THRESHOLDS

There are thresholds, and then … there are thresholds. We wake up each day with a more or less fixed groupings of them and use them to face what’s ahead. Some are tested right away, others not at all. Some severely, some lightly. We either draw new lines in the sand or lose ground and suffer. Some thresholds last, others don’t.

There are the thresholds colliding with the thresholds of others. It may be on the same battlefield, over one issue, but our defenses are clearly different. I’m strong, courteous, confident, patient, and humble this morning because I’m not threatened; while this afternoon I turn into a raving lunatic over something which is a mere trifle to another with a higher threshold. My only salvation is keeping my lunacy private. I hope the walls in my home are thick enough so my neighbors don’t hear me.

Then there’s the threshold of one facing the lies one says to himself. Forget the public. This is one that cannot be tossed aside by physically leaving it. Herein lies the warring, detentes, and treaties written in the clouds between ancient gods and goddesses, archetypes of the soul. These are the negotiations that go on for a lifetime. In the end, we can only hope peace is restored through the land and treasures are returned to the peasants whence they came.

Thresholds pushed by others get “pushed” because those interior gods are pushed and prodded. What happens “out there” happens because it happens “in here” first. Or, maybe not. Maybe it’s the reverse. It’s Marx – versus – Freud (two faces still needing to be on a stamp). Suffice it to say history is written by the “ins and outs” of warring gods, mine and yours. It’s the stuff of Shakespeare (who has his own stamp).

I fight opposing thresholds inside myself. One prefers to steer inward because that’s where the riches are. But another has to steer outward to deal with others (and theirs). Today, it was a lady who was completely out of her wits (a punctured threshold) because of a small indiscretion on my part. I failed to see “the line begins here” sign at Customer Service. I was instantly cast into the image of Satan. My mind was obviously “inside,” and I apologized profusely. But it was too late. The stereotype was already mapped out and cast. I had committed an unpardonable, mortal sin. The scene reminded me of how frail thresholds really are “out there,” putting my own on high alert.

It’s a fairly common dilemma for someone like myself. To be so “inside” that I neglect protocols, those courtesies that save us from embarrassment and conflict, some which are then difficult to unravel. The unfortunate incident at Customer Service had several thresholds converging (the lady behind the counter had hers as well).

Another threshold now also faces another danger, what might possibly take the form of a “complex.” It’s that of wrong persecution for doing dumb things. It’s the consequence of being too “inside” myself. Case in point: I was once standing in a long line at an airport, when I had to use the bathroom. I neglected to ask the person behind and/or in front of me to hold my place in line (that would be stepping out of my box). I thought I’d just slip “out and in” and no one would notice. When I returned to get in line, a security guard pulled me out claiming that everyone thought I had tried to “slip in line” unfairly. The next moment I turned around and a hundred people were staring at me, giving me the same hateful and condemning look the lady did at Customer Service. I tried to defend myself, but words were futile. I was already dodging stones. All I could do was disappear and find another flight. I was “right” but did the wrong thing. – I know the sting of persecution, being cast into “an image.” – I also confess to feeling things too deeply and rarely forgetting them. Hence, the (persecution) complex.

Thresholds keep us sane, or they force us to caste stones. Sometimes I get the feeling the whole world is casting stones, and it’s a threadbare threshold keeping things in check. As for law & order, my own neighborhood is witnessing that thread actually breaking. The “system” is losing its grip on crime. Which forces us to fortify our personal thresholds on vigilance and (in-)tolerance. We’re quite “on our own” today, putting it plainly.

Thresholds which cast stones also change daily. They fluctuate and bend like sound waves. Hence, the stones themselves – how many thrown, at whom, for what reason, and for how long. Everything oscillates in and out, back and forth, pressing, pulling, and stretching opposing forces. It’s thermodynamics is action. Euclid said (in his Second Common Notion) that “things that are equal to the same thing are equal to each other.” (Lincoln said this when referring to the North and South). – From a distance then, what all thresholds have in common are each other. No one threshold is better than or more important than the next. They all mutually attempt to find balance. It’s never found, always pushing and pulling – unless the pushing and pulling is itself the balance.

It’s a lesson still waiting to be learned: How to understand the dynamics of conflict. Not through suppression but by accepting conflict for what it is – often violent, fractious, confusing, and eternally unsettling. – If nature teaches anything, it’s this. We humans impose our own moral judgments, terms and concepts, on things that we deem “unfair,” which then need to be “resolved.” We impose our own rules to serve our needs. But then we only create more devastating forms of violence than before. Nature’s violence happens. It sustains us. It has its own kind of balance. Our thresholds for conflict will only grow when we understand that.

In other words, there’s the threshold of understanding Euclid and thermodynamics, the symbiosis between forces. – But now there’s another force also entering in: that of physical limitation. In other words, the flesh weakens. It’s an inevitable turn we all face. We don’t will it, but there it is. It’s as much out of our hands as the lady at the Customer Service counter and lines at an airport. There’s nothing to do, except to learn about our thresholds for limitation. Thresholds shift place to place, circumstance by circumstance, many times to where we least expect them. They test us. I’m not as quick “on the uptake” as I once was, and it forces my thresholds to adjust accordingly.

And then there’s the threshold which deals with self-deception (the “lies” mentioned above). We lie about, and to, ourselves daily – even when we think we’re not. So much rides on illusions, rules and absolutes, assumed to be real. It therefore brings up a threshold for deconstructing ourselves. When do we do that, for how long, and how much? The irony here is that the more we deconstruct, the more we understand nature’s rules and her thresholds. Nature is always there, underneath, making us see through our barriers.

When you’re thinking about it, just walking out the door has us facing an avalanche of converging/intersecting thresholds. Normally, our threshold for watching others with theirs is strong. We have no problem with it, until they involve us. We are by nature voyeurs. We also live by an instinct often known as schadenfreude – finding discrete pleasure and validation through the suffering of others. “There but for the grace of God, go I,” we say. “Better him than me.”

Then there’s the penultimate threshold: The willingness to still play “the game,” playing our parts in the theater of fools. Self-preservation is the strongest human instinct of all, but there’s also a threshold for how much one wants to play the game of “keeping score” (I think of Hesse’s Glass Bead Game). When its rich and scripts stay interesting, it’s fun. When it just “chewing leather,” it’s not. One grapples with this, it seems, more and more the older one gets.

So far, I wake up in a world which is still interesting, on some levels. On other levels definitely not (if they ever were interesting). My thresholds have not gotten stronger, just more clearly defined. I recognize them more readily, especially with limitations relating to age. I accept them for their imperfections. Even the ones that still get me in trouble. For example, I still have a “low” but persistent threshold for l’affairs de coeur. It takes me out of my safe zone which makes me feel alive. Oscar Wilde said we should “always” be in love (with somebody!), and who’s to argue with that? The thresholds for and against it battle constantly, and detentes are, at best, fleeting. There never will be a DMZ or balance. Unless again, the struggle itself is the balance. Knowing men and woman (as I do), the balance is the struggle.

