The earthly success of the Lims

.

I spent a better part of the afternoon last night learning about the irreversible nature of time. I was at an exhibition of Qing curio boxes -- an interesting show both on account of the technical mastery required to produce them; and on account of their kinship with the contemporaneous western Wunderkammer collections -- kinship with a difference: instead of collecting, like any other normal people, objects the Chinese curio collectors collected... their miniature effigies.

One could wax philosophical here on the Huntington themes, but a much simpler message forced itself upon me: I discovered that I was too old for the show. The objects were small, behind glass and the light was dim. I squinted at them glasslessly, then through my reading glasses, then in my prescription glasses, finally with the help of a small magnifying glass; yet, from more than half of the displays I had to walk away unsatisfied: I would never catch the details. It was all nothing but blur to me. I have missed, it would seem, the chance to admire them.

I suppose this is what happened to my Taiwanese friends, too. Encouraged -- compelled! -- by their families, teachers, and friends, they went out and were productive: they worked 12-hour a day jobs, saved and economized, and gave birth to numerous children. Now, thirty years of hard work has born its fruit: their children are healthy and tall, intelligent and well educated, and soon they will be loosed upon the world to make their mark upon it. And they have amassed a great deal of property which they will pass on to their children: several apartments in the city, acres of land and houses in the countryside. (Being traditional Chinese they believe in only one store of value: land). But they have grown old and frail; their bodies have acquired the usual long list of chronic complaints; not debilitating, by any means, but enough to make simple comfort a matter of considerable rarity and difficulty. They have lived this otherwise successful life frugally and selflessly, devoid of luxuries and pleasures, without the smallest measure of self-indulgence (except, of course, for food, which was always simple, economic fare). Now, knowing them as closely as I do (as a non-Chinese outsider I am on occasion able to pierce the veil of pretense imposed by the society) I know what few do: how intensely unhappy they have been all these years; how much they have had to sacrifice; how much pleasure and gratification they have delayed, thinking sometimes no doubt that it was temporarily delayed, while it fact it was, as they now well know, like my ability to appreciate Qing curios, foregone; lost never to come back.

Today, their happiness consists in this: at their parents' farm, over the Chinese New Year, four generations of Lims sat down to eat a sumptuous feast: 78 people: 2 parents, 12 children, 62 grandchildren, and -- a sign of things to come, the first shoots of the next generation -- 2 great-grand-children. This was their success. It sounds Biblical. The earth has been populated. The Lim tribe has become an economic power to reckon with. The Lim ancestors have been assured of progeny to sustain them into infinity by their worship¹.

Yet, for me, it is hard to tell what my friends have gained through this personally. Millionairies, they still economize. He insists on wearing plastic shoes to work. She will still not send laundry out to wash.

Yet, sitting with their relatives at the jam-packed six tables, eating and talking, they say they are content. This is the warmth of the family, they say; this is their reward. Anyone who knows the Taiwanese knows that being in their company can be nothing but pure pleasure; not only for us, foreigners, I am sure, but, surely, for the Taiwanese themselves. If you didn't know them as I do, you would never know what I do -- and what they seem not to remember on most days -- the cost in self-sacrifice and denial paid for this family warmth.

On the fourth day of the New Year, six nephews and nieces -- all between 18 and 22 -- drop in for a day on my friend, Mr Lim. He spends the morning cooking for them, and the afternoon feeding them, with an expression of absolute delight on his face. "You are their favorite uncle", I say to him, and he beams. He is the traditional ideal male: he lives to feed people. He likes it. If you ask him he will say, and he believes it firmly, that personal happiness is irrelevant.

My grandfather came from a similar background to his: a hard working, farming family of modest means. And he lived his life in a similar manner: relentlessly making a living in order to feed countless mouths; he paid for the project the way Mr Lim is still paying for his: by denying himself simple comforts and pleasures, by never resting and sleeping very little, by putting up with an unhappy marriage, cheap clothes, uncomfortable furniture; in short, by taking nothing for himself out of his life. Men like my grandfather, and Mr Lim, think themselves virtuous; and think virtue to consist in constantly giving and taking nothing in return. Virtue to them is a kind of perpetuum mobile, an economic engine which never stops and runs on empty. It is hard not to admire these wonderful traditional men. But it is also difficult not to feel sad for them.

But perhaps one should not. Their life protects them against one pain at least, the pain of the Chinese curio box. They'll never know what they are missing there; and -- they won't miss it.



Footnote: On the origin of the surname Lin (Lim)

¹ During the reign of Shang Zhou, 1154 BC to 1122 BC, the last king of the Shang dynasty (1783 BC to 1122 BC) had 3 of his uncles advising him and his administration. The king's uncles were Bi Gan (also spelled Pi Kan), Qi Zi and Wei Zi. Together the 3 men were known as "The Three Kindhearted Men of Shang" in the kingdom.

