I am not religious, will never be. I recently finished reading Zealot (Reza Aslan) about the life of Jesus of Nazareth and enjoyed it (academically). Seems appropriate for this time of year.
But then religion and the negatives it can introduce brings to mind a quote from Age of Anger:
“Constant cautioned that ‘there is no limit to tyranny when it seeks to obtain the signs of consensus’.”
True of politics, but also of the opiate of the masses.
All day I struggled to stay awake, and now that it’s time to sleep, I’m struggling. It’s the confines of things – whether it’s a corporate structure, a deadline, a shirt buttoned all the way to the top – it’s all suffocating.
Is anything, though, more suffocating than misunderstandings and false assumptions? How can one possibly be expected to understand the full picture if she doesn’t have all the facts? If one has only half the story, and even that much possibly false, how can she act appropriately? Perhaps the answer is – never act at all.
“Marco Polo describes a bridge, stone by stone. “But which is the stone that supports the bridge?” Kublai Khan asks. “The bridge is not supported by one stone or another,” Marco answers, “but by the line of the arch that they form.” Kublai Khan remains silent, reflecting. Then he adds: “Why do you speak to me of the stones? It is only the arch that matters to me.” Polo answers: “Without stones there is no arch.”” –Invisible Cities, Calvino
In the absence of time to write something, I instead quote. Pessoa, of course:
“Metaphysical theories that can give us the momentary illusion that we’ve explained the unexplainable; moral theories that can fool us for an hour into thinking we finally know which of all the closed doors leads to virtue; political theories that convince us for a day that we’ve solved some problem, when there are no solvable problems except in mathematics … May our attitude towards life be summed up in this consciously futile activity, in this preoccupation that gives no pleasure but at least keeps us from feeling the presence of pain. There’s no better sign that a civilization has reached its height than the awareness, in its members, of the futility of all effort, given that we’re ruled by implacable laws, which nothing can repeal or obstruct. We may be slaves shackled to the whim of gods who are stronger than us, but they’re not any better, being subject – like us – to the iron hand of an abstract Fate, which is superior to justice and kindness, indifferent to good and evil.”
“The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd: the longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.”
“This is my morality, or metaphysics, or me. Passer-by of everything, even of my own soul, I belong to nothing, I desire nothing, I am nothing – just an abstract centre of impersonal sensations, a fallen sentient mirror reflecting the world’s diversity. I don’t know if I’m happy this way. Nor do I care.”
“Tocqueville captured the phenomenon of invisibly creeping despotism in atomized societies devoted to the pursuit of wealth when he wrote that people ‘in their intense and exclusive anxiety to make a fortune’ can ‘lose sight of the close connection that exists between the private fortune of each and the prosperity of all. It is not necessary to do violence to such a people in order to strip them of the rights they enjoy; they themselves willingly loosen their hold.’”
We might for some inexplicable and unreasonable reason (what else can we call it but a ‘reason’ even if it defies that very thing?) expect that the world, our quality of life – our own individually and that of each successive generation – will progressively improve. This is the lie we’re told/sold in at least American society, if not as overtly in others. And sometimes it turns out true. But the forecast isn’t true for everyone. This we know from the divisions we see played out in American society. And in all societies – modern and historic – the haves and have-nots, the with and without, the empowered and disenfranchised. None of this is hidden or difficult to see, but the label still reads: the world continues to get better; progress is on an endless march forward (whether “progress” means more liberal markets or universal prosperity/material betterment, eradication of the worst of the world’s diseases – its definition depends on to whom we pose the question, and even then does not have a simple answer. After all, for example, we might eradicate disease theoretically, patting ourselves on the backs about the triumph of science and ingenuity. But a drug company will come in and make the cure prohibitively expensive, so we have not made that much progress in reality).
These ideas come to the fore in many books I’ve read recently, most notably in Age of Anger (which I recommend) and the book about Boomers destroying everything. Things teeter on the brink on many fronts because people have been told that this label is true: “Freedom is all that matters – and by freedom, we mean the freedom to get rich.” And somehow, the have-have not dichotomy becomes entrenched because the masses of have-nots do not feel the same deprivation they should or the drive for equality. Instead they have been promised that there are lottery winners (whether literal or through hard work). Because they live in “freedom” (another word with complex meanings, all depending on whom you ask) – which in this case is another form of cage – they will swallow anything because there is a slight hope (certainly not expectation) of becoming wealthy, i.e. truly free.
In Gabor Maté’s book In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, which was about addiction, one of his addict patients said it in the most down-to-earth, distinct way possible: “Then you go to the office and you see a couple of dozen patients … and all your money goes to the bank at the end of that, and then you count up your shekels or your doubloons. At the end of the day, what have you done? You’ve collected the summation of what you think freedom is. You’re looking for security, and you think that will give you freedom. You collected a hundred shekels of gold, and to you this gold has the capacity of keeping you in a fancy house or maybe you can salt away another six weeks’ worth up and above what you already have in the bank. “But what are you looking for? What have you spent your whole day searching for? That same bit of freedom or satisfaction that I want; we just get it differently. What’s everybody chasing all the money for if not to get them something that will make them feel good for a while or make them feel they’re free? How are they freer than I am? “Everybody’s searching for that feeling of well-being, that greater happiness. But I’d rather be a dog out in the street than do what many people go through to find their summation of freedom.”
