Touching the Absolute?

Commenting on my Wittgenstein post, Steve said “I bring up the topic of ‘The Absolute’ because it seems to me to be the subject of your writings.” I regret my foolish argument with you, Steve, and want to give due credit to what you say, and be open-minded about it. Of the definitions in the OED, the one which seems to fit is this one:

Absolute (noun, often with capital A): “That which exists without relation to or dependency on any other being; that which is capable of being thought or conceived of by itself alone.”

You mention Annie Dillard too as writing about the Absolute. I didn’t quite understand you, but I just finished her book The Writing Life, and discover that she closes it with this quotation from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin:

“The world is filled, and filled with the Absolute. To see this is to be made free.” Which is a good enough signal that whatever it is, she has fixed her sights on this elusive entity.

Not only that, but the publisher’s synopsis on Amazon of her book Holy the Firm includes this:

“Dillard bears witness to the violent incursions of the Absolute into the wreck of space and her vision of the power play of holy fire.”

The Absolute is not a word I would normally use, because I prefer to write about things I know directly, via senses or inner revelation. But I’ve been revisiting the website I put together some years ago, before I stumbled on Blogger as a medium of expression more suited to my needs. It seems to me that the Ian of those years had a more circumscribed life and vision than the Vincent of today. I recognize the Ian of the website, but as Vincent my awareness is different. Was the Absolute there in the website too? Browse for yourself.

It’s replete with different ways to navigate to its various out-of-the-way corners. Click on any screenshot for a start-point and you should be able to get to anywhere else from it. Turn your speakers on, for there are midi files you can play, plus two pages with background sound, intentionally very quiet. (Firefox, at least on my computer, shortens or ignores some of the longer midi files, so I recommend you use a different browser to hear them at their best.)

Lost in a world of books

I haven’t been writing because I’ve been reading so much. One book leads to another and the Kindle Reader has a lot to answer for. Snuggled in bed late at night, cradling the thing in its handsome leather case and its own light just bright enough to illuminate the page of black and white e-inks, I reach the point where my brain can no longer process the sentences, but I’m not ready to fall asleep. So it’s now that I click “Kindle Store”, and am wafted to a vast virtual space, not the Web that I know how to get lost in, but a different Aladdin’s cave: a shop of invisible books that I can browse with samples or buy with a single click, for download in seconds, all while half-asleep. More prudently, I can wait till morning and order the desired item in hardback, second-hand, for a fraction of the price—less instant, but more satisfying, like many things in this world. For the hardback is a physical possession that you can enjoy all the time, even when not taking the trouble to read it. Either way, Amazon is the wish-fulfilling genie, rejoicing in its escape from that mysterious bottle which contains all the things that haven’t yet been invented, which are virtually impossible to persuade back into the bottle thereafter.

If there were any justice, Amazon would pay me for my product-placement efforts; but I’m still a stranger to the brave new world of sponsored content, innocent as an Eden-dweller for whom everything grows on trees. What happened to Eden, anyway, after Adam and Eve were driven out of it? It was a pretty good asset. I imagine people still want to get back there. Our new shopping mall is called Eden. After the English fashion, I shall go on calling it ‘new’ forever, long after it has shown signs of old age. Our town of Newcastle, proudly straddling the river Tyne, is named after a castle built there in the year 1080 AD.

I detect in this post so far certain stylistic signs of an Emersonian ramble. What you read definitely rubs off in what you write. John Myste in a comment on my last mentioned Emerson’s essay “Self-Reliance”. Without benefit of the Amazon-genie for once, I’m proud to say, I was able to locate it on my own groaning shelves: groaning as in heavy-laden, not as in complaining. It’s a faded little volume published by G Bell & Sons in 1913 for Bohn’s Popular Library. Turning to the fly-leaf, I see that it previously belonged to E Ellis, 5 Percy Rd E11 [London]. Its spine was torn and hanging off. I felt the kind of reverence one might have towards an unkempt tomb made venerable by age, and mended the book carefully with some paper reinforcement and PVC adhesive mixed with red and black powder paint to match the faded cloth cover. Only after it had dried did I read the essay itself, and must confess to you, dear patient reader, that I haven’t read it all through yet. I got enough to blow my mind from the first ten pages: the other fifteen will have to wait. Thanks to the Amazon empire and my own squirrel-store from charity-shops, I’ve enough to read for a very long time, for literature is a branching path, as I shall illustrate, below.