Bi Gan was the son of Prince Ding, son of Emperor Shang and, thus, was King Zhou's uncle.

Unfortunately, Zhou was a cruel king and the state's citizens suffered tremendously. His 3 uncles could not persuade him to change his ways. Failing in their duty to advise the king, Wei Zi resigned. Qi Zi faked insanity and was relieved of his post. Only Bi Gan stayed on to continue advising the king to change his ways. “Servants who are afraid of being killed and refrain from telling the truth are not righteous,” he said. This put him in danger of incurring the king's wrath. Bi Gan stayed at the palace for three days and nights to try to persuade the bloodthirsty and immoral king to mend his ways.

The stubborn king would not relent and had his uncle, Bi Gan, arrested for treason. Upon hearing this, his pregnant wife (surname Chen) escaped into the forest to protect her unborn child from death. She knew, in time, the king would execute Bi Gan and his entire family. In the forest the baby was born. Alone with no one to help, she grabbed hold of two trees and gave birth to a baby boy whom she named Jian. When she reached the nearest town, she gave her child the surname Lin (Chinese character depicted by two trees).

Thanks to the efforts of my friends, the spirits of Bi Gan and his son are well taken care of for decades to come.

Concerning the nomadic mind

(Mushroom picking makes a good metaphor for all life projects. How so? Read on).

Imagine going out mushroom picking in an area where you have never picked mushrooms before with a group of experienced locals. Once they enter the forest, they all turn right. What do you do?

If, like yours truly, you have true nomadic instincts, you of course... turn left.

For although the fact that everyone turns right probably indicates that plentiful mushrooms are to be found right and perhaps hardly any left; and to any normal mind this just might seem a strong reason to turn right (“surely, these people know where the mushrooms are”); yet – the fact that everyone turns right also means that there will be stiff competition for any mushrooms found. While, even though by going left instead, the nomadic mind risks finding no mushrooms at all, yet he also gains the chance of leisurely taking 100% of everything he finds (assuming he finds it) -- a far better shot at the jackpot than anyone has on the right hand path. Plus he gains something priceless: freedom from stress: he can afford to stroll slowly, stop to take in the view, etc. He avoids the mad scramble of competition of the right hand path. Surely, it would seem, these benefits are worth the risk of going mushroomless every now and then?

Now, this the universal truth: everywhere and always, the right hand path is overcrowded; too many intelligent, efficient, capable people chase too few opportunities there; as a result there are no opportunities for arbitrage and profit margins are egg-shell-thin. Unless one is much faster and much stronger than everyone else -- and can therefore thrive in competitive, crowded situations -- the profits of the right hand path are simply too meager to be worth their while. For most participants, the right hand path is all work and hardly any reward.

On several occasions, when asked for advice, I tried to explain the nomadic left-hand-path logic to friends who stood before significant life choices (education, profession, migration, business venture, management of family affairs). They nearly always rejected my advice. Often, I could see that they could see the point of my argument. Often, they even thanked me for my brilliant insight. But understanding the logic of a proposition is one thing; trusting it with one’s life is another. My friends' minds were settled minds, farmers' minds. They could understand the logic of my idea, but they could not see it applying to their lives.

I have sometimes thought my friends timid on this account. But that is a silly view: one does not call a snake timid because he crawls into holes, or a monkey timid because she lives in a tree. This is what snakes and monkeys do. Likewise, this is what the settled minds do: they take the right hand path. They cannot help themselves.

Nor is there anything especially heroic about the nomadic mind's persistent preference for the road less traveled. A nomad like myself cannot help himself, either. In the nomad’s risk-taking decision to take the left-hand path there is no heroism at all: this is how his mind works. It takes no courage whatsoever because the decision comes automatically; there is no pride in it; there is hardly any premeditation; it just makes sense. That anyone would turn right boggles and amazes him. The nomad is no more free to go right than the settled mind is to go left. The nomad knows -- just like the Hurons did -- that the strains of the right hand path would emotionally kill him.

Whether the nomadic mind turns out more successful in specific instances depends more on luck than anything else. A nomad who turns left and stumbles upon some chanterelles, will be acclaimed a genius; one who comes up with nothing and starves, or, as is more common, ends up having to eat berries instead, will be deemed a fool. Such views are silly, too: at the time when the choice between the right hand path and the left hand path is made, no one can know how thigns will turn out. The choice is simply this: poor odds of a good payoff versus good odds of a meager one. Which do you take?

To settled minds, the relatively high certainty of the poor pay off, makes the right hand path more attractive. To my mind, the choice is skewed in favor of the left hand path by the fact that the left hand path, being less crowded, is more leisurely. If I do not find the chanterelles, at least I did not have to scramble in search for them.

