As funny (awful) as such misogyny and its solutions can be (Hesiod’s story of Pandora in Works and Days being his solution to the woman “crisis”), there is something there that had me thinking about it all night. I do rather think that hope is a problem for human kind. I know there is all that rhetoric about how hope keeps us going along when things are awful, but I suspect that such a sentiment is tripe. And not the edible kind.

It’s not that hope got hung up on the lip of that (alabaster) jar that is the problem – that Hope didn’t fly out into the wide world like her miserable siblings – the problem is more that we hang onto hope like it is something fragrant that one might find clinging to the lip of an alabastron, when in fact it is often the reason we don’t face up to how things really are. When in hope of a just resurrection one tolerates the humiliation of being used and discarded – as an example.

Then this wonderful thing happened this morning.

I was on twitter and @harvestbird posted a link taking me to Letters of Note. Ooooooh.

So I’m reading and I come across this paragraph:

You ask me, in brief, what satisfaction I get out of life, and why I go on working. I go on working for the same reason that a hen goes on laying eggs. There is in every living creature an obscure but powerful impulse to active functioning. Life demands to be lived. Inaction, save as a measure of recuperation between bursts of activity, is painful and dangerous to the healthy organism—in fact, it is almost impossible. Only the dying can be really idle.

Heh! for the same reason that a hen goes on laying eggs… and with Hope’s her flightless wings nowhere in sight.

We can call it what we choose I suppose, but really we keep on going because we are animals, and that is what animals, on the whole, do. But if we gave up our rhetoric of how the future will be better and ignore the bad shit happening, then maybe we’d actually have a chance to attend to the bad shit and do something about it. Sort of like Hesiod…maybe if he’d actually looked when preening, he’d have left the poor girl alone and he’d have been able to write a more truthful version of Pandora’s emergence.

I mean Hesiod had her made by Zeus as an act of revenge against the transgressions of Prometheus in giving man gods’ fire.

So he ordered. And they obeyed the lord Zeus the son of Cronos. Forthwith the famous Lame God moulded clay in the likeness of a modest maid, as the son of Cronos purposed. And the goddess bright-eyed Athene girded and clothed her, and the divine Graces and queenly Persuasion put necklaces of gold upon her, and the rich-haired Hours crowned her head with spring flowers. And Pallas Athene bedecked her form with all manners of finery. Also the Guide, the Slayer of Argus, contrived within her lies and crafty words and a deceitful nature at the will of loud thundering Zeus, and the Herald of the gods put speech in her. And he called this woman Pandora, because all they who dwelt on Olympus gave each a gift, a plague to men who eat bread.

This lying, crafty, deceitful woman – can’t you just hear the echo of Hesiod’s wail when the 16-year-old hottie old-man-Hesiod thought should love him forever turned him down flat?

And this is the genesis of all the ills in the world for man to stumble upon? No wonder hope got left behind trapped by the lid of that jar. Do you think it was alabaster?

The myths are bleeding together in my head.

I love prophecy. It’s such a very human thing to do. I delight in the bad ones and, to be honest, don’t come across the accurate ones. Are there many?

Someone emailed me recently about our human need to read and speak about the future and it had me thinking about Frank Kermode’s wonderful book The Sense of An Ending. Then this morning I came cross “Apocalypse Soon” by Daniel Baird in Walrus Magazine.

In the article he initially argues that the reason why so many of our prophesies (whether religious or secular) look alike is that they are all based on the writings associated with Western monotheistic literature (wml).

The ever-expanding cadre of bestselling science, strategic, political, and business writers who make a living prophesying the less-than-happy human future would not ally themselves with literal readings of Isaiah or the Revelation of St. John, much less with eccentrics like Harold Camping, but the stories they propose seem remarkably similar. Although they appear secular, they are Biblical tales of the pillaging of the earth by human greed and vice and the inevitable reckoning. Redemption will come, if it does, through contrition, humility, and moral soundness.

