Indexing the Eschaton, Part I

I wanted, off the top of my head, to dash off a quick-and-dirty post listing and capsule-summarizing appearances of the Eschaton in popular media (it doesn't seem to turn up much elsewhere; even the most ostensibly highbrow of the items on this list, a roughly 1,100-page tome of a novel that people speak of with reverence and awe in many literary circles, is in spite of its tenure in the hearts of readers a work of highly sophisticated pop art).

Unsurprisingly, what I intended to be an interesting little ditty has ended up turning into an essay-length document, and I've decided to break it up into chunks for serial posting.

I'm not talking broadly about eschatology, per the Christian apocalypse and other end-times cosmologies. The Eschaton, more specifically, is an event, a contemporary archetype, a kind of teleological koan; yet a poorly defined one, with varying parameters. The preeminent type, the mystical-temporal concept of Eschaton that the late ethnobotanist and entheogenesis advocate Terence McKenna popularized in the late twentieth century, is but one of several. These differing forms of Eschaton vary widely in nature; those listed here scantly resemble each other, except to suggest similar underlying principles and/or mechanisms. In the first part of this essay, I'll briefly discuss a few of these forms, noting an exemplar of each.

Let's get started:

• Utopian Eschaton: The Illuminatus! Trilogy (1975). A seriocomic romp through the chaotic landscape of western conspiracy theories, co-authored by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea. The novel aims to permanently undermine the ontological complacency of the reader through a rapid progression of shifting premises, repeatingly asserting new sets of apparently solid assumptions about reality that subsequently and suddenly give way like trap floors. Illuminatus! famously begins with the line "It was the year when they finally immanetized the Eschaton" (although whether this actually happens in the ensuing text is debatable). At the time of the novel's writing, the conceptual genesis of "immanetizing the Eschaton" was a right-wing political admonition against leftist utopianism, the phrase coined by political philosopher Eric Voegelin and popularized by conservative commentator William F. Buckley. Thus, at its conception, the Eschaton was synonymous with the age-old "kingdom of Heaven on earth" eschatologies of the major world religions - it had yet to acquire the modernized psychedelic magnetism of Terence McKenna's later rendering of the concept in speculative metaphysical form as a teleological attractor, a "transcendental object at the end of time."


• Semiotic Eschaton: Infinite Jest (1996). A big, self-important, profoundly moving and yet frustratingly imperfect novel by the late, reluctant literary icon David Foster Wallace. In one of its myriad sections, the comically brainy students at an elite tennis academy construct an elaborate global thermonuclear warfare-scenario with racquets, tennis balls and statistics -- and they call it "Eschaton." At the midway point of the novel occurs a lengthy chapter detailing the mechanics of an Eschaton match. Gameplay is riveting, complex and entertaining, but proceedings deteriorate catastrophically when snow begins to fall on the tennis courts, and the players can't reach a consensus as to whether or not that means snow is also falling in the game scenario.
  
  Wallace is commenting on the fragility of our meaning-making capacities, and the Eschaton match in his novel humorously suggests an ultimately quite frightening notion, one that the novel explores in depth throughout its duration: the idea that some event could occur to so thoroughly rupture our current understanding of reality as to permanently disable our ability to form any new understanding. This terminal semiotic psychosis would constitute a type of Eschaton - but unlike the form that Voegelin proscribes, or that McKenna enshrines, this is an Eschaton of a more abstract variety: an irreparable breaching of the division - upon which our capacity to make meaning depends - between signifiers and their referents.


• Apocalyptic Eschaton: Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995) - A shadowy cabal of technocrats uses angel chromosomes, a sad kid's mother's biomechanized corpse and redacted portions of the Dead Sea Scrolls to force a radical shift in the evolution of humanity. The original series spanned twenty-six episodes of slow-boiling melodrama, masterfully cultivating a growing sense of existential dread and pre-apocalyptic malaise before going full-on Larry Carlson with a ninety-minute theatrical release that the director has all but admitted constitutes an act of willful aggression against his show's shitty fans. I mean, look:

I'll be honest: if I were going to be tangled up in an Eschaton, I'd be kind of thrilled to see it play out like this. In addition to being a gorgeous, disturbing work of symbolic art, the series' concluding film End of Evangelion evokes a number of classic works of late 20th-century psychonautical doomsday prophecy - Terence McKenna's explications of his Mayan calendar-based novelty-forecasting algorithm Time Wave Zero, for instance, which was arguably unprecedented in properly introducing the world to the Eschaton-as-terminal-mindfuck trope with which readers are likely the most familiar today.

I'm going to follow up with Parts II and III in a couple of weeks, drawing on examples from the graphic literary corpus of Grant Morrison and Alan Moore, as well as hard science-fiction narratives such as the online post-Singularity world-building project Orion's Arm, and the recent films Arrival and Interstellar. I'll speak of these works and their concepts of Eschaton in terms of a fourth categorical form: the Paradigm Eschaton, having to do with sudden, global initiations into radically expanded dimensional and/or temporal understandings.