But how are we to define freedom, really? We have the version that society feeds and reinforces; our own innate need to fit in or make ourselves feel better (and how? Collecting money? Consuming? Doing drugs or drinking? Owning guns?). From where do we derive our conception of personal/individual autonomy, freedom and what that means and why it is important? Why do we place such an outsized emphasis on freedom – or the version of freedom painted-by-numbers for us in the societies in which we live? Are safety or community or compassion not equally important?
From Age of Anger of course Dostoevsky is cited again: “True socialism, which rested on spiritual self-sacrifice and moral community, could not be established in the West, for the ‘Occidental Nature’ had a fundamental design flaw: it lacked Fraternity. ‘You find there instead,’ Dostoevsky wrote: a principle of individualism, a principle of isolation, of intense self-preservation, of personal gain, of self-determination, of the I, of opposing this I to all nature and the rest of mankind as an independent autonomous principle entirely equal and equivalent to all that exists outside itself.”
For Pessoa, though, no, freedom actually equates to being free of people and needing them for anything. I relate to his feelings on the subject. I have worked to find freedom from having to co-exist (even if in a bigger sense, e.g. paying taxes and earning money, I do co-exist), and flexibility when I did have to co-exist. At the same time, it is not entirely clear that this ‘freedom’ is important, certainly not beyond the individual sense, and is probably not psychologically healthy either (like it or not, we as humans do need some kind of network and connection to survive, i.e. no man is an island): “Freedom is the possibility of isolation. You are free if you can withdraw from people, not having to seek them out for the sake of money, company, love, glory or curiosity, none of which can thrive in silence and solitude. If you can’t live alone, you were born a slave. You may have all the splendours of the mind and the soul, in which case you’re a noble slave, or an intelligent servant; you’re not free.”
“Slavery is the law of life, and it is the only law, for it must be observed: there is no revolt possible, no way to escape it. Some are born slaves, others become slaves, and still others are forced to accept slavery. Our fainthearted love of freedom — which we would reject as strange and unfamiliar, if it ever came to us — is proof of how ingrained our slavery is.”
“We squander our personalities in orgies of coexistence. Every spoken word double-crosses us. The only tolerable form of communication is the written word, since it isn’t a stone in a bridge between souls but a ray of light between stars.”
“Whenever I’ve tried to free my life from a set of the circumstances that continuously oppress it, I’ve been instantly surrounded by other circumstances of the same order, as if the inscrutable web of creation were irrevocably at odds with me. I yank from my neck a hand that was choking me, and I see that my own hand was holding a noose that fell around my neck as soon as I freed it from the stranger’s hand.”
How can there be this kind of false freedom when it really is a form of keeping people in line, enslaved to a system that pushes them down but teases/taunts them with the tantalizing idea that maybe they could be one of the few to reach the upper echelons? What does it say about a society whose values and education reinforce the idea that that is all that is worth striving for and that that is what truly constitutes freedom?
From Age of Anger:
“In Santayana’s view, most human beings, temperamentally unfit to run the race for wealth, suffered from impotent resentment, and even the few successful rich did not enjoy ‘moral security’ and ‘a happy freedom’. He left the United States for Europe in 1912, having concluded that ‘there is no country in which people live under more overpowering compulsions’. For the next four decades he continued to amplify his warnings that the worldwide dissemination of an individualist culture of competition and mimicry would eventually incite a ‘lava-wave of primitive blindness and violence’.”
“Modernization, mostly along capitalist lines, became the universalist creed that glorified the autonomous rights-bearing individual and hailed his rational choice-making capacity as freedom. Economic growth was posited as the end-all of political life and the chief marker of progress worldwide, not to mention the gateway to happiness. Communism was totalitarian. Ergo its ideological opponent, American liberalism, represented freedom, which in turn was best advanced by moneymaking.”
“Responding to Fukuyama’s thesis in 1989, Allan Bloom was full of foreboding about the gathering revolts against a world that ‘has been made safe for reason as understood by the market’, and ‘a global common market the only goal of which is to minister to men’s bodily needs and whims’.”
A society in which the bitterly competitive fire is stoked to create humans most inhumane?
“Rousseau warned, amour propre is doomed to be perpetually unsatisfied. Too commonplace and parasitic on fickle opinion, it nourishes in the soul a dislike of one’s own self while stoking impotent hatred of others; and amour propre can quickly degenerate into an aggressive drive, whereby an individual feels acknowledged only by being preferred over others, and by rejoicing in their abjection – in Gore Vidal’s pithy formulation, ‘It’s not enough to succeed. Others must fail.’”
“try to make sense of bewildering, and often painful, experiences by re-examining a divided modern world, this time from the perspective of those who came late to it, and felt, as many people do now, left, or pushed, behind.”
“Yet only on the rarest of occasions in recent decades has it been acknowledged that the history of modernization is largely one of carnage and bedlam rather than peaceful convergence, and that the politics of violence, hysteria and despair was by no means unique to Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy or Communist Russia.”