While I agree that wml is likely the source of much of the particular imagery and obsession with particular doomsday sufferings, I doubt very much that wml is the source of the desire to know the ending. Wml is, after all, just another set of those failed prophecies, albeit more carefully constructed since, unlike most of today’s prophets, they didn’t give a firm date by which they could be proved wrong.

It does need to be said that wml is not the first source of those fears either. Flood stories long pre-dated Judeo forms, for example. Narrative itself—having a narrative module to the mind and the thing it does to us—seems a more likely suspect to our continued obsession with knowing the ending.  That’s where Kermode goes, anyway.

The real problem with the future is that it doesn’t yet exist, and the forces that bring it into existence are too complicated, too subtle and volatile and fractal, for us to know in advance — or ever.

And yet we continue to try. Why? Because we need to have a sense that we control our fates, even if all that means is that we know our fates. And because we need to believe we are part of a story with a larger meaning, that vice is rewarded with punishment, that redemption is possible, that history is not random and empty, that a higher power (whether Isaiah’s wrathful God or simply the natural world) exacts the final judgment.

That’s where Baird goes with his article, which after a somewhat unpromising beginning seems much more full of promise.

My question is where in us, in our biology and our social natures, does that need for punishment and redemption come – that tendency which led to the writing of wml as well as many of the secular prophecies of today.

I have my own ideas of course, but I’d really rather hear yours. You can leave a comment here or email me / mary (at) tailfeather (dot) ca.

Oh, and welcome to the new year and all the wonderful, terrible and simply mundane unknowns it will bring.

I read her book Cassandra and think it one of the best recountings of that story that has ever been written. Certainly the exchange between the story of Cassandra and the various narratives about the genesis of Wolf’s version of the story that end the volume illuminates the contemporary difficulty we have in assessing what is happening to us politically, socially and ethically.

Cassandra lived in a complex, bitter, dangerous and rapidly changing world. As do we. As did Wolf.

Although widely praised for her contributions to German literature, Wolf’s public image was damaged for not being critical enough of the former communist regime. It took another hit in the early 1990s when it was revealed that, for a period of nearly three years during the 1950s and 1960s, she had served as an informant to East Germany’s feared secret police, the Stasi.

Oh so easy to criticize in hindsight.

Wolf released this information herself, by the way. Was this a mistake? Was working for the Stasi a mistake? Was it a mistake to become a target of theirs in return? I’m not sure how helpful such questions are really. All they do is dice up a person’s life into convenient morsels for the later hawking up of blind judgement.

Speaking to SPIEGEL in June 2010, Wolf said, “what bothered me, and actually made me angry, was that people focused on this single point and that they didn’t see my development and that they didn’t even think it necessary to find out what other files there were.”

What she wanted was to “create a truly democratic society.” That was a consistent thread in all her political activities. She believed in East Germany and in the people there. Surely this was not a mistake – to believe in her world, her people?

I think this blame game outrages me so partly because it is so ridiculous. What person could withstand the assessment of hindsight? What human being should be judged by another’s piecemeal approach, and deeply unexamined, complex history?

I mean, I’ve given to Salvation Army in the past. Now that I know about their tendency to anti-gay thinking, I’ll not give again. Which of those two actions is the mistake? Bah….

Stupid way to think about a living history.

peardg sent me a link to Colossal Art & Design – an article called “Carved Book Landscapes by Guy Laramee“.

Awesome. Makes me wonder what he would do with the corpus of Gothic Romanticism produced in the late 19th century by British women – not to dis Horace Walpole.

Here’s his website.

Man had to have stepped out of his previous absolute containment in life, so that he now was both enabled and forced to view life as if from outside, because only in this way could the whole of life become thematic in the first place. Now, with the question about its meaning and worth, existence as such had become a vis-à-vis, as it were, which is the opposite of in-ness. Man now for the first time had a position to the world per se. The question of meaning is the mark of the modern period after the conclusion of the age of metaphysics at the beginning of the 19th century. (page 3)

My question is whether or not this is the best way (most accurate with respect to actual human history) to explain the apparent changes in human psychology. For one thing, such a metaphor – to view life from outside – implies a place that is outside our lives. Where would that be? To require a place outside the forces that generate our living for our consciousness to view those same forces necessarily divorces consciousness from its ground of origin. Not only is it probably not empirically possible for such a divorce to occur, but such a view generates a dualistic metaphor that can’t be undone later.