Nature steps in. The exquisitely wonderful thing about surrogate companions (pets) is that they have no negative thresholds toward us. They embrace us just as we are, not just because we feed them but because they love us. We have much to learn from the animals, and the plants, and from the planet (Gaia) herself, who undoubtedly has the highest threshold of all for tolerating us. One day that threshold will snap, I predict, and the whole game of push-pull will simply end. Just like that.

© 2023 Richard Hiatt

A NEW TRIBALISM

Expatriation has always been a problem from the aspect of “levels.” I’ve never been an expatriate, but always felt like one. It finally came down to more of a sensibility than a passport. I visited Europe years ago, seven countries inside four weeks. And though it was a whirlwind tour set up for tourists (part of a chamber singers group, a pretext to let me go), it felt as if I had arrived “home, at last.” I almost forgot where I came from. It was a transposition and a transmigration.

In the subsequent years I learned I wasn’t alone. The most famous American novelists of the 20the Century – Henry James, D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett – were all in fact expatriates. They all had profoundly unsettled cultural identities. This was validating, and still is. Not to ever presume being part of august fraternity like that, what they shared together was a need to transcend native boundaries (via language), to rekindle a kind of tribal identity. It was an obsession to see through dialects and grammatical rules while forging unique writing styles.

James had a deep idea of an “intelligent worldly personality.” His characters used language that reached into a vault of universal recognition. D.H. Lawrence’s characters reversed the “bilingual conventions of nineteenth-century fiction.” Dialects worked against “sterile, hypocritical, and repressive formulae” which allowed him to “discredit the entire language of standard English” – what he referenced as “bourgeois cliché.” Joyce is famous for his cliché mimetique – his irreverent and mocking energy, attacking conventional language, aiming for an “abdication” of forms. Beckett’s final goal was to “empty the novel of its usual recognizable objects.” Switching between French and English, he toyed with “practical” sense too often obscured by “common” sense. When a character’s parrot fails to learn more than three words, it goes into a rage and retreats into the corner of its cage. It’s a metaphor for the strains of finding an “imperfectly mastered art.” There are “falsettos of reason” which lend itself to artifice. The best le bon sens (common sense) is “horse sense.” Some translate “horse sense” as a reference to bullshit (my term). ¹

There was a timeless sense of belonging in the four weeks we were in Europe. And then, coming “home?” to America was like forced exile from home. I was just nineteen but already felt torn from roots and family clans, stretching over hundreds/thousands of years. The feeling was as ancient as the burial mounds and stone calendars strewn over the English countryside, in Scotland, and the caves of Provence.

In America, we often obsess over reconnecting and re-identifying with aboriginal tribes, some going back 20,000 years. But we also forget lineages/blood lines with roots that don’t originate in this soil. They belong, but don’t belong. Those roots are deeply twisted and gnarled below ground. They tap into another genealogy, which is part of an even broader ancestry.

I’m beginning to see what’s happening when I find myself reacting, as I do, to words and phrases and dialogue, or what’s left of it. There’s a subtle but deep urge to find meanings not expressed. And it’s only harder today, because Americans have reduced their command of language by “half” since 1940. The average high school graduate knew 10,000 words in 1940. Today it’s 5,000 words. Back then they could back into compound sentences with participial phrases. Today young people speak (and read) in simple “Dick & Jane” sentences. – All that aside, what I’ve been doing (without consciously knowing it) is looking for that deeper stratum. One that deconstructs the English rules of grammar, punctures surfaces, and connects to a ground-level semaphore. – I actually wonder if everyone does this without knowing it. In spite of the words, attempting to get around words, we say “I hear what you’re saying.”

Languages do what religions do. In their separateness they all point to the same universal principles and axioms. I “get it” when a freethinker says “No one religion is enough.” Languages and religions are like the fingers on a hand. They all connect to the same palm connecting to the same body. The “tribal” language is a gutteral one – glottal, throaty, and thick. It lifts the ears of the beasts around him, and they listen.

It also contains a reduced vocabulary. Fewer words actually contain a multiplicity of meanings, more than we can ever imagine. They overtake the vocabularies of today. – Just imagine a tribe in the Amazon forest whose entire vocabulary consisted of just verbs. Imagine ourselves using just verbs for 24 hours. Our consciousness would change dramatically. Imagine an “illiteracy” which is actually more literate.

Our four famous expatriates above attempted to rendezvous with this, but too often ended up using more language than less. Ulysses for example uses language, logic, styles, and structures which are very complex, while at the same time seeking the simplest messages. These writers succeed of course, but not before chapters-upon-chapters (Proust holds the record at 1,267,069 words). They labor hard, perhaps because they know the culture they’re writing in and for. Still, they compromise nothing. They belong to a Club des Etrangers (Club of Foreigners); hence, their spirit of expatriation.

Personally, I see poetry more as an expatriotic device than prose. When you look at it, the genius of writers like Joyce and Blake is their turning prose into poetry. Poetry gets words out of the way while bridging meanings in broad strokes. The essence of something in poetry can be immediately and deeply felt – or — it can be reconnoitered, circumnavigated, seduced out, and played with. It reaches a “tribal dialect” faster than prose. The poet is the ultimate prose writer, and visa versa. – Alas, I’m nowhere ready to write poetry, and I still use too many words.

All of which brings me back to communication in exile. The irony here (in America) is speaking one language while hearing another trying to get out. It’s not unlike going into a brasserie filled with foreigners. “Sharing” is all signing and body language, while words are just white noise. But there’s an effort for a tribal connection. The other irony (and tragedy) is that it succeeds in places elsewhere, but not in the US. Here, words, “bourgeois cliches,” slogans, and worn-out topics only get in the way. Everything stays shallow and empty and is instead compensated for with “volume.” — Americans love volume and loud places. Volume is all about trying to physically force a higher meaning out when all else fails. Then, to quote the song, “everybody’s talking, and nobody’s listening,” because no one is saying anything.

There’s no getting out of here without mentioning Chomsky (on language). Chomsky credits a “language faculty” in the brain which resists cultural constraints on comprehension. Children learn “syntactic rules” (phrasing structures) which are universal but which also deprive them of a rich enough data to acquire more than their languages offer. We each develop within the constraints of certain properties (nouns, verbs, content) which limit. But we also try to reach out for a never forgotten “biologically determined” faculty. Young children understand this innately before “syntactic categories” begin stripping it down. “UG,” or universal grammar, is (for me) a tribal grammar.

The question is then, what does “expatriation” actually mean – not politically and socially, but emotionally, synesthetically? It drums up a constant pining for something which is already here and accessible, but also inaccesible. I move “in and out” of that tribal orbit everyday. And not unlike poets and stream-of-consciousness writers, the language I use (sometimes written down) betrays the rules of syntax and grammar, even logic. How can it not, when everything we do is part of a journey to find a primordial beginning, a real genesis?

Not that we consciously set out on these trails. But we set out anyway. It’s all part of who we are – to go the “long way around” in order to return to the beginning. “Being there is realizing you’ve already arrived,” etc. It’s the “hero’s journey” spoken of many times by Joseph Campbell – of “separation, initiation, and return” which then breaks down into twelve arduous steps.