Annie Dillard in The Writing Life describes the windowless dens in which she has at various times confined herself to perform the curious alchemy of extruding strings of words from the crucible of her brain to congeal on the glaring white page. At one point her routine was to go in the dead of night to a hired room in a city library for this purpose, and leave at dawn. She learned to feel her way to the room in the pitch-dark, counting her way through the bookstacks till she reached the turn-off for her door. In the brightening sky of one early morning she retraced her steps to go home and noted that a book on a corner that she must have fingered like a signpost the night before happened to be The World I Live In, by Helen Keller. In this manner, a book inadvertently conveyed the essence of its content without her having to open it—or even look at its cover. Look on such books, thou Kindle, and despair! For a few seconds, feeling her way in the dark silent library, she had stumbled on the deaf-blind world that Helen Keller knew so well. She remarks: “I read it at once: it surprised me by its strong and original prose.” This was hint enough for me, and I summoned the Kindle-Genie for the complete works of Helen Keller, price £0.72, only to discover that Dillard’s sensuous appreciation of the world and lively intellectual curiosity is matched by that of Keller. Yet the chain of reference continues, for Keller mentions that one of her favourite books of childhood, which she re-read till the Braille dots wore smooth, was Little Lord Fauntleroy, familiar from my own childhood, another item to download in a snug late-night session, transmitted by Whispernet® for a princely £0.00.

Life is too short to tell you all the books I have been reading and the way they cross-fertilise in this seething brain. Add provocative remarks from bloggers and their appended comments, and you have a volatile explosive mixture, hard to keep stable, even in laboratory conditions—which my own strewn desk-tops, actual and virtual, certainly do not maintain.

Bryan, for example, in Making Contact on his Nuclear Headache blog, discusses whether contact with intelligent life from outer space would give us humans a better sense of our own tribal unity, if we perceive “Them” as our prime common enemy. I invite you to join me in speculating how “intelligent life” is to be defined. We have no choice but to examine our own intelligence with our own intelligence, a type of procedure which in most disciplines would be proscribed as totally invalid, on account of prejudice and vested interest, not to mention something vaguely incestuous. By intelligent life, I conclude, we mean nothing more than “someone like us”, for on earth, we are alone: a weird species separated from all the others by myriad distinguishing characteristics. You could write a book about them all. We look around at the various kinds of organic life on Earth and don’t find any that come close. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Jesuit priest and palæontologist rolled into one, tried to explain it—you and me and why we are here—in terms of increasing intelligence which will one day make manifest its already latent Omega Point, at which Christ’s Kingdom will be realized, evolution will be revealed as teleological all along, and the universe will end with a final big bang like the one which started it. But when we use human intelligence to study its own place in the universe, we are in a speculative realm where we can invent anything we like for our own comfort, ambition or mere intellectual challenge. The very word ‘universe’, as understood today, seems to carry the implication of a vastness that could and probably does contain anything: just the thing to please scientists, professional and amateur, as the Trinity was for centuries just the thing to please theologians, for it gave them something to argue about.

The way I see evolution, human intelligence is a kind of weapon, the result of hardship, danger and rootlessness. I can imagine other planets which evolve an amœba (just one species) and then stop, as would undoubtedly happen if the formula remained successful and unchallenged. The amœba can eat, drink, swim and reproduce—by the unexciting method of dividing its nucleus in two and separating. The joys of sexual intercourse are outside its scope but such a lack does not trouble it, for Nature has not provided it with the means or taste for this flight of Divine fancy. Imagine all the trial and error involved in the invention of sex!

I heard on the radio this morning that the diminution of ice in the Arctic Circle has encouraged or forced grizzly bears to mate with polar bears and produce golden-haired offspring. We may think this is exotic fun for the bears, and who knows? But it’s my intuition that every one of the creative twists and turns which Evolution has thrown up has been Nature’s response to a desperate, near-disastrous situation. None more so than the string of disasters which, I suspect, conspired to beget homo sapiens.