I also have to question the in-ness he assumes in “pre-modern” minds.  He’s talking about the minds that so questioned what they had as to paint the cave walls in France, those same pre-modern minds that came up with the wheel, atl-atls, hide boats, figured out how to domesticate dogs, horses, barley, corn, and everything else that made modern minds what they are. I’m sorry, but those minds sure seem as if they could think outside the in-ness for long stretches at a time.

I think part of the problem is that thinkers about myth and the unconscious seem to take for granted that we have a mind. A mind. We don’t you know. We have many minds and a kind of floating flash-light of an awareness that only makes it seem like we have “a” mind.

As we evolved different abilities, we also developed different brain-body bits to control those developing skills. When the “control movements and coordinate with visual sensations” is needed the spot-light is there and not on the “continually assess smells but only make “us” aware of ones that indicate possible dangers or potential treasures” skill that we still possess (ever suddenly smelt a hint of acrid smoke when you were driving and notice how your attention shoots over there?).  Each of those abilities is the hub of a “mind”; they run simultaneously; most of them are unaware and constitute the manifold territory we know as the unconscious.

If we view mind like a cell, with many interlocking bits that make the thing function as a whole, with no in-ness in any time of human (Homo sapiens) history, then what to make of the loss of meaning?

part 1 here

I’m not done yet so there will be a part 3.

Here’s the abstract:

“Meaning” as in “the meaning of life” is not (“semantically”) a belief system, but (“syntactically”) the sense of “in-ness.” A comparison of the logic of animal existence with that of human existence reveals that man, despite having been biologically born, remained psychologically unborn, language, myth, metaphysics having served as a secondary psychological “uterus” for him. With the dramatic changes in the human situation since around 1800 (the closure of Western metaphysics, the industrial revolution), the previous in-ness was no more. This fundamental change can be seen as the eventual birth of man, astrologically expressed as the emergence of consciousness from the status of “fish in the water” to that of “Aquarius,” the lord of the waters. In this sense, the “loss” of meaning must not be interpreted negatively as a loss.

C. G. Jung’s personal need to nevertheless regain a new sense of meaning necessitated his becoming a psychologist. Only through the logical interiorization of former contents of myth and metaphysics, only through the displacement of the arena of essential questions from the public world to the so-called unconscious “inside” the private individual, was it possible to simulate a situation where the former sense of meaning could become true once more. This interiorization is comparable to Kronos’ swallowing of his just-born children.

This idea that man has lost the exterior meaning function, that is, we have lost the capacity to live inside myth because we have become individuals, seems a little sideways to me. Nevertheless there are some brilliant moments in just the small amount I have read so far. For example, the idea that meaning is not semantic is frakking brilliant. Of course it can’t be because otherwise any non-linguistic human being is incapable of meaningful moments, relationships etc, and what little is known of normal adults with no language shows that this is not the case. So meaning is pre-linguistic.

What gets me is that Giegerich then goes on to say as his “therefore”

Meaning, where it indeed exists, is first of all an implicit fact of existence, its a priori.

and this is a problem because it shoots us right back into Kant’s lap and that simply will not do. Now, perhaps that’s not what he intended so I’ll keep reading and see what happens.

So here’s what I am going to do. I’m going to do one of those post-as-you-read/react things.

The next installment will be titled: a fish swimming, part 2

I’m a few chapters in now, and will probably finish the book today or perhaps tomorrow. It’s a quick read; Hollis can write.