I’ve already “separated.” I’m now wandering in “the unknown,” crossing thresholds, visiting “innermost caves,” (what I call “spelunking”), trying to find the road back to where I started – where we all start – but this time carrying an “elixir” of insight. All this, in and through the magic of a Logos. It calls for a language we all want, We keep trying. One day (with fewer words, maybe with just verbs) we’ll get there.

© 2023 Richard Hiatt

1Quotes are taken from The Dialect of the Tribe, by Margery Sabin (Oxford Univ. Press: New York, 1987).

CAMP

The essence of Camp is it’s “love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration,” said Sontag, while also going against the grain. The concept held much meaning for years and over many generations, and not just in the arts. One could conceivably consider himself “unnatural and prone to exaggeration” (defending a different sensibility) in science, philosophy, and politics as well (politics no stranger to artifice); but we’ll give the honors to the arts anyway. – Alas, a shift has occurred in the last 50 years which has set Camp on its ear.

It’s a crisis of identity. First, everyday “norms” as we now know them are Camp(-ish). Everything is Camp. Nothing is not Camp. Everyday seems to be a desperate search for out-doing yesterday’s Camp. Reality is fiction, virtual is real. And what is not exaggerated for effect anymore? What does not define itself by trying to go against the grain? The problem is that it leaves “the art” of camp out in the cold. It doesn’t know where to go.

Consider that real and unreal have been interbreeding. Socializing (even dating) is done on I-phones. Money is now a datum in a computer instead of paper you can touch. Even war is so impersonalized that it’s basically a video game. Marriage success is no longer determined in “real time” in “one-on-one” moments between two people; instead determined according to how they score on mental health evaluations, comply with rules set by marriage counselors, and the impression and image it leaves in public. “We need to be happy. Our counselor says so.”

This leaves Camp in a kind of existential crisis. How does one find the “unnatural” in a climate where everything is already unnatural and bizarre? Today, it tries to find itself away from itself. The irony then is something no one would have believed sixty years ago: finding refuge inside the natural and ordinary – going not against the grain but with an older grain – but of course with an irreverent twist.

It can’t be just a regression or retrogression. Camp requires a certain rebelliousness wherever it goes. It must stand out and appear fresh. But this is seriously challenged by norms which are already rebellious and fresh, where “grains” no longer even exist – leaving one not knowing if he’s going with them or against them. Confusion reigns as Camp can’t even find a place where it can do an inventory on itself. It claims to be alive and well, but it grasps for air.

There’s the ever-present urge to freeze moments, analyze, constellate, and interpret things. It’s the need to know what’s going on. But Camp has also said that “to interpret is to impoverish.” It robs reality of its seamless continuity, its non-isolation, its bleeding into all things at once. Each moment is a vignette, a prelude into another moment. But it’s so fast now that it’s a blur and, again, there is no grain. Hearing it is to hear white noise, the heavy drone of all sounds, a deafening silence.

Hence, the “Camper’s” dilemma. The irony here is losing by being too successful over the years. Technology has only taken it and run with it. Artifice and exaggeration have reached breakneck speed, and now Camp faces its offspring. An analogy can be made to liberalism. There’s an old saying that “liberalism’s worst enemy is success.” This is because with every success comes the task of having to find something more liberal again – a “new liberalism” (without becoming radical about it). The “Campish liberal” is not an uncommon figure.

The thing about “Camp as normal” is that it happened unconsciously and accidentally. It used to be planned and executed. But this latest curve happened too fast to recognize it. Boundaries and grains vanished before society had time to see they were gone – too busy peering into screens, I-phones and cameras. It’s not unlike “creativity” itself (the process of “bringing the new into being”): It’s said creativity is 98% accident. From there, Cocteau said, ”The trick is trying to get the accident to work for you.” Camp’s task is to get the accident to work in such as way as to appear planned and never accidental. It’s not very convincing, but it’s the best Camp can do in these times. The more Camp announces itself as spontaneous, the more ordinary (saccharine, jejune) it is. It’s the sailboat waiting for a wind that doesn’t come. There’s nothing to push against.

No critic today even attempts to defend the old division between style and content. The two are indistinguishable, one lost inside the other. To examine Camp is to examine everything. The hope is that something still lies outside of that, which is absurd. Another way to look at it is to look at what Sontag said was not camp in 1964. Now it is. Reversely, what was camp then is no longer because the lines between Camp and non-Camp are gone. The concept itself is arguably outmoded and finished. – So, let’s look at was part of the “canon of Camp” back in 1964 (from her Notes on Camp). It may shed some light.

First, Sontag says” the way of Camp, is not in terms of beauty but in terms of the degree of artifice, of stylization.” Some random examples (then) were, “Tiffany lamps, The Enquirer (headlines and stories), Swan Lake, Bellini’e operas, Schoedsack’s King Kong, the Cuban pop singer La Lupe, the old Flash Gordon comics, women’s clothes of the twenties, and stag movies seen without lust.”

Camp taste has an affinity for certain arts rather than others…. [It] is often decorative art, emphasizing texture, sensuous surface, and style at the expense of content. Concert music, though .. is rarely Camp. It offers no opportunity, say, for a contrast between silly or extravagant content and rich form…. In the last two years, popular music (post rock-n’-roll, what the French call ye-ye) has been annexed. And movie criticism (like lists of ‘The 10 Best Bad Movies I have Seen’) is probably the greatest popularizer of Camp taste today, because most people still go to the movies in a high-spirited and unpretentious way.

There is a sense in which it is correct to say ‘It’s too good to be Camp.’ Or ‘ too important,” not marginal enough…. Thus, the personality and many of the works of Jean Cocteau are Camp, but not those of Andre Gide; the operas of Richard Strauss, but not those of Wagner; the concoctions of Tin Pan Alley and Liverpool, but not jazz. Many examples… are either bad art or kitsch. Not all, though. Not only is Camp not necessarily bad art, but some art which can be approached as Camp… merits the most serious admiration and study.

At the end of her famous essay, she says, “Camp taste is a kind of love, love for human nature. It relishes rather than judges, the little triumphs and awkward intensities of ‘character’….Camp taste identifies with what it is enjoying. People who share this sensibility are not laughing at the thing they label as ‘a camp,’ they’re enjoying it. Camp is a tender feeling.”

If Camp is indeed an “aesthetic”and a “sensibility,” then it’s something that is definitely felt. What I personally feel today, everyday, when I walk out the door is an overwhelming cloud of confusing and colliding sensibilities – Orwell, Huxley, Marx, Freud, Jung, Kerouac, Billy Graham, Basquiat, Putin, Wall Street, Trump, I-phones, Snapchat, surveillance, and cameras on every person, in every doorbell, on every street. The “product” is a tossed salad of everything imaginable and all at once. Nothing is “out there” anymore because it’s “in here.” It’s managed to leak into the brain’s gray matter becoming impossible to know what I’m imagining- or not. In the old days, this was “mental illness.” Now it’s normal – to be depressed, anxious, fearful, and marginally paranoid – referred to as “healthy vigilance”). Most of us give it little attention and simply adapt. Others pick up guns and “lose it.” The problem goes far beyond any “love” for Camp. It speaks to something much bigger and dangerous.