The bottom line, I suppose, is that the nomad is... a lazy bone.

Continuing education

Oy's a rare enough story anywhere, much more so in the developing world: grown tired of her prospect-less life in the provincial town where she was born, she rebelled, dumped her love-home-town-want-to-stay-near-mom boyfriend and moved to the city, managed to get a job which gives her significant control over her work and pays her enough to afford her own place, a car, and a few extras. At thirty she is were some of us find find ourselves about that age: in control of her life, confident and reasonably content. She realizes the rarity of her success, and is proud of her achievement, but also knows that she's not likely to do much better and does not strive to. There is contentment in accepting our limits -- when they are comfortable.

This is one way a young person's life can turn out: crowned with the contentment of early maturity.

I know, because mine did.

I remember well when I reached that point -- I was then around thirty myself. It felt like the final victory in a long struggle. We spend our teens and twenties trying to figure out what kind of life we want to -- and can -- live and what kind of person we can and should be. And when we at last arrive at a juncture at which it seems that we have finally figured it out, we quite suddenly feel unusually comfortable with ourselves. A period of easy contentment ensues; we call it maturity; and we assume that it will stay with us forever.

Yet, life, it turns out, does not stay still. While we kick back in the comfort of our content thirties, all the while our life changes: we change -- we get older, uglier, frailer, we begin to tire easily, our old routines begin to master us -- and bore us; and the world around us changes: our friends become older, their life situation is now different, and the world around us turns relatively younger, people begin to see us in a new light. As a result some things we assumed we knew -- how to dress, smile, apologize; how to seduce a woman, say, or charm a client -- no longer work.

Back when I was thirty, if I got drunk at a party and made a pass at a woman she might have rejected me perhaps, but would have thought the whole incident funny and me a silly prank, at worst; today the possible downside is far worse: if she does not like me, she's liable to be upset and think me a repulsive lecher. Little things may be even more important, because they are with us every day: with only half my former hair left, I no longer look cute -- but -- miserable -- when uncombed... And since my beard has mostly turned white, I can no longer afford to go unshaven every other day and count on sympathy... If I fall asleep with a lover, I must get up before her and shave... or else she'd think she's dating a geriatric...

I can no longer afford to dress in sweat pants and ripped T-shirts because I no longer have the charm of youth which excuses poverty... Poorly dressed at twenty five or even thirty, I was to many an attractive rogue and it was assumed that I was on the make... but poorly dressed today, I am to those who look at me and don't know me, a poor old bastard: I appear to them a pitiful financial failure. And how much of our success -- and contentment! -- depends on how they -- the people who do not know us -- see us!

Thus, it seems, the period of contentment in which we know perfectly how to act in all situations -- the early maturity -- is just that: early; we outgrow it and we must change and learn again. We must learn new lessons -- the lessons of the middle maturity; and above all how to project confidence, dignity, and probity: the virtues expected of people of our age. (And the only way to earn respect).

And how to accept our new limits -- since trying to go beyond them when so obviously it is not possible exposes us to nothing but ridicule.

(Ah, the new limits. These are the hardest, of course).

Staring at the pond

.

My pond is a fascinating place and staring at it is a full time job. It lies in the shade of the trees. In places direct sunlight hits it, and, penetrating below the surface, it scatters within the depths off the small particles of mud suspended in the water creating milky areas of impenetrability. Other areas of the pond lie in varying densities of shadow: the deeper the shadow, the more faithful the reflection of the world above: trees, sky, and clouds. The wind moves the trees and with it, the effects on the water shift.

Now, add to that complexity other layers of complexity: that there are here and there objects -- usually dry leaves or flower petals -- scattered and floating on the surface of the pond. In other places objects sunken under the surface can be seen: branches dropped in the water by the wind, or fish sunbathing lazily right under the surface. As if that was not enough, the surface of the pond is sometimes disturbed: perhaps a fish has stirred near the surface; or a kingfisher skimmed the surface in an attempt to catch a small fry; or something fell into the water from the trees above. All these events cause different sorts of waves, resulting in different patterns on the water; and sometimes two happen at once, creating a kaleidoscopic interference.

An American naturalist who sometime in the 1820's retired to live in a shack by a pond, wrote how sitting by the pond and staring pointlessly brought up to his lips, unawares, a silly smile. I emulate that great literary model a great deal these days.

Two kinds of happiness

.


Back in the 1950's a woman wrote a book about ecstasy: her point was to argue that there really is such an experience (since descriptions of it ranging from religious to literary to erotic texts were all strikingly similar across all ages and cultures) and that, presumably, there must be a brain mechanism responsible for its generation.¹ Though she did not say it, the book's one possible implication was that, if we only learned to manipulate that mechanism...

The book passed without an echo. (It was the fifties, after all: too early to talk about sex; and ecstasy does not seem to interest anyone unless it be sexual).

