On texture and weight pt.2

When one is alone enough, one finally begins, again, to write. At the end of a dry and wordless spell lies the feeling of returning home after a long trip, being able to converse freely in one's native tongue - no longer having to take the same care with which one handles fragile tableware at someone else's dinner party in handling the most basic of expressions.

But speaking in a second language offers a kind of defense, that excuses ambiguity, convolution and other such obscuring elements of speech. A lowering of the listener's expectations that enables one to say: "Yes, well, perhaps I am not being entirely clear...but if you only understood my dialect,  I could paint it all so beautifully - as an artist in his element - and surely, then, you would understand."

How often one feels as a foreigner in another country like a locked chest of antiques - commonplace items, carried into another culture as the most exotic and mysterious of treasures. And again, as children - how we invent secret codes to encrypt our most private and hidden thoughts; we scrawl them across our diaries in invisible ink. How we mourn the great tragedy of translation - because that which cannot be translated is of the highest value, locked away in the vault of another language for safekeeping.

And we are all multi-lingualists in this sense - each of us operates in a multiverse of symbols; each set of meanings a language of its own. A language of thought, of emotion, and then of behaviour. A language of religion, of culture, of place. And we guard, with all our different modes of being, a single one that is no longer a collection of descriptors, but that described.

Grids upon grids, as Foucault describes, placed one atop the other over history, to provide us with new ways of knowing - and describing truth. Organising the world, delineating its boundaries and demarcations - yet it seems now, there is more to be known than ever before. I love thinking of the idea of the universe continually expanding through time and space, as if mockingly, ridiculing our attempts to contain it.

For now we see in a mirror dimly - awaiting what? The gathering of reflections into their very object, the subject itself. Symbols come boldly into their meanings. And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us... when the shifting shadows that herald an oncoming light are finally dispersed, scattered into the wind, when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away... when meaning arrives in the full force of its substance, rising through fissures to the surface in a tide - submerging description, language, forms in its course - sweeping over all things, and finally to carve, across the flat and formless ground, the shoreline of eternity.

On texture and weight, pt. 1

Do you feel it between your fingers?

The exquisiteness of life, stretched out before us in ripples, in an endless cascade of creases and folds, tumbling, one into the next. Life's abounding… is-ness as they say, for the lack of a more elegant expression. How dimensional it is; not in a physical sense, but in the variety of ways by which it can be measured, considered.

We live a textured existence. Bradbury writes, in Fahrenheit 451:

Do you know why books such as this are so important? Because they have quality. And what does the word quality mean? To me it means texture. This book has pores. It has features. This book can go under the microscope. You’d find life under the glass, streaming past in infinite profusion.

Life is details, whether captured in words, colours, or lines. Detail upon detail, wonder upon wonder. If a stage, how elaborate the production! How expansive each set, how intricate every act. A needless display, some might even call it indulgent. But somehow -

There is so much, there is not enough, there is so little 

Kundera's singular phrase "The Unbearable Lightness Of Being" captures, in one breath, this absurdity: The immense weight of the human experience in all its intensity (the pleasure, the pain) rests entirely on the fragile scaffolding of a scant existence.

How does anything hold?

On essentials

In these past few weeks, my train of thought has been tossed mercilessly between tracks by each new reading, conversation, encounter; veering off its initial course into novel terrain.

It began with the notion of inherency, and a consequent paradox - by which extrinsic measure do people use to ascertain intrinsic value? How have we come to hold belief in the intrinsic value of life (human or otherwise) - a concept so strange, so contrary to what the natural laws of survival dictate? To think, if something as basic as one's right to existence rests on one's individual 'fitness', we could hardly proffer the argument that life in all its forms - weak and strong, sick and well, young and old - is inherently worth preserving.

And next, an onslaught of anthropological concepts that brought the discussion into the realm of universals. Is what is intrinsic, intrinsic to all? Do all human cultures abide by the same basic rules (-assuming the universality of an internal system that guides individual behaviour)?  How do we free ourselves from the very biases that enable us to gather with our senses some symbolic understanding of the world around us? Impossible as an attempt to rid thought of language. 

First, despair. Realising one's necessary partiality, a handicap inextricable from our very nature - an inability to take things at face value, to see things for what they are. Second, hope. Relief at the inconsequentiality of our efforts to understand everything, believing that omniscience lies boundless, wide and deep and far beyond the most foreign of borders.

***

And I too wanted to be. That is all I wanted; and this is the last word. At the bottom of all these attempts which seemed without bounds, I find the same desire again: to drive existence out of me, to rid the passing moments of their fat, to twist them, dry them, purify myself, harden myself, to give back at last the sharp, precise sound of a saxophone note.

I cannot be sure what the author's (Sartre) intent was, but only of what it impressed upon me - that there is a superfluousness to life that detracts from what we feel to be essential - precious, pure and true. We pore through thick layers of styrofoam and bubble wrap, before finally arriving at the tiny weight, transparent as gold, encased within.

