philosophy

The Way Better Day Than Tomorrow

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I'm told to live my life like
There's no tomorrow
But truly
There has to be a better way
For if the morrow never comes
And it's my last breath I breathe today
How will I know to appreciate it
For won't I be too enthralled, too focused, too busy with
Living
As much as I can, as hard as I can, as fast as I can
Before the day's end and the morrow that may never come
To simply catch my breath and just
Breathe
Slow and steady
In and out
Filling my lungs
Feeling my lungs
Expand and
Contract
And listen to the fresh-filled blood pounding in the ears
Echoes of the patient heart
Sounding throughout the rest of today and in
To the morrow and beyond
Forever

The River and the Bed

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The river winds around my head,
Fish before my eyes.
I lay my cheek upon its bed and
Contemplate the skies of
Morning's red, of
Midday's blue, of
Twilight's pink aglow, that
Filters through the rushing stream
Born of mountains long ago.

Where does it go in such a rush from
Rushing 'bout my mind? This
Is the thought I can't escape;
Its answer won't unwind its
Liquid coils from the root where
All such knowledge grows. And
Like the river born of distant mounts,
Its seed sown long ago.

Death is my co-pilot

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Well, at least my fear of death is…

Well, at least according to the late great interdisciplinarian philosopher Ernest Becker.

Yes, according to Becker, it is this death anxiety of mine – and of yours too so you might want to pay attention – that really drives much of my life’s behavior.

I guess I should have titled this entry, “Death is my pilot,” or better yet, “I am Death’s co-pilot.”

It seems that this mostly unrealized, or at least unacknowledged fear of our eventual turn into worm food is fed mostly by our desire for immortality, which then feeds into our pursuit of it by other and any means possible: by our offspring, by our profession, by whatever means that allows us to achieve some sense of our being being realized long after the worms that fed upon us have passed.

But few of us are able to achieve even this, this immortality by other or any means possible because of our fear of life itself, by our not having the courage to engage it, life, to the magnitude required for us to transcend our mortality by other and any means possible.

From Becker’s monumental book The Denial of Death, one which I cannot recommend highly enough:

Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order to blindly and dumbly rot and disappear forever. It is a terrifying dilemma to be in and to have to live with. The lower animals are, of course, spared this painful contradiction, as they lack a symbolic identity and the self-consciousness that goes with it. They merely act and move reflexively as they are driven by their instincts. If they pause at all, it is only a physical pause; inside they are anonymous, and even their faces have no name. They live in a world without time, pulsating, as it were, in a state of dumb being. This is what has made it so simple to shoot down whole herds of buffalo or elephants. The animals don’t know that death is happening and continue grazing placidly while others drop alongside them. The knowledge of death is reflective and conceptual, and animals are spared it. They live and they disappear with the same thoughtlessness: a few minutes of fear, a few seconds of anguish, and it is over. But to live a whole lifetime with the fate of death haunting one’s dreams and even the most sun-filled days—that’s something else.

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Yeah…

Actually, this whole death anxiety thing is something of a theme of my soon to be finished work in progress.

But that is not what prompted this entry today.

What prompted it was the PsyPost article New psychology research indicates hatred toward collective entities inspires meaning in life.

Heck of a lede, no? I hardly have to quote from the article because the author seems to have crammed the gist of it into the title.

But reading the article, we find that its title is actually as much a mouthful as is the title of the study upon which the article is based: Hate and meaning in life: How collective, but not personal, hate quells threat and spurs meaning in life.

Now, I haven’t actually read the study – I don’t feel like shelling out the $35.00 it would take to do so.

But I kind of want to because I would like to know if Becker is referenced in the study seeing that he was telling us pretty much the same thing way back in the Swingin’ Seventies.

However, according to Becker, this hate (as manifested by racism, sexism, homophobia… you get the picture) that brings us together in collective and harmonious accord is driven by, you guessed it, our collective fear of death.

It was this theory – that our fear of death feeds our hate – that led a mixed group of researchers and huge Becker disciples to put it to the test/studies to see if it could be proved.

Which it could, at least according to them, and which led them to develop the Terror Management Theory (I wish I could come up with such a cool-sounding theory) and which they discuss in detail in their fantastic book The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life.

