Mid-term Pensivity
So I’m approaching midterms in my first semester as a graduate student, and I thought I’d take a little time to reflect on what the experience has been like so far (the psychoanalytically oriented might sense a certain desperate displacement of my creative energy into a less academic, and therefore less anxiety-provoking medium 
). Possibly the strangest and best thing about the experience is that I have entered the program as a ‘normal’—that is, nobody’s aware, at this time, of my history or of the book I’ve written. I haven’t withheld this information in an attempt to hide a part of who I am, or where I’ve come from, but just to prove to myself and to others that I can succeed on the same terms as everyone else. If I were experiencing significant anxiety or a return of symptoms I would, of course, discuss things openly with my professors, but so far it hasn’t seemed necessary. Nobody likes to be average, increasingly in the years since my hospitalizations, I’ve felt the need to define myself based on my achievements instead of my sickness. As proud as I am to have written my memoir, and had it published, I can never escape the fact that its foundation is illness—transformed, yes, but still a sublimation of disease. Arguably this alienation is the foundation of art, or at least, a certain type of art—but it’s only now that I’m in graduate school, writing papers and giving presentations and getting to know my cohort that I begin to feel whole as a person, motivated by curiosity and interest in others, rather than as a smoldering, damaged ego trying to repair itself with pretty words.
I’ve also started to accept the fact that I belong here. Initially I was nervous, thinking myself a kind of imposter—surely someone who’s actually been psychotic has no place as a clinician, right? But reading more on the history of psychology, it becomes clear that the field has been full of nutty and eccentric people from the beginning, so it’s ridiculous to exclude myself on that basis. Figures no less significant than Rollo May, founder of existential psychology, and C.G. Jung, father of analytic psychology, have suffered fearsome breaks with reality.
I suppose it will happen soon enough, but I can’t begin to imagine how my professors and fellow students would react if they knew. Respect? Fear? Disgust? Thus far I’ve seen all these reactions in people who’ve read my book [seen my soul], sometimes simultaneously. But whatever happens, I have come to believe in the last few months that I do have the capacity to help others, that I’m not damaged beyond repair, and that I am not as much of an aberration as I once believed. And in the end it’s only myself that I will have to turn to for judgment or affirmation, as tempting as it would be to seek it out in the eyes of others. For now, I can only do my best and try to learn—which at the moment, unfortunately, means memorizing the foundations of psychoanalysis, psychodynamic theory, existential psychology, humanistic psychology, Gestalt therapy, exposure therapy, and behaviorism well enough to have something clever to say to my midterm blue-book next Tuesday. eep!
So it’s the middle of September–how did that happen? I have been M.I.A. for the past month because I’ve just started my Master’s program in Clinical Psychology. I’ll write more about that soon, but for now, here is an article that I wrote for Counselling Resources on the topic of creativity and mental illness:
Aside from that, the only other thing I have to say is that every time I move, it makes me appreciate the value of Zen minimalism. Nothing like hauling boxes of books up two flights of stairs to make me wonder whether I really need to own the entire Harry Potter series or whether a visit to the library would suffice if I ever have a desire to re-read them. At least I bit the bullet and donated most of my CDs to the Salvation Army because everything’s on my iPod now. Of course, while I was there I bought this awesome Charlie the Unicorn t-shirt, a vintage zebra-stripe jacket, and like a million other articles of clothing I don’t need, so the net gain in stuff made that a fairly counterproductive trip–oh well!
Arcadia
Arcadia
Lessons from the New England woods—
You are never alone, if beetles count; you are not the center of anything.
There is still senseless death in Eden, but it all returns to earth in the end.
Ants build colonies in amber beer bottles, and these become poems,
and eventually the poet is eaten by ants, and a tree grows in that place.
Once the red dust settles, the mind is still.
Owls are: omens of death in some cultures, of birth in others;
people’s souls transmigrate into fungi if they should learn patience,
or gnats if impermanence escapes them.
Up close, you can see what hard lives the deer have had,
all ticks and scars. They bound away, and they are once more idyllic
silhouettes in the primordial dawn.
Out here, I am not sick in any way that matters;
everything that has breath in it still, is alive. Nothing is wasted.
Words words words
A brief post, but: My day started out really sucking. I accomplished almost nothing, and mostly lay around questioning all the things I had previously accomplished. Even things that ought to be unabashedly good–a publisher interested in seeing a revision of my novel, people writing to me about my book, seemed only to pile on the pressure until, if possible, I became even more of an inert blob than before. I decided that I hate writing and would probably never do it again except when absolutely necessary for my survival, e.g. replying to emails, the occasional book review, a Facebook status update or two.
Then I sighed and had a cup of tea and wrote a poem and a new first chapter for my old novel.
