My creation myth

In the beginning was the void. How big was it? How long did it last? It’s impossible to say because time and space had not yet been created. Let’s imagine it as an empty matchbox. The Prime Mover, impatient for things to start, opened the box and the void escaped like a genie from a bottle. Time, space, matter, energy all came into existence.

Matter divided into elements, gases at first, coalescing into hot stars, and sometimes planets. Some parts hardened into rocks, the rest slopped around in a chemical soup, tethered by a newly invented force, gravity. “It is good”, said the Cosmic Intelligence to itself.

On a planet of days and nights, excited elements danced all day in the chemical soup, aroused by hot rays beamed from the local star, and by close proximity to one another. Randomly following their impulses—attracted here, repelled there—they endlessly swapped partners and formed gangs. Not the Montagues and Capulets, the Sharks and the Jets, but the Alkalines and Acids. When they attacked one another, debris was formed, resulting in new compounds of varying stability.

Thus it was that the Amino Acids became dominant, a tribe noted for their endless variety of structure, which folded up into braids called proteins. By some mysterious transformation, these formed into organisms. Thus was born Life.

Life differs from simple rocks, gases and water. Its characteristic is to generate individual organisms which come into existence and then die. Instead of being constantly created from scratch, they reproduced themselves, in endless generations. Successive generations were more complex and better adapted than the ones before. This came about through sexual differentiation—each organism being either male or female. The new generation wasn’t just produced from the production of spores, or eggs, from an old organism before it died. It resulted from a reproductive act, an act of creation as extraordinary as the one which brought forth something from the void of nothing at the beginning of time.

And so there were animals, which miraculously developed into a teeming variety of unlikely shapes and habits of life. My illustration shows an artistic reconstruction of some of the creatures whose fossil remains were discovered in the Burgess Shale, in the mountains of British Columbia, Canada.

Somehow or another, the various lineages, branching over the generations, produced hominids (great apes) and then the genus Homo, of which you and I are the species homo sapiens sapiens. A characteristic of our species is to accumulate hereditary lore, not all of which is wisdom, for it takes many generations to winnow the grain from the chaff. By the time I was born, and grew to absorb some of it, Sigmund Freud had come and gone, leaving his mark which inspired Ernest Becker (see my previous post) to say this:

“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 blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever. It is a terrifying dilemma to be in and to have to live with.” (Becker, The Denial of Death, p. 28)

Clearly his words have struck a chord with many, if not with me personally. He’s making a claim about the difference between man and the other animals and it prompts me to set out this, my own creation myth, that is, to summarise those parts of hereditary lore which make sense to me, and which I can live by.

Till recently I was writing a book of my own, entitled I am an Animal. It was well advanced, but I got stuck on the structure. I seemed to have produced a dinosaur, which could not adapt to the changing environment of my constantly developing ideas; or a winged bird too large for flight by some law of engineering unknown to me. And now I see that one of the (very many) weak points of my manuscript was its failure to adequately express what I meant by my title; and more generally my failure to express what I most profoundly wanted to say.

I usually find myself most grateful, in the end, to the person or idea I most mock at first. It is Ernest Becker who makes me see that my creation myth must address the difference between man and the other animals in a manner that’s cogent but also resonant. I need not worry about the science: my myth will inevitably reflect it, having been constructed in an ambience permeated with science, mostly transmitted through Wikipedia and BBC Radio 4.

Quickly and superficially, I scan the options for what differentiates man. Two-legged walking can’t be it, for the birds got there first. To the poetic imagination, it’s their ability to fly that excites wonder, not two-legged locomotion, which bestows no towering majesty. Skill with the hands, the ability to construct tools? It’s certainly important, but there are some parallels in other animals.

I conclude that the development of facial and laryngeal muscles that lets us talk, and a brain development which allows limitless elaboration of language, are the key factors. There is also the matter of soul. I started this blog with the question “Do fish have souls?” and concluded, in the five years since, that if man has a soul then so has every creature, so have the rocks, so has the air, so has the empty space, if there is such a thing. This, you may say, is God: except that I don’t see evidence of just one God, acting in a co-ordinated manner.

I’ve left my creation myth very incomplete. I still haven’t explained, in this my first attempt at a twenty-first century equivalent of a Kipling “Just So Story”, why human beings are so different from one another.

Nor have I explained why a profession has come into being where people like Sigmund Freud have laboured to try and cure the freakiness of their patients and themselves, and been listened to with some seriousness, even when they say things like this:

“What I have tried to do ... is to suggest that the problem of heroics is the central one of human life, that it goes deeper into human life than anything else because it is based on organismic narcissism and on the child’s need for self-esteem as the condition for his life.” (Becker, The Denial of Death, p. 7)

Perhaps human beings are so different from each other that each of us compiles his own creation myth.

