What Is Missing

I mean from me, at this juncture.

It's the spirit of His Majesty's Navy.  The very real courage of Nelson at Trafalgar.  The fictional courage of Jack Aubrey and of Horatio Hornblower during the Napoleonic Wars.  The courage embedded in the very names of certain storied ships of the line -- "Indomitable!"  "Indefatigable!"

Me, I have to pause to summon the gumption to go down the steps at Park Street Station.

I should mock myself by changing the name, for the second time, of my jaunty little would-be tugboat.  Change the name; change the hailing protocol -- "IBYC launch ... IBYC launch ... this is Indefatigable for a pick-up."

 

A Bold Thought Experiment

Music is precious to most of us.  Stereotypically, it stirs the soul, inspires joy, sorrow, passion, patriotism, dread -- you name it.  And it is mysterious; as far as I know, no evolutionary biologist has been able ever to explain what role it plays in facilitating our individual or collective survival which, supposedly, is all that we care about.

Let us now imagine that mankind will face a new global pandemic, worse than the previous one of the 2020's insofar as literally everyone will suffer its severest symptom -- being struck deaf, totally and permanently.  And also, that this malady will be passed on genetically to our children, ad infinitum.

One consequence of this is that music will be a thing of the past.  For a while it will be preserved in the internal monologue and perhaps also in sheet music that wistful historians will peruse with regret.  But over time, even those vestiges will disappear.  It will be as if music, which played such a big role in our emotional lives, never existed.  But we know that in fact it did exist, and that its loss was due to a mere contingency -- the fact that our senses could no longer perceive it.

What else is there around us that is equally real but equally walled off from our normal perception?  (We know, for example, that we cannot see infrared or ultraviolet light, but that other creatures may perceive these parts of the spectrum.)  Scientists are taking these unseen worlds more seriously of late, whether they posit a literal multiverse, or conclude that drugs like psilocybin and LSD do not distort our perceptual apparatus but rather remove filters so that we can experience, for the first time, raw inputs that are as legitimate as the aural inputs that we prize as "musical" but that have disappeared in my hypothetical.

The veil is being torn in so many places, and via so many modalities, that it seems in danger of being ripped apart entirely.  What modalities?  Ayahuasca and DMT, near death experiences, incubi and succubi, cryptids like "dogman" and "mothman," glowing orbs in the sky and in our bedrooms, apparent "portals," and yes, more conventional close encounters of the third kind.

When psychonauts go "all in" via one of these modalities, they often report that the other realm, masked as it may be, is at base a realm of pure, unified consciousness that feels like the Ultimate Source, the One, the Godhead.  They also often report that while it is a realm beyond spacetime, it strikes us as extending in all directions, without limit.  This perception can be both awe-inspiring and terrifying; we know not how to navigate this space!  (More and more I reject the template of the Tunnel of Light, with Jesus or Mom/Dad there to welcome us, at least as the ultimate answer.  I think that the Tunnel of Light may  merely be Step One on a much deeper journey.)  Here is where I look for guidance from certain among the ancients -- the Tibetan Buddhists, the Gnostics and the Kabbalists in particular.  They are like the Lewis and Clark of the unseen worlds, taken in their full abundance.

 

Once Again at the Hour of the Wolf

I felt in the depths of the night that I was being charged (by whom?) to find a single vignette in my life that would represent and explain the whole, as if my life were holographic in form.  I failed in this.

This would be a cinematic exercise.  Fine actors in finely-directed films can sum up characters in five or ten minutes, powerfully.  Orson Welles in "Citizen Kane."  Marlon Brando in "On the Waterfront."  Charlize Theron in "Monster. " Rod Steiger in "The Pawnbroker."  And yet we must concede that the high points of these portrayals would be nothing without context, supplied by the rest of the films.

And life is not a movie.  Like most people, I roll from quotidien to quotidien, seeking comfort in routine.  The salient points are often sins of omission, failures to act, risks averted, examples of courage not found.  Where I have excelled enough to distinguish myself, it has been mostly because of two things -- a rarely-encountered ability to focus paired with an inability to forget a whole range of things, even at a granular level!

The old Reader's Digest used to feature a column/essay called "The Most Unforgettable Character I've Ever Met."  When I look at the lofty, met or unmet, these might include the Nobel laureate Richard Feynman, who was a gifted bongo player and safe cracker, and of course Ludwig Wittgenstein, about whom perhaps I have said too much already in these pages.  Among the low, we have Steve Jobs for his utter transformation of global society in a mostly sorry direction, Ayn Rand for her glorification of selfishness, and [insert politician whom you love to hate here].

In the life review that awaits us all in transition to the hereafter, every single moment is said to count; every single moment is said to have moral consequences; no singular moment that we review will be singularly exemplary in a literal sense, good or bad.  We have to hope, then, that in the event we will meet a singularly merciful God.

 

That Elusive Transcendence

I have now lost three close companions, loved ones to be sure.