We are the feral children of Nature’s favelas, who had to learn by our wits, for we lacked the claws of bears, the armoured hides of crocodiles, the speed of wildebeest, the tree-climbing agility of monkeys. Human babies are the most helpless for the longest. Never mind, we have made ourselves artificial claws and have clawed our way to the top, dominating Nature with the wilfulness of a mad-dog dictator. The human being over the last one or two centuries, depending on which society you live in, has increased its power and even its longevity. But in a Faustian contract, it has had to sacrifice sanity, almost down to the last vestige, in a mad gambling game of strip poker.

To be human is to be neurotic. That’s what I think, my own brain perhaps overheated with too much reading. Not that all my reading inflames the ideas I’ve expressed above. Hayden, for example, extols ‘being’ above ‘doing’. I’m all for that, dear Hayden, as it suits my stage of life (more or less retired from hunter-gathering, I mean earning money, for survival). But hardship, danger and rootlessness are somehow in my genes. I don’t want to live my days in permanent siesta. Not yet! They say that Goethe’s last words were “Mehr licht! More light!” Well I cry, “more life!” Or as Richard Bach says (in his short novel, Illusions): “Here is a test to find whether your mission on earth is finished: If you’re alive, it isn’t.”

So I have chosen a 2003 photo of Richard Bach as the top illustration, ©2009 Isaac Hernandez, All Rights Reserved. The others are of Helen Keller graduating from Radcliffe College, Boston, Mass. in 1904; and an old cover for Little Lord Fauntleroy illustrating a little of what one misses with only a Kindle edition.

Author reviews II – Ludwig Wittgenstein

The other day I was writing about being nineteen and somehow feeling the same way fifty years later. But it was a mysterious feeling because I could not adduce a single instance of nineteenhood to illustrate my point. So it is a coincidence that I first discovered Wittgenstein at that age. Discovered is hardly the right word, for the vivid awareness of Ludwig Wittgenstein that I obtained was like a single flash of lightning, so indirect, you might say, that the long rumble of thunderous recognition did not follow till many decades later, when I first opened a book that he’d written.

I was staying in no. 57 Goldsmith Road (see recent photo below, courtesy of Google Maps) whilst an undergraduate at the University of Birmingham. Miss McKenzie, a diminutive woman with a slight spinal deformity and a history of polio, ran Scottish dancing classes for little girls from that house, as well as a lodging-house for students. Next to the kitchen was our communal room. Upstairs were two small dormitories for students. Miss McKenzie herself occupied a tiny attic room. On Sundays she would prepare us a roast dinner with lots of orangeade and a dessert. She was not a good cook, but did her best, and this Sunday offering was her way of showing appreciation for her lodgers, to make up for any stinginess and rancour she may have displayed on the other days. She found us difficult to cope with, but needed the three pounds a week we each paid.

It was on one of these Sundays, then, that my friend and fellow-student Jim Slater (if only he would read this, then we could renew contact!) mentioned his new subject of study: Wittgenstein. He was reading Philosophy. Peter Geach, his tutor, was one of those who had studied directly under Wittgenstein; his wife Elizabeth Anscombe was another. The great man’s close disciples seem often to have unconsciously acquired certain stigmata of eccentricity, particularly while lecturing small groups of students. Peter and Elizabeth had seven children and I heard that when she was delivering seminars she sometimes had to bring her toddlers in too, and perched them on a mantelpiece behind her, making it difficult for her listeners to focus on her words for worry that they (the toddlers) might fall off.

Jim Slater and I were opposites. He revered Frank Sinatra (as in Songs for Swingin’ Lovers), whereas I was into Brenda Lee (“Weep no more my baby”, “Sweet Nothings”). I’d recently seen seen her in a show at Birmingham Town Hall, where the programme included Bill Haley and his Comets. Jim also revered Bertrand Russell, philosopher and peace activist, who I considered a tedious old egotist. Jim was a rationalist sceptic and shameless square. For my part I was into Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac, and the Blues. We were disdainful of one another’s preferences, so when he told me about Wittgenstein, he little expected that I would be interested, especially as study of this philosopher (he said) involved awareness of the mathematician Gottlob Frege and required training in symbolic logic. Within five minutes of Jim’s synopsis, however, I hailed Wittgenstein as one of my heroes. Jim was stunned, convinced I had not understood what he was saying. “He’s very difficult, Vincent! You can’t even begin to appreciate him till you are aware of the context,” by which I think he meant the entire landscape of European philosophy going back to Plato. But I brushed that aside. To me, Wittgenstein was super-cool, and that was that.