The Denial of Death, by Ernest Becker

According to Ernest Becker, the wellspring of human action is the fear of death: correction, the denial of the fear of death. In his Preface, he actually says that the “prospect of death . . . is the mainspring of human activity” (my italics). He makes short work of the real fear of real death, that natural and necessary instinct which man shares with the other animals. He mentions it right at the start, to make his point that man is driven by the notion of heroism, whose invariable purpose, he claims, is to deny one’s own fear of death. In this denial, he claims, spring all the world’s evils—crime, war, capitalism and so on. He reckons evolution made a creative leap in producing man, a huge leap riddled with defects. From birth we are beset with traumas and impossible demands. The only way we can cope with life and especially our imminent death, is through repression of our real feelings, that is, our terrors. (And if we argue with him, we prove him right, for we have repressed so well that we are unaware of our repression. So there!) For example, the fear of death can be repressed by heroism, proving that one is not afraid at all; or by personal distinction, proving one is superior to the others and attaining thereby a kind of immortality.

By way of support for his ideas, he quotes throughout from Freud, Ferenczi, Rank, Adler, Perls, William James, Jung, Fromm, Maslow, Kierkegaard and himself. Now, who is the odd one out in this list? Kierkegaard, you may say. He’s the only one who’s not a psychologist. Wrong! He has a chapter entitled “Psychoanalyst Kierkegaard”, despite the obvious fact that Kierkegaard never had any patients to analyse. So the odd one out is Becker himself, for he was certainly not a psychologist by trade. This doesn’t stop him writing a chapter entitled “The problem of Freud’s character, Noch Einmal [once again]”. Becker hero-worships Freud one minute; in the next he demonstrates his own superior understanding, or sometimes the definitive understanding of all the Freudian problems which, by the early nineteen-seventies, the best minds have finally achieved. This alternation, Freud-right, Freud-wrong, Freud-heroically-almost-right, provides a leitmotif throughout the book. Indeed, I’d suggest that it’s more of a topic than the title-theme. Becker’s heroic discovery about the denial of the fear of death, which is the cause of all the evil in the world, is merely the stick which he uses to beat the ghost of the late Sigmund Freud, to show who’s the new alpha-male. In my head, I keep calling him Boris Becker, not Ernest: recalling the men’s singles final at Wimbledon in 1985.

Ernest B. was actually Professor of Cultural Anthropology in a Vancouver university. Wikipedia says “Because of his breadth of vision and avoidance of social science specialization, Becker was an academic outcast in the last decade of his life.” But reading The Denial of Death I see tunnel vision, not breadth. It’s more likely he was an academic outcast for playing in the wrong court and refusing to admit it: a sort of John McEnroe of the professorial tournament. Wikipedia also calls him a “scientific thinker and writer”. There is no evidence in the book of scientific work done by Becker, or even a scientific approach. At best the book may be evidence that he thinks about the scientific work of others and reaches his own conclusions. But when you look more closely, you see that he reaches his conclusions first and then uses the quoted opinions of others as support. This allows him to be selective and choose some wild speculations, based on lifetimes of clinical work done by Freud and others, but none by Becker himself. He’s just the armchair detective who knows better than the real ones who pound the streets.

For Becker, every age in the human lifecycle is full of impossible conflict, confusion and agonising trauma, all based on Freudian notions of sex, Oedipus complex, repression, transference etc, which he updates in accordance with more recent thinking. He likes comparing man with the other animals. For the latter, it’s simple: you follow your instincts, and then you die. For man, you are driven by the demands of a mind which lives in symbols, by which means it can climb the highest peak, be infinite, rule the world, coruscate in glory; apart from the unfortunate physical reality: you are stuck with a body which excretes, and sex, which is almost as messy. And then you die.

It’s a little comical that in his preface Becker says “mainspring” because a mainspring is man-made, has to be wound up; but ultimately runs down. A wellspring by contrast is created by Nature, and symbolises “a source or supply of anything, esp. when considered inexhaustible” (dictionary.com). As a Freudian slip it’s more sad than comical. Becker published The Denial of Death a year before his own death at 49 from colon cancer. I don’t know how long the interval might typically have been, in the early Seventies, between knowing one was ill and dying of cancer; but I wonder if it’s more than coincidence that his Preface starts with these words: “The prospect of death, Dr Johnson said, wonderfully concentrates the mind.”