This latest loss leaves me feeling as if I have watched him leap from the lip of the Quincy Quarry into its particular abyss, and now that I am being poked with a stick to follow him against my will into the same abyss.  In the absence of signs, it also leaves me with a weakened confidence in the hereafter -- first that it exists at all and, if it does, that I will find it a welcoming place, not one populated by laughing machine leprechauns or rapacious reptilians.  The collective unconscious by all accounts is not the same as heaven as we see it portrayed in film.

And yet I take some level of solace in films, not the great dramas of the late 20th century like "Chinatown" and "Taxi Driver," but films from any era that carry a special purity of heart and purity of execution, viz., "The Passion of Joan of Arc" (1928), "La Strada" (1954), "Babette's Feast" (1987), John Huston's "The Dead" (also 1987).  It is as if I could slip the noose to populate the worlds therein depicted without suffering death in the transition, not as an active participant but as a quiet observer, a cat or a mouse, perhaps, watching unseen from the corner of the kitchen as Babette perfects her "real French dinner" of turtle soup and quail en sarcophage!

I know that I will have to forsake all of my personal attachments in the end, perhaps to the point of "ego death," but I would take with me attachments at least to these synthetic worlds, talismans to protect me in the ultimate wilderness.

 

Victory Gardens

The time has come for me to cherish my relative independence, because it has a time limit on it; I just don't know what it is.  I see it all around me in my peers.

The next and presumptively final stop will be a place where living is "assisted," and where the fruits of the victory gardens feature peas, carrots and mashed.

We, the inmates, don't call the place by its proper name.  Having seen how our world has shrunken in the transition, and how things we talk about now are real to us but have already melted into history for those who have come after, we refer to it sardonically as "The Walled-off Historia."  We speak of rabbit ears and curb feelers, book bags, newspaper routes, wax lips and ice cream push-ups.  But also of politics, bitterly.

The chaplain comes to visit once a week, whether we need him or not.

 

Metaphorically Speaking

I have spent quite a bit of time in this space talking about metaphors.  I've talked about how ubiquitous they are, about the great visionary biologist Michael Levin, for example, saying that "all science is metaphor!"  What does he mean by this?  I surmise that he means that in science we create models for reality that inevitably do not truly match reality, first because they are oversimplifications, and also because our limited senses wall us off from more than what they show us is there.  Thus, we picture every atom as a mini-solar system when in reality, if we had a microscope that could see into things at that scale, an atom would look like nothing of the sort.

And I have also talked about the mystery of metaphor-making.  If I say "faster than a speeding bullet" to people of a certain age, they will instantly recall the image of the TV Superman doing his thing "like a bullet."  It's embedded in our culture.  But how is it that we understand a metaphor when the first person to say it says it -- something like "she was the apple of my eye" or "Hitler and Stalin were locked in an unholy embrace in 1940?"  How is a beloved like an apple after all?  Did Hitler and Stalin actually embrace in 1940?  Our linguistic and logical architecture must be inherently fluid for us to understand in such instances.  (And note that to characterize an "architecture" as "fluid" is itself metaphorical!  It never ends.)

Metaphors were of course among the sharpest tools in Shakespeare's toolbox.  All the world's a stage, after all, and that world is your oyster, kid, if you just shuck it up rather than ... (never mind).  But I continue to argue without much company that Will routinely is forgiven for many such expressions that land with a thud upon the modern ear, and may indeed have so landed even in his time, but we are forbidden to say it.  Blow, blow, thou winter wind.  Thou art not so unkind as man's ingratitude.  Nor so chill as my Pomeranian after a hearty breakfast of Kibbles.

Shakespeare has his place, but there is no metaphor greater than the metaphor that is used to make fun of metaphors.  In this, the champion is not Monty Python or even the BBC's Philomena Cunk in conversation with an eminent scholar ("'I wandered lonely as a cloud.'  But clouds don't have legs!  How was Wordsworth allowed to get away with that stuff!?"). The champion is the late literary and cultural critic Clive James.  

In one of his memoirs, James recounts how he would spend his down-under summers as a teenager at the Ramsgate Baths, just southwest of Sydney.  The main object was to impress the girls with extravagant swimming and diving maneuvers, both for its own sake and to establish his place in a rather mindless local bloke hierarchy.  

There was one beautiful girl by the pool whom Clive would be the first to admit that he lusted after, but as it often is, the lust was purified by, filtered through, the kind of crush one can only experience at that precious and fleeting stage in life.  And one day, as he discreetly spied her from his towel, a single dark pubic hair found itself uncovered by her Spandex, "like the escaped mainspring of a pygmy timepiece."  

We can picture the pygmy examining the pocket watch he has taken from his victim before eating him; we can hear David Attenborough intoning this most creative image with solemn satisfaction.  Oxbridge, which set the gold standard for such things, nodded in approval.

 

Pointillism

I have been meaning for some time now to make a very important and precise point.  But I've forgotten what it is.  

Maybe a smear is more what is called for.  Like Silly Putty on the sidewalk, stepped on, on a hot summer day, by accident, distorting the Bazooka Joe image that I worked so hard to immortalize.