***

And again, it arose: the need to shed
To strip the skin of culture off its seed, each shred
To lay life bare, fresh, bruised and plain
To devour it whole: flesh and pulp,
kernel, shell and grain.

On reductionism

If minds are wholly dependent on brains, and brains on biochemistry, and biochemistry (in the long run) on the meaningless flux of the atoms, I cannot understand how the thought of those minds should have any more significance than the sound of the wind in the trees. And this is to me the final test. This is how I distinguish dreaming and waking. When I am awake I can, in some degree, account for and study my dream. The dragon that pursued me last night can be fitted into my waking world. I know that there are such things as dreams; I know that I had eaten an indigestible dinner; I know that a man of my reading might be expected to dream of dragons. But while in the nightmare I could not have fitted in my waking experience. The waking world is judged more real because it can thus contain the dreaming world; the dreaming world is judged less real because it cannot contain the waking one. For the same reason I am certain that in passing from the scientific points of view to the theological, I have passed from dream to waking. Christian theology can fit in science, art, morality, and the subChristian religions. The scientific point of view cannot fit in any of these things, not even science itself. I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.   

C.S. Lewis (1944). Is Theology Poetry?

On knowing and truth, pt. 2

In Notes from the Underground, Dostoyevsky remarks of our instinctive - and violent - aversion towards pure (scientific) objectivity:

And that is not all: even if man really were nothing but a piano-key, even if this were proved to him by natural science and mathematics, even then he would not become reasonable, but would purposely do something perverse out of simple ingratitude, simply to gain his point... I believe in it, I answer for it, for the whole work of man really seems to consist in nothing but proving to himself every minute that he is a man and not a piano-key! It may be at the cost of his skin, it may be by cannibalism! And this being so, can one help being tempted to rejoice that it has not yet come off, and that desire still depends on something we don't know?

One of my favourite bits from J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey goes:

“It was the worst of all in class, though,” she said with decision. “That was the worst. What happened was, I got the idea in my head – and I could not get it out – that college was just one more dopey, inane place in the world dedicated to piling up treasure on earth and everything. I mean treasure is treasure, for heaven’s sake. What’s the difference whether the treasure is money, or property, or even culture, or even just plain knowledge? It all seemed like exactly the same thing to me, if you take off the wrapping – and it still does! Sometimes I think that knowledge – when it’s knowledge for knowledge’s sake, anyway – is the worst of all. The least excusable, certainly.” 

Pilate said to him, “What is truth?”

Because truth, in its purest form, offends us. Its specificity startles us; it harbours an extreme devotion to itself - a degree of particularity unrivalled in all of nature. How can we know it? Surely in the face of such exceeding singularity we would cease to be individuals; we would be consumed whole, what would be left of us to call our own?

How narrow a way it seems from a distance! But if we dared approach it perhaps we would catch a glimpse of the broad expanse of path that lies just beyond its gate, stretching far and wide and deep into an infinite horizon (made up of many lines, all forming just one).

On knowing and truth, pt. 1

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I
 lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)
 - Sylvia Plath, Mad Girl's Love Song

Two things, or maybe three. How fragile our minds - how fragile our world, in which we experience only through our minds. How limited. How incapable of reaching that great height, from which we can know anything to be true - except through faith of some sort. A leap. A knowing beyond knowing.

And can even the truest skeptic live without belief in the possibility that there are things worth knowing that have yet to be known?

***

Started thinking deeper into the concept of objectivity upon encountering R.D. Laing's The Divided Selfn. Laing writes:

In contrast to the reputable 'objective' or 'scientific', we have the disreputable 'subjective', 'intuitive' or worst of all, 'mystical' It is interesting, for example that one frequently encounters 'merely' before subjective, whereas it is almost inconceivable to speak of anyone being 'merely' objective. 

The first definition of subjectivity I came across online was this:

existing in the mind; belonging to the thinking subject rather than to the object of thought.

But what, then, isn't subjective? If it is only through our mind that we perceive anything at all. If our very existence is a purely subjective one, if subjectivity is not a crutch but the crux of all experience - how can we lay claim to any form, shape or type of objectivity?

Again, Laing writes:

We all know from our personal experience that we can be ourselves only in and through our world and there is a sense in which 'our' world will die with us although 'the' world will go on without us.

And I cannot help but think: Perhaps one day we will really come to believe we know all the answers, all the explanations, all for the reasons for everything, and I will be able to explain everything away - to science, to reason, to the laws that govern nature - but then, who and what will be left in all the universe, to explain me? 

***

Because now, what does it mean to know anything? It seems that to lay claim to knowledge one has to either admit ignorance, or be found guilty of it.

But what about things that can be assessed objectively? Studied, measured, calculated, deduced. In the grand court of Reason, is everything false until proven true?