Hollis, seems to me, is a cross between Jung and Lacan. There’s a kind of abysmal misery in his history (as recounted in the opening of the book) that makes the infinite regression of Lacan’s mirror-Self resonate with the transcendent hope of Jung. What Hollis comes out with is the idea that, yes, our sense of self is fractured; yes, the Self is “dead”, but even so, even with the fact that all we have is fiction, we do have the power to make those fictions consciously. This conscious ability provides the “exit” from our existential tragedy – the tragedy of being human.

Making fictions consciously is sanity and pragmatism; making fictions unconsciously, and being captivated by them, is madness. Such madness is common to literalism, scientism, fundamentalism and most ego psychologies.

Do you spot it? This capacity called “making fictions” seems to be the unitary bulwark replacing the fractured Self. We just cannot frakking let go of the notion that there must be something singular to hold it all together. Why is that?

OK, yes. Hollis has moved from the self as a noun to selving, and thereby making of person a personing. We are not an object now, but a process. I have to admit I like that, but why, oh why, just one dominant process. Why the unitary need? In the penultimate paragraph of “The Examined Life” this (probably unconscious) need for a unification is expressed in the metaphorical “Archimediean point”.

There my be no Self, but the Self is a useful fiction which helps us find an Archimedean point, a stance outside that of the ego, from which to question all other points.

Gawd.

Let me back track for a minute.

Just before this section Hollis speaks about the “selving” going on.

The Self selves—for that we came, and individuation is the name. And yet the other side of the paradox is found in whatever guiding intelligence occasions that selving, which in somatic, affective or intellective ways forever seeks its further expression.

In seeking that supraordinate wisdom, intuitively perceived, the West has depended most on mystics, authorities, scriptures, and reason.

There are two major assumptions at work here, which I assume will guide the solutions Hollis develops as the book reaches its raison d’être. The first is that phrase “guiding intelligence” and the second is “supraordinate”.

Assuming a “guiding intelligence” is a bit like an anti-evolutionist citing the need of a watchmaker. Watches are complex structures, the argument goes, and life forms are even more complex. Watches need makers, therefore life forms do too. Baloney of course, but it sounds logical. Now I am sure Hollis is much more intelligent and well read than the average “watchmaker” proponent is wont to be but the ideological assumptive strategy is still the same.

Intelligence, consciousness, awareness, the capacity to reflect, to decide, to construct symbolic structures and narratives is not a monolithic “intelligence”. I know the singular noun suggests it to us, but that is a linguistic convention and not a statement of material truth. All the neurological, behavioural, anthropological (etc, etc) evidence suggests that what we have is a series of intelligences that results from our evolved material beings operating in our material and social worlds.

Our conception of a “guiding intelligence” is going the same way as did “God” and the “Self”. Just as millions of small moments of genetic change become a new species without the need of a maker, so do millions of small “decisions” made by complex chemicals in our bodies become “decisions” without the need of a guiding intelligence.

Does this mean we are at the mercy of the material universe? No. Wrong question. It means we are the material universe. We are the material universe which thinks when it is in this particular form. It means that asking questions like are we at the mercy indicates we are still in the grip of the old assumptions – the ones that furiously displace the One from God, to Man, to Nature, to Self, to Fiction.

There is no “the One”; there is no “guiding intelligence”.

Finally, “supraordinate”. It’s a Jungian term.

Supraordinate personality. An aspect of the psyche superior to, and transcending, the ego. (See also self.)

The “supraordinate personality” is the total man, i.e., man as he really is, not as he appears to himself. . . . I usually describe the supraordinate personality as the “self,” thus making a sharp distinction between the ego, which, as is well known, extends only as far as the conscious mind, and the whole of the personality, which includes the unconscious as well as the conscious component. The ego is thus related to the self as part to whole. To that extent the self is supraordinate.[The Psychological Aspects of the Kore,"CW 9i, pars. 314f.]

See above argument for “guiding intelligence” and apply it to “supraordinate personality”.

One final comment before I return to the last chapters. The only way I can see the supraordinate as existing in any form is in the body itself. That is, the various systems of self maintenance, the biocatalysts, the regulatory chemical structures, the bio and chemical mechanics of the body that hum, tick, whir their way through countless “decisions” made necessary by our organism’s meandering through the world, these various sub-systems all together make up the supraordinate – the “guiding intelligence”. But thinking that way changes the potential solutions. So I will read Hollis first, then read his solutions against my own. And really, shouldn’t it be the subordinate personality?