That’s the problem with being a writer…even if the net effect of your efforts is more stress than catharsis, you just can’t stop. It’s not surprising to me that many people who identify as writers also have some kind of mental illness or another. There’s a morbid, obsessive quality to the act itself; you’re compelled to shut yourself away from life for long intervals, you start to see life and people as things to be put in novels rather than as, well, things and people. I’m sure there are happy writers out there, but I haven’t met many of them. It seems to be the process by which neurotic people sublimate their introversion and hypersensitivity into something positive.
There are times when I thought I’d be happier if I stopped writing for creative purposes. In particular, when I started reading more about Buddhism. Meditation is supposedly the best thing ever for personal wellness, and it’s kind of the opposite of writing. It’s the process of emptying your mind of all thoughts, language, and associations. I’ve never been able to meditate well, despite a few (okay, not that many) earnest attempts, and I think the reason is because I’ve relied on language so much to filter my experience. Ever since I was a kid, whenever I’ve been frightened or overwhelmed by any strong emotion, I’ve always started up a running third-person commentary in my head…I remember doing it even before I could write.
In fact, one of my earliest memories is of me at dinner with my parents and I’m translating the whole experience into prose in my mind, e.g., “She waited impatiently for her drink, and was bitterly disappointed when the color-change bendy straw proved to be orange, rather than the blue that would complete her collection.” Okay, so I’m embellishing a little, but you get the picture. I’m not sure if it’s because I was read to so much as a kid or what, but I was always hyper-lexical, although I was fairly shy so most people didn’t it. Actually, I think it’s one of the reasons I was shy…try using the word ‘obsequious’ in a sentence when you’re six years old and see how many friends that makes you on the playground!
But in any case, I think the tendency to process an experience through descriptive language is a mixed blessing. When you’re always observing yourself, there’s a gap between you and any emotional reaction. This can be protective, but also isolating, because you later tend to use words instead of people as comfort, and even start to feel that you’ve lost some kind of authenticity. Growing up, I envied people who just reacted to things instead of deciding how they ought to react based on their observations of other people’s behavior or whatever. It’s really only in the past few years that I feel I’ve been more aware of genuine, unfiltered emotions, and I begin to see why people find them so overwhelming as to buffer them in the first place!
But as they say, it’s all a process, and in reflecting on this I realize how ridiculous it is for me to say that I’d stop writing or playing with words in my head; I’d just as soon stop breathing or eating. It might be cleansing for like a minute or a day, but as a long-term solution to my inner chaos? Not so much. Case in point: About five paragraphs ago, I said this would be a ‘brief’ post, and that’s honestly what I had intended…
Books and Lives We’ve Yet to Live
The other day I received a box of advance copies of my book. Actually, I was startled to see it because I didn’t check the return address and I was expecting a pair of trail running shoes that I ordered online, but that’s another story. In any case, the box contained several dozen copies of Demons in the Age of Light, and as I held a copy of the book in my hands for the first time, it struck me that this little rectangle of paper and words was the culmination of not only a year of hard writing and two subsequent ones of intensive revision, but of my life as I’ve lived it up to this point. That’s the peculiar thing about a memoir—how do you capture a life, even with a narrow-angle lens, even stylized and Photoshopped as all works of autobiography are, in 85,000 words? Obviously, the book isn’t ‘me’, but it’s the only way in which many people will ever know ‘me’, and in a way, that rough sketch of me will become more real, in some ways, than ‘I’ am as a living person. It’s weird to think about. It’s one thing when characters take on a life of their own, but it’s altogether more surreal when that character is yourself.
All in all, I’m happy with the book, but it’s interesting to look at it and realize how, even in the few months that have passed since the print was finalized, my ideas about the world have been shaped by the books and news stories I’ve read, the people I’ve talked to, and heck, even the food I’ve eaten. The simple act of moving through time has made me into a subtly yet fundamentally different person than I was in June—or five years ago, when much of Demons is set. On a physiological level, most people know that the majority of cells in their body are replaced in a fairly short period of time. I think it’s something like two weeks for skin cells, four months for red blood cells, and ten years for our skeleton to contain an entirely different set of atoms than it started with. But we view our personalities as something stable and perhaps incapable of radical change. Our opinions evolve, our fashion sense and tastes in music hopefully improve with age, but this process is so slow and mercurial that even we, as conscious entities, are often not aware that it’s happening.
Eastern philosophy is more attuned to this idea of impermanence, and I’ve studied it a bit, but it’s hard to stay aware of the fact as I go about my daily life. So much of our ‘success’ from a cultural standpoint is predicated on our stability, on the development of a solid ego that shapes our every perception and interaction with the world. Even more than we limit ourselves, we are held in check by others. Certainly everyone knows certain people who drag us right back into old behavior patterns, ones that we sincerely thought we’d outgrown. Welcome to the world of the social animal, right? In a way it was easier for me not to conform to expectations when I was sick, because I was so trapped in my solipsist thinking that I simply didn’t notice or care what other people thought of me. I’ve come to realize that one of the ‘taxes’ of being well is that pressure from the outside moves conveniently in to fill the gap. In theory, I should be getting on my knees and thanking God every day that I don’t have hallucinations, that I can enjoy being around other people, that my health problems are getting better, that I find moments of serenity between periods of depression that are intrinsic to my nature. And I do, but I also begin to care too much about things that didn’t trouble me before, simply because my mind is conditioned to be troubled about SOMETHING.