I look through the entire volume for any personal note, any indication of Prof. Becker’s more-than-professional interest in his topic. But he hides behind the academic convention that the text is about the observed and not the observer. The closest he gets is when explaining why he has added yet another book to the great pile of literature: “Well, there are personal reasons, of course: habit, drivenness, dogged hopefulness. And there is Eros, the urge to the unification of experience, to form, to greater meaningfulness.”

I start to form a picture in my mind, of Becker himself as the unacknowledged subject of his own book: Becker the denier of his own imminent death; the ostracised academic; the upstart Oedipus whose idea of the erotic is to challenge Daddy Freud and mate with Mother Evolution, to beget offspring which will correct the great mistake; the pioneer in the eventual destruction of evil. Sadly, it is he who’s confused; who can’t see the difference between religion and psychology, Kierkegaard and psychoanalysts, morbid and healthy psychology.

I don’t know what family he left behind by his untimely death. I mean no disrespect to those who hold his memory and his books in high regard. In fact, I write this review only because Raymond Sigrist talked admiringly about the book. Will you forgive me, Raymond? But in the year of his death, 1974, The Denial of Death won the Pulitzer Prize.

You may also discover that there is an Ernest Becker Foundation, which would like your donation to enable it to “apply [Becker’s] principles to the mitigation of violence and suffering”. So, posthumously, he has his own cult: evidence of a crank, I think, rather than a researcher. Never mind, he succeeded in repressing death himself, by attaining personal distinction, proving superiority to the others and attaining a kind of immortality. What else is a Pulitzer Prize?

The Joker Chuang Tzu

Raymond Sigrist, by doing nothing and making no recommendation, finally got me to start reading Chuang Tzu.

When I write about books, I adopt the same strategy as an unscrupulous professional reviewer: read a few pages, then rush headlong to the typewriter. Not that I can’t be bothered to read it through, but there’s nothing more effervescent and heady than initial enthusiasm. Read it doggedly to the end, with the intention of sharing your thoughts afterwards, and you get a heavy feeling, an indigestion; or such a kaleidoscope of fleeting impressions that you realize that you can’t say anything coherent unless you read the whole thing again. So now that I’ve read a few pages of Chuang Tzu, I reach the conclusion that he’s a comedian.

Take the Bible, reputed to be the world’s best-seller. It has few if any jokes, despite having been written entirely by Jews, who these days at least have more than their fair share of humorists and clowns. Raymond tells me that the prophet closest to Chuang Tzu is Ecclesiastes, so I open his Old Testament book in high hopes, till they are dashed by this:

Sorrow is better than laughter: for by the sadness of the countenance the heart is made better. The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth. (Eccl. ch.7, vv. 3,4)

Now I open at random The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu, in the sparkling translation of Burton Watson. You can imagine a philosophy student copying down as best he can a session where Master Chuang has them rolling in the aisles of a packed lecture hall. I’m not saying it will make you laugh. You have to be there, hear it in context.

But to wear out your brain trying to make things into one without realizing that they are all the same—this is called “three in the morning”. What do I mean by “three in the morning”? When the monkey trainer was handing out acorns, he said, “You get three in the morning and four at night.” This made all the monkeys furious. “Well, then,” he said, you get four in the morning and three at night.” The monkeys were all delighted. There was no change in the reality behind the words, and yet the monkeys responded with joy and anger. Let them, if they want to.”

I wouldn’t exactly call Master Chuang a teacher—he’s more of an unteacher, an eye-opener to make us question everything we think we know. But something in me wants to offer some quote that might even encapsulate Chiang Tzu’s “message”. Well, I don’t know.

Master Tung-kuo asked Chuang Tzu, “This thing called the Way—where does it exist?”

Chuang Tzu said, “There’s no place it doesn’t exist.”

“Come,” said Master Tung-kuo, “you must be more specific!”

“It is in the ant.”

“A thing so low as that?”

“It is in the panic grass.”

“But that’s lower still!”

“It is in the tiles and shards.”

“How can it be so low?”

“It is in the piss and shit!”

Master Tung-kuo made no reply.

Chuang Tzu said, “Sir, your questions simply don’t get at the substance of the matter ...”

Angels

A propos my newly-confirmed belief in the existence of angels, Ashok says in his new post: “He will not believe in anything easily unless he has very sound proof of it.”

Au contraire, my dear Ashok. (I seem to be starting each sentence in French.) There is no need for proof when the experience is by its nature subjective. To quote from dear departed blogger Jim, “Some things I just ‘know’ and believe in as fact without any proof.”

