You've got Saul Goodman here, played by Bob Odenkirk, a great character we all love, and we've got these great people behind the casts, great cinematography. And it ended up being the show it is, with its basically copying the rhythms of Breaking Bad and becoming a Breaking Bad explicit prequel filling in all these gaps of Where'd Hector get his bell? and things like that. That's inevitable as soon as it had to fit the format of a prestige show. As a prestige show, it probably is great. I've watched enough of it. Yes, it fits all the terms that we discuss when we talk about prestige television. Yes. I would say it's as good as Mad Men, it's as good as Breaking Bad or even better, it's as good as The Sopranos, whatever you want to say. Fine. It's good. But it's good in the context of a television show. I've written about prestige TV and I've talked a lot about it, and I was trying to articulate something that I've never actually been able to explicitly say in a way that I felt like I was saying what I meant, let alone if other people understood it.
What I realized with this mental Ginsu now to chop everything up that I encounter is, my problem with Better Call Saul is that it is a product of the demiurge. Better Call Saul, like all prestige TV, is a product of the demiurge. Art is an attempt to reach the etheric plane. Art is always an attempt to strike at the heart of the universe, to strike God and become God. Everything attempt at art is that, in some small way, the way that the person making it can do or try to do. It's the urge to do it. But then, there's the reality, the embodied reality of being a person, being a body that has needs. Those material needs that shape the world and limit us, that's what the Gnostics talked about. That's what the demiurge, the evil god who creates the material world that is illusion below the spiritual realm.
In this case, if we're talking about art, in an objective sense, television is a more degraded form of art than literature by the very simple fact that it is more commercial. And you might say, "Well, Stephen King makes a lot of money." No. What I mean by that is, the writing of a book and the publication of a book are relatively capital unintensive. Making a television show is much more, by exponential numbers, more capitally intensive than a book, which means that whatever art is in it has been constrained by being a product of a commercial enterprise. That means that television can be good. Every show could be fun. You should enjoy every program you watch. Either stop watching it if you can't find yourself enjoying it, or find something about it that speaks to you. Everything should be enjoyable, artistically. And if it isn't, find something that will, something that you can work it. Some things aren't going to work because the talent of the people involved, the amount of resources put to it, the amount of commercialism leavened within it, it's going to hit you and make it hard. That is why I see Better Call Saul, and I go egh because it just reminds me that we're all praying to this degraded version of art. And the reason we are is because we have been immiserated culturally. Capitalism has done that to us. That's not something you can argue. Our tastes are more broad, and poptimists like to say, "You're being a snob." But I'm recognizing a goddamn reality here, which is that there's a structural difference between art depending on how much they are required to make money, the degree to which a piece of art needs to make money to be worth the endeavor leavens its individual artistic expression because it has to be translatable to the largest possible group. The art, in translation, gets lost.
And that's fine. You can find the sparks. You can find the things you like in anything, including Breaking Bad. But because we have lost free time, we've lost energy, we've lost the ability to take a small moment and treasure something and really dig into it, that we need our entertainments to go down easier. They have to be absorbable because we don't have the energy, the mental or spiritual energy to sit with anything because of where we are, because of how degraded our conditions are, because of our bodies essentially. All these institutions—capitalism, feudalism before it, slave labor—every class order created was created to manage the issue of keeping bodies alive, basically. That creates our structures. It creates our economic structures, it creates our art, it creates our culture, it creates our personalities, it creates our religions, it creates our ideologies, it creates everything. It creates this computer, it creates this phone. It creates this shirt, and it creates the systems that create the hyperexploitation that goes into making this shirt, the gunpoint slave coltan mining that makes this phone. Those things are all necessary to the degree to which they allow for the human bodies to be restored.
Then there is the temptation to seek pleasure, and pleasure always comes at the expense of someone else. Pleasure always comes at the expense of us—always. All pleasure is at the expense of others and at the expense of ourselves—karma. And so these institutions get warped. "Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made." What that means is, the crookedness is the fact that we have bodies. That's not a sin, it's not bad—the Christian thing is another mistranslation from the initial true divining of reality. The material world gets in the way, and it gets baffled, and so Christianity gets muddled up with all this stuff. When you say, "The body creates this world," it's not bad—it's inevitable. It's inherent. We have to deal with it. We have to create a society that minimizes suffering by spreading pleasure out as broadly as possible, not concentrating on any individual because doing so creates a situation where you cause misery to all the people whose exploitation goes into the pleasure of that one person, and that one person's pleasure is fleeting. It's going away. They're going to face the flames of judgment, which is the coming of death, with the terror of hell in their heart. There's no stopping it. And so no one has gotten any sort of benefit out of that arrangement.
We have to have some suffering and pleasure just to keep the bodies going, but it should be spread out. That's where the dialectic comes in. Somebody said, "Go back to Marxism." I'm sorry, but this moment made me realize that these are nesting series of thoughts, ideologies, and structures, and guess what? Nesting in here is dialectical materialism. Maybe Gnosticism or Buddhism or something or The Dark Tower or I was talking about Infinite Jest the other day and maybe Ulysses, those things help structure your thoughts and make it easier for you to behave in a way that reduces suffering. But then you need structures within other people, amongst people in the social realm of economic production and political economy, that need to serve those ends as well. Dialectical materialism is the drive toward that. It is the drive toward a world where everyone is free of the bodily temptations and distractions to reach full enlightenment.
When people talk about "fully automated luxury space communism," there's a lot wrong with that notion. But the truth thing that's reckoning with is that the only way for universal human enlightenment—which, if enlightenment is the individual goal, as it well should be, then presumably it is the universal goal for all humans—then you need some sort of taming and instrumentalizing of technology toward the goal of human enlightenment as opposed to the dark singularity we're moving toward, where the machine takes over and totally annihilates human spirituality and turns us into machines. We don't want that.