I have forgotten it, too: the experience which interested the author did not interest me. It seemed too tiresome: it was too intense sort of thing for me. Who wants to writhe with pleasure? (Don't get me wrong: pleasure is fine, but I am not such a great fan of writhing).

What interested me in her book was another experience of pleasure. This the author did not discuss at great length -- only long enough to define it and to say that it is not the subject of her book. She termed it "The Adamic Experience" (that is, that of Adam in Eden, before The Fall). She also called it the Oceanic Experience, from the way it feels: the experience of utter and complete calm, like looking at the ocean from a great height, gently undulating beneath us.

Milosz has a poem which captures it:

A day so happy.
Fog lifted early. I worked in the garden.
Hummingbirds were stopping over honeysuckle flowers.
There was no thing on earth I wanted to possess.
I knew no one worth my envying him.
Whatever evil I had suffered, I forgot.
To think that once I was the same man did not embarrass me.
In my body I felt no pain.
When straightening up, I saw the blue sea and sails.

I became intimately familiar with the experience during the six years when I lived by the sea. And I have done well to tame it since; at times seem able to just turn it on at will.

(Alas, un-philosopher-like, this ability to do so depends entirely on the circumstances in which I find myself: the place must be both beautiful and -- quiet. You see, the oceanic experience enters, so to speak, through the eye but escapes through the ear).

But my last several days have taken me away from the oceanic calm and back towards ecstasy.

I don't have Laski's book with me here, so will make a literary reference I can recall: Lawrence Weschler's Vermeer in Bosnia. In one of its essays a man recalls: "it was soon after I returned from Japan... I was driving on [some freeway in Southern California] and these waves of intense pleasure just rolled over me one after another."

Well, that's what happened to me yesterday while I lay on my terrace in the afternoon and looked up at the sky through the trees:



Intense waves of pleasure, like waves of heat emerging from a kiln, washed over me.



I stared up hungrily, insatiate.


It was no doubt a malfunction of the brain.


Ecstasy is bad for us. It upsets us. It makes us greedy. It makes us grasp. We want more. We fear it may stop.

And happiness is not built on fear and desiring.




But I was OK with it for a day.
A little writhing is good every now and then, I suppose.
At my age and all.



¹ Marghanita Laski, Ecstasy: a Study of Some Secular and Religious Experiences

Commentary on Seven Against Thebes (4)

(For those of you hungry for my wisdom and too impatient to read Krawczuk, I will from now on break out my commentary as a separate post following the chapter on which I am commenting).



CONCERNING THE QUARREL BETWEEN THE IDLE AND THE PRODUCTIVE

Virtues of simplicity. Why scholars are boring. Hostility between
the productive and the idle. The importance of idleness for art.

When I told people that I was translating this book, explaining to them that it is a kind of miscellany of loose leaves -- almost Ming-style vignettes, if you will -- safety-pinned together by the story of Seven Against Thebes, some have suggested The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony by Roberto Calasso as a comparable work.

It isn't.

There is something about Calasso which makes it, to my mind, unreadable. It is, for one thing, too dense. The style is certainly beautiful, but simply too ornate for discussion of weighty topics. Weighty topics are best discussed plainly, lest one lose his thread in the jungle of erudite oratory. Ornate style is best for simple things: love, for example; texts wherein the message is simple enough ("I love you, baby, yeah yeah yeah") not to get lost in the labyrinth of verbal pyrotechnics; indeed, so embarrassingly simple that rhetorical devices are necessary to obscure its simplicity. Krawczuk's style is simple, conversational; this allows him to address difficult points with ease. But Calasso's style is most of the time to beautiful for ease.

And, second, Calasso's book is -- well -- trivial: the points he makes -- I do not hesitate calling them philosophical, as any serious reflection seems to me philosophical, philosophy, being after all, the love of wisdom -- are cute enough but without any reference at all to the pressing questions of life: love, friendship, betrayal, death. Weird, this: his subject being the Greeks, for crying out-loud, with their famously big themes, I did not find a single sentence in Calasso's book which made me ponder life. All his points seemed -- well, irrelevant to life.

Calasso's work seems to me in this regard of a kind with a very great deal -- indeed, nearly all -- of acclaimed Anglosaxon scholarly writing -- and most of the ambitious best Anglo-Saxon blogging: erudite, well turned, witty, and -- eminently not worth reading; an intelligent man's equivalent of that great English virtue: small talk. I suppose Calasso's work is the sort Joe Campbell referred to as typical of all scholarly work: much verbiage and evidence building up and up and up to -- nothing. To a kind of mouse flitting furtively out one's lips: a small, trivial pseudo-point.