Second, as for Camp drowning in all the above, it becomes more and more difficult to “love,” as Sontag put it. If you can’t identify what it is in the first place, how on earth can you love it? Camp’s other agenda then is to rekindle that “love of human nature” and the “awkward intensities of ‘character’” to recognize what is capable of appreciation.

Despite everything, what survives is a love for artistic exaggeration and “the idea” of the unnatural and going against grains (real and imagined) – what I still call a subversive imagination. “The times” have put subversiveness no less on notice, and I am fully aware of that. It comes down to how one decides to constellate the human experience in his own mind. This is the bottom line of it all.

Today, I confess to floundering and “floating” much of the time. I wait for “moments in context.” Relative to things going on at various peripheries, something surfaces now and then which appears playfully/aesthetically “out of” context. It summons memories and fantasies which are pleasing and challenging. I search for “lost time” (and le temps retrouve), when there was a clear divide between “in here” and “out there.” And sometimes, caught in just the right shadows, the right juxtaposition of buildings and mountains, sounds and smells, I actually land it. Then I remember who I am.

The moment is fleeting, which means so am I. It’s a “fugitive sensibility,” said Sontag. One either becomes part of that canvas or watches the canvass. It borders on a terrain lodged between “the crazy” and the impossible. Maybe this is the new Camp trying to resurrect itself and find form. ”One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art,” said Oscar Wilde. He also said, “The first duty of life is to become as artificial as possible. What the second duty is, no one has as yet discovered.” One might construe this as authentically Camp!

© 2023 Richard Hiatt

CRITICS

Something has troubled me for a very long time. Why in the world do art critics even exist? What is their usefulness? Have they ever improved anything they were judging or evaluating? Do they have a practical or serviceable function? In fact, do they not do more harm in the long run to art and artists? ¹

Definitions of “critic” vary widely to fit their own needs. Just a few: one who “judges the merits of literary, artistic, or musical works professionally.” “One who expresses a reasoned opinion on any matter especially involving a judgment on its value, truth, righteousness, beauty, or technique.” Another is simple: to simply “understand an artist’s goals.” And still another, “ a person who expresses an unfavorable opinion of something,” probably the one most familiar. – But again, what useful function does it serve? How is it that critics are the gold standard by which we judge something’s merit and worth?

The liberties critics take are at their lowest point when (a la Siskel & Ebert) art is rendered a Commodus-like “thumbs up” or “thumbs down.” In one flick of the opposable pollex an entire work is rendered good or bad, worthy or unworthy, commercially successful or a flop (hence deciding an artist’s entire future and career). It’s a brazen abuse of a privilege which is most often a passive-aggressive form of envy. Most critics know how to judge but have no talent. “Those who fail teach,” and it’s true. They remind me of those who fail entrance into a school but refuse to leave and stay around announcing their views anyway. No one can shut them up.

It must be asked: How many critics become good artists? Hardly any. How many successful artists become critics? Most do not critique, but when they do, they’re trusted. When was the last time anyone has even needed to acknowledge a critic for something he thought was good? When he enjoyed it he simply credited himself or possibly a friend. Critics had nothing to do with it. Reversely, critics are often the reason people see/read bad art for telling them that it’s good.

In all, critics have an abysmal track record for recognizing good contemporary art while jumping on (safe, conservative) bandwagons when it comes to classical art. As “professionals,” something crucial is missing in their arsenal when it comes to an acumen. They’re long on words (300 stuffed into four columns) but astoundingly short on instinct and intuition. The more they talk, the less they say. Indeed, whenever they’ve said bad things about artists, it just injured the artist (and his career). Whenever they’ve said anything positive, it rarely ever changed anything.

To be accurate, it’s worth looking at what the critic’s original function actually was. They emerged as functionaries for public enlightenment, to inform and educate on the finer details of art and the art world. But they did so by being tasked to simply ascertain “two” things. First, to describe art and the artist’s “intent” – what he was trying achieve. Second, to then render a fair assessment whether the artist succeeded or not. If so, then how and what degree. From that point on, the critic’s job was finished. It was the viewer’s responsibility then to decide if it was worth lending his attention and patronage. The job was simple.

It reminds me of the original “muckraker-newshound,” the “newspaperman” on the beat. His interest was simply to get news and report it. The job was low-paying but made a living. He never imagined himself as anything more than a byline, an almost forgotten name at the bottom of a page. An almost thankless job, one did it because he loved it. Not because it would bring him celebrity status and a new income bracket.

It was never his job, first to be a celebrity, and second (as a TV celeb) to patently declare someone’s work “good” or “bad,” a “success” or “failure.” Most importantly, it’s not his task to say if it’s worth the listener’s time and effort. To presume so is to say that the audience is too dumb to know for itself. Secondly, it presumes that the patron sees the work just as the critic does, because the critic is “always right.” Hence, why not just announce the verdict now, for everyone, and save them the trouble?! Anyone with a different opinion is clearly ignorant, naive, and misled.

I remember a movie critic (back in the 1970s) who had a weekly column in a Denver newspaper. As the months unfolded, and as I went to the movies, it began to dawn on me that this particular “reviewer” was obsessed with “gratuitous” sex. She went on rants about the waste of time and effort in showing so much of this and not enough that. It became clear that the issue wasn’t with the film at all. She was grappling with her own sexual issues and projecting them onto the public. It became an almost laughable theme unto itself. She accused the public of being “obsessed.” Au contrare.

Eventually, I came to realize that she was an excellent guide on what not to see: Every film she condemned turned out to be good. Everything she said was good (especially “great”) was consistently awful. – This was when I began questioning the authority, legitimacy, credibility, and worthiness of critics themselves. Contrary to these legends “in their own minds,” they’re just blokes, some terribly flawed, some with “bones to pick,” others with specific hang-ups, assigned to columns and narrow lenses, but who, for one reason or another, find their own views more worthy than others. The column becomes the ego’s opportunity to “swell.” It’s a common affliction among humans.

Their rationale is always the same. “I taught films studies at Stanford!” “I wrote a book on the history of film!” “I personally know and interview movie stars!” and on and on. Somehow, in their minds, mere information and physical proximity is the mark of talent and special license. They become celebrities alongside “real” celebrities. Some become authors and “tour” like the movie stars themselves. They think of themselves as part of an elite fraternity for just knowing artists, though the artists themselves say nothing to the contrary (fearing what the critic will say). If they can’t be successful artists themselves, the next best thing is to camp out next to those who are. – In “rock n roll” lingo, they can’t be the rocker, so they’re the roadie – fame by association.