If you were to make the claim that objective knowledge - quantifiable knowledge - is the only knowledge worth knowing, what evidence would you call up to the stand? Even if one could acquire the dimensions of the universe or a formula to predict every possible trajectory of the human mind an objective case would not be made.

Maybe we all have a little more faith than we realise.

On wordlessness

"A person removed from his own room, almost without preparation and transition, and set upon the height of a great mountain range, would feel something of the sort: an unparalleled insecurity, an abandonment to something inexpressible would almost annihilate him."
- Rainer Maria Rilke, The Dragon Princess

As I wrestle now with words, straining inwards to reach adequate expression, in my native tongue, for these foreign symbols - I think now of all the thoughts in the world left latent, laid in crevices beneath the surface (as unformed as man first lay in the ground), of all the beautiful and brilliant sentiments that have only ever had substance in the mind of one; substance charged with a vigour that was never reciprocated by any other - no language, no form of agency, no outlet.

And thus contained, unexpressed, suppressed by the weight of their own immensity, made void, lost forever to a collective invisible consciousness - they created something else entirely; that which haunts - and yet, escapes - us: the inexplicable.

It collapses like a candle, folding into itself in the same way 

a starving man would eat himself alive 

and nothing would be accomplished.

- "Fragile", 14 June 2012

On narratives

Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see.
- C.S. Lewis

It's the anxiety of loose ends, the chaos of possibility in a universe with no beginning or end. Each wayward thread poses a threat, waiting to unravel that timeless tapestry that stretches as long and wide as human history, as high as human ambition. Every generation past has stitched itself in, securing its place in time and space. But where are we?

***

Nouwen notes that this generation is marked by a sense of historical dislocation - "a break in the sense of connection, which men have long felt with the vital and nourishing symbol of their cultural tradition; symbols revolving around family, idea systems, religion and the life-cycle in general."He writes:

Crucial for those who live in the modern age is the lack of a sense of continuity, which is so vital for a creative life. We find ourselves part of a non-history in which only the sharp moment of the here and now is valuable. For modern-age people life easily becomes a bow whose string is broken and from which no arrow can fly. In this dislocated state we become paralysed. Our reactions are not anxiety and joy, which were so much a part of human existence, but apathy and boredom. Only when we feel ourselves responsible for the future can we have hope or despair; but when we think of ourselves as the passive victims of an extremely complex technological bureaucracy, our motivation falters, and we start drifting from one moment to the next, making life a long row of random chained incidents and accidents.

Barring any notion of spirituality, John Berger makes an observation of "the world today" in his latest collection of writings:

Any sense of History, linking past and future, has been marginalised, if not eliminated. And so, people are suffering a sense of Historic loneliness. The French refer to those who are forced to live in the street as S.D.F. Sans Domicile Fixe. We are under a constant pressure to feel that we may have become the S. D. F. of History. There are no longer any acknowledge occasions for us to receive the dead and the unborn. There is each day's life, yet what surrounds it is a void. A void in which millions of us are today alone. And such solitude can transform Death into a companion.

***

Perhaps the root of our disillusionment is that we no longer subscribe to the concept of narrative. The idea of an underlying connection; a single thread that runs through a sequence of seemingly disparate events in our lives. The idea that we can find in real life the same elements we discover in literature - symbols, themes, motifs, the elements that bind, so artfully, every character and setting together into a coherent, continuous whole.

As long as there have been human beings, there have been stories - myths, legends, folktales - passed along from one generation to the next. People have always told stories because people are stories; all the moments in our lives are indisputably connected by one unifying fact - they happened to us.

A thought crosses my mind every once in a while - that sometimes we live our lives as if we have lived life a thousand times over. I think of it as a Many Lives Hypothesis - it posits that the connectedness of the world today has provided each of us access to more people - and insight into more lives - than ever before, and that this knowledge has dulled our sense of expectation towards what our own life holds for us.

Because what is the point of expecting anything from the future when it seems that every outcome has been exhausted, every trajectory anticipated? When someone is always one step ahead in the game, whatever you choose to play at; when what happens next is inevitable, predictable but above all, inexplicable... an order, yes - but without sense or logic; try as you may, there is no algorithm to be found.

And the what if no longer inspires us - each possibility only reminds us of the million other possibilities we could, or will miss (or have already missed) out on. The quote from that Jonathan Safran Foer book  - “Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living.” 

But when did we begin to forget that in the midst of so very many lives - lives past, lives present, lives that will be, could be, should be - each of us only has one - our own? And there is so much that remains unlived. It's a wonder wonder enough to last a lifetime.

***

A little while back I found myself asking a ten-year-old this: "If you could be any age in the world, what would it be?"

She thought for a moment, then told me quite curtly that she thinks there is no point in wanting to be any another age, because "then people would end up missing out the age they really were".