I never got the chance to read what he’d written at that time. Books were hard to get hold of: expensive from the shop, and they never had enough copies in the university library to satisfy the students’ needs. I managed to scrape my own degree despite lazily having failed to read most of the essential or recommended texts in my French and Italian literature course.

But I’ve caught up on Wittgenstein in later years and am pleased to say I stand by my initial judgement. He’s the greatest thinker I’ve had the privilege to encounter, and one of the most honourable and fascinating human beings. I feel that I know him personally, and understand him better than most. I’m poor on mathematics, and he loses me in much of his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, but I can read his Philosophical Investigations again and again, for pleasure, while doubtless missing much of his significance to the learned academics.

What was it that Jim said about him that so convinced me that Ludwig was a man after my own heart, a mystic? I think it must have been the famous last sentence of the Tractatus:

“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” To Jim, it meant that since I did not know what I was talking about, I should shut up and listen only to the voice of reason, i.e. Jim’s.

But I saw it differently, in accordance with the context of the two preceding paragraphs:

My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them—as steps—to climb up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.)

He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright.

To my intuition (then as now, I was impatient with cold reason), this indicated that Wittgenstein was up there with the Zen Masters.

“Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.”

“Make sure that your religion is a matter between you and God only.”

“A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.”

“One often makes a remark and only later sees how true it is.”

“What cannot be imagined cannot even be talked about.”

“Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination.”

“My aim is: to teach you to pass from a piece of disguised nonsense to something that is patent nonsense.”

To many of his friends, Wittgenstein seemed to have had a tortured life, but his last words were, “Tell them I’ve had a wonderful life.”

I’ve grown up now, and don’t think of my hero as a Zen Master, and don’t even give any special respect to Zen. But I see in him a prophet whose time has not yet come, who is scarcely understood, whose discoveries are ignored by the very philosophers who have succeeded him, as if he were nothing more than a super-intense German eccentric whose thought is so abstruse that he’s good for name-dropping to show off your cleverness.

One of his key ideas, one I come back to again and again, is this simple bombshell:

“The meaning of a word is its use in the language.” (Philosophical Investigations, 43, where he adds a minor qualification, but never mind that here, for you might say that much of the book is an exploration of thought, meaning and language.)

This is the killer blow whereby he knocks Plato’s Idealism off its sacred pedestal in Western thought. Plato thought that the idea behind a word (such as Truth, Beauty, Justice ...) existed in some realm, some heavenly warehouse, where ideals are stored, perhaps along with the International Prototype Metre. Such an idea is so ingrained in the Western psyche that this might be a reason why Wittgenstein hasn’t been absorbed into the intellectual bloodstream.

So let him remain an outsider, and my continuing inspiration.

Author reviews I – Annie Dillard

“In blogging, less is more. Discuss.” That could have been an essay topic in the days of my youth, had blogging then been a word.

An old friend who used to post as Rob and later Bob did it for the interaction rather than the self-expression or self-revelation, in which genres he was reticent. His most popular post, measured in number of comments, merely said “Boo!” I think I can claim the credit for introducing him to Blogger, but I made up for this act of kindness by posting argumentative comments (which annoyed him), as well as commenting on his commenters’ blogs, thereby luring them to my own new blog. In fact I think that is how I met Hayden.

My own entries have evolved into protracted dithyrambs. This shall change! If I were not too lazy, I’d act on my plan to write about four writers whom I most specially admire. But their superabundant brilliance actually encourages me into further indolence, rather than provoking me out of it; for they have said so much that I would have liked to say myself, if only I could. Since they can and I can’t, I can write correspondingly less, and focus on “the process of simply being”, as Hayden inspiringly suggested the other day.

So, lolling in bed on a Saturday morning, I’ve conceived a new efficient method of book-reviewing: (i) to review the whole author, not individual books; (ii) to use the author’s own words, and select a brief quote or two which encapsulates the impact the author has had on me. Rather than engage my brain in the hard tasks of synopsis and analysis, I can have the rest of the day free!

So, let’s try it for Annie Dillard. This is from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, page 268, near the end. She has been describing a disconsolate moment, uncharacteristically for her, when she gazes at the sky and sees what seems like a Martian spaceship. It turns out to be “a maple key, a single winged seed from a pair.” She throws it back into the sky and watches it fall again.

