Believing In

C. S. Lewis was a glib son of a bitch, but he nailed it when he spoke of how disastrous it is to embark upon believing something "not because it is true, but for some other reason." The existentialist project as conceived by Camus strikes me as simply impossible. Certainly impossible for me. "I'll just decide that all people are important, and then they'll be important because I have decided they are important, and their importance will sustain my devotion to them --" No. No, the whole thing collapses under the slightest pressure. (for example, what the hell is important about some of these individuals? Not much that meets the eye.) For exactly the same reason, I am not going to be a Christian without a good reason, no matter how much a life of service and devotion appeals to me. (And I have always recognized that I am a servant, by temperament and inclination.) I would become a Christian simply and only because I thought it was true that Jesus was the unique human incarnation of the one God. Full stop. I'm not going to believe it because it's pleasant (and anyway, it's terrifying, if you take it seriously) or because it will make me mentally healthy. I don't know how other people are built, but I'm simply not built for that: I couldn't do it if I wanted to. I believe things that I think are true. 

Once upon a time I believed in the metaphysics of reductionist materialism. What's real are subatomic particles, and they bang into each other in deterministic ways, determining what the atoms do, and that determines what the molecules do, and that determines what cells do, and that determines what creatures such as us do, including -- somehow -- generating subjective experience and a sense of self, at some arbitrary threshold of neural complexity. Okay, well, maybe. Maybe free will is a delusion. Maybe subjective experience is a delusion: some people argue that, though it's a rather desperate move. I think it's more likely that what seems obvious is actually true: that we have intentions and make decisions. I suspect that even cells have intentions and make decisions: that mind and life are coterminous. This is I guess some kind of pantheism. It doesn't particularly leave me "believing in" God, which is a formulation that I suspect is self-subverting in precisely the same way as the Existentialist project. A God you have to "believe in" is not much of a God.

Nevertheless, my intuition is that there is Something to which one can orient, that you can know "where" it is as a blind man knows where the sun is, and turn towards it. (This is a METAPHOR, people. If you don't know what a metaphor is, look it up.) And that intuition is based partly on the surprising intelligibility of the world. It's weirdly explicable. It has rules it plays by, and we can figure some of them out. And, as the Stoics maintain, you can line yourself up with it, and swim with its current, in which case you will be happy (in an ultimate sense, not to be confused with gratified), or you can struggle against it, in which case you will be unhappy, unlucky, clumsy, and conflicted. This being so, the most fruitful thing to practice is orienting to this Sun. Listening for it.

This will distress those who insist that you must know what something is before you investigate it, which is to say most modern people most of the time. How do we know, ahead of time, that what we are orienting to is The Good (a.k.a God?) Well, we don't. But if you agree that we are not now exactly where and what we want to be, then you have to give yourself permission to look for where to go and what you would want to be, in places that are presently unknown. (Once again, this is a metaphor, Deal with it.) And it is actually not that hard to tell, most of the time, whether you are orienting yourself more properly. Are you more unified, more graceful, more at ease, more effective? Someone who is oriented more properly ought to be all of those things.

Contraction

All this may be true: but most of it is beyond my reach, and would be beyond my reach even if I were not old and deaf. My circle has contracted to my family, my span of days to a decade or two. I want to walk attentively here. It is a rainy, windy fall, and the turns of the future have become ever more wildly unpredictable: fretting my heart about the world to come not looking as I expected it to look is not going to help matters. I'll do my best to look after the people within my reach (and myself.)

I expected a gentler collapse of American civilization, but the writing has been on the wall all my life. When asked why he regularly went to make speeches at Hyde Park, to not many listeners, William Morris answered, "You can't make socialism without socialists." Likewise, you can't make democracy without (small 'd') democrats.

Such business as I still have in the world is the cultivation of democrats and the democratic virtues (which are, after all, just a subset of the virtues, period). The lamps may not be relit in our lifetime, or in our grandchildren's. I am sorry about that. It is painful to watch an old established democracy attempt suicide, and the slow motion slide into comic horrors, while we wait to see if the attempt succeeded, is not much to my taste. But you play the hand you're dealt.

