On Poking Into the Existential Mysteries Around You (There’s More Than One!)

[Image: “Fractal Existence (Brachiations),” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

Soooooo many essays about the state of the world in 2022 dwell on what seems obvious: we, all of us collectively, are in pretty bad shape (thanks to our active choices and to our passive acceptance of conditions we’d never consciously have chosen). Even good news — like the startling success of what’s currently called the James Webb Space Telescope — is shaded with awfulness. (In JWST’s case, there’s the controversy about commemorating its deeply flawed namesake. And at the other extreme — really deep, deep, awfulness — there’s just the absolute, undeniable realization that anything ALL humans can or will do, have ever done (let alone an individual human) really doesn’t amount to much when put in context with the vastness of the universe.) One of whiskey river‘s readings for the week seems to follow this trend:

So much of what we dream flickers out before we can
name it. Even the sun has been frozen on the next street.
Every word only reveals a past that never seems real.
Sometimes we just stare at the ground as if it were
a grave we could rent for a while. Sometimes we don’t
understand how all that grief fits beside us on the stoop.
There should be some sort of metaphor that lifts us away.
We should see the sky open up or the stars descend.
There are birds migrating, but we don’t hear them, cars
on their way to futures made of a throw of the dice.
The pigeons here bring no messages. A few flies
stitch the air. Sometimes a poem knows no way out
unless truth becomes just a homeless character in it.

(Richard Jackson [source])

Another recent reading (not from whiskey river) approaches all of this from a slightly different perspective — the asking of unanswerable questions:

Who Says Words with My Mouth?

All day I think about it, then at night I say it.
Where did I come from, and what am I supposed to be doing?
I have no idea.
My soul is from elsewhere, I’m sure of that,
and I intend to end up there.

This drunkenness began in some other tavern.
When I get back around to that place,
I’ll be completely sober. Meanwhile,
I’m like a bird from another continent, sitting in this aviary.
The day is coming when I fly off,
but who is it now in my ear who hears my voice?
Who says words with my mouth?

Who looks out with my eyes? What is the soul?
I cannot stop asking.
If I could taste one sip of an answer,
I could break out of this prison for drunks.
I didn’t come here of my own accord, and I can’t leave that way.
Whoever brought me here will have to take me home.

(Rumi [source])

So which is it? Shall we assert our despair, over and over? Shall we torture ourselves — and one another — by hammering at profound questions which cease to make sense almost the instance we utter them? We sense — we know (or so we tell ourselves) — that we’re all swirling down the drain. Isn’t there a way out? Let’s stampede toward the exit…!

Well, I don’t know. (Of course.) But I think of a couple of things:

First, I am reminded daily — often within a span of moments — of the value of grace notes: points of individual light which seem to fly in the face of what the world and the universe at large seem to insist is true. Vast, ungraspable “things” and institutions (politics, the natural environment, democracy, “the economy”) dominate the news, and they’re all concurrently exploding — going to hell, as the saying goes. And yet…

We stand in line in a restaurant and glimpse the look on a parent’s face as they dab with a napkin at the corner of a child’s face. We fumble with a handful of change, losing a quarter, which rolls away across the floor and out of sight, and just as we chalk it up as One More Damned Thing Going Wrong, a stranger approaches, thumb and forefinger pinched together, and asks, “Excuse me — did you drop this?” Even something as simple as scrolling through social media (all the ads and self-promotions, the noisy “stories” and “reels” overloading our senses): even that offers up moments of sheer innocent pleasure and delight — images of utter stillness and beauty, light-hearted stories of everyday human interaction, amazing tales of journeys taken (actual adventures or figurative voyages of the mind) and obstacles overcome…

Which do you look at? Or no, let me put it to you more pointedly: Which do you choose to look at?

This reminds me of another favorite passage, from James Stephens’s The Crock of Gold:

“I would like to dance, indeed,” returned the Philosopher, “for I do believe that dancing is the first and last duty of man. If we cannot be gay what can we be? Life is not any use at all unless we find a laugh here and there.”

[source]

Second: I have come to think that maybe, just maybe, the main (only?) problem with human existence is simply human awareness of human existence. We know some things; we don’t know much else; we tell ourselves we should do this or that, and/or that we should or must not do these two other things; we craft careful ideologies — institutions of belief — which admit of no inherent weaknesses and will fight competing ideologies to the death, if need be…

…all of which doesn’t make a lot of sense, in the grand scheme of things, because human beings are just, well, dots: infinitesimal microcosms of Everything Out There. The chain of being doesn’t ascend to human beings — and human creations — on Earth. It ascends from protons, atoms, molecules, proteins, ultimately DNA and evolution, through human beings — not to whatever comes next (sorry, science fiction!) but to whatever already is. Existence isn’t like a timeline of This and then That; it’s a myriad of concentric circles from tiny dot on up to cosmos.

I think if we could just lose our self-consciousness and -absorption, and just do What We Do, I think that we — like our atoms and our molecules, like the molecules of everything else (including molecules making up the JWST and those of the meteorite that dinged its lower rightmost mirror) — we could get through each moment of each and every day with much less anguish, with much less fear of (and/or hope for) whatever happens next.

Easier said than done, to be sure. (Above all else, Homo sapiens is the creature which frets.) But I think it’s worth trying.