In one early [Terror Management Theory] study assessing the [Mortality Salience] hypothesis, Greenberg et al. (1990)[4] had Christian participants evaluate other Christian and Jewish students that were similar demographically, but differed in their religious affiliation. After being reminded of their death (experimental MS induction), Christian participants evaluated fellow Christians more positively, and Jewish participants more negatively, relative to the control condition.[26] Conversely, bolstering self-esteem in these scenarios leads to less worldview defense and derogation of dissimilar others.

– Wikipedia

Must be legit because even the National Institutes of Health published a death anxiety study called Terror Management Theory and the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Well, they also published a study called Why Most Published Research Findings Are False, so… there’s that.

Anyway, long story short…

We all should be doing those memento mori meditations like the Stoics and other ancient smarties told us we should be doing long ago and then, hey, we would have absolutely nothing to fear…

Don’t look down on death, but welcome it. It too is one of the things required by nature. Like youth and old age. Like growth and maturity. Like a new set of teeth, a beard, the first gray hair. Like sex and pregnancy and childbirth. Like all the other physical changes at each stage of life, our dissolution is no different.

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Except, maybe, fear itself.

What time is it? That’s right, it’s the Boy from Bohemia Time!

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While I wasn’t exactly thrilled with Kafka translator Michael Hoffman translating Ungeziefer as cockroach…

To say the least…

I am in definite accord with him on much of what he discusses in his introduction to METAMORPHOSIS AND OTHER STORIES, a collection translated by him consisting of all of Kafka’s stories that were published in Kafka’s lifetime.

For instance, when discussing how hard it is to translate Kafka, Hoffman tells us this is so because in Kafka’s work “there is no ‘voice’, no diction, no ‘style’ — certainly not in the literary sense of high style ….[Philip] Rahv describes him perfectly as a ‘master of narrative tone, of a subtle, judicious and ironically conservative style’.”

Obviously, as a single-tongued simpleton I can’t comment on the translation difficulties, but as a Kafka fanboy I do get what he means by the lack of high style, of how inobtrusive Kafka’s writing is.

As a writer myself, I rely far too much on literary devices such as metaphors and similes and on language such as adjectives and adverbs (yeah, I know, I know…), but Kafka’s writing is almost as if it isn’t there, as if it comes to us as a dream, without any distracting devices or large, literary words to destroy that deep, immersive verisimilitude that no other writer I find can create quite like him.

“If this is what Kafka is like,” Hoffman says, “then the big words in his stories are in fact the little words. Not verbs and nouns, much less adjectives and adverbs, but what are aptly termed ‘particles’…that change or reinforce the course of arguments in his prose.”

Which is why I was so surprised when I read such an overtly literary passage in one of Kafka’s earlier stories found early in the collection called “Unmasking a Confidence Trickster”:

I had an invitation, I had told him as much right away. I had been invited, furthermore, to come up, where I would have liked to have been for some time already, not standing around outside the gate gazing past the ears of my interlocutor. And now to lapse into silence with him too, as if we had decided on a long stay in just this spot. A silence to which the houses round about and the darkness that extended as far as the stars, all made their contribution. And the footfalls of unseen pedestrians, whose errands one did not like to guess at, the wind that kept pressing against the opposite side of the street, a gramophone that was singing against the sealed windows of one of the rooms somewhere – they all came to prominence in this silence, as though it belonged and had always belonged to them.

I had to stop after reading that passage, mostly because I felt it was such beautiful writing and I wanted to reread it, but also because I wasn’t quite sure what I had just read, what it was about, which is always a danger for me with highfalutin literary writing.

Even in this winding passage, I can still feel the underlying Kafkaian vibe to it, but the vibe is disrupted because of its “literariness,” because of the beauty of the writing. Usually, it’s not until after I stop reading Kafka for whatever reason – bathroom break, sleep, never because of disinterest – that I realize that Kafkian vibe had totally penetrated my psyche and has been humming deep within me without me even knowing it.

Yeah…

And this brings me to what I am particularly smitten with in Hoffman’s introduction, this concept he calls “Kafka time,” of how it’s always either too late, as it is for Gregor Samsa who has already metamorphosed by the time we meet him, or is never arriving, as how K. is never able to fulfill his land surveying duties for the castle.

Or, to put a twist on a point Hoffman made above, it’s in that slip of time it takes for the particles to change or reinforce the course of arguments in Kafka’s prose.