Why scholars should write this way is not clear. It could be that they are shackled by some sort of professional prejudice against saying something important; perhaps doing so is considered crass: a kind of making waves, or worse, an attempt to court cheap popularity. Or perhaps scholars think their job is not to tackle the big questions, for which there are no immediate answers, but little ones which can be answered -- perhaps in the false belief that a myriad small answers thrown up together on a big pile will eventually reach the big questions, like ten million tiny bricks piled up in a kind of epistemological tower of Babel eventually meant to reach heaven.

Or it could be that scholars are simply dull people. After all, it is a matter of temperament, is it not: it takes a certain kind of man to be able to live one's life entirely as an intellectual adventure, in libraries, books, debates and lectures -- no life-threatening situations, no ambitions of love or power, no disreputable gambles -- certainly no gun smuggling, God forbid -- no hunger for distant lands or unattainable women; indeed, talking to many scholars one gets the idea: apparently, no hunger of any kind at all. To us they seem to have... low levels of hunger for life in their blood. They are -- colorless, gray.

*

Having ripped into Calasso, I now need to slap Krawczuk, too. He, too, is a scholar (poor fellow can't help it) and suffers as a result from a professional perversion: he sees everything in the light of his own discipline. Not being a classicist, I do not understand -- though will henceforth try to find out -- the precise nature of the historical debate between bios practicos and bios theoreticos; but that debate, as Krawczuk presents it, seems to me to be between men of action on the one hand ("men of action" defined as "sweaty brawn") and effete brains -- in other words, scholars -- on the other.

But the original argument between Amphion and Zethus, as it is presented in the myth, is different from the one Krawczuk presents. It is the argument between men of action on the one hand -- by which a broader category is meant here, one including scholars, who, after all, do practical stuff -- teach, write books and opinion pieces, consult; and, on the other hand, good for nothing idlers. After all, there is nothing theoretical about wondering about the hills with one's lyre (or was it luth?). Amphion is not an intellectual, Monsieur Krawczuk, he is a lazy bone.

Perhaps it takes a lazy bone like me to recognize one, and perhaps it is my professional perversion to see the world in the light of my line of work. It is entirely possible that Aleksander Krawczuk, a teacher and an author of numerous books, has never experienced what I experience with great frequency, and thus cannot speak to it: the accusation that he is doing nothing, that he is wasting his gifts, denying them to the human race, not carrying his weight, not making a contribution. People who tell me this are irked that I spend my days reading books, visiting museums or attending performances, viewing my collection, thinking, and writing for my own consumption. They are full of suggestions as to what I could do instead: teach Polish several hours a week, says one; write a book, says another; sail around the world, says the third. (My friends are not racked by an excess of imagination).

This is how I see the debate between Zethus and Amphion. From where I sit (usually with a book in my lap), the debate seems irreconcilable because it arises out of basic misunderstanding: Zethus cannot imagine that anyone might be happy not working; Amphion simply cannot see what the big deal about working is.

Now, the interesting thing here is that Zethus tells Amphion to work, while Amphion is happy to leave Zethus alone. Why should this be? Is it possible that Zethus is not really happy in his productive life and views Amphion's with envy? Is it possible that he secretly wishes he could live such a life, but knows full well he can't, and therefore does the next best thing: tries to deny it to others?

*

It isn't a matter of economic necessity: after all Zethus could also not bother with the damn wall and live quite well (he did for years on the mountain, even though he also worked and worked). Equally, many of those who urge me to do something -- anything -- do not need to do a damn thing in their lives: either because they have independent means, or well-earning husbands who wouldn't mind them being idle, or are already retired; yet they work, sometimes for pithy wages, often stupid, unremarkable jobs. Why?

Partly, perhaps it is the matter of moral unease, as most would suggest: the bourgeois ethos united with the biblical notion that God has condemned us to work in the sweat of our brow and we better do as God says; partly, perhaps lack of autotelic imagination; but partly it is a quarrel between the hunter-gatherers and the agriculturalists. Switching from hunting and gathering to agriculture may well have been attended by a behavioral mutation; hunter-gatherers are glad to stop when they have obtained the day's food; but agriculturalists can't stop working as long as the sun is up. (It doesn't mean they actually like the work, only that they just can't stop). Now, an old tale says that my people are descended from Central Asian nomads who conquered (and then herded) a Central European settled folk. Certainly my ancestors had no problem doing nothing productive at all -- unless you consider an annual pillaging expedition into Crimea or Moldavia -- "work". So perhaps it is the nomad gene in me that makes me so easily content doing nothing productive at all?