It requires a lack until you get to the top, and you don't get there and stay there. It's a process. You go back, and you come back. And you go back and you come back. It's pushing the fucking boulder up the hill. That's why it's compatible.
If we want that version, universal enlightenment, then it requires, in my view (and I am wrong, at some point in time in the future I am wrong. I think I'm right now. I have enough history around me and I think I'm smart enough and compassionate enough together to figure out broadly what's right. More specifically, as it gets drilled down, I don't have the information or the intelligence to specifically answer technological questions, social questions, whatever. Broadly, I think I'm right, but I'm not right forever. At some point in the future, at some point in space time, everything I think is going to be wrong. Every single thing, and that's true of you too. Every human being. Every single thing you have ever thought, every decision you've ever made, has been wrong. We are all, in fact, the sum total of our wrong choices.
This is all a way of saying you can enjoy Better Caul Saul. To enjoy Better Call Saul, of course, it doesn't make sense to watch it if you're not going to enjoy it. Watching it to get made at it, you're getting pleasure somewhere else. And at the end of the day, the pleasure's at others' expense because what are you going to do? You're going to go online like I have a million times and kick people in the dick and say, "Ha! Fuck you. This show is stupid, and you're dumb for liking it." That's the pleasure I get out of it, and that's at someone else's expense as all pleasure is.
What makes a decision right or wrong?
It's not defined until afterwards. It's only retrospectively known because all time has already happened. Everything has already happened. Everything has already happened. And when I say everything, I mean not just in your life, I mean the lives of all beings to exist or ever will exist.
So you can enjoy Better Call Saul, but you see the way people are defensive about the show and see the way they get mad about it—and even if they're not mad, the way they insist on its greatness. It's because they have decided that instead of acknowledging the lack at the heart of prestige as a concept, instead of saying, "Aw, this is sad that now we have to get our real artistic nourishment from something this banalized"—It's banalized! It has to be, because it's commercial. It has to be banalized—"I have to try so hard to squeeze meaning out of it not for my enjoyment of the show but to convince other people and myself that watching this is actually good."
It's not necessarily bad. It's not going to doom you to like it in that way. But it implies attachment to something that is degraded without acknowledging and recognizing the degradation. And without the ability to recognize the degradation, you cannot act in a way in your life to move away from degradation in your interpersonal relationships, in your preferences, what you do with your time, and what you think politics should be and how you should act on political beliefs. If prestige TV is good enough, then why do you need to change anything?
So commercial art is bad?
No. No art is bad. Every individual's relationship to a piece of art is completely individualized, and it's a result of translations. All art is translation. All existence is translation—your brain literally translating to you through language what is happening to it, first in senses, then in symbols, then in words: words to yourself and then words to others. At every level, the translation breaks down. There is loss between every level of translation. By the time you're trying to express an idea through art, you're way down here. You're so degraded. But if you're talented enough and enough people see it and you're collaborating with others and you make something together, because collaboration, depending on the art form and the project, helps signal boost and bring together individual insights and individual talents, and it creates something.
There's something to it. There's a spark to all art. It's just either the talent was not there to express it fully, or it was a piece of cynical dogshit. But even the cynical dogshit will have things in it that might be enjoyable. You can watch a piece of cynical dogshit with the right frame of mind and enjoy it. The danger is when you mistake the shadows for the figures, and that is what prestige television does. If we just accepted, "Yeah, TV, it's the idiot box," the shows could be the same, have the same stuff, and it would be fine. But a culture that requires television to be good is one that has not acknowledged its barriers . . . .
Plato's stuff, I never really got until now. Now I get it. Gnosticism, I never really got. I feel like I get it. And of course I get it less now than I did yesterday, and I will get it less tomorrow than I do today. My task is to get back, to remember that moment, remember what I knew then, and try to find it again. The way to do that is by daily acts by the Eightfold Path, by the Path of the Beam. What that really means is not just I'm going to say, "Epic path of the beam," when I see a fucking Stephen King reference. It means my every action informed by the knowledge of what is there—the imminence behind reality, the real universe beyond the demiurgical one—and then trying to get there.
That means these reading projects are not about learning something. It's about re-learning something, because you don't know anything. You only have echoing, clanging notions in your head. A lot of them contradict each other. The only way to thread them together in a way to make them useful is to sit with them. And that is not something that anything we do encourages. Not something anything in our culture encourages, is sitting with these questions. Existential materialism, whatever you want to call it. Gnosticism, whatever you guys want to say . . . .
Gnosticism says this is a degraded shadow realm. It is. It's a degraded shadow realm of material reality, but we have to work with it. How do we work with it? How do we thread it? How do we push it in a direction that leads toward the chance for as many people as possible to achieve transcendence and direct it back to themselves in the future and to everyone else who can hear them in their lives and people around them? It's by resolving contradiction, because contradiction is at the heart of existence. No and yes. The universe is yes, and it's always there. It is outside of space and time. The world is no, and we are all—every person, every being in the universe, every photon, every chain of chemicals, anything—those things are all no's. Those are different levels of rejecting. And the thing is, there aren't that many of them. But there doesn't need to be, because yes exists outside of space and time. It is the accumulation of no's over this endless expanse, they are accumulated in actual reality, this world. And you've gotta get back to yes.
I say that and you hear it, and it's like, "What does that mean?" And for me, these words, "getting back to yes," they're freighted with my memory of this experience. You are only hearing my words retell it, which is fraudulence, as Nietzsche points out. All language is a lie. All I can do is use my talents—to such extent that they exist—and my will, my morality, my intellect, to try to push in the direction of the good.
So that's Better Call Saul.
