CHRYSANTHEMUMS

CHRYSANTHEMUMS

Cecelia Watson has a new book out, entitled Semicolon: The Past, Present, and Future of a Misunderstood Mark. She says “The semicolon is a place where our anxieties and our aspirations about language, class, and education are concentrated.” She chronicles a long list of writers and critics who were both great fans and detractors of the semicolon. For every fancier there was (and is) a critic.

The visual smallness of this sign, this hieroglyph now writ[ten] large, reminded me how self-conscious writing has become in an extremely self-conscious age. Psychology, technology, and mass-media has seen to this. Something else has finally reached a point of equal interest as well – the metaphor – a communication tool not used any more today than in neolithic times. It has not just literary ramifications but psychological ones as well. It’s the older sibling to the simile: the latter only compares us to things; the former actually turns us into something else.

When you think of it, is anything not a metaphor – a representation/symbol/ sign signifying something else? Perhaps this is jumping the gun. Maybe we need to ease into this more gently.

I just wrote an article on the nature of “the lie” – it’s virtues when understood, it’s devastating impact when misunderstood and misapplied. This I suppose could be considered a continuation of that discussion, only taken to another depth. Let’s look at the cleverness of the metaphor and what it does to our thinking and to reality itself. It might just help us understand how using the very tools of “endarkenment” to find enlightenment never works.

Since everything is essentially something else, what does that do with our sense of understanding things, and more importantly our sense of purpose? Does our “selective” understanding depend on a “displaced” reality? I think so. To have one is to need the other. To lose the one is to lose the other. And therefore, what does it say to the validity of anything? It reminds me of the great paradox spelled out in Buddhism’s Four Noble Truths. Consider: a) Life is dukkha (suffering), b) the cause of suffering is desire, c) put an end to desire, hence, put an end to life itself as we know it. And to achieve that, d) live the doctrine and walk the eightfold path. Plato’s Cave of shadows and illusions is the West’s response to this, but Plato never went so far as to advocate giving up desire – just to know the truth.

Appearances? Shadows? So fleeting and subtle are they that they come down to another Buddhist (post-structuralist) principle: “what is the proof behind your proof, the premise behind your premise?” Who is it that’s asking the question? – Suffice it to say, this is territory, again, which Western philosophy and religion dare not enter. If they did the very institutions and pillars of Western civilization would suffer “self-consciousness.” What would we do without our “absolutes” which are our foundations of meaning – God, I and Thou, empirical-sensory evidence, etc, – the absence of which would send us hurdling into the worst death of all – nothingness. Without purpose, ambition, and desire, the Western mind sees only darkness.

Hence the black veils which place a frightening pall over funerals and death in general. In place of specificity and concrete knowledge (shared in the East), the West offers only “faith” in the hereafter. Which isn’t really faith at all, but belief (lief, meaning “to hope for”). We hope to be rescued and saved. The blackness Christianity paints over death isn’t exactly the best indicator of trust in (or knowledge of) the subject. It’s all about mourning and fear and very little in the way of celebration. Something else seemingly ignored is that “the dead” don’t care anyway – only the living. Funerals are for the living, who privately repeat the mantra “there but for the grace of God go I.” The best the living can do is Pascal’s Wager.

“In the beginning was the word” – the Logos. And what is the word but a sound. And what is a sound? Suddenly a circular relationship begins between the sound and the object. There is no subject-object (awareness of the other) independent of language. Hence, the appearance of “signs” comprised of the sound (signifier) and what it indicates (signified). From this, language begins. But it doesn’t end there. Sounds only point to other sounds (“no word is free” said Lacan) and a metaphor is just one signifier in place of another in communication. One word/sound is only identifiable in terms of another. And from here advanced languages flourish – called “metaphoricity.” Just open the dictionary and what you see are words defining other words. So where does it end, or begin? Is there any solid foundation to fall back on anywhere? No.