My life is a thousand percent better than it was when I was eighteen, but seeing Demons in print has made me realize how much farther I still have to go. Like, what will the book of the next five years of my life contain? Or the next fifty, if that’s what’s in the cards. What will the cover look like, who will the characters be, and will it have a happy ending? More importantly, will it be a bestseller? ^.^ It’s both liberating and terrifying to realize: I am writing that book right now. Some of the events will be beyond my control, but many of them, far more than I’d like to think, are entirely up to me. We’re all authors—maybe we don’t get to choose the outcome or anticipate the plot twists, but the genre at least is up to us, because it’s all in the telling. Right now, I’m thinking a futuristic literary psychological thriller time travel romance with film noir and magical realist overtones would be cool. But that may change with time!
Some Poems
Mendel’s Dominant
C binds to G, A binds to T
rope binds to hands.
Only make this journey
if you think free will a parlor trick of the starry-eyed philosophers;
like ethics, appealing, but ultimately useless.
If you breach the cytoplasm,
draw your sword to stave marauding lysosomes;
with fortitude, and gifts of simple sugars
you may survive to reach the citadel
wherein the double helix wears her crown.
Supplicate,
and beg the question:
Am I tall or dark or fair or
programmed to self-destruct?
May I eat this raspberry cheesecake, flaunt it in the face
of myocardial infarction? Or will you send
clots of avenging erythrocytes to bring me to my knees?
These are the questions that haunt
scientists grown pale from existing under a fluorescent sun.
Will my children bear my blue eyes?
Will they be stronger, brighter,
less prone to nervous attacks and brittle nails?
The scientists are up too late again,
eating things that do not exist in nature
from vending machines,
while chemical revolutions surge on chocolate agar slides.
With no other deity so visible, we unravel genomes
like pig entrails cast across the snow;
prognosticate,
tell me my destiny.
Psychostasy
Lay your heart upon the scales, says the jackal god.
The accused was once an attorney,
but now his mute meat fails to elocute.
In the secrecy of his mind he wonders
if the autopsy room doctors felt a draft
a sharp agitation of wingbeats rising
when sternum or skull was laid open.
Aloud he says, my heart is an organ,
a vivid lump of flesh
shot through with tiny neuropeptide receptors
to make me feel.
He looks down and sees it already in his hands,
streaked white
like a poor cut of beef.
He says I tried, I tried to order the salad
but it was so tasteless.
Remembering his circumstance,
he says to the black-faced jackal:
Return to myth, I have no use for you.
and the god says once more,
Lay your heart upon the scales.
Choice is beyond him now, if ever it wasn’t…
he would far rather entrust it to cold steel,
but the scales are gold, the feather
from some bird of dreams.
What’s the balance of a soul denied?
As the scales tip and the heart shatters into nothing
an autopsy room doctor looks up
alight with wonder, a child once more
as white feathers rain down like nuclear snow
with weight to crush the world.
Worldview #1
We are God’s dice
Snake-eyed and probabilistic
principled in our uncertainty
and free as white rabbits on holiday from the lab
set loose in the forest
to play.
We are fallen images who lack the grace to shatter on contact
with solid ground.
Obtuse to metaphor,
at right angles with every toppled idol
we must now do our taxes and quietly die of truth.
We have put corn in everything but we are far from the earth
and who among us would deny
that the saddest day of our lives
is when we look in the mirror and know our own eyes.
We like ghost stories about zombie cats
and math poems about everchanging light
but we cling to our chains like a child on a playground swing
who cannot make the leap
and trust that gravity will not betray the arc,
defect to chaos and leave him weightless forever.
Like insects in honey we have no desire
to cross that golden sticking point of noncontradiction
but neuroplastics make it possible to see the eternal truth
that everything begins and ends in Copenhagen.
musicophilia
A friend once hypothesized to me that it’s possible to know the essential content of somebody’s soul if you know their ten favorite songs. I’m thinking it would provide at least as valid an estimation as say, the Myers-Briggs or the MMPI.
And since blogging is all about revealing the sordid contents of one’s innermost psyche to random strangers in unknown places (or, you know, sharing pie recipes, same difference)…
P.S. my apologies for the lack of real MVs that correspond to all the songs, hence the generic album cover/fan photo vids.