The questions – and answers – are tied up in language and its influence/power as well. The language of freedom and equality are an effective smokescreen to mask that there is no actual freedom or equality. In a sense, it’s a sleight of hand (or tongue, in this case), not unlike when US Republicans have recently insisted that all people will still have “access” to healthcare if Obamacare were repealed. Yes, they would be free like every other person in America to shell out a whole lot of money to buy the care or insurance that perhaps, under Obamacare, they could actually afford. They don’t tell you that by “gaining so much freedom”, you are also losing a lot of money – if you could even afford the care in the first place. Bernie Sanders crusaded around this tricky language in the aftermath of the 2016 US presidential election, reminding people that yes, “access to” something is not the same thing as actually being able to get, buy or use it.
“Four years before Marx and Engels published The Communist Manifesto, the German thinker Max Stirner argued in the equally incendiary The Ego and its Own that the impersonal rationality of power and government had disguised itself in the emollient language of freedom and equality, and the individual, ostensibly liberated from traditional bonds, had been freshly enslaved by the modern state. Bakunin, the forebear of today’s leaderless militants, spoke with glee of the ‘mysterious and terrible words’, Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, which portend ‘the complete annihilation’ of the ‘existing political and social world’.”
“His friend Herzen saw Europe’s new gods of wealth and power as inaugurating an era of mass illusion – and violent counter-attacks. Europe was fated to move, Tocqueville warned, to ‘democracy without limits’, but it was far from clear ‘whether we are going toward liberty or marching toward despotism, God alone knows precisely’.”
Does it go beyond just the language in which the concepts are couched? Are concepts now inextricably tied to other concepts to form a net in which we are completely tangled? That is, to be American is to be free? And yet “free” in that statement is in a constant state of redefinition, stretched and pulled by different groups (one is tempted to say the liberal and the conservative, but this is too simplistic. Possibly it is pulled by the haves and have-nots, but in those cases, it’s more like the haves are holding the have-nots in their hands and pulling them at both ends like … a taffy pull, manipulating, stretching and taking more and more from them).
“Presciently critiquing the neo-liberal conflation of free enterprise with freedom, Rousseau claimed that individual liberty was deeply menaced in a society driven by commerce, individual competitiveness and amour propre. Anticipating anti-globalization critics, he argued that finance money is ‘at once the weakest and most useless for the purpose of driving the political mechanism toward its goal, and the strongest and most reliable for the purpose of deflecting it from its course’. Liberty was best protected not by prosperity but the general equality of all subjects, both urban and rural, and balanced economic growth. Emphasizing national self-sufficiency, he also distrusted the great and opaque forces of international trade, especially the trade in luxuries.”
And what could be more true than these ideas, also fruits plucked from Age of Anger?
“Writing in the mid-nineteenth century, Kierkegaard doubted the then new ‘idea of sociality, of community’ promoted by journalism, and cautioned against the public opinion that rose from ‘a union of people who separately are weak, a union as unbeautiful and depraved as a child-marriage’. Early in the twentieth century, communications technology was still confined to the telegraph, the telephone and the cinema; but Max Weber warned that, combined with the pressure of work and opaque political and economic forces, it would push modern individuals away from public life and into a ‘subjectivist culture’ – or what he called ‘sterile excitation’. In 1969, Marshall McLuhan claimed that the era of literacy had ended with the advent of radio and television; their multi-sensory experience in a ‘global village’ had returned humankind to tribal structures of feeling and ‘we begin again to live a myth’. Today’s colossal exodus of human lives into cyberspace is even more dramatically transforming old notions of time, space, knowledge, values, identities and social relations.”
“In his prescient critique of the neo-liberal notion of individual freedom, Rousseau had argued that human beings live neither for themselves nor for their country in a commercial society where social value is modelled on monetary value; they live for the satisfaction of their vanity, or amour propre: the desire and need to secure recognition from others, to be esteemed by them as much as one esteems oneself. But, as Kierkegaard pointed out, the seeker of individual freedom must ‘break out of the prison in which his own reflection holds him’, and then out of ‘the vast penitentiary built by the reflection of his associates’. He absolutely won’t find freedom in the confining fun-house mirrors of Facebook and Twitter. For the vast prison of seductive images does not heal the perennially itchy and compulsively scratched wounds of amour propre. On the contrary: even the most festive spirit of communality disguises the competitiveness and envy provoked by constant exposure to other people’s success and well-being.”
Photo: Yes, should have paid attention to/read the label before purchasing online. A 1.5 kg package of tea is probably a bit too much.
“The cause of my profound sense of incompatibility with others is, I believe, that most people think with their feelings, whereas I feel with my thoughts. For the ordinary man, to feel is to live, and to think is to know how to live. For me, to think is to live, and to feel is merely food for thought.” –Fernando Pessoa
Guests in town, unable to write anything too thoughtful but realized I never posted a whole thing about Fernando Pessoa despite constantly citing him.
Unfinished Pessoa: “The monotony of everything is merely the monotony of myself”
No plot, unfinished, beautiful observations, ramblings and self-conscious passages filled with self-doubt and aching humanity. Even unfinished and unpolished, the aimlessness of his work strikes a chord. I’ve never found anything that amounts to the internal ramblings of an introvert to be particularly readable, but in Pessoa, I’ve found the exception.