Publications and TV networks hire them for reasons sometimes unknown but never convincing enough. The assumption is, again, that they have knowledge no one else has. They “know” more, their instincts are more attuned, and they actually help us avoid bad art and guide us to good art. But in general they fail miserably. It also speaks to yet another problem: who we summon for the answers to an often abstruse and abstract subject like art. Logically, we look to “pros” (PhDs, authors, teachers). But again, those who fail, teach (or write books). Yet they’re retained anyway because we have nowhere else to go. They keep up a suitable impression if for nothing else than to soothe an anxiety about the most difficult questions of all.

I’ve never (ever) encountered a critic who I could trust about books, films, art galleries, or theater. And I would never prevail upon myself to act as one lest fearing I would insult someone’s intelligence, intuition, ability to know, and his/her right to decide. It would be an unfair and inappropriate boundary violated. At most, I describe something, say if I like it or not, and leave it at that. I recommend something only if he or she asks.

I can’t count the number of times I wanted to kill someone for hearing, “Oh, you absolutely must see this film” or “read this book!! It’s the best thing ever!!” If I don’t, I’ll be losing out on a lifetime experience! The only thing worse which makes me want to kill even more is being stupid enough to give in to the overture. – It’s one thing to share one’s exuberance. It’s another to expect (and pressure) another to be just as exuberant.

When a critic is arrogant enough to proclaim something “the best,” the public listens, spends millions of dollars, and it becomes a box-office hit. I often wonder if it’s because they really like it, or because they’re told that they like it. It invites a deeper look into the effects of public persuasion and even cultural indoctrination. But short of that, it also puts a shadow on what they inversely call “the worst,” which so often turns out to be very good. But “the worst” makes no money, and if it makes no money, then it must be bad – a horrible feedback loop. We say, “One man’s trash is another man’s gold.” But critics, without admitting it, find the adage annoying and invalidating (of themselves).

Some examples come to mind: First, Hamilton. Granted, I did not see it in its entirety – just separate scenes. But first, the play’s author didn’t even do his homework on the real Hamilton. Not to belabor it, he would have done better had he chosen Jefferson, Washington, Adams, or even Thomas Paine. He even admitted not knowing anything about “the Founders” in the beginning. So, he “picked” someone (he said). – I’m not falling into the trap of being a critic here. I’m not recommending it, or “nixing” the play. I simply don’t understand how something can generate so much patriotic fervor based on apocryphal sources, exaggerated lies (and half-truths). – Or, maybe I do.

Reversely, films like The Train (1964), BarFly (1987), and The Name of the Rose (1986) ² are ones (I would wager) hardly anyone remembers. They were “in and out” of theaters within weeks and eventually sent on to HBO. But they did something films are not supposed to do – placed substance (acting, historical context, and portrayals) over and above visual “candy.” – This is exactly why directors like Woody Allen have left the US and taken up residence in Europe. European audiences relish substance, history, and good writing. In the US, Allen’s work has fallen out of public view almost entirely. Only a small contingent of fans remind us that he’s still not dead and still writing.

As opposed to Hollywood’s “rubber-stamped” films in the thousands, equipped with the same (predictable, unchanging) formulas: explosions, car chases, guns & bombs, “t&a,” “nonstop action,” and very little meaningful dialogue. It becomes a chicken & egg tautology: the public pays to see them because Hollywood makes them, and Hollywood makes them because the public pays to see them. – It reminds me of grocery stores that provide only certain foods. When you ask why only those foods, they tell you “because it’s what customers buy.” But they’re forced to buy what the store sells. The same again applies to news programs, insisting that it’s “what viewers want to see – because they watch it.”

Which brings up another kind of critic: the news reporter and “investigative journalist.” Essentially, they are critics of just another color, of events they not only report on but give us personal (corporate-approved) descriptions of reality. No one questions it. The presumption is that they’re fair and objective, non-partisan, and unaffected by inside or outside interests. They critique and package the world for us. And of course, they know, and we don’t. They also write books and memoirs and tour like celebrities. Many are shamefully overpaid which only adds to their celebrity personas.

As for books, I can list probably a hundred that received no fanfare or “best seller” list at all, which I personally anoint as invaluable. They’re the “filed gods” as Susan Sontag referred to hers, who speak out everyday. Whenever I visit a bookstore and look at how books are compartmentalized (and watch which sections are most frequented) it tells everything. What sells is fiction, sci-fi, drama, war, religion, romance, sports, sex, espionage and horror. What sells to a much smaller market are essays, bios, politics, philosophy, nature, astrology and metaphysics. It simply comes down to taste, different fields for different people. But what corrupts that again is the critic. Applying terms like “savory,” “thrilling,” “exciting,” a “real page-turner” to the one but only “concise,” “thorough,” and “thought-provoking” to the other sets up a predisposition which caters to fixed markets. One hardly ever crosses over into the other. It forces authors (and the public) to stay inside set boundaries. In other words, “thought-provoking” does not appeal to those who do not like to think (who visit the more popular stacks). – It’s just unfortunate that the adjectives for the one are never switched with the other. It would reveal a much more balanced public interest and “substance” where there is none.

The point is made (hopefully by now). Critics are (post-)modernist overpaid sinecures who try to fill a strange vacuum in society’s search for itself. It’s an emptiness that stays empty. We hire them to furnish answers, but the answers fall short. So then we end up with critics who critique other critics (and artists) for failing to deliver. Then there’s verbal warfare between this and that source, whether on cable, in the movies, news networks, literary publications, or tabloid talk-shows. No one’s any smarter because no one has convincing answers to anything. In the end, as Joe Pesci’s character (Simon B. Wilder) says in another mostly ignored and debunked classic, With Honors (1994), “We’re all bums.” ³

There’s only one way for critics to redeem themselves. And that’s to downgrade themselves in the spirited manner of a Simon B. Wilder. That is, to return to their original job: present something, describe it, give us the maker’s intent, and assess whether he succeeds or not, and in what ways. And then – go home.

Insofar as he (the critic) is unwilling to give up so much prestige, it makes him worthless. He’s “filler” in a culture already over-stuffed with filler. If it’s “substance” we really thirst for, then each person needs to learn how to be his own critic and make his own aesthetic judgments. It requires not just knowledge but trust in oneself. We’re too used to letting others tell us how to think and what to do (as in religion). When we finally learn how to think for ourselves, the first to see his/her pink slip (and go extinct) will be the critic. And it won’t be soon enough.

© 2023 Richard Hiatt

1And no, this is not “sour grapes.” So let’s put that to rest right now. I’ve haven’t had a critic look at anything I’ve written for over twenty years. I write “for the drawer,” to borrow the expression. What you see here is as far as it goes anymore. These are observations culled over that same stretch of time comparing music, painting, movies, and books with critics’ published responses. More often than not, I literally wondered if we were talking about the same thing. If a had a dollar for every time I said, “Are you joking?!”

2Umberto Eco’s book sold over 50 million copies, one of the best-selling books ever published.

3Critics called it “schmaltzy,” “hackneyed,” “predictable,” “oversimplified,” and “insincere.”