“O maple key, I thought, I must confess I thought, o welcome, cheers.

“And the bell under my ribs rang a true note, a flourish as of blended horns, clarion, sweet, and making a long dim sense I will try at length to explain.”

Which she proceeds to do, bless her!

Reason to celebrate

Today I celebrate a milestone. It is exactly fifty years since I reached the age of 19, a special number for many reasons, and the last year of one’s teens. This morning I was given a mug bearing the words, “Today is all about YOU ... and there couldn’t be a better reason to celebrate!” with a card bearing the words, “Today’s a special day A time for doing all the things you love to do, relax, take it easy ...”—and then inside, “... Why Change the Habits of a Lifetime!”—alongside a reclining man surrounded by empty beer-cans, the remnants of a box of pizza, and a TV remote-control—a picture which reminded my beloved of me.

Let me devote my remaining years to learning the art of being elderly. That is the creative task now! You could put it otherwise, if it didn’t sound morbid (though nothing morbid about it to me) and say learning the art of making a graceful exit. So I shall do nothing more than finish what I’ve started in this life, by tying up the loose ends. First I must see just what it is I have started. I shan’t be in a hurry about this process of clearing my desk, for after that, there would be only one thing left to wait for. On the other hand I might be dismissed from this employ called Life tomorrow.

I could consider my past, with all its flagrant mistakes, regrettable if only for their effect on others. Yet a journey is not wasted if you end up exactly where you want to be. Here now, there is nothing I want to change. So perhaps I can say that all along I had a winning strategy, even though it was far from obvious at the time. Of course there are irritations and discomforts aplenty, but I would not wish them away, for such is life; and without life there is only death, which may come in its turn without an invitation.

I could say truthfully that I am 100% content, but to actually realise this takes a catalyst, such as an aimless walk in the sunshine, even when it’s cold with a bitter wind, as it was yesterday. As I walked, the idea of nineteen plus fifty came to me, and filled me with happiness like a magical mantra. For the duration of that aimless stroll, I felt in some mysterious way that I still am nineteen; and that the fifty years have folded like a concertina into a mere membrane, a negligible interval of time, such as when your attention wanders and you miss what the other person has said, so then you concentrate, and wind it back with a kind of instant replay facility. Yes, it’s all there, in a single folder marked “50” into which all the dusty files left over from those years are neatly collected, present in ghostly form, researchable only by the one scholar, because I have better things to do than make those memories public property.

I started to ask myself in what way I feel a continuation of being nineteen, whilst the fifty years in between appear like a digression (the sort you might include in brackets if you were writing on one topic and noted something else in passing). I certainly don’t have the same preoccupations and worries as when I was nineteen, thank goodness for that. It’s more of a physical thing. Within those fifty years, thirty were under the cloud of a chronic illness and another ten at least in undiagnosed acute unhappiness. So there is some logic behind my illusion of having woken up from a bad dream, to discover that I am still in the same (nineteen-year-old) body and seeing through its eyes. It has been said, "Youth is wasted on the young". And how often do people say, “If only I knew then what I know now!”

It occurs to me that this month of March, in which I was born, is symbolic of youth. In the Northern Hemisphere, the seasons act out a symbolic drama, from January birth to December death, in which March is the teenage time, followed by the Springtime of courting and dalliance. To be really aged nineteen, there are many future uncertainties to face. You have to establish a life for yourself, somewhere to live, a career, a mate. Somewhere within these activities, you have also, and most importantly, to make or discover your identity. Discover as in uncover, like sculpting with marble, by cutting away and discarding what is not you, to discover what is really you, within the expendable dross.

So this is what I mean when I feel like nineteen all over again. The previous uncertainties have been resolved. The discovery of identity is still on the agenda, a Grail-quest of no particular urgency but somehow containing everything.

I’ve spent my life getting lost. So intoxicating was the sunshine that I got lost again on my walk yesterday, though as a proverb says, “You ain’t never lost if you don’t care where you are.”

But I found a square tunnel under the motorway, specially built for walkers, and when I got out the other side I was captivated by a landscape, so unfamiliar and magical, that I wondered if I’d gone to another dimension. I did my best to take a photo, above.