Milton and World-Building

I have an old paperback edition of Paradise Lost sitting around, and I pick it up and read a page or two from time to time. Milton is one of the few acknowledged great English poets I've never taken a shine to. Nothing about Satan's grandeur appeals to me. If all the powers and potentates of Heaven and Hell have to do is make speeches of elaborate self-justification, then I'd rather poke along here in the middle kingdom and watch a beetle negotiate a tuft of grass. Who cares about all their bombast and swagger?

And then there are the weird discontinuities. The world-building, as kids like to say these days, is comically inconsistent and contrived. Having Death and Sin walk around with the same ontological status as Lucifer and Jesus, not to mention as the Creator himself? How is that supposed to work? The world dangling on a string? The invocation of a Greek muse on a Hebrew stage? And if Milton really thinks that this God is the creator of the world, and of himself, how dare he stuff His mouth with his own words? I mean that literally: you would think that even the most naive and unreflective of Christians would recognize that they're not up to writing a script for God.

Yet Milton is neither naive nor blasphemous in intent, and he's no teenager. He's a man who's taken enormous real risks and played a key part in the great events of his time. His learning is (a little too obviously) immense. What is he playing at?

---

I'm uneasy about the way my children and their friends talk about world-building. They prize it highly; too highly, it seems to me. Thorough elaboration and consistency are virtues for an engineer, not for a storyteller. When it was pointed out to Ursula Le Guin that she had created two different planets named Werel, in different stories, she was entirely unconcerned. So what? These are fictions. We're making them up. They're for visiting, not for living in.

---

Meditating on that, I realize that I'm engaged in the same thing as my children. I'm holding Milton to standards of realism he never undertook to honor. He's writing a poem, and he's drawing shamelessly on all the literary traditions and devices he knows. He is not engaged in world-building. Arrogant as he is, he's not that arrogant. He's a man writing a poem, that's all. He's not pretending to be anything else. The problem is not that he's unsophisticated, It's that I am. My kids are just a bit further down the dead-end of realism, where the literary ideal is a novel so huge that you never need to come out the other end, and so consistent that the author has not changed at all between the writing of volume 1 and the writing of volume 83. Everything will be exactly where you expect it to be; all the pieces interlock; you will never be ejected into your own lived experience. You will never have to fend for yourself.

---

I have Milton's Sonnet 19 by heart, so it's not true that he's never spoken to me. Someday I hope to be able to receive from Paradise Lost more of what he was sending: I'm old enough in reading to know that its not Milton's deficiency but mine that I'm dealing with here. Maybe not this year, or this decade, or this life; but I'll leave the door ajar. You never know.

Waking up Worried

I woke at four, worried that yesterday I had reassured my daughter about the political future badly and wrongly. No more sleep after that. I dutifully counted 150 breaths, in hopes that sheer boredom would get me back to sleep, but it didn't. But anyway I want to get up earlier, if not quite this early, so hey. Here I am.

I get so muddled nowadays, I have so many thoughts about the future, and sorting the true from the false and the useful from the useless is difficult, even before you get to trying to evaluate whether the problem might be thinking about the future at all. We're trained to think about the future as princes, and we are not princes. We are peasants, and we will take what get, and do our best with it. 

Being old helps a little, because I know now that almost nothing I was worried about forty years ago was the right thing to be worried about. We think we know way more about the future than we do; we're O so clever. "If things keep on going this way, then..." but things don't. They speed up; they slow down, they evoke overwhelming opposition; or they are fixed by "small hands that do them because they must, while the eyes of the great are elsewhere." Or they are swamped by things still worse and yet unimagined in the womb of time (but that is not one of the ways to reassure your daughter.)