To me, it is from this sense of “Kafka time” where the Kafkaian vibe resonates most, creating this unsettling feeling of striving for something just beyond our grasp…

While traversing along a narrow, crumbling path barely wide enough for a foot to fall…

While high on a mountain’s edge…

While sightless from the thick and endless and suffocating clouds.

Hey, what can I say, I’m no Kafka, but i think you get what I’m trying to get at.

Anyway, Hoffman goes on to discuss the “middle moment” of Kafka’s writing, the time it takes to shift from the Muzak of normalcy to that initial, sweet, dissonant twang of that Kafkian vibe, as “the Zeno moment, the infinite possibility of infinitesimal change.”

The Zeno he is referring to of course is Zeno of Elea (as opposed to Zeno of Citium or Zeno of Southern Pennsylvania) who pretty much gave us way back (B)efore (C)hrist was even a sparkle in God’s eyes the definition of Kafkaesque, but which he less than humbly dubbed Zeno’s Dichotomy Paradox.

Actually, I think it was Plato who first gave Zeno his props so we should cut him some eponymous slack.

Anyway, Aristotle illustrates Zeno’s paradox thusly:

“Suppose Atalanta wishes to walk to the end of a path. Before she can get there, she must get halfway there. Before she can get halfway there, she must get a quarter of the way there. Before traveling a quarter, she must travel one-eighth; before an eighth, one-sixteenth; and so on.”

And by so on, I take it to mean Atalanta is never going to reach the end of that path.

Sounds like it could be the blurb for just about any of Kafka’s books, no?

But then, even Kafka himself lived on Kafka time as he was thrice engaged but never married, authored three novels but completed none, and then, sadly, his life was left incomplete by disease.

So strange.

Yeah, there is so much more to discuss regarding Kafka and his time, but perhaps it’s best if we come to a conclusion with this one final thought…

All I’m Conscious of…

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Is what I’m conscious of.

You dig?

Put with brutal succinctness, Damasio’s brief goes like this: Mental activity consists of a stream of “images” that map aspects of the world around us. But these images, by themselves, cannot be conscious. For that, they must be related to a perspective, an “owner,” a self — this, after all, is what subjectivity means. And here is where feeling comes in. As Damasio uses the term, “feelings” are “the hybrid, interactive processes of the interior, at once mental and physical.” They register how well or badly its various subsystems are doing at maintaining homeostasis, at keeping the organism alive and flourishing. So feelings point within, to the interior; images point without, to the world. And when feelings and images come together in the brain, the result is conscious thought. To adapt a simile of Damasio’s, feelings are like a musical score that, when added to the silent reel of images in the mind, produces cinematic consciousness.

Is It Possible to Explain How Consciousness Works? New York Times, November 2, 2021

ONE SONG ETERNAL

During that half-measured beat of our lives
for Heaven, we look upward to Sky
for Hell, downward to Earth

All whilst desperately,
dependently, desirously
existing within an infinitely
expanding Universe –
our One Song Eternal –
a Rhythmical Void void
of Direction
of Time

A Void where that which we seek
be it that Heaven or that Hell
can only be found within
that Composition of
our Mind

∞

From Short Verses & Other Curses

Only those with a big one can see it…

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There is a very familiar shape in the picture of the stack of wood I shared last week, but I doubt that everyone can see it*. Kind of like how only the chosen ones can see the face of the Virgin Mary in their toast… but different.

*If you’re having a hard time seeing the shape, try closing your eyes and squinting real hard too see if that helps.

A Pebble is a Rock is a Mountain is Me

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I look at the little pebble at my feet and can’t help but think

But for the grace of god go I

And then laugh

Not out of humor

But of fear

Because he’s nowhere

But within the magic of my mind

The madness

For, but for the grace of chance goes that pebble at my feet

No more purposefully than the patient rock at the corner of my lot

Having had waited a million years for me to move it there

Or the mountain I’ll never climb

Or the moon, or the sun

Or the boundless galaxies in the sky

That are as real to me as the oxygen molecules I breathe

I just have to take your word for it

And yet you admonish me over and over

Essence before Existence!

An a priori on high

And I want to take your word for it

Like I do for the oxygen molecules I breathe

And many times I almost convinced myself I had

But then comes the horrible news

Relentlessly so

To remind me that

Nope

You got the order all wrong

That the only a priori meaning there is

First and foremost and forever more

Is only that of my mind’s making

Of its madness