1. Nine Inch Nails: Right Where It Belongs
More like ‘everything NIN ever wrote’, but if I had to pick just one, this is it. It somehow manages to sum up all of existential philosophy in 4 ½ hauntingly beautiful minutes.
2. Sara Barielles: Gravity
I first heard this song on “So You Think You Can Dance”, during the incredible Mia Michaels routine while I was in the process of revising DEMONS IN THE AGE OF LIGHT, and it seemed to sum up my whole experience better than any song I’ve yet heard. Yet the genius of it is that it can apply to nearly anyone’s situation, being essentially about the loss of power to a force greater than oneself, which all of us can relate to in some way.
3. The Smashing Pumpkins: Disarm
I was minorly obsessed with this song for a time.
4. Bush: Body
There is something so viscerally sexy about this song. Maybe it’s the use of the word ‘visceral’, which is undoubtedly a sexy word.
5. Seconds to Mars: Attack
Need at least one compulsory ‘angry song’ here, & there’s no such thing as too much Jared Leto.
6. Chevelle: Shameful Metaphors
Gorgeous song, gorgeous singer.
7. A Perfect Circle: The Noose
Hauntingly beautiful and sinister
8. Nirvana: Drain You
As with NIN, it’s actually impossible to pick my ‘favorite’ Nirvana song. It’s like trying to pick your ‘favorite’ molecule of oxygen, you know? But this one is a good representative.
9. Radiohead: Creep
Who can’t relate to this one…
10. Flyleaf: Fully Alive
Flyleaf is a great example of a band that manages to be both Christian and awesome at the same time.
11.Agnes Vanilla: Csak egy éjszaka volt
Sometimes it doesn’t matter whether you can understand the lyrics.
12. Kyo: Sarah
Best French pop/rock band ever! When I’m listening to them, it always creates the odd illusion that I can understand French, which is certainly not true. As they say, music transcends language.
13. PJ Harvey: Is This Desire?
Gotta love Ms. Polly Jean, if not the fan made clip vid.
[I know that was thirteen, non ten, but I simply could not pare the list down any further without losing some essential part of my subconscious anatomy. And thirteen is such a totally cooler number than ten ].
This is by no means a comprehensive list of music-I-like, but I think it’s a pretty good representative sample!
Book Review: Starving Hearts
A reader of this blog was kind enough to send me a copy of her own novel, Starving Hearts. The book is set in the 1950s, and is about a woman in college who is struggling with an eating disorder, which was virtually unheard of at the time. I’ve read several memoirs and novels on the topic of eating disorders, but this one was particularly interesting because it takes place in a cultural era that is foreign to me. My parents were kids in the 1950s, but they’ve never told many stories about their childhoods. However, I know it was a time of great social change—a significant increase in the standard of living in the middle class meant that many families who’d been poor, or even starving during the Great Depression were now quite affluent.
But excess creates its own diseases, and I would venture to guess that the 1950s were the era in which eating disorders became more pervasive, if not more publicized. Categories of mental illness were quite different at that point, still very much under the influence of Freudian psychodynamic theory, and eating disorders were not a concept that existed in the public lexicon. Susan Talberg, the protagonist in Starving Hearts, feels like she is the only person she knows who has such a messed-up attitude toward food, but anorexia and bulimia were probably far more common than most people realized at the time.
Additionally, the culture was a weird mixture of modern conveniences and outdated social norms. Women had achieved a somewhat increased status in society by the 1950s, but there was still a lot of sexism and inequality in the work force and the academic environment. Most women were under pressure to marry young, and therefore to be as attractive as possible, often while working and/or going to school. Many were forced into hasty and ultimately not very happy marriages, resulting in a family that was materially comfortable but emotionally starved, as is the case in Lynn Ruth Miller’s book. Family meals are the only context in which Susan feels she can connect with her mother, which leads to a pervasive pattern of disrupted eating that she struggles with for years as she finishes college and enters a marriage that eerily mimics her own parents’ dysfunction. Starving Hearts is well worth a read for anyone who’s interested in eating disorders, mid-century Americana, or just plain family dynamics.
how existential!