Still, in the run-up to the disastrous election of 2016, though the polls were looking good, my heart misgave me. I was pretty sure Trump was going to win. And now though the polls put it a knife-edge, my heart is easier. I think this time he will probably lose. Which is evidence of nothing, of course. But nothings are sometimes the appropriate medicine for imaginary illnesses.

On the other hand, the bizarre fantasy entertained by both Left and Right in this country, that the opposition is somehow imaginary and ephemeral, and one good election will make it go away, is one of the main problems. We keep not really taking the other side seriously, because we're convinced that it's not really there, people couldn't really be so awful. Surely we'll wake up and they will turn out to have been just a nightmare? And surely we are not part of the problem, heavens no, our virtue is complete and perfect and the other side fears us totally, totally unreasonably.

I say that not because I think the sides are morally equivalent. I don't at all. But we are equally negligent of our political duty to engage with each other. We have already paid heavily for that, and we will pay even more heavily, because we have not the slightest intention of changing anything about ourselves. Anything. At. All.

Round Like An Orange

The toenails of the decades click on the oak wood floor:

they patter past the post, mortality set on "stun";

they'll eventually get the zoomies

and then your race is run.

The other day I learned of a new procedure:

they peel your prostate like an orange, removing it whole

rather than slicing it. I don't know how they get it out,

or if it leaves a hole.

The yellow leaves are brilliant in the sun,

the birch bark's white puts cadmium to shame,

the sky gets pale closer to the ground,

the tide runs back the way it came.

Flailing

Something very large and indistinct is moving slowly into alignment with me, so I'm sighting down its length. Or into its barrel. I'm not sure this thing will not blow up. I don't know what it is.

Still sick, perpetually sick, these days. My old ways of recovery won't do: I need to get rid of this visceral fat without doing a whole lot of exercise, and that means letting a lot of muscle go. Maybe I'll get to build the muscle back, and maybe I won't; but nothing good is going to happen until this systemic inflammation drops. If the muscle has to go it has to go. I need to get rid of this fat, as quick as I can.

It is an achingly beautiful Fall, this year, and I have barely seen it.

Why have I been so fretful and self-absorbed? Being sick does that to you, I guess. For one thing. But also I am more cut off from the world than I have ever been. Flailing in space like an untethered astronaut; every action its own equal and opposite reaction, summing to zero.

I fumble towards an idea of how I am in the world that includes the notion that understanding things may do some good even though it remains implicit and uncommunicated, but my materialism is so ingrained that there's not much traction there. What good does it do? I mean, there are side-glimmers, mistakes I don't make, injuries I don't inflict. Maybe. But the steamroller of Dickensian liberalism keeps bearing down on me: what good does it do? Where are the children saved from poverty, the tigers from extinction, the libraries from demolition? I'm just a black-robed priest muttering to himself in a dark place, grudging the virgins their sunlight.

Thus Dickens. Blake has another point of view: but then Blake was visited by the Christ in the morning, and drank God with his morning tea. I am a spirit of another sort.

Checking In

So I guess the three times I check in would be morning, afternoon (meaning not long after I get home, whether that's 10:00 or 4:00), and evening (meaning not long after dinner), and the idea of the afternoon and evening check-ins is to not get lost in the mindless repetitions for hours at a time -- not, anyway, until the constructive things are done. I don't tend to get lost in the morning, so that's more just a matter of getting out into the light of day and the air of the world.

I can invoke the divine double, if he'll show up. What would the angel bearing my semblance do? What would he feel and think? I don't need to do this alone, and I don't need to know what I'm doing. I can ask for help.

They can be very short walks: at this stage of my recovery, they should not be long ones. Hell, they can even just be standing out under the sky.

I do not need to know what should be done. My job is to find that out. I am groping my way: I don't know who I am or what my surroundings are: I'm blind. My light is spent. Pretending that it's otherwise is not going to help at all.

"And that one talent which is death to hide / Lodged with me useless..."

The constructive things might be almost anything. Don't close that circuit prematurely.