THE GRAIL in the 21ST CENTURY

What a strange world. We seem to live between two polarities. That is, we may congratulate ourselves for releasing ourselves from superstition, but we’ve reduced ourselves to two criteria by which we can test it – science (empirical knowledge) and religion (and the occult) – astrology, theosophy, numerology, and the like. Then we’re compelled to make a choice.

In between those choices we have the extremist/fanatical polarities, both which take their “intelligences” out of any rational orbit. They also face off on another level. Science postulates its theories on the idea that all knowledge will eventually converge in the future – what Teihard de Chardin called the “Omega Point.” The “revelationists” on the other hand say that the future is taking us away from a time (past) when all knowledge was already One. Science to them is a retrogression from a time when things were already understood. The further we forge ahead, the more lost we become.

Then there are those who officially support science but sub rosa practice esoterica. And then there are those who see the past in the future, and visa versa, and all things coming full circle. There were those like Berenger Sauniere, the parish priest from Rennes-le-Chateau, who in the 1880s carried a secret with him to his death that went against both science and religion. Somewhere in the hills of southern France he discovered that which was most taboo of all. He shared it only with a young girl, an employee of thirty-two years, who also kept it secret. She promised to share it, but (like Sauniere – mysteriously) suffered a stroke, couldn’t speak, and died prematurely. She took it to her grave.

Both science and religion today have begun to forge a bridge, and there are those in both camps (I would wager) who begin to see past and future, empiricism and faith, atheism and religion, alchemically converging. They begin to fit (I believe) in the range of Sauniere’s thinking. For them, orthodox religion has been reduced to a cultural curiosity, an awkward and unsettling place to be. This synergism has already begun to express itself. Others are afraid to express it. While still others (the majority) remain blind to its unfolding, sticking more or less to Pascal’s Wager, just “going to church” and “not thinking too much” (syncope, not synergy).

What was Sauniere’s secret? What did he discover in that rocky French countryside. Was it something that has stayed locked in the occult, never earning its legitimacy as a scientific certainty? Yet something so powerful and steadfast that it’s been translated a thousand different ways? Here was someone who read every version of the Grail hitherto, and came away, perhaps, with a revelation. It was a Damascus moment.

The first Grail story surfaced around 1180. Its reference to a Grail itself is shaky and vague. It was a romance story written in poem format. The protagonist is Percevel (“Son of the Widow Lady”) who sallies forth to win his knighthood. A Fisher King offers him shelter for the night in his castle. That evening a young woman appears holding a Grail (in no way connected to religion). He fails to ask the magical question: “What does one serve by serving the Grail?” The next morning the castle is empty and there is blight on the land. But later he learns that the Fisher King is his uncle and belongs to a special “Grail family.” Because of his unhappy experience, he ends up declaring that he no longer believes in God. – The poem is a blueprint for subsequent Grail narratives.

The next significant narrative introduces King Arthur and Jesus. There are other narratives floating about (before and after 1180, give or take fifty years), but this one Christianizes the Grail. It gives it a specifically religious context: The Grail is now a cup taken from the Last Supper. Joseph of Arimathea fills it with Christ’s blood at the Crucifixion and makes off with it. His family is now “the keepers” of the Grail. Galahad is said to be Joseph’s son, and Joseph’s brother-in-law takes it to England and becomes the Fisher King. The Grail story is now set in England and Arthur is replaced by Joseph.

Another version is authored by an anonymous figure. Why anonymous? Nobody knows. It’s basically the original story, but the protagonist is now Perlevous. There is also some evidence that it may have been penned by a Templar – a “warrior monk” – because it talks about the realities of fighting, armor, weaponry, strategy, tactics, and the wounds of battle – a stark departure from the romantic Grail themes. But from now on, there is a solid link between the Templars and the Grail.

The Perlevous rendition also makes references to alchemy – men made of “copper” and masters “sealed in silver and lead” — “coming thither the head both of the King and the Queen.” It’s steeped in magical allusions which means it is by now clearly heretical and pagan.

The most telling version however (for researchers) is the Parcevel romance written by a Bavarian knight, named von Eschenbach, between 1195 to 1216. In the beginning he first announces that all previous Grail narratives are wrong, and that he got his information from a “privileged” source. It incorporates astrology – “in the constellations… the hidden mysteries.” He says the Grail author is also from an ancient family descended from Solomon. It was “dedicated to purity and [those] worthy of carrying the Grail.” The author is now of Judaic origin, and it tells of traveling into western Europe through the Pyrenees from Muslim Spain.

Living at Rennes-le-Chateau virtually his entire life, Sauniere read every one of these narratives and studied them thoroughly. And somewhere he may (or may not) have encountered Dan Brown’s own interpretation in The Da Vinci Code — current and yet also very old. Mary is Jesus’ mistress. She is pregnant and escapes to southern France following the Crucifixion. She is carrying the “Holy Blood” (the Sangraal or “Sang Royal”) in her belly. She gives birth to Sarah who then lets the lineage of Christ continue on. Mary dies either in France or England, but the bloodline lives on today.

But another interpretation is still missing, and maybe Sauniere stumbles upon it. The Perlesvous version probably comes closest to where this is all going. It turned the Grail into “personal” experience, as it mentions the Gnostic “illumination” extolled by the Cathars and other sects in that time period. It doesn’t go far enough, isn’t explicit enough, but hints at where the Grail rests.

All versions up until now (but also including Brown’s) refer to a poetic romance, an object, or a blood-lineage. They stop with a “literal” translation of one kind or another. What is still missing is the Grail being nothing more than pure consciousness – a seed already within everyone ready to germinate with the right “illumination.” All the searches and scholarly investigations have always been “out there,” never “in here.” They assume(d) that whatever it was, it had to be hunted down, preserved, fought over, and held in secrecy (the perfect recipe for political intrigue, espionage, cloak & dagger suspense, and more and more novels). The Grail never points to the most obvious and simple translation: a Christly (alchemical) death & resurrection within us all.

If Sauniere came to this conclusion himself, then it’s also a mystery that he had to keep it secret. Why not just share it? We could theorize that he and his young mistress did not see something deeper and in fact were still enslaved to an object, a manuscript, or something hidden which needed protection. But maybe he did make that spiritual “leap” and feared recrimination from the Church, society, and his peers, should he have ever divulged it. We’ll never know. I prefer to think it was the latter.

There’s lots of talk today about the consciousness of the earth itself, of which we are its conductors, leading into another (fourth, fifth?) dimension – as the old dimension (politics, religion, society) is unraveling and self-destructing. It incorporates both science and spirituality (and occultish elements). Hence, it validates both the future and the ancient past. It transcends time & space altogether. We are not only part of it; we are it.

This, to me, is the Grail narrative today – the sequel – being written as we speak. In a sense, de Chardin’s “Omega Point” holds true. But now future is past, past is prologue, and both are “right now.” There’s just the living present. This is the new dimension.

© 2023 Richard Hiatt

REFLECTIONS

We lose lots of things, literally and figuratively, as we age. But there’s one thing we should never lose, and that’s a source of emotional catharsis. A release valve to purge all the muck we collect in the form of disappointments, outrage, shock, horror, sadness, and anger. But also from smaller, less obvious, frustrations. They build up behind walls we scarcely know are there – until they break open and explode (or kill us).