I promised bleakness and existentialism last time, but suffered a metaphysical crisis in trying to deliver. But why not let my past self do the work? I did not, after all, suffer a tri-weekly dose of breakdown-inducing philosophy in my junior year for nothing! So here for your (possible) amusement I’ve decided to post my Existential Philosophy term paper from way back when–which is to say, when I was 21, which sadly is starting to feel like ‘way back when’. Looking back, most of my undergraduate essays are pretty grim, and I can only imagine how bad the rest of the papers must have been for mine to receive ‘A’s. Actually, I was a teaching assistant, so I know exactly how bad they were. One might expect that most college sophomores would be capable of forming grammatically correct, economical, and globally comprehensible sentences at least some of the time. Unfortunately, one would be in for a surprise…
But I digress. I think I mentioned it a couple posts ago, but the story behind this paper is that I was getting dangerously close to C student territory in my existential philo class after I failed to read most of the assigned texts (I was having a lot of difficulty concentrating—we were actually assigned really interesting stuff, I just didn’t have the presence of mind to appreciate it at the time). So I decided I could probably get away with a pretty facile term paper if I could find some way to make it superficially amusing, and obviously fiction is the way to go. So somehow I convinced the professor to let me write this in lieu of the academic final:
Philosophy 336 Term Paper
The Existentialist
Whitney Robinson
Existentialism in its pure, intended form is liberating and beautiful…one lives simultaneously with conviction and with abandon: if nothing matters we are eternally free. Unfortunately, this insouciance is nearly impossible in a state of nature, and it all turns to giant cockroaches and visions of hell very quickly. The people who are drawn to existentialism are, with little exception, the ones most likely to be driven mad by it. To put it politely, they are slightly neurotic individuals, uncommonly bright but with a tendency to shred any tissue or bit of stray paper they are holding, to snappishly entreat people to define their terms in arguments.
Let us conjure a hypothetical existentialist: a college student, because the vast majority of those to whom existentialism appeals are that age; beyond then, one does not really want to pay such microscopic attention to one’s own mind and the body it inhabits…both become increasingly unpleasant. Physically, we might imagine him (although it could just as easily be a her) as a slightly twitchy ectomorph, wearing stylishly unstylish glasses with chunky black frames, who neither washes nor cuts his hair quite often enough for comfort. To seal this image, he owns both a beret and a stocking cap, and wears one or the other of these regardless of the weather.
Although he reads philosophy, probably too much philosophy to be entirely healthy, this existentialist has no ambitions to be a philosopher, to create something new from the substratum. After all, 4.6 billion years of evolution have only been sufficient to produce one Kierkegaard. For a while he thought maybe he would just be a writer, that by writing beautifully he could make up for knowing nothing, but language itself became a series of problems. The most fundamental, of course, being the unproven nature of signifiers.
How do I know that red is red and blue is blue?
Maybe red is blue for me, and blue is red for you.
How do I know that I am me, and you are you?
Maybe we are illusions in a sucking vortex of eternal emptiness
And none of this is true.
But this is an elementary dilemma, a Philosophy 101 dilemma. It bores him that he finds it so compelling, and it sickens him that he is bored with a perfectly good paradox. At these times he often feels like biting something, so he eats. Because philosophy is psychology he knows that the veal cutlet is metaphorically his own skin, but then again, the baby cow and the man may not be ontologically distinct. No one can reduce themselves to a fetal ball of contradictions faster than an ailing philosopher, and our existentialist is sinking.
But he has a hope: pragmatism. It even considers itself philosophy, so it’s not a total cop-out. Pragmatism assures him that he can put down Being and Time and go have a beer without turning into Nietzsche’s pathetic Cheetoh-crunching, Jerry-Springer-watching Last Man. Relinquishing himself to his fallenness, to being-in-the-world, our existentialist decides to leave the problem of mind and prepare a quiche for dinner. Being a philosophy student, it logically follows that his refrigerator is empty, so we will meet up with him at Whole Foods, where he stands holding a list in front of a dazzling array of grocery products with only the simple missive ‘eggs’ to guide him. What does Kierkegaard have to say that might ease him through this dilemma? Surprisingly little, for someone who has produced many volumes of erudite prose. Existentialism tells us precious little about how to exist, but mostly takes perverse pleasure in telling us why we can’t with any degree of tranquility. What use can philosophy be in helping a hungry existentialist choose the freshest eggs for his quiche? Now he understands why his father wanted him to be something useful like a mechanic or an electrician. These people might not be able to elucidate the Euthyphro dilemma, but they know how to survive.
And yet, how do you set it aside and say it doesn’t matter? Doesn’t one need to commit to one’s philosophy? Among two millennia of eloquence there has been much talk of means-not-ends and philosopher kings, but our existentialist has found that philosophy is rather awkward anywhere but on paper or in minds. If all of philosophy is simply a series of parlor tricks for the woefully clever, why do we pretend it matters? Because pragmatism is a cop-out, he decides. He must find a way to make the elegant treatises he admires mean something in the world. But he is slightly afraid to even try to fuse Kierkegaard or Camus with egg selection; he uneasily remembers a prior shopping trip during his ethics seminar, when he was unable to decide between the organic and the conventional eggs, the one being more economical and the other more environmentally sound. He tried to apply the Categorical Imperative to this situation, uncertain of the potential ramifications of minimum-wage egg factory employees losing their jobs if no one bought conventional eggs. He tried to imagine a world where people only bought organic food, but he got confused somewhere along the way and ended up imagining himself as a giant talking chicken, which really freaked him out, and he decided that ethics had never been his strong suit. But he instinctively feels that animals should be treated respectfully if we’re going to use their flesh and byproducts to sustain us, and that’s enough for him.