Has anything come so close to describing such a range of human feelings – the deepest sense of understanding the world and its nothingness and our nothingness within it at the same time as embracing a strange, but sad, soulfulness? (He might disagree, were he able.) Pessoa’s unfinished and scattered The Book of Disquiet reminded me of myself and my own scattered thinking, reminded me so much of others and their even more scattered thinking (and battles with self-esteem despite the bulwark of their formidable intellects). The sense of inner disquiet, the sense of always wanting to flee but not knowing from what (Anna Swir’s – paraphrasing here – “I envy you – you can leave me any time but I can’t leave myself):
“…envy everybody for not being me. Since this always seemed to me like the most impossible of all impossibilities, it’s what I yearned for every day, and despaired of in every sad moment.” (Again like Swir: you are not only not me – you can also leave me!)
But also knowing leaving yourself is futile because no place in the world will be able to give you what your own soul cannot:
“What can China give me that my soul hasn’t already given me? And if my soul can’t give it to me, how will China give it to me? For it’s with my soul that I’ll see China, if I ever see it. I could go and seek riches in the Orient, but not the riches of the soul, because I am my soul’s riches, and I am where I am, with or without the Orient. Travel is for those who cannot feel.”
“There are basically only two things in our earthly experience: the universal and the particular. To describe the universal is to describe what is common to all human souls and to all human experience”
“Eternal tourists of ourselves, there is no landscape but what we are. We possess nothing, for we don’t even possess ourselves. We have nothing because we are nothing. What hand will I reach out, and to what universe? The universe isn’t mine: it’s me.”
He observes; he complains/criticizes; he lets his dreaming soar but reins it in, finding it tiresome; he complains some more – strikingly bold in his prose but timid in existing in the world outside his own mind and words. Everyone else is stupid but happy, and he can’t help but revile and envy it at once while also knowing this is the multiplicity of one’s own being:
“Only one thing astonishes me more than the stupidity with which most people live their lives, and that’s the intelligence of this stupidity.” “Wise is the man who monotonizes his existence, for then each minor incident seems a marvel.”
“Monotonizing existence, so that it won’t be monotonous. Making daily life anodyne, so that the littlest thing will amuse.”
“Each of us is several, is many, is a profusion of selves. So that the self who disdains his surroundings is not the same as the self who suffers or takes joy in them. In the vast colony of our being there are many species of people who think and feel in different ways.”
“To live is to crochet according to a pattern we were given. But while doing it the mind is at liberty, and all prince charmings can stroll in their parks between one and another plunge of the hooked ivory needle. Needlework of things … Intervals … Nothing …”
“Life’s basic malady, that of being conscious, enters my body and makes me uneasy. To have no islands where those of us who are uncomfortable could go, no ancient garden paths reserved for those who’ve retreated into dreaming! To have to live and to act, however little; to have to physically touch because there are other, equally real people in life!”
“The intensity of my sensations has always been less than the intensity of my awareness of them. I’ve always suffered more from my consciousness that I was suffering than from the suffering of which I was conscious.”
Pessoa makes statements that our own ‘shadow selves’ might utter with some shame, and never in the wrong company, but he is unapologetic:
“I see humanity as merely one of Nature’s latest schools of decorative painting. I don’t distinguish in any fundamental way between a man and a tree, and I naturally prefer whichever is more decorative, whichever interests my thinking eyes. If the tree is more interesting to me than the man, I’m sorrier to see the tree felled than to see the man die. There are departing sunsets that grieve me more than the deaths of children. If I’m unfeeling, it’s so that I can feel.”
These words, devoid of sentimentality, nevertheless collide directly with my recent readings on creating one’s own reality, thoughts being things, the oneness of everything. How, indeed, is the tree – or the loss of it – any different from the loss of the man? Would we be somehow poorer for, say, wishing a swift death or karmic justice on American frat boys visiting Mexico chanting, “Build that wall!” while standing on the Mexican side, soaking in the Mexican sun and hospitality? (I realize I bring more ire to this argument than Pessoa’s dispassionate expression of preference. But, in relating this tale to someone, I offered similar disenchanted but detached twinned apathy-hope that these frat-asses might ‘disappear’ in Mexico. Can you be apathetic and hopeful at the same time?)
“Life is whatever we conceive it to be. For the farmer who considers his field to be everything, the field is an empire. For a Caesar whose empire is still not enough, the empire is a field.”
“How many Caesars I’ve been, but not the real ones. I’ve been truly imperial while dreaming, and that’s why I’ve never been anything.”
“Expectations carry the day, causing us to ignore contradictory data. We speak in conversations in incomplete thoughts and sentences but we do not perceive it that way. Oral conversation is full of holes, but we don’t hear it that way. If we did, it would be quite disruptive. It is usually efficient to perceive in terms of our expectations. On the other hand, it disguises just how much we actively share what we perceive to fit our image of what is there to be perceived.” – Awakening Your Psychic Powers
I think (and write) a lot about the concept of expectation – but what exactly is it?