My father was an “old-time” country doctor (GP) in a small farm community. One day he told me to look around and single out all the “nicest” elderly people I knew in town. He then asked, “What do they all have in common?” When I answered I didn’t know, he said “ulcers.” They never showed anger at anything.

For the longest time my go-to catharsis has been art, music, and writing, but also jogging and enjoying time with my pets. On occasion I have the joy of meeting with a friend to share and compare. But once in awhile those cathartic fonts need priming and adjusting. If they’re not, toxins build and erupt in the wrong fissures, and I fear the prospect of becoming another elder in my hometown.

On occasion it dawns on me that I haven’t been paying attention to those sources. I take them for granted until their neglect generates symptoms. I need to slow down again and reverse the pattern of sound to silence, plenum to void, note to rest. In other words, make them the focus in between what stays out of focus. It’s what happens to “gifts” that work too well for us. They fall into the cracks of complacency.

The idea of “slowing down” carries a weighty stigma. It’s the sign of losing one’s edge, a quickness to respond, etc. But it also implies a willingness to stay with simple things longer. Wherever I go, I see “scenery” – angles of light, shades, geometric shapes, colors (or grays), lines, circles, and rectangles. I feel the cold and warmth and the sun and the moon, The world becomes an Edward Hopper painting. In the morning and late evening a Maxfield Parrish, then an Ansel Adams, then an Atget, then a Bruguiere.

The world breaks down into its component parts. Scenes are only proffered and never complete. They call for sounds as well. And with that an active imagination to furnish the brushstrokes. Sounds become their own music – a city’s drone of moving machines mixed with urban wildlife, birds, dogs, and cats. Today’s portrait is a prelude to tomorrow’s, and it becomes a series of vignettes, one day’s border becoming another’s, eventually doing away with borders altogether. Borders are more like musical bars keeping a contiguous tempo linking day to night, and to morning again.

My eyes open at dawn. I stroll outside to feed the birds and set my gaze to a building’s wall across the street. At just the right moment the new morning light strikes it in such a way (a prism of mellow golds and yellows, burnt umber, chestnut, desert sand, all mixed in white light) that it evokes distant memories – of youth, my early days in Denver 50 years ago. Which then also summon the sounds and smells of those times. It says good morning to me, every morning. It’s a fleeting salutation but also a constant companion. It follows me everywhere; we meet wherever I am (at dawn). But here at home, we meet from across the street on the side of an old house.

The trees say good morning as well (again, anywhere I happen to be), my oldest companions of all. They remember everything. I’m the child listening from below to his great-grandmother. She tell me stories. Generations of families have come and gone on her enormous limbs, but it’s the same faces, the same ghostly figures each year. People are no different. They shift positions, but it’s always them. The squirrels and birds greet each other year-to-year, generation-to-generation. One day someone is gone. We all grieve and move on. Someone replaces them, and it’s another season. We could take a lesson from the animals on bereavement and loss.

The light on the wall is gone, and I say “thank you, see you tomorrow.” By late morning the sun’s light pierces new angles, creating new lines and shapes that add dimension to an unfolding day. When you remain still in order to notice this, you’re in the company of the most unexpected friends. Critters watch along with you while watching “you” at the same time. It’s a convocation. It’s what happens when humans aren’t looking.

Slowing down has a price to pay as well. You’re on a different vibration, feeling a different cadence to the day from everyone else. Hence, the out-of-step awkwardness when having to engage humans again. A wonderfully sensitive bubble has been brutally violated and ruptured. The mind needs to accelerate in order to pay attention, or else you drown in a wash of embarrassment (and humans are quick to notice things “odd” and out of sync). The umbilicus is severed and the rhythm ruined. It’s now mid-day anyway, and the light is all wrong. There are no shadows.

Cats and dogs siesta, and I envy them. The birds and squirrels go into auto-mode of simply carrying on, amidst loud human cacophony and thunder (crashing, clanging, screeching, screams, shrieks, squeals, honks, clatter, scrapes, grinds, echoes, distortions) – the stuff of human propulsion. I follow the animals’ lead and burrow under the leaves of Bach, Bill Evans, and Bruguiere.

The need for catharsis resumes. During this time anxiety has built up. “Cocooning” informs me of this. The midday world spins faster and louder, completely ignoring the body’s response. It’s like trying to decelerate on a fast-moving train. I engage whatever tools I have to stem the noise and violence stirring like a whirlpool. A mild desperation erupts. There’s already so much to purge, and it’s barely midday. The uneasiness becomes more acute realizing that those simple, delicate, rich, ethereal, pure, and unearthly threads of predawn have evaporated. The intense human heat is too much for them. And to lose those threads is to lose one’s “grasp.” There’s nothing to hold on to.

The day pounds forward. I step out into the rushing currents and waves of human traffic, while stepping inside myself at the same time. One step out means one step farther in. I’m still holding onto the electric morning light – my umbilicus to psychic balance. Hence, I’m engaged and disengaged “out there.” And again, it’s a sign of losing my “people skills,” and “losing touch” – dissociated and distanced. But it’s okay. If others see only the stigmas of introversion, I’m hardwired and unfazed.

Confirmation of all this is easy to recognize when we witness how we respond to things around us. Here we are in public, and the person standing next to me responds to conversation, to a crying baby, the sight of a friend, someone’s clothing, shared experiences, and so forth. I respond to white noise, congestion, the chatting of ravens outside, service dogs, animals too close to the road, the clouds, natural light, shapes, smells, ambiance, and atmospheres. And there we are.

Their passion is to invite more human connectivity. Mine is to vacate it, retreat to the privacy and silence of my car, then to the sanctuary of home. Their emotional and physical batteries charge through their connectivity. My battery doesn’t charge again until I leave it. My “social circles” are the silent heroes aligned on my shelves, in my computer, on downloads, in the trees…. the twain will most definitely never meet.

Which is why, in retirement, I now realize just how much my social skills have truly “gone south.” I would not be a good candidate for anything requiring “response time.” I’m not a team-player. About this I am quite clear (used to be, but no longer). In a sense, it feels like having set up residence in another dimension altogether, one which precludes human habitation. What do wolves, cats, and birds do when humans panic and show hysteria? It’s an easy call. I’m slow to respond when I should, slow to speak when its time to speak. Instead, I perpetually listen. Our respective worlds are completely out of kilter. But again, it’s okay, as long as synchronizing is not required. There’s no rush to fix it.

There is loneliness, but also aloneness. It’s interesting that the word “alone” comes from the Middle English root meaning “all one.” It’s a derivation that makes perfect sense to me, just as I don’t expect it to make any sense to others. For them, aloneness is just being alone, hence “lonely,” hence “lorn,” hence needy and out of balance. But “all one” is also a cousin to “at-one-ment,” or atonement. Leave it to language to connect the dots.

