Jack and Jerry • This had all the makings of a great slapstick comedy routine. And this is after Jack chased him halfway around the pole several times in each direction.
David Whyte, on Goethe’s poem “Holy Longings” (which you should click-n-read):
So Goethe is looking at the way that we often feel like troubled guests, that we’re somehow slightly out of sync, not completely present, somehow have missed part of the information.
I always think it’s quite fascinating that we are one of the few corners of creation that’s allowed to feel as if we don’t belong. A stone is a stone; a hawk is a hawk; an armadillo is an armadillo — in its armadillo-ness. And each of the creatures in the world, and the inanimate objects of the world, or a tree, or a bush, just gets to be itself, with no argument. Whereas human beings are one of the few creatures of the world that can actually seem to be there while a good part of their identity — their imaginations, their senses of vitality and presence — can be absent completely.
Some sort of anxious not-at-home-ness is a negative potential that has probably followed human beings for our entire history. But I doubt if humans have ever more willingly made themselves — and, more importantly, their offspring — feel less at-home than we do now.
I was flipping through Nicholas Carr’s 2014 book The Glass Cage yesterday and stopped on this highlighted quote (emphasis added):
“A map is not the territory it represents,” the Polish philosopher Alfred Korzybski famously remarked, and a virtual rendering is not the territory it represents either. When we enter the glass cage, we’re required to shed much of our body. That doesn’t free us, it emaciates us.
The world in turn is made less meaningful. As we adapt to our streamlined environment, we render ourselves incapable of perceiving what the world offers its most ardent inhabitants.… The result is existential impoverishment, as nature and culture withdraw their invitations to act and to perceive.
To my memory, Carr never explicitly defines the “glass cage,” but describes it by way of a simile. A glass cage is like what pilots in the 70s and 80s started calling the “glass cockpit,” as the analog gauges in the newer flight decks were replaced with “glowing glass screens” displaying data from a computer, and the mechanical controls, with their cables and their pulleys and their tactile feedback, were replaced with “fly-by-wire” systems. This and the increased ubiquity of “autoflight systems” led to the 2013 FAA Safety Alert for Operators, with which Carr begins his book.
It may sound a little silly, but the FAA really did feel the need to write a letter saying that people who fly planes need to spend more time actually flying planes. The concern was that pilots were experiencing “skill fade” and that in situations where they were forced to manually, you know, fly the planes, they would be overwhelmed by the task of actually, you know, flying the planes.
It’s an analogy perfectly fitting for the age no less than for Carr’s entire career.
Living too much of your life through a screen — and “too much” is not much — makes even the front door of your house an increasingly overwhelming object, and the other side of that door an increasingly unwelcoming place — not because the world outside has changed, but because we have changed. As Hannah Arendt put it (in 1977!), we’ve created a radical world-alienating situation “where man, wherever he goes, encounters only himself.”
All this makes David Whyte’s poem “Self Portrait” all the more pressing and heartening.
David Whyte, on Patrick Kavanagh’s wonderful poem “The Self-Slaved”:
It’s one of the truisms of postmodern therapeutic language that you’re supposed to be constantly exposing yourself, but Kavanagh says there’s a kind of false self you can expose. You can be saying how you had that trauma, this trauma, how you need that, and all the time you’re speaking from a kind of contingent identity. And there’s another more radical identity that’s more often more silent, which is inimicable to therapy, in a way, and is more radical, wilder, lives according to a more “outlaw” view of the universe, of creation. And Kavanagh says, to be constantly describing yourself and to think you know who you are and to be constantly explaining to others who you are, is a gospel of despair. That to BE yourself and to put that self into conversation with others, and to overhear yourself saying things you didn’t know you knew — this is more like the truth, this is more like an identity, this is more like the poetic imagination.
Very much enjoying this one, which as far as I can tell is exclusively an audiobook. I “borrowed” it from our local library on Hoopla, but it’s also available on Libby.
The Hmong language is, uh, more blunt, and arguably more accurate:
The Hmong have a phase, yuav paim quav, which means that the truth will come to light. Literally, it means “feces will be excreted.”
The casual way that American Christians have of talking about God is not simply dispiriting, but is, for some sensibilities, actively destructive. There are times when silence is not only the highest, but the only possible, piety.
See also Naomi Shihab Nye.
Coworker 1: “I haven’t been watching the olympics much, but I just think Snoop Dogg such an American treasure.”
Coworker 2: “Totally! 100 percent.”
Coworker 1: [Sharing phone screen] “Look at him! He’s so cute. And so genuine, I feel.”
Me:
Stanley Hauerwas, still fighting the good fight:
The disavowal of violence is to create a world in which alternatives exist that I couldn’t have imagined if I thought that reaching for the gun takes precedence over the possibility of sharing a meal with an enemy.
Mary Catherine Bateson:
Learning is perhaps the only pleasure that might replace increasing consumption as our chosen mode of enriching experience. Someday, the joy of recognizing a pattern in a leaf or the geological strata in a cliff face might replace the satisfactions of new carpeting or more horsepower in an engine, and the chance to learn in the workplace might seem more valuable than increased purchasing power or a move up the organizational chart. Increasing knowledge of the ethology of wolves might someday replace the power savored in destroying them.
We reach for knowledge as an instrument of power, not as an instrument of delight, yet the preoccupation with power ultimately serves ignorance.… Ironically, in our society both the strongest, those who have already succeeded, and the weakest, those who feel destined for failure, defend themselves against new learning.
While they may never properly iron linen table napkins, children and adults alike gain much from cultivating the skills required to bring livable order to ordinary chaos. It is a balm to have that skill in one’s pocket, not because it exercises proto-dominance on an indifferent universe, but because it can also bring clarity and calm to one’s cluttered interior. It mirrors exactly what thinking effects. Yet why is it bestselling brilliance for psychologist Jordan Peterson to say “make your bed,' but not when your mother teaches you to do it?
This essay, and its references, reminded me a lot of Mary Catherine Bateson’s Peripheral Visions, which I’m also freshly reminded was one of the best books I’ve ever read.