But it isn't like us idle folk are of no value. For one thing -- the main thing, really -- we are the main driving force of culture: not only does an amazing amount of really good literature come out of us: from Tsurezuregusa to Gattopardo; but also no one but us has the time to consume art, to become expert connoisseurs and to guide, with our finely trained senses, those who laboriously produce for our pleasure. The qualitative change in artistic production in the twentieth century is perhaps best accounted for by the disappearance of a true leisure class. Just look at who buys the stuff at the auctions today: they are all working people. From the point of view of the art, it makes no difference whether the buyer is paid thirty-six thousand a year or thirty-six million a year; what matters is that he labors 70 hour weeks and as a result, has no time to look at art, and therefore, when it comes to evaluating it, is basically illiterate.

So, dear friends, the idle us, like the drone-bees, have a noble calling in life: we make it more interesting. Remember that before you tell any one of us to do something. We are doing something even when it seems we aren't.

A very poor Ming-style vignette in honor of Grandmaster Zhang Dai

.
Three years ago I lived near this place. Frequently, of an evening, when the sunlight turned golden and the air became brisk, I came here by motorcycle to race on this isolated road along this high mountain ridge. Both sides of the road here are deep valleys, filled with dark, cool, silent forest, and, higher up, the mountains roll away towards the horizon in rows and rows of ever fainter blue -- until they merge with sky and clouds at infinity.

Every time I came here, a sparrowhawk would join me and fly by my side for several miles, staying constantly some 30 meters away, on my right, which was also the eastern side of me, where the sky grew dark. The sunlight reflected off him; against the darkening sky he burnt like a precious ruby.

I don't know why he followed me: perhaps he liked the color of my bike, or mistook the logo on my helmet for a bird. Or perhaps it was just his regular time to fly along the ridge to enjoy the sunset and it was me who followed him instead. Or perhaps he simply wanted to take a closer look who it was that intruded on his territory.

Or perhaps he was not an sparrowhawk at all, but an omen¹, or a ghost of someone who had died here, or an incarnation of the genius loci. But he was here every time I came to race my bike on this isolated road along the top of the mountain ridge.

Today I returned here to see if he was still there, but, no, he wasn't. I raced my bike alone and no one followed me.

Footnotes:

¹ A bird of evil omen: one appears about half way (6'20") through this video.

That life is the enemy of philosophy

With a regularity which is no doubt statistically meaningful (and thus calls for an explanation, a master's thesis anyone?), conversations among the unreproduced turn to the topic of their relationship with the reproduced. Upon such occasions two things are invariably observed:

1. That the reproduced desire us to reproduce. Usually they do this nicely, telling us how nice and worthwhile is the experience, or, less nicely, how we are missing out (every PR man knows that fear of missing out is the single most powerful cattle-prod in his toolbox), but sometimes not nicely at all, as when they suggest that not reproducing is unnatural ("That's what we're here for"), or even immoral ("Why should you have it easy while we labor in childbirth and child-rearing?");

and

2. How their reproduction robs us: it robs us of our friends because those who have been our favorite conversation companions to-date, on topics which interested us (which is why we picked them as friends in the first place), now, suddenly prove incapable of talking of anything other than their progeny's exalted status as the ultimate blessing upon the multiverse. Which is, of course, while the progeny remains in the initial (sausage) stages (and for a very long time afterwards) both laughable and dull in the extreme.

No more Heidegger for us, or Proust, or -- anything; the quality of the progeny's evacuation preempts all topics now.

*

This second topic is part of a more sinister aspect of reproduction which is that, unless the parents have sufficient financial resources to

a) hire domestic help in order to insulate themselves from the duller aspects of child-rearing (i.e. nappies, school pick ups, play-dates) and thus preserve for themselves a reasonable amount of free time in which to continue being themselves as they once were; and,

b) more broadly speaking, have resources sufficient to make sure that the arrival of the offspring does not ruin them financially and chain them to the tiller till their dying day by burying them under a mountain of economic obligations (prams, school fees, babysitters, tutors, toys);

then the arrival of the progeny means the end of their life as their life. They become little more than an adjunct to the progeny's life: its foot servant, its cotton-picker, its babysitter, its driver, and its slave-tutor all in one.¹

They are simply no longer their own.

Mysteriously, they don't deny it: they readily admit that their life has but one purpose now -- to assure the best possible future for their offspring -- and are mystified by our objection to this fact. Why would you not want, they seem to want to ask, to give up all you have for the sake of your children? And already the s²-word is lurking in the background.

*

Now, there is a sense in which the unreproduced are held by the reproduced to be pupae of a sort: that is, unfulfilled human beings, imperfect and incomplete; ones assumed to be merely waiting to reproduce; indeed, ones who have failed to reproduce; and thus objects of pity in the manner in which one might pity an athlete who collapses before reaching the finish line.

The truth is that while there are perhaps some unreproduced who are like this -- desiring to reproduce and unable to -- there are also others who are hardened career criminals: we have no intention of ever reproducing, not for five minutes, and look upon our reproduced friends, now chained to the tiller for the rest of their lives, with silent but profound pity. Silent because it would be too cruel to tell them the truth that, in our eyes, they have mocked up, messed up, and thrown away their lives. Cruel because what could possibly be the point of revealing to them their own misery in all its stark terror -- if there is nothing they can ever do about it?