If only all his cognitions were so effortless. He lacks instincts about the strangest things…sometimes he is like a kitten whose whiskers have been cut, leaving him bumping into mental walls that most people would avoid without thought. Now, for instance, people around him are plucking eggs unproblematically from the shelves, but there are at least a hundred individual cartons our existentialist could choose from. And if he opens himself to the possibility of a different supper entirely…the world is ablur with a riot of meat and vegetables vying for his attention. Suddenly his awareness of his own freedom is crushing, emetic. This phenomenon is so terrifying it has spawned its own pervasive form of angst, the kind associated with people exactly like him (at least three-quarters of whom also wear glasses with chunky black frames, irrespective of whether they need them). And still he has not chosen a carton of eggs. Maybe he should just skip the eggs altogether, and sup on milk from the carton and flour from the bag. Maybe he should just starve to death because he is too neurotic to live.
Dasein, Dasein, he chants internally to calm himself. Be cool. Be Dasein. His private mantra, which brings him peace. Actually, he is not quite sure what Dasein consists in, because it’s one of those multifarious German words that doesn’t translate well, but he remains careful to say ‘consists in’ rather than ‘consists of’, because this, along with the glasses, makes him seem like a real philosopher or at least a grad student.
Dasein. Why must he analyze everything to the bone? He wants so much to just be, to exist without introspection, to live the mindless, mercurial moment-to-moment life of the unexamined soul.
Perhaps he will buy some refreshing green tea to soothe his nerves. On the back of the box, he notices a Chinese proverb: ‘Give thanks to the pot, for it gives up its emptiness for the tea.’ Would but he could! In Eastern philosophy, emptiness is sacred. To achieve Nirvana is to extinguish, to lose the self forever. Yet how many of us can identify with that? In the Western world, emptiness is a dark void that fills us with unspeakable terror, which we try to fill with food and shoes and wireless technology commodities, and cling close to other people for comfort. Afraid that he is going to cry, and not wishing to do so in public, the existentialist hastily sets down the tea box and fumbles toward the dairy cooler. Steeling himself, he forces his eyes shut and gropes blindly until milk, eggs, cheese, and flour find their way into his cart. And then he stops at the bakery for some scones, because one can’t be in a black existential quagmire for every second of every day.
And now comes a little relief for our tragic hero, because it’s time to check out and he plays this game well. He carefully installs himself the checkout lane beside that of a lovely flaxen-haired young doe, so that when the lane closes, as he could see was imminent, he appears to be thrust into her presence by mere happenstance. Her gaze is calm and unperturbed as she scans the eggs, the milk, the flour…she knows nothing of the machinations that swirl around her innocent splendor. Bend a little lower over that bag of scones, dulcet minx…our existentialist has deliberately failed to label the bag with the corresponding bakery item code. As she rings up his purchase, the existentialist allows his eyes to make smoldering contact before flickering casually away to the magazine rack—but no, his eyes have landed on ‘Home and Garden’. Now she will either assume he is gay or realize that his indifference is a façade. He manages to save the situation by grabbing a candy bar off a lower rack and pretending it was the attentional object all along. The candy bar has walnuts in it, which he hates, but the sweet sisters fate have made it right in the end, because the checkout girl’s hand brushes his as she takes the candy bar to scan it. An electric thrill runs through his being as the tips of their fingers meet, and the girl’s eyes flash momentarily up to his. He withdraws his hand quickly, the first of the two to retreat from contact, and utters a cool, polite “Thank you,” just suggestive enough that she must later wonder if the tacit compliment was only in her imagination. Overcome as he reaches the door, our existentialist closes his eyes and loses himself to the aesthetic until people begin to look at him askance. He hastens out of the store, secretly smiling that this encounter has played out to perfection, and will sustain him for years to come.
Yet a scant hour later the bloom has faded from the rose. The world is open to him, chains of latent potentials leading to presidencies, riches, Nobel prizes…and yet he is eating a rather unsuccessful quiche alone in his apartment, and he does not delude himself into believing this will change, regardless of whether it can. He finds himself bitterly wishing he had sneered at the checkout girl, maybe made her self-conscious about her lowly position in society and slightly frizzy hair, which come to think of it looked like she dyed it anyway. He turns to the candy bar for solace, then remembers the walnuts…in addition to finding their taste unpleasant, they make his mouth itch. Sometimes, hypochondriacally, he wonders whether if he ate enough of them he would stop breathing. He toys with the idea in his darker moments. But for now, he merely stuffs some congealing quiche into his mouth and mutters aloud his ubiquitous though slightly borrowed catchphrase for all of life’s failures, its cautionary gloom for all successes. “It doesn’t matter”, he tells himself, but he is not quite sure he believes it.