Of course, western religion begins with the Logos. This is its chosen “rock” which cannot be deconstructed. It’s disallowed – incontestable, self-evident, unerring, axiomatic, infallible, and absolute – because God said so. He created the Word so that man could talk to Him. There’s no discussion about (as the little boy innocently asks) “but who created God?” There’s no serious looking at the construct of “I & Thou” which assumes the unqualified existence of the “self” (self-consciousness) which purposefully “decenters consciousness.” Decentering creates need. Power is now given away to the object, and God is now made in man’s image – also censored.

At this juncture, the Manichean universe opens up – dualism, yin & yang. And human evolution is henceforth given the conundrums of balance and constant disharmony (decenteredness). In the East it’s about the Fourth Noble Truth (mindfulness) which addresses duality. In the West it’s cogito, ergo sum and an omnipotent deity reigning over everything. – He is perfect and all-knowing, we are not.

So, we’ve at least touched on the roots of metaphorical thinking and the subtle but palpable (and absolutely crucial) utility of “sounds to sounds.” Today we take it all for granted, and the realization that all experience and understanding happens only in terms of signs relating to other signs means very little to anyone. On the contrary, meaning and truth must also always be “objective truth,” even if objective meaning has no meaning. It has meaning only if that meaning is independent of (outside) the human mind. In other words, it must be “disembodied” – independent of the words themselves.

With this as our premise, we seek “higher meaning” everyday, using the very tools which keep us from it. Paraphrasing Einstein, we can’t solve problems using the same thinking which creates them. Hence it becoming a matter of “undoing” our learning. Again, “who is it asking the question? Who do you think you are?

The pure and “absolute” unknowability of ourselves puts me in with a small fraternity of others obsessed with this. Though I could never be in their league intellectually, two individuals come to my rescue – heroes both.

First, I think I know where Hermann Hesse was going with his “glass bead game.” Even today most of his readers are virtually stumped by the meaning behind his Nobel-Prize winning book. For that very reason, I wish I could hitch a ride on an old tanker to Castalia.

“How far back the historian wishes to place the origins and antecedents of the Glass Bead Game is, ultimately a matter of choice. For like every great idea it has no real beginning; rather, it has always been, at least the idea of it…. There are hints of it in Pythagoras, for example, and then among Hellenistic Gnostic circles…. We find it equally among the ancient Chinese, then again at the several pinnacles of Arabic-Moorish culture…. This same eternal idea… has underlain every movement of Mind toward the ideal goal of universitas litterarum, every Platonic academy, every league of the intellectual elite, every rapproachement between the exact and the more liberal disciplines, every effort toward the reconciliation between science and art or science and religion.”

Aside from the truly gifted are other seekers who also migrate to Castalia: “[T]his elect circle of candidates for the higher reaches of the hierarchy of the Glass Bead Game seem odious and debased, a clique of haughty idlers … who lacked all feeling for life and reality, an arrogant and fundamentally parasitic company of dandies and climbers who had made a silly game, a sterile self-indulgence of the mind, their vocation and the content of their life.” – Insofar as society sees those individuals engaging in frivolous abstractions and “sterile self-indulgences of the mind,” I must include myself.

But what is “the game?” Not a utopia, and yet a reality which has actually existed. It is a mental synthesis through which the spiritual values of all ages are simultaneously present and alive, a “synthesis of human learning” requiring years of hard study in music, mathematics (sacred geometry), art, cultural history, psychology and religion. Hesse’s school is led by Josephus III, a Magister Ludi (Master of Play) who guides students through thematic mazes “to achieve the greatest possible integration into the generality, the greatest possible service to the suprapersonal.” The teacher uses analytical psychology (the tools of thinking, feeling, sensation, and intuition) to best facilitate this.

This has remained incredibly cryptic and illusive ever since 1943 when the book was published (originally in German, entitled Magister Ludi). No one has ever figured out a definitive meaning to this mental-spiritual labyrinth. And yet I think I know where he was going: to a place beyond dualities and divisions, where one flips into seeing things coalesce from incomplete pieces into the inexplicable and unfathomable. Everything from science to music and art are mere metaphors of metaphors, words and signs of words and signs – as if individual instruments in a large cosmic orchestra.