So we smile benignly and pretend that the sausage-like thing in the pram is indeed the eighth wonder of the world (and its evacuation extraordinary in every measure); that we do secretly wish for one ourselves (or at least for more of the same for them); and that we are sorry that we have not attained to our reproduced friend's exalted status as kings of the universe: Mom or Dad.

Forsooth, it is out of pity for our friends that we do not tell them that the miracle that they deem to have achieved was no miracle at all; that the act is an ordinary act (one just lies back and moans for about 3 minutes): baboons can do as much and as well; and so do chickens every day of the year; or that their joy at the arrival of the munchkins is morally suspect: parents invariably talk of "their" children and are proud of their parental authority; but the children are not their children, or at least ought not to be; they will only naturally want to be their own, not their parents', which is what all parents, even the best meaning ones, always, invariably forget; while authority is something to be earned over our equals, not something to be imposed by default over defenseless little things.

*

I suppose one could divide all adult life into ante-reproductionis and post-reproductionis; the ante-reproductionis is characterized by many things -- free time, disposable income, higher frequency of the experience of happiness and pleasure (there are incontrovertible statistics to prove this last point but the reproduced labor incessantly to deny or distort their truth, or at least to disbelieve it); and -- by a certain sense of searching for something. This sense is mostly quite mild, or at any rate intermittent, in most; but it can be quite powerful in some, leading them variously into religious pursuits or debauchery or extreme sports; it is sometimes described as searching for answers; and by some deemed the proper concern for philosophy.

Famously, a certain popular cultural franchise proposed once that our whole species were no more than a kind of computer devised by a higher civilization to find these answers. Being young and as yet unreproduced one can easily identify with this view. And though the franchise then proposed, rather meanly (and thoughtlessly), that the questions to which the answers are to be found are themselves unknown, and thus the whole search is a kind of confused head trip³, the truth is the opposite: the question is but one, and always the same, and very clear: how should we live our lives? That is: what should I, Joe Blow, do with my forty or fifty years here? The resource -- life -- is finite and wasting. There is a desire, a natural economic instinct, to deploy it most efficiently: to make the most of it, and now, before any part of it wastes away, gone never to come back.

And there is that sense that the endless cycle of birth and death and birth and death, as a good Buddhist might put it, or a life lived earning a living and then eating it; a life amounting in the end to no more than a tombstone, or a Wikipedia entry if we're lucky (as some consider it) -- that such a life does not amount to anything; that it is some preposterous waste of unknown possibilities which must surely be greater, more meaningful, more satisfying.

(I do not wish to argue here that this thought process is in some way correct; it is enough for the sake of my argument to observe that it commonly happens with the young).

Now, this search is naturally time consuming. Let me illustrate: Angelica, when I took her for a motorcycle trip in the hills, exclaimed at the end of the day:

"My goodness, this is wonderful, so this is what I have been missing!"

And then, being the thinking girl that she is, reflected:

"It is not easy to know what one likes, or to guess what one might like, is it? And one needs so much free time to find out!"

And she was right: one does need a lot of time to find out how one can live one's life to one's own satisfaction because opportunities to try different things are not evenly spaced out, are sometimes expensive, and are always crowded out by other choices. The search is made more difficult by the fact that many seem hell-bent on diverting us in our search to their own purposes, telling us things like "Plastics!" or "Hold up the flag!" or, most commonly, "Having your own children is the most wonderful experience you can ever have."

But, for most of us, before we can make much progress in this difficult and time-consuming search, there comes, usually out of the left-field, reproduction and stops our research dead in its tracks. Suddenly turned into our children's slaves now, we no longer have the time to try different things, or the energy, or the money; and most importantly, we no longer even want to, having suddenly transformed into breathless worshipers of our progeny's magnificent poop . The question how to live our lives, the central question of philosophy (at least in the way in which the ancients saw it), becomes irrelevant; it has been answered for us by life itself; life turned us into that into which it had always intended to turn us: slaves of the species reproductive process. In accepting this role, we agree not to question it. And thus there are no more questions which need to be answered. The way we ought to live our lives is this, it turns out: we ought to reproduce. Thus philosophy ends.

Then, as our progeny grows it will in turn eventually become human (i.e. acquire a mind of its own) and almost as soon as it does it will, invariably, turn to the immortal question: how should I live my life? (Thus raising philosophy back from the dead). But it's question, too, will go unanswered, because, the progeny too, will end up reproducing before it is ready and abandoning the search incomplete as a result. Philosophy's quest is thus doomed to failure.

Which is how I have illustrated my point: that life is the enemy of philosophy⁴.