***
This might be unbearably sad, but we owe it to our existentialist to return to him twenty years later, to see him through to the end. Imagine him a little grayer but similarly attired, slouching into the Chestnut Tree Café, his habitual haunt at the outskirts of the university where he now resides as an eccentric faculty member whom the students quietly try to avoid.
“Afternoon, Winston,” he murmurs to a hunched figure in the corner as he enters.
Taking his traditional seat, alone and mostly obscured from sight by a large potted plant, he sits quietly and broods in his search. Outside, idealistic liberal-arts majors chant for freedom in some impoverished country that everyone secretly wishes would just go away altogether. The students, and ones like them in bygones eras, have fought so hard for freedom, for the right to publicly declaim and disseminate their mindless mantra, and now they want to inflict the same liberty on others. Don’t they know that men are happier as causal prisoners?
The students chant relentlessly on. Freedom, freedom, freedom! Our existentialist looks on with a tolerant, sickly smile. The silly students chase it like well-fed housecats enamored with a bright bird. On the off chance a claw catches in the feathers and brings the quarry down, they will be awed and frozen. When you have your freedom, what do you do with it? This is not part of the game. They will drop it and poke it gently with a puzzled paw, hoping it will fly away and the world will be right again. When the bird does not move, they will look guiltily around, hoping no one has witnessed them strike down teleology, then turn and slink away unsettled.
A waitress comes and asks our existentialist what she can bring him. Oh, cruel Pandora, you couldn’t just have brought him a black coffee? How can you expect an existentialist to choose a dessert? The choice paralysis is astounding. In selecting the apple tart he may allow an orchard-keeper’s daughter to attend college and in turn discover a cure for a disease that would have decimated the population…but perhaps this posited girl has darker ambitions, perhaps she will rise to political power and enact a regime that makes Red China look like Walden Two. Perhaps the orchard-keeper has no daughter, and apples are all grown in some kind of sterile facility these days. Maybe one pie bought or sold makes no difference to anyone’s future, and then what is the point of eating it, save a sorry hedon or two for his personal satiety?
He could just as easily choose the coffee cake, but maybe it will contain traces of peanuts that will send him into sudden anaphylaxis. And perhaps if this occurs a lovely and talented young EMT will intubate him just in time, and he will find love at last. But this probability is slim at best, and the existentialist finds coffee cake to be rather dry and tasteless in general. He would suffer it for true love, but the chances of this are a barest fraction, and if he orders the chocolate pudding, which varies little from day to day, he will certainly be cozily sugar-sated for the rest of the afternoon…really, these momentary pleasures are all he can count on. On the other hand, he who lives without risk dies without glory…
Faced with the swirling, taunting, overwhelming possibilities, the existentialist will inevitably avert his eyes, point to something in blind panic, and end up choosing something he hates…probably something with walnuts or licorice. Over the years he has eaten many walnuts in similar straits. Perhaps this has been his undoing, along with the nights spent with heavy books perched on his solar plexus, with the choices examined to disintegration yet willed to be spontaneous. In the wrong hands, philosophy can make one very ill. The mind becomes diseased and scoliotic, head bowed and cervical vertebrae fused to direct a lidless, staring eye to the navel.
This is the fate befallen our poor existentialist, powerless to surrender his freedom. Either he will take up yoga, find a good chiropractor, and discover the many benefits of Eastern philosophy and/or anxiolytic drugs, or he will continue to skulk in dimly lit cafes, mumbling incoherently about the will to power and occasionally scribbling something in a notebook: an unreadably scholarly treatise, or a free-verse poem that fairly sears the page with incisive yet minimalist metaphor…the kind critics will love and no one will ever read. When the waitress brings his dessert, which in a truly sadistic exercise of culinary potentials contains both licorice and walnuts, the lonely existentialist can scarcely summon the energy to lift the sugary treat to his mouth. Utterly sick of his mind, he can hardly bear to nourish it through his body.
Freedom corrupts nearly as much as power, he reflects with an erudition that makes him want to smack himself upside the head…or rather, it corrodes, because human beings are contrary by nature; the very mind that leads us to the value of ‘mere’ existence will never allow us to live it in full. While the rest of the world seeks freedom, the existentialist seeks its cure. He has come to learn, as most agile-minded persons do, that consciousness is a disease, an itis of soul. As of yet, he has found no remedy, but he awaits death with interest.