We all seem to have an understanding of what ‘expectation’ means. We expect something to happen, to receive something, and there is a level of trust implied in that expectation because, as I have written elsewhere, expectation is on one end of the spectrum and hope is on the other. On both ends, some action or object is ‘promised’ – it’s just that with expectation, we have a stronger sense or assumption, or trust, that we will experience or receive the promised thing. With hope, it’s more distant, just a possibility, and often much more unrealistic. Is that how everyone perceives these concepts? Is expectation always in the “likely, unless…” (sometimes with caveats) column while hope resides usually in the “unlikely” column?
Sometimes it’s practical: things go as expected… until they don’t. And you wonder why. Promise theory aims to get to the root of some of these issues. Even if it won’t solve everything, it is an interesting enough concept to delve into briefly (with an handy animated video, no less!):
“No matter how good the plans or how detailed the instructions our expectations about the world have limitations. Our information is incomplete.
One answer to the question is that the world has both remarkable predictability but also maddening uncertainty. But that’s not helpful.”
Can we immunize against uncertainty?
From Calvino’s Invisible Cities: ““I speak and speak,” Marco says, “but the listener retains only the words he is expecting. The description of the world to which you lend a benevolent ear is one thing; the description that will go the rounds of the groups of stevedores and gondoliers on the street outside my house the day of my return is another; and yet another, that which I might dictate late in life, if I were taken prisoner by Genoese pirates and put in irons in the same cell with a writer of adventure stories. It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear.”” “At times I feel your voice is reaching me from far away, while I am prisoner of a gaudy and unlivable present, when all forms of human society have reached an extreme of their cycle and there is no imagining what new forms they may assume. And I hear, from your voice, the invisible reasons which make cities live, through which perhaps, once dead, they will come to life again.”
It’s funny when you’re immersed in something, especially with another person, and when something changes, that other person – almost like an amnesiac, or a cold operator who shuts everything down with emotionless precision, now outside the sphere of shared feeling or experience, forgets or misplaces what the connection once (possibly only in a limited or illusory way) offered to both people. Or when you are part of a project or a job or any activity. Expectation boils down to – to be successful – a give and take.
But failing that, in essence, we can always expect inconsistency, a lack of transparency and, most of all, contradictions, particularly where people and feeling are involved.
Is anyone better at juxtaposing the contradictions and our propensity for fooling ourselves than Pessoa? At our expectation and desire for the new but then being exhausted and annoyed by having to actually deal with the details and complications of the new?
“I reject real life for being a condemnation; I reject dreaming for being an easy way out. But my real life couldn’t be more banal and contemptible, and my dream life couldn’t be more constant and intense.”
“This is true in the whole gamut of love. In sexual love we seek our own pleasure via another body. In non-sexual love, we seek our own pleasure via our own idea. The masturbator may be abject, but in point of fact he’s the perfect logical expression of the lover. He’s the only one who doesn’t feign and doesn’t fool himself. The relations between one soul and another, expressed through such uncertain and variable things as shared words and proffered gestures, are strangely complex. The very act of meeting each other is a non-meeting. Two people say ‘I love you’ or mutually think it and feel it, and each has in mind a different idea, a different life, perhaps even a different colour or fragrance, in the abstract sum of impressions that constitute the soul’s activity.”
“The tedium of the forever new, the tedium of discovering – behind the specious differences we see in things and ideas – the unrelenting sameness of everything…” “…the stagnation of everything that lives just because it moves…”
“To love is to tire of being alone; it is therefore a cowardice, a betrayal of ourselves. (It’s exceedingly important that we not love).” Yes, even within ourselves. We long for love, sometimes to not be alone, but at the same time, feel as though that longing is a betrayal or that we have succumbed to a great weakness. (See the poem “Longing is the betrayal of oneself…” by Agneta Ara for a more poetic take…)
“this syndrome is a war that nearly every woman faces every day, a war within herself too, a belief in her superfluity, an invitation to silence…” –Men Explain Things to Me
We can also – almost always – expect mansplaining and sexism. It’s almost always a given, unintentional or overt. Rebecca Solnit has published two whole collections of essays on how half the world’s population expects the worst – expects to be silenced or talked over or had its concerns ignored, at best, or expects to be raped or killed, at worst.
In Solnit’s Men Explain Things to Me, she pretty much hits all the nails right on the head:
“Yes, people of both genders pop up at events to hold forth on irrelevant things and conspiracy theories, but the out-and-out confrontational confidence of the totally ignorant is, in my experience, gendered. Men explain things to me, and other women, whether or not they know what they’re talking about. Some men.”
“…billions of women must be out there on this seven-billion-person planet being told that they are not reliable witnesses to their own lives, that the truth is not their property, now or ever.” “…And no man has ever apologized for explaining, wrongly, things that I know and they don’t.” “…Dude, if you’re reading this, you’re a carbuncle on the face of humanity and an obstacle to civilization. Feel the shame.” (Maybe I fell in love a little bit with this statement because I love starting statements with “dude” when I am at-the-end-of-my-rope frustrated and irritated.
“Think of how much more time and energy we would have to focus on other things that matter if we weren’t so busy surviving.”