So, I come back to the sanctum which is my All-Oneness. As for strangers who stumble into my small world, they see an older guy, harmless, safe, defanged, and mostly irrelevant. This is good. I pose no threat to anyone. There are a few friends however who do not see irrelevance. They understand, relate, and need no explanation. They resonate with the slow tempos and rhythms that keep us in sync with a higher ebb and flow, nature’s silent systole and diastole. It’s a cadence that listens and responds to moments of cathartic need. It’s an ecosystem unto itself, that takes care of itself.

The day has burned itself out. Night comes with its unique “Edward Hopper” scenes. I watch and admire the grays, the shades of juxtaposed darkness-to-light, mostly street scenes. The night burns itself out and nothing changes. I rest and wake up again to the same pre-dawn light greeting me from across the street. We say good morning. The day is new again and very, very old. It’s all good again.

© 2023 Richard Hiatt

WAGERING

Isn’t everything a wager? When we “hope,” “pray,” “believe,” and “predict,” are we not actually wagering against certain calculated odds? The term belief derives from the Middle English lief which means to “to hope for.” We hope for so many things, and wagering is venturing on their outcomes.

We wager/believe that we exist, that we are who/what we think we are, that our thoughts are real, and that those beliefs/hopes are actually based on absolute certainties that can’t be challenged or questioned. I’m also wagering that you exist and are reading this.

Our beliefs also depend on windows of perception which (we wager) are shared in common. I want to believe that your interpretation of “green” is the same as mine and everyone else’s. But we don’t know, do we? We wager against the odds of being desperately alone in separate worlds, so we carve out middle grounds where objectivity (another wager) is allowed to exist (mathematics, physics) – from which we can organize and control an otherwise chaotic universe.

Here’s another irony: What we share in common is the fear of being desperately alone. The term “alone” comes from the Middle English for “all one.” To be alone is to be all One again. To wager/hope/believe individually sacrifices our separateness because we all do it together. It’s another way of saying that for each of us to wager is to join (invest in) the human family.

And so, together we share a certain concession in terms of life’s certainties. As for the things which remain uncertain (despite our beliefs), the wagering shifts to a new level. At first, as mentioned, it’s all internal, existential/ontological. But when that fails, we shift to something external. Enter God and the wagers we place on Him (or some divine presence called anything we want, faute de mieux). There’s an old Sufi saying: “If I pray to you in the hope of getting heaven for myself, you should deny it to me. If I pray to you only in the fear of hell, you should send me there.” But we still wager anyway, and hope for good results.

We seem to not exist without our wagers. Centuries have passed and a distinct separation between inner and outer worlds evolved. And debates have been conducted on the premise of those “absolutes.” Then, slowly, the lines between inner and outer have begun to blur, and we’re right back to our existential drifting again. We wager on the “absurdity of meanings,” madness, suicide, humor, and the “human theater” so well played out by Camus, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Dostoyevsky, Cioran, Heidegger, Kafka, and so many others. In the end, said Camus, we wager on “suicide” not being worth it.

God, Self, God, Self. I-Thou, meum–tuem. We go back and forth. I am what I imagine, and the caterpillar dreams of being a butterfly dreaming of being a caterpillar (and the caterpillar says to the butterfly, “You’ll never catch me up in one of those things!”). We skirmish for meanings, and that becomes a skirmish between beliefs and unknowns. The struggle gets so twisted and drawn out that more labels are applied (for expedience) and we find ourselves wrestling with demons we would have never imagined. Our wagers become efforts to escape an anthropomorphized Satan. He lives both internally and externally. – Basically, in so many words, we’ve fucked ourselves. The mind is the devil’s playground.

The signature impresario of wagering has yet to be mentioned. There have always been those, as Blaise Pascal phrased it, “so made that they cannot believe.” Meaning, those so lucky have also “given up hope.” As car-owning Buddhists (and spiritual atheists) say it on their bumper stickers, “I’ve given up all hope and I feel much better.” For them the wagering stops. It’s all about no longer pushing to make something happen or to preserve what doesn’t happen.

Pascal lived when it was difficult to reconcile this problem, when fideism (faith-ism) prevailed over reason and science was up against the Church. He was a polymath (mathematician, physicist, astronomer, philosopher, inventor, writer) but who later also had a “religious experience” and found himself sandwiched between rationalism and fideism (ending up favoring the latter). His “wager” however amplified the same kind of vacuity that empiricism still fights to reject. He said that rational people should live (the operative phrase) as though God existed, even if they didn’t believe it; that they should wager on the belief that a) He did exist, and by so doing b) He would grant them special favor and entry into heaven. If God did not exist, there was very little to lose. But if He did, he stood to gain eternal happiness. It was not a very solid proposition, but Pascal believed that, in the end, we were all forced to gamble on life’s uncertainties (in religion, science, reason, skepticism, man’s purpose on earth, and so forth). It was all a wager.

I see this everyday, in fact, especially on Sundays. Most people (I would wager) go to their places of worship to “play a part.” It’s pure theater, actors playing what isn’t real to them. They go through motions as if playing for a winning ticket. Pascal of course put it differently: He said they’re incapable of understanding all the paradoxes and conundrums of existence, so they take it to a higher power who does understand, who will then rescue them from those inscrutable riddles which terrify them. Yes, but it’s still a wager, hoping that if they “do this,” they will “get that.” – In a sense, even God also wagers. Family therapist and author John Bradshaw called it “religious codependency,” the ultimate symbiotic relationship. As a codependent relationship, if one goes away, so does the other. God therefore wagers that his followers won’t disappear so He won’t.

As Pascal himself put it:

If there is a God, He is infinitely incomprehensible…. He has no affinity to us. We are then incapable of knowing either what He is or if He is…. There is infinite chaos that separates us. A game being played at the extremity of this infinite distance where heads or tails will turn up. What will you wager?

Pascal presented his wager in the 17^th century. But even without him, man has been wagering since the moment he became conscious of himself. The term isn’t used to describe the mental “plotting” of our earliest thinkers, but the act of weighing odds has been with us all along. The question is, where does it all lead? Will it end? Is there a purposeful to it? Isn’t it a matter of giving it up, then settling with what is? The worst (most dangerous) wagering of all time is “religion.” Seneca said, “Religion is regarded by the people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.” “If you want people to do wicked things, you need religion.” This certainly has to end.

The fundamental issue here, isn’t really about belief, but about “trust or mistrust,” said Catholic priest and theologian Hans Kung. We trust in what we want to trust, “in which I stake myself without security or guarantee.” The difference between the cleric and the scientist is that, for the cleric, what we trust is heavily consequential and final. For the scientist, what we trust is eternally open to possibilities, is relative and continuous. The former wages that it is an “open” system (to the transcendent), but in fact is frighteningly closed. “You had better wager, or else.”

They say “to believe.” But we know what that means. So, then they say to “have faith” (the opposite of belief). But faith requires a thanatological “death” which they don’t understand. In so many words, being God is a noblesse oblige – lots of responsibility, and devotees would rather follow (fear, hope, believe, trust) and be rescued instead. As