Footnote:

¹ Given the direction public education is taking, less and less the last, since the public appears eager for us not to educate our progeny ourselves but to desire us instead to slave breathlessly to support a child whose mind then a total stranger -- a goobment appointed "teacher" -- will pervert without reference to our desire or opinion; this last means that, really and honestly speaking, once our children leave for school, at the tender age of five or six, we are no longer rearing it.

² As in self-centered, egoistical, parsimonious, miserly, self-seeking, ungenerous, small-minded. You take the hint?

³ It will be apparent from what follows that the authors of this BBC series were very likely already reproduced at the time of writing its script.

⁴ I have suggested elsewhere that the history of philosophy -- everywhere, East and West -- could be seen to follow this pattern: that philosophy begins with the attempt to figure out how we should live our lives, from which attempt it promptly strays into meaningless drivel like debating "intentionality" or "prime matter" or "causation". The number of excuses which reproduced philosophers can think up in order to duck philosophy's fundamental question is vast and potentially unlimited.

Reading Canetti or: Same Old Same Old, part 2

What can we do with the people from our past, with all those we have known? They keep turning up, more and more of them, a kind of transmigration, not of souls but of faces, and not in the hereafter but here. Years ago I was so astounded by their turning up in totally new places, with different ages, jobs, languages, that I was determined to write down every occurrence of this phenomenon. But I did so only rarely, and they have gotten more and more numerous. Now they are proliferating so fast that I could never record them all.

What is it about these constantly recurring people? Is there really only a limited number of possible faces? Or can our memories be organized only with the help of such resemblances?

Canetti writes about this experience often -- that a totally new person we meet is just like someone else we have known elsewhere; sometimes the similarity is so striking that we refuse to believe that it can possibly not be the same person. (And it s not just faces: it is gestures, grimaces, the timbre of the voice – the works). The intuition is not false: those who see more faces – the well travelled, the elderly have it more frequently – as the number of faces they have seen accumulates.

Canetti asks his questions right – first, he asks: is it possible that there is only a limited number of human faces? Had he been familiar with evolutionary psychology it would have been obvious to him that yes, of course, it is: the human gene pool is vast but limited; even accounting for all possible permutations of all possible genes – 1 x 2 x 3 x 4 etc. -- (but note that not all possible permutations are viable) -- given 6 billion of us on earth, there are bound to be repeats; a little math shows that there are probably far more repeats out there than we intuit possible.

Canetti’s second question is also relevant: I suppose he is right in guessing that our brain capacity to remember faces is limited; were it not we’d probably spot a lot more of the repeats than we do.

*

But Canetti opens the paragraph with a sentence which could be interpreted differently; and which, so interpreted, seems to me a much more interesting philosophical question. For, if you stop to think about it, indeed, what shall we do with all the people we have ever known – all the women we have slept with, say – who have gone, disappeared among the other 6 billion, never to come back, never to be recovered?

Yet, they live on in our memory; and we never quite cease interacting with that memory; we hear their voices; imagine what they might say. We pick shoes, for instance, and we think, she’d like this one better than that. How odd: these people -- for all intents and purposes as good as dead -- they continue to affect us deeply decades after they have disappeared.

It seems like a one way interaction, too, and as such a little unfair – we can’t talk back to them without – well, visibly talking to ourselves, it would seem. But perhaps not? Perhaps we affect them, too, in the same manner in which they affect us, affect them, so to speak, unbeknownst to us?

And if we do, how strange to know that there is something we do without having the least inkling of it.

And another thing: if we do affect them in some way, it is probably all wrong. I mean: my girlfriends, when they were still around, usually guessed things about me wrong – in their expectations of what I would like or say they usually erred in most surprising ways. I’d tease them saying “I am like no other man you have ever known” (which was probably true, actually, given that I came from a place which was a lot like the other side of the moon).

So what chance that, if they continue to interact with my memory, they do it all wrong? What chance they imagine me choosing a pair of shoes I never would?

*

Reading Notes from Hampstead is not entirely a waste of time: bon mots – books of maximes -- epigrams – have seemed more interesting to me lately than either novels or books written to make a point (say, How Great Empires Fall) -- in part because the epigrams' succinctness makes them not entirely transparent: the thought they seek to express being incomplete works a bit like a Rorschach test -- and stimulates my own thoughts in new directions, directions unforeseen by the author. And these directions I often find a lot more interesting than being guided exactly through that author's thought process.

Canetti works this way for me: the thoughts he stimulates in me seem to me a lot more interesting than his own.

Indeed, I seem to myself a lot more interesting than most famous intellectuals of our day. Not that this is their failure: perhaps being not too intellectual is what it takes to become a famous one. (Certainly, one cannot be too demanding of one's thought processes if one is to prepared to opinionate on TV).

I long to read the books of the unfamous intellectuals.