Perhaps the remarkable thing about Solnit and her writing is that, despite describing the condition of – and expectation(s) – of, for and by women in society, she nevertheless explores the opposite end of the spectrum: hope. And why? Because, back to the principles of the aforementioned promise theory, of uncertainty:
“To me, the grounds for hope are simply that we don’t know what will happen next, and that the unlikely and the unimaginable transpire quite regularly. And that the unofficial history of the world shows that dedicated individuals and popular movements can shape history and have, though how and when we might win and how long it takes is not predictable. Despair is a form of certainty, certainty that the future will be a lot like the present or will decline from it; despair is a confident memory of the future, in Gonzalez’s resonant phrase. Optimism is similarly confident about what will happen. Both are grounds for not acting. Hope can be the knowledge that we don’t have that memory and that reality doesn’t necessarily match our plans; hope like creative ability can come from what the Romantic poet John Keats called Negative Capability.”
It is not blind hope, though. It, too, is informed by experience – the times we have ignored logic or signs to succumb to seeing only the reality we wanted – or expected – but if we were to marry the two, could we overcome the stumbling block of the ‘plan’ we can’t seem to abandon?:
“As I began writing this essay, I picked up a book on wilderness survival by Laurence Gonzalez and found in it this telling sentence: “The plan, a memory of the future, tries on reality to see if it fits.” His point is that when the two seem incompatible we often hang onto the plan, ignore the warnings reality offers us, and so plunge into trouble. Afraid of the darkness of the unknown, the spaces in which we see only dimly, we often choose the darkness of closed eyes, of obliviousness.”
“We are by nature optimists, if optimism means that we believe we see the world as it is. And under the influence of a plan, it’s easy to see what we want to see.”
We expect death, but we hope it comes for us later, much later. But do we know what to expect within death? Is it, as I have asked before, just an expanse of nothingness forever?
What we do know, as William Empson writes in “Ignorance of Death“: death is “the trigger of the literary man’s biggest gun”. Too true – pondering its manifestations and meanings runs through everything. And yet, as Empson also wisely states, “Otherwise I feel very blank upon this topic,/And think that though important, and proper for anyone to bring up,/It is one that most people should be prepared to be blank upon.”
In Slaughterhouse Five it is: “At that moment, Billy’s high forehead is in the cross hairs of a high-powered laser gun. It is aimed at hm from the darkened press box. In the next moment, Billy Pilgrim is dead. So it goes.
So Billy experiences death for a while. It is simply violet light and a hum. There isn’t anybody else there. Not even Billy Pilgrim is there.”
In Calvino’s Invisible Cities: “I thought: “Perhaps Adelma is the city where you arrive dying and where each finds again the people he has known. This means I, too, am dead.” And I also thought: “This means the beyond is not happy.””
In Pessoa: “I don’t mean the mystery of death, which I can’t begin to fathom, but the physical sensation of ceasing to live. Humanity is afraid of death, but indecisively. The normal man makes a good soldier in combat; the normal man, when sick or old, rarely looks with horror at the abyss of nothing, though he admits its nothingness. This is because he lacks imagination. And nothing is less worthy of a thinking man than to see death as a slumber. Why a slumber, if death doesn’t resemble sleep? Basic to sleep is the fact we wake up from it, as we presumably do not from death. If death resembles sleep, we should suppose that we wake up from it, but this is not what the normal man imagines; he imagines death as a slumber no one wakes up from, which means nothing. Death doesn’t resemble slumber, I said, since in slumber one is alive and sleeping, and I don’t know how death can resemble anything at all for us, since we have no experience of it, nor anything to compare it to.”
Also, even one of the new-age psychic books suggests that meditation is as close to near-death experience as we can get – makes me think of my questions on this very topic earlier.
Maybe we don’t always have expectations – penis size, for example, is apparently a crapshoot. One can hope, of course, but pop culture will caution about expectation in either direction.
Vonnegut’s preternatural obsession with cocks and their sizes (appearing in both Slaughterhouse and in Breakfast of Champions) is another reflection on how our society prioritizes and values this all-important fact. Size matters, even when this particular size is confidential and invisible. He has just made it visible.
From Slaughterhouse: “Montana was naked, and so was Billy, of course. He had a tremendous wang, incidentally. You never know who’ll get one.”
No, in fact you just never know… until you know, that is. But you really cannot have any expectations in this department. In Breakfast, there are stats provided about multiple characters on these matters.
And then there is Lars von Trier, famously bizarre film director, who claimed that actor Willem Dafoe had a “confusingly large” member, which called for a “stunt cock” in Antichrist. (And this becomes slightly more confusing for me, reflecting on watching The Last Temptation of Christ and recently wrapping up my reading of Reza Aslan’s book Zealot about Jesus of Nazareth. By the way, even Aslan refers back to Dostoevsky when it comes to faith and religion – does anyone not fall back on Dostoevsky?! Hard to reconcile it all somehow.)
Oh, and then there are always the poor micropenises.