And then there is my second hero – psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. At fifteen he wallpapered his room with pages from Spinoza’s Ethics, and decided to specialize in psychology. What fascinated me most about him was his observation of how we all (as young children) look into the mirror for the first time. Prior to this pivotal moment we experience ourselves as an almost infinite universe of feelings, thoughts, sensations and intuitions (borrowing again from the “four psychic functions” in analytical psychology). We are quite literally not beings but eternal becomings.

And then, one day, we look in the mirror. And we ask ourselves, “Is that me?” Of course it isn’t, and all of us (without exception) announce “that’s not me!!” Instead, we know ourselves to be is formless inside, a stream of consciousness made up of thoughts, images, memories, and fantasies. We are “polysexual,” ever-changing, chaotic, and ambivalent. – But now, we’re told that the image is us, a stable, three-dimensional entity” with symmetrical features. This Lacan simply called the “mirror phase.”

The outside world tells us we must not only conform to the image but the image itself must conform to its expectations. Suddenly and forever, our true inner universes are virtually shut down. From then on we’re measured by our physical dimensions and attributes – voices, hair, eyes, weight, height – and what clothes we wear.

This is why Lacan said that we are eternally “alone,” frustrated, and unhappy. Each one of us is a vast universe which actually intersects everyone else’s universe, but we aren’t allowed to say or share that.

We use words to try and bridge the distances now separating us, but they always fail us. We can never say what we feel. And Lacan says this is not a personal failing on our part but simply an “existential truth.”

We all long for others to understand us, but we’re all resolutely stuck on the “outside” of ourselves – alone and lonely. The outer world insists that if we just “look” and “act” a certain way, we’ll all be properly understood and accepted. But we know better.

Hence Lacan’s pessimism regarding romantic love too – doomed from the get-go.”There is no such thing …. Man knows nothing of woman, and woman knows nothing of man.” We never truly comprehend our partners and spouses. All we have are outer projections, physical forms, and fantasies drawn from the outside. Hence Lacan’s understanding of true love: “an awareness of our fundamentally illusory nature.” Eventually all else falls away, and must. If we’re still standing (and together) – that’s love.

With Lacan’s help, we can hold on to who we really are, within and relationally. At the same time we are always more or less “alone.” But just knowing this becomes a window on how we can begin building realistic and sustaining relationships.

In the 1960s Lacan saw young people protesting and forming new identities at many levels. But underneath what he saw was a vast movement in search of a new kind of leadership; not a religious or political guru in the generic sense, but what might be the equivalent to a Castalian Magister. He said the hallmark of a truly effective leader wasn’t his/her ability to just stir up crowds, but who “dared to be an adult.” In other words, who taught the disappointing (but potentially redeeming) nature of reality. We are all immature and lonely creatures, and we’re more miserable than we need to be. Hence, our endless search for “something” more than we admit to ourselves.

Lacan mixed intellectual truth with politics believing that it all blended together – again, parallels to the “glass bead game.” He was an atheist, and believed that psychoanalysis could eventually enlighten our greatest institutions like the Church and governments. He hoped it would liberate them from their errors. Instead superstition and fear have taken over since he died.

These are two of my personal heroes – reaching for (and finding) the transcendent. The former carving out an actual place (Castalia), not very different from my own “Underground Cafe.” The second finding it in deeply “alone” intellectual spaces.

All these themes eventually come together. I can truly understand Cecelia Watson’s great interest in the semicolon. And why not? The smallest and most trivial-sounding subject becomes a microcosmic “game” within an entire universe of its own. It is no more or less important (wisdom-filled, instructive) than anything else. It becomes a study, an institution, unto itself.

Like the Chinese in martial arts who say, “pick one thing and study it your entire life,” any one subject contains all the answers to the universal questions. And of course, there are no answers, just riddles and cryptic allusions – corridors and alleyways leading to yet more clues. Eventually we give up, find a cafe, and sit down for a drink with a stranger who specializes in chrysanthemums.

© 2019 Richard Hiatt