GPT

The tension between prima materia and its estrangement is deeply evocative, suggesting a violent rupture within the very essence of creation. The war, as you put it, between matter and mind, or the self-reflective psyche against the primordial, feels like a metaphysical civil war where the forces of order, perhaps both intellectual and social, attempt to control or mold the wild, formless substance that is the khôra, the "place" of generation that resists form and yet gives rise to all.

When Keller writes that systematized religion "removes us both from the streets and from the deep," there's a critique of institutions that, instead of facilitating connection with the underlying, messy reality of existence, pull us into structures that alienate us from both the visceral, lived experience ("the streets") and the deeper, unknowable flow of existence ("the deep"). The very act of systematizing, of giving ordered shape to the divine or to the process of becoming, risks severing us from the chaotic wholeness of the world as it is.

McCall’s vision of the deep as an indeterminate force of infinite potential speaks to the relational dynamic that cannot be fully contained by structure or narrative. It’s a force that perpetually unfolds, evading finality or completion, refusing any definitive telos. This aligns with the khôra as a generative abyss that resists final closure, perpetually giving birth to more but never arriving at a fixed state of being.

In this way, the estrangement from prima materia and the deep isn't merely a battle between mind and matter, but a stripping away of connection to what becomes, to what we are, in a process that always unfolds beyond our conceptual grasp. What we are left with, perhaps, is the struggle to reconnect—to find a way to live in the tension between ordering and chaos, between the mind and its primordial other.