“To read is to dream, guided by someone else’s hand. To read carelessly and distractedly is to let go of that hand. Superficial erudition is the only method for reading well and being profound.” – Fernando Pessoa
An unseen hand (not Adam Smith’s invisible one) guides my reading choices from one thing to the next and each is a link to a mighty, unbroken, infinite chain – coincidental mentions of concepts I had just been contemplating. Thinking and writing obsessively about mirrors and suddenly I decide, “Now is the right time to read Vonnegut” – and woven throughout is the concept of mirrors as “leaks” – “holes between two universes”. But even in the book I improbably read on teeth, dentistry and oral health, what springs off the page? “A “photograph is more than a mirror. In the face of mortality, it offers hope for a permanent self.” Or in a contemporary Japanese-German short story by Yoko Tawada:
“Eighty percent of the human body is made of water, so it isn’t surprising that one sees a different face in the mirror each morning. The skin of the forehead and cheeks changes shape from moment to moment like the mud of a swamp, shifting with the movements of the water below and the footsteps of the people walking above it. I had hung a framed photograph of myself beside the mirror. The first thing I would do when I got up was to compare my reflection with the photograph, checking for discrepancies which I then corrected with makeup.”
And perhaps more deeply than mere reflections in a mirror, reading Vonnegut’s work and rereading Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, their warnings and observations about American and/or totalitarian societies provide obvious parallels:
“It was after the catastrophe, when they shot the president and machine-gunned the congress and the army declared a state of emergency. They blamed it on the Islamic fanatics, at the time.
Keep calm, they said on television. Everything is under control.” -from The Handmaid’s Tale
“Seems like the only kind of job an American can get these days is committing suicide in some way.” – from Breakfast of Champions
“America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves. … They mock themselves and glorify their betters. The meanest eating or drinking establishment, owned by a man who is himself poor, is very likely to have a sign on its wall asking this cruel question: ‘If you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?’ There will also be an American flag no larger than a child’s hand – glued to a lollipop stick and flying from the cash register.” – from Slaughterhouse Five
At no time is this more timely – in these works of fiction, or as a red thread sewn through much of modern non-fiction, such as other books I’ve recently read, such as the incisive Age of Anger, White Trash, Teeth and even the books on addiction.
Other parallels are not as obvious – in Atwood there are the “Marthas”, ominous-sounding household servants, and in Breakfast of Champions, “Marthas” are large designed-for-disaster buses converted into ambulances.
It fascinates me to no end that despite dipping into and reading from the broadest range of disciplines, there are connections between all of them: Virtually everything can swing back around to this perverted idea of uninterrupted “progress” and the selfish, perverted definitions society gives to the word “progress” – in the individualism described in Age of Anger, embodied by the Boomers, leading to the hungry ghosts and spiritual emptiness Gabor Maté discusses and diagnoses. And then the effects – ranging from the dismal and often fatal results of the healthcare and dental care system in the US as described in Teeth, to the “long-term losers” described in Age of Anger, such as the degradation of any hope for a country like Congo (about which I also recently read a book): “In Dostoyevsky’s view, the cost of such splendour and magnificence as displayed at the Crystal Palace was a society dominated by the war of all against all, in which most people were condemned to be losers.”
None of these overlaps should be a surprise. It should also not be a surprise that Dostoevsky is cited in almost every book I have read no matter what discipline, time period in which it was written or what genre, fiction or non-fiction. Dr Gabor Maté quotes Dostoevsky in his book on addiction; Dostoevsky figures prominently, as quoted above, in Age of Anger. And even in Vonnegut.
“Rosewater said an interesting thing to Billy one time about a book that wasn’t science fiction. He said that everything there was to know about life was in The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky. “But that isn’t enough any more,” said Rosewater.
Seeing and making the connections is gratifying, but much like an alcoholic seeking long-term sobriety, just going to meetings (or in this case connecting the dots) is hardly enough. The addict needs to commit to engage with all the steps to make progress, and the reader must start to process and form her own ideas about the connections identified.
“The teeth and back reject…” -Marge Piercy
For much of my life I’ve struggled with the teeth – and these last days have been hobbling along like an 85-year-old lady with a back ‘disturbance’, so the quotation feels apt. This is what happens when you push too hard.
Nerding out, as I do, as soon as I read a review of the book Teeth: The Story of Beauty, Inequality and the Struggle for Oral Health in America, I knew I had to read it immediately. God knows why. Weird things fascinate me, and maybe it’s not true to say that I “nerd out” sometimes. I am, let’s face it, a full-time nerd.
I get fired up about reading the most random of things – this time about teeth and the history of dental care and dentistry: everything from the obsession with the cosmetic aspects of teeth (which is treated at length in the book, but about which I choose not to focus here) to the pain, suffering and real, life-threatening medical emergencies that can occur when teeth are not cared for (and a system that isn’t designed to care for the majority of people and their teeth).
What does it say that this book actually made me cry? That a child’s dental health (or any person’s really) is able to reach such a state of total breakdown that it is his final frontier. Once teeth are beyond all help, the body itself slips toward mortality – that’s too much for my emotional parts to process. The story of 12-year-old Deamonte Driver, a Maryland boy who died of a systemic infection caused by one decaying tooth was heartbreaking and not at all unique.