And enlightenment spreads. As a contagion, it is more virulent than even panic or boy bands; sheer stupidity is the only known vaccine, but who would choose it? I tell you this as gently and decorously as I can, aware that you, reader, are free as well. The fourth wall cannot save you…it is too late to hastily set this down and pretend you were instead reading an interesting article on giraffes in National Geographic. If you have not already, you will soon realize that the whole world is choice, that every moment is a riot of potentialities to which we must blind ourselves. When some new paper in speculative astrophysics or applied neuroscience announces a certain proof of a closed causal chain, complete materialist determinism and the death of free will, you will read it with trembling anticipation, but in the end, you will realize it says nothing a few mental gymnastics cannot refute. Syllogism only works when you accept the singular if that leads to the unconditional then. But for the existentialist, the if is always surrounded by a million more, a swarm of tiny ant-like possibilities that together reduce a tree or a life to pulp in dismayingly short order. Freedom is one of those horrorfilm villains that never dies. In the unfortunate event that you stumble across it while cutting through some graveyard at night or wading too deeply into some arcane text, you will never be rid of it. And like the last attractive young person standing at the end, the obligatory lone survivor who knows the murdering masked marauder can never truly die, you will go insane. Only if you choose to go insane, of course. But you will.
***
We have closed this out with dismal style, but the story isn’t over. The great philosopher lived for years in a walled asylum after setting his last cogent thoughts to paper. Any final fevered revelations were mumbled only to brisk, patronizing nurses or the flowers of a restful sanitarium garden. How much of our finest thought has been lost in the whispers of madmen?
Our existentialist has sunk into a similar entropy. Like Nietzsche, he has gone insane, but without having brought anything beautiful to the world. Indeed, he has begun to read the self-proclaimed Antichrist with a new appreciation, a rekindled willingness to look beneath the pomp and arrogance to find a man with answers instead of only questions. Someone who tells us we needn’t disown life, however badly it abuses us. Beneath his stern mustache, his unwilling asceticism, his untimely psychosis, Nietzsche was a surprisingly hopeful sort of fellow, and our existentialist often seeks comfort in his prose at night. The futile grace of eternal recurrence alone is enough to bring meaning to a shattered world.
Send me your demon, Nietzsche! our existentialist prays in the dark, let me live every torturous moment of this finite world again. European to the core, he could not bear to extinguish in Nirvana. Should the blessed demon come and tell him his life will play out a billion billion times again without recollection, without a chance to learn from his mistakes, the existentialist will fall to his knees and cry thank you, thank you, divine creature. This is the beautiful taste in the bitterness, the redemption of the antihero. Life is unmeaning, which leaves us free to form it into anything we want…it exculpates us if we are not quite as successful as we had hoped, and humbles us if we are.
After all these years the existentialist still doesn’t quite know what existentialism consists in, but he suspects he is closer to its center than he has ever been. We are bound by our circumstances and gagged by our genetics, and only our poor understanding of probability allows us to think we are special. And yet beneath this we are free, even to keep our eyes open or closed as the guillotine falls. Nothing you haven’t said more beautifully, Sartre, nothing. The existentialist calls this aloud, although he has long ago realized the uselessness of passing ideas to others when all they do is make them their own. He will only ever stand in the shadows of great men, but this revelation belongs entirely to him, and again he cries aloud for the whole café or world to hear: I will take the suffering, I will take the angst. I will take the sleepless nights, the impenetrable prose, the walnuts in my cake. I am here and I am alive. I have been created, and that is enough.
Nature is a Temple
So I’d decided that for my next blog post I wanted to consider some Important Topic like free will and determinism, or the power of symbolic language to shape reality–something really heavy and existential. But in doing so I came to the conclusion that a., metaphysics is not my strong suit and b., thinking about such topics, and worse still trying to write about them, is highly unpleasant and stressful for me. I’m serious, it reduces me to a state of nervous anxiety. My stomach begins to churn, my hands go limp and icy, I develop an eerie farsighted stare and respond to conversational attempts with weak monosyllables. I am one of those people for whom philosophy is actually pathogenic.
Therefore, needing to calm my nerves after a traumatizing afternoon of considering Laplace’s demon and the hard problem of consciousness, I went for a walk at the Arcadia Wildlife Sanctuary. There is something instantly soothing and reparative about the New England woods, which take on a different mood with every season but always manage to retain a certain mystique. There’s a peculiar watchful quality about them, but it’s not a malevolent presence. It’s just that the spirit of nature feels very close. It always brings to mind a favorite quote by the Romantic poet Charles Baudelaire: “Nature is a temple in which living columns sometimes emit confused words. Man approaches it through forests of symbols, which observe him with familiar glances.”
Evolutionary biologists argue that it’s our unique human destiny to see meaning where meaning does not exist—to imagine faces in the moon and see weeping willows as sorrowful creatures because of the particular drape of their branches. But I wonder sometimes if these things really exist only in our minds, or if our perception of the ‘inner life of objects’ is in fact based upon something real. In the end, we know so little about the seething quantum forces that compose our world, or the laws that have drawn breath and dreams out of mere aggregates of chemicals. Who are we to say that trees have no souls? I should think they might reasonably believe the same of us…
