Time Is Our Home

So glad I have my multiple readings of Iain McGilchrist to salt my John Gray with. McGilchrist is my touchstone philosopher, nowadays. Whatever he may be wrong about – and I disagree with him at several points – his central insight, (which stands regardless of his neurological arguments: I’m not educated enough to evaluate those), is that our main problem is not what we’re thinking, it’s how we’re thinking. We are trying to stand outside of time, and everything that changes, or shifts its borders – like personhood, consciousness, goodness, beauty – we simply declare to be illusory, made-up, not real. Unfortunately, the category of things that change and shift their borders includes nearly everything that is important to us. So we’re left in a world where our reason can address only things that we don’t really care about. This is not, nor it cannot come to good.

 
Time is our home, says McGilchrist. If we try to live outside it we will only come to grief.

Before the Seas were Bent

I do want to understand things. And I feel like I have really made progress that way. I have cleared away a lot of misunderstanding. But having cleared the space, I would like to build something: I don’t want to just go on clearing space, although that obviously is something that goes on for as long as I live.

I don’t want to be a guru. I do want to walk in woods where the birds are like jewels and the air is cool and sweet. I want to be beautiful and make beautiful things, and to adore beauty where and as I find it: I guess my role model really is Tom Bombadil: nobody’s owner: nobody’s servant: minding his own house. The vita activa has never appealed to me, and I have never shown the slightest aptitude for it. But I do have an enormous capacity and appetite for perceiving beauty. That I think is the thread that runs through my life, the thread I will have to follow now.

The Space between Utopia and Apocalypse

John Gray is certainly piquant. He says clearly some things that I have long vaguely thought. I have even now not really come to terms with the idea, both tempting and frightening, that history may have no meaning. The recurring nightmares of apocalypse endemic to our imagination these days are only the reverse side of the fantasy of progress. Progress means that people are good and will be rewarded: apocalypse means that people are bad and will be punished. What we are having great difficulty with is the idea that history is just what happens when people bump into each other (as they do constantly, in a crowded world.) If it doesn’t mean anything in particular, we can peer into the space between utopia and apocalypse which is actually where we are headed, and maybe get some more sensible bearings. We are not altogether helpless, but we spend ridiculous amounts of thought and effort designing futures that are never going to conform to anybody’s design: and our commitment to teleological histories makes us intolerant extremists, across the board: my liberal friends are frothing at the mouth these days quite as much as any Christian Nationalist.

But Gray sees the question of free will oddly, to my mind. He seems to see no space between an absolutely free will and will as an absolute delusion. But here again it seems to me that reality is in the space between. We are subject to causes and conditions, as any other animal is. Much of what we think and do is born and performed outside of our narrow spotlight of consciousness; in some cases we have to find out what we are and what we want by simple empirical observation, because there are many things about ourselves we can’t see by way of introspection. There are many doors in the chambers of our mind that are locked, and we can only guess what’s in them. But that doesn’t mean that we see nothing in the light, and it doesn’t mean we are only hallucinating when we think we are deliberating. It means that we have to be humble, but it doesn’t mean we have to grovel.

Spring Solstice; Autumn of the Patriarch

The solstice! Dark gray and rainy, the sweet smell of grateful earth and flourishing grass. I am feeling so blessed, and almost at ease.

Trip to Dad’s was a Tom’s breakfast, a Glenwood lunch including a sausage patty that seemed too much even as I bolted it, and Burgerville dinner in Albany which included a hazelnut chocolate milkshake that was really, really disgusting. Then a night of diarrhea and weird cramps in my calves and obliques and groin, like what the hell? And a day of recovery, and then today, still not feeling quite well, but the POINT is, the point is that there wasn’t any binge at any point of it, and I’m still on track, with enough data to reasonably say yes, I am on a regimen that presently comes to a pound and a half of weight loss per week, which is exactly what I am aiming for. It will change; everything changes; but for now I can say, this is exactly where I should be, this is the course, I am steering for the right star, gleaming above the waters.

So at last I know. And of course life is punctuated with illness and times when you can’t exercise, that’s simply human life and always has been, probably more frequent illness now that I’m an old man, but who cares? And it’s always been way more frequent than I’ve ever acknowledged. Roll with it, roll with it, roll with everything, sir. And maybe I go to work today or maybe I just leave it till tomorrow and none of it really matters, because I’m just doing them a favor anyway and the whole thing is laid out, regardless, I see the whole vista and this work thing is finished. It can’t really touch me any more.

The meditation vow is broken, but we’ll repair it, it’s not broken badly.

The opening pages of John Gray’s Straw Dogs is absolutely amazing and quite beautiful. I wish I had come upon him long ago. And also reading Otoño del Patriarca, which is also absolutely amazing, and responsible I suppose for all these run-on sentences. Much love dears.