Jim disappeared suddenly from the Blogosphere on Sept 14th 2008. I hope he is in jail. That’s an astonishing thing to say, but I’d rather it was that, than that he killed himself. He deleted his blog just before he went, and seemed to know something serious was about to happen. But by some anomaly in Google Reader, I still have copies of his posts going back several years. I sent them to him, too. He had a lot to say about angels and I wish he were here today.

It is of course possible to ‘just know’ and be wrong. I ‘just knew’ it was the same cat that prowled on the top of my backyard fence until one day, when I saw it fighting for the privilege of prowling that fence with its apparent twin. One of them ran off with a torn ear, and I’ve never known which was which.

Is there one angel per person, on permanent standby? Or do you call one up like a taxi when the need arises? To me these are idle questions which don’t make sense. I’ll explain angels as I see them. They are messengers. That is my experience, but it is also gratifying to know that the word “angel” originally meant “messenger” in Latin and Greek, and was used to translate a similar Hebrew word in the Bible. So I feel happy that my experience is mainstream, common to different tribes in different millennia. But it’s not proof.

I was going down the Ledborough Road this morning on an errand, when it came to me that the Angel’s main message, to me at any rate, is “Wherever you go, remember to be at home there. This earth is made for you.” In other words, it’s sheer foolishness for me to feel alienated from myself or my environment. There’s a very close link between my self and my environment, as if one mirrors the other, but I can’t explain it rationally.

When I do feel alienated, when I feel some fear, persecution or enmity—different sides of the same thing—then the angel sends a warning message, a kind of chastisement. The more alertly I listen to these messages, the milder and more symbolic the chastisement. I see this phenomenon happening to others as well, not just to me.

When I am in need of encouragement, in general or in a particular direction, the message is more affirming. I can’t call it a blessing because even the chastisement is a blessing, being a message to warn of danger. If you were two yards from a precipice, because you didn’t know where you were going, and someone shot you in the leg, so that you collapsed on the ground before falling off the cliff, that person would be a true friend.

Just as a child needs to break free of the parent’s restraining hand to see where wilfulness will lead, I go through negative phases, at first from the sheer urge to rebel. But then like a child I get lost. That is when I am particularly grateful to angels—my angel, the angel, whatever. Even there, you see, I don’t want to believe beyond what I know; even though my knowing has no proof.
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Illustration: detail from Madonna and Child, by Filippino Lippi (1457—1504). Allegedly. I got it from http://www.luckypalm.com/ and can't find any corroboration from other sites.

Making a start

Hayden commented on my last with some excellent remarks on how to start a story, including the following:

“I love broadness and specificity in a beginning. A sense of mystery that isn't addressed by the ample facts stated. The facts situate the event in a time and space, anchor it if you will. The mystery, still unaddressed, is the reason for reading. The sense that there is a story here, something with yet-hazy edges, but something that will eventually be as solid as the mundane detail that cloaks the beginning. That is what makes me draw a shawl around my shoulders on a cool evening, adjust the light and settle in for a good read.”

The beginning establishes a frame for the reader’s expectations. Early in 1986 I was working in Dublin. There I bought a delicious anthology of first lines*, from which I show one of the pages, dedicated to Irish authors. Aren’t they fabulous? Apart from Finnegan’s Wake.

It doesn’t include the famous (some might say infamous) first paragraph of A Glastonbury Romance:

“At the striking of noon on a certain fifth of March, there occurred within a causal radius of Brandon railway station and yet beyond the deepest pools of emptiness between the uttermost stellar systems one of those infinitesimal ripples in the creative silence of First Cause which always occur when an exceptional stir of heightened consciousness agitates any living organism in this astronomical universe. Something passed at that moment, a wave, a motion, a vibration, too tenuous to be called magnetic, too subliminal to be called spiritual, between the soul of a particular human being who was emerging from a third-class carriage of the twelve-nineteen train from London and the divine-diabolic soul of the First Cause of all life.”

It goes on in this vein for four pages before we reach the first bit of real dialogue, that is to say, between two humans, as opposed to soliloquy.

“Canon Crow’s funeral, sir?”

This is followed by a further half-page of “ripples in the creative silence”, as it were, before the response:

“The funeral; Northwold; thank you very much.”

As an online bookseller might say, if you liked Moby Dick you might like A Glastonbury Romance. Indeed I love them both.

Hayden’s comment has made me think deeply about the first lines of my current writing project.

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'Hell!' said the Duchess: or First Lines. Gemma O'Connor, Wolfhound Press, Dublin 1985.