Not to add that America, with its fragmented health or dental care systems, which are – as the book explores – completely separate, the idea of preventive care, while trotted out in marketing and ad efforts for toothpaste, isn’t taken very seriously. (“Parents need to teach their children: “Your teeth are pearls. You should keep them,” she said.“) And analyses of the total cost involved (not even looking at the tragic loss of life) balance an 80 USD tooth extraction against the estimated 250,000 USD that Driver’s emergent medical condition, surgical procedures and hospitalizations ended up costing. Driver might have been saved had the labyrinthine system, leading his mother around in circles but going nowhere but an unnecessary and excruciating death, had more transparency or advocates in it.
“The rate of dental suffering is a grim kind of economic indicator.”
It’s complex. How did the human body and its (medical) treatment become completely disconnected from the treatment of the mouth and teeth, moving further away from any notion of “holistic treatment”? The book highlights, for example, the squeamishness that even seasoned combat and trauma physicians feel when it comes to extracting a rotten tooth from a patient who comes to the ER in the absence of some other form of treatment or pain relief. The theory behind this is that perhaps working with teeth is just too personal.
None of it is new. The teeth tell a story, both an evolutionary and individual history. And can erupt in the pressure of the kind of pain and suffering that can scarcely be put into words.
“The teeth flame out when they die. That is a very old kind of pain. The human fossil record bears mute testimony.“
“At some moments, he said the pain was so deep it became like a partner. “Really the pain almost feels good after a while*. The medulla takes over and you waltz through it.” At other times, he said he was its slave. “I’m in a lot of pain but I can’t do anything about it,” he said. “I don’t beg, borrow, or steal. Shoot me in the head, please. It would be a lot easier if you put me out of my misery.””
*As I always say, there is a poem or song for everything. PK Page writes in her poem “Suffering”:
“But
suffering is sweeter yet.
That dark embrace – that birthmark,
birthright, even.
Yours forever
ready to be conjured up –
tongue in the sore tooth, fingertip
pressed to the bandaged cut
and mind returning to it over and over.Best friend, bestower of feeling
Status-giver.
Something to suck at like a stone.
One’s own. One’s owner.
…One’s almost lover.”
Reading such an extensive diatribe against the Baby Boomers, and daily hearing and seeing the battle lines drawn between entrenched Boomers and Millennials trying to gain a foothold, I have wondered where the comparatively ‘diminutive’ middle child, Generation X, fits into this fraught landscape. A negotiator? Invisible as always? Luckily I am not the only one asking the question.
Apart from asking the questions about intergenerational politics and warfare, it’s interesting to consider that Gen X is the last generation with active memory of a pre-digital world, when the “looking up” mentioned below, as the writer meant, looking at the world and people around you, face to face and eye to eye. Or meant “looking up” in the phone book or library card catalog. And hooking up? Well, there were no apps for that. (And oddly now that we have apps to make ‘hooking up’ easier, there seem to be fewer real connections than ever.)
“We all need to remember what was important in the pre-digital world, and before the toxic smartphone culture. I’m as guilty as anyone of that, it’s alluring and addictive, but it’s important to look up.”
Douglas Coupland, who coined the term “Generation X”, discussed this point in the article cited above:
“Though the fact that Gen X straddles the analogue and digital eras is, he says: ‘A sacred trust. Once we go, there’ll be no living memory of the analogue era.’
So does he think that algorithmic culture has surpassed or will surpass human intuition? ‘Actually, yes. I know you’re supposed to say ‘no’ and cheer, ‘Yay humanity!’ But intuition is doomed.'”
“He imagined neurons as protagonists in an intense cerebral drama. Their fibers “groped to find another.” Their aching contacts became “protoplasmic kisses”—“the final ecstasy of an epic love story.””
How beautiful is this? And how timely, given how the US government wants to cut all funding to the arts. But literature and new ways of seeing and imagining drives innovation in all kinds of disciplines. How else to untether our thinking and the well-worn tracks and near-brainwashing we get in formal schooling? Drawing from as broad a range as possible engenders new ways of seeing, being and realizing.
Santiago Ramón y Cajal, “the father of modern neuroscience”, defied the punishments of his strict, scientific father to devour innumerable works of fiction – all of which eventually informed his work: “Reading novels primed his mind to explore more invisible realms.” Benjamin Ehrlich’s article in The Paris Review opens the door to this remarkable story as a kind of introduction to Ehrlich’s book, The Dreams of Santiago Ramón y Cajal. (I haven’t read it yet.)
“Though it had emerged decades earlier, cell theory was revolutionizing—or scandalizing—the field then. Reading about it, Cajal encountered literary metaphors that drew him in, such as the famous line from the German pathologist Rudolf Virchow: “The body is a state in which every cell is a citizen.” Cajal’s first look through a microscope confirmed this idea, showing him, in his own words, “captivating scenes from life of the infinitely small.” For twenty continuous hours—or so he claimed—he watched the movement of a leucocyte away from a capillary, akin, in his vivid imagination, to high-stakes escape. He even wrote and illustrated a novel about a miniature man—about the size of a cell—traveling through bodies of gargantuan beings on Jupiter.”
Photo (c) 2011 Anders Sandberg used under Creative Commons license.