But be wary – this is not a “hive” mind I am suggesting because that suggests a queen bee. This bio-chemical bag of life is something quite else I think—it is, for example, made up of primarily the non-living—and figuring it out may well take us down the rabbit hole, but without Alice as a guide.

(Thanks to Andy for suggesting I read Hollis. I mean it. Thanks.)

What I want to do is share with you part of a paragraph from the book.

To begin with, it’s true, she read with trepidation and some unease. The sheer endlessness of books outfaced her and she had no idea how to go on; there was no system to her reading, with one book leading to another, and often she had two or three on the go at the same time. The next stage had been when she started to make notes, after which she always read with a pencil in hand, not summarising what she read but simply transcribing passages that struck her. It was only after a year or so of reading and making notes that she tentatively ventured on the occasional thought of her own.

Howl. The Queen with a thought of her own. Goodness, I hope Elizabeth had the pleasure of reading Bennett’s book.

Also, glad to see I have so many things in common with Her Highness, although it took me considerably more than a year after beginning to read to have a thought at all, let alone one that could safely be described as “my own”.

So I put down Morton and picked up a book of essays called the Eye in the Thicket. I was reading Don McKay’s essay “Otherwise Than Place” before I went to sleep. It was perfect. A piece about our fear of oblivion and long stretches of time, McKay carries a small stone in his pocket: geologic time reconfigures human concern.

Here is the closing of the essay:

So let me close by risking another pair of definitions: place is the beginning of memory, and memory is the momentary domestication of time. We could continue that walk around the meadow, pausing at the mulberries where the cedar waxwings got drunk, the red maple beloved of orioles, and the grave of the second dog, Sam — and at each the stories would proliferate. But each would come with that temporary, provisional quality built in. Those little walks, whether exercised in situ or in memory, exist on the hinge of translation between place and its otherwise, with the flow going both ways, rooting me in place while they simultaneously open — always with that sense of danger, that pre-echo of oblivion — into wilderness.

Beautiful. And true to the simultaneous nature of being human. we have a body that walks, perceives, is part of the ongoingness of reality. Then there are the memories, the narratives that overlay the ever present ongoingness. Reading is like moving into another’s memory, and by doing this moving into a new one of one’s own. It does not supersede the body’s knowing of now and here. Narrative, memory, or McKay’s “place” just exists as a after image on a somatic photo already taken.

I know this in my body, in the calcium in my bones that will one day be part of some rock another will walk on, or carry. And yet I dreamt uncomfortably all night. As I read I could hear Morton’s refusal of McKay, the assessment of such ecomimetic strategies McKay employs as hiding the failure of the subject and pretending a holism we don’t in fact have. And I carried that niggle into my dreams.

And of course on waking I got angry, because we do in fact have it. Pay close attention to your walking. Feel your body’s pinging, pinging, pinging, and the attached thinking, thinking, thinking. This is the whole of the earth as it appears in this one little place called you. And yes it is a “place” but it is also a wilderness. It is both at the same time.

I suspect it may take a little time to recover from Morton. But also, the niggle, was something in McKay. The sense of the separation of place and its otherwise (wilderness) is an old trope but I think a bad one. In this I agree with Morton. But not to continually require artists to draw attention to this “failure.” That’s ridiculous and a bit petulant if you ask me. Instead, perhaps, we could draw attention to the simultaneity of multiple experiences, of the ongoingness of both “wilderness” and “place”. And with McKay, I agree that we might begin by conceiving of long-time, of rock history, of geologic scales as a counter weight to the brief flare of human time, of our impermanence, and quick oblivion. That would be a fine recovery.

For Jan Zwicky’s poem “Recovery” from which the book’s title comes go here. It’s a beautiful poem and perfectly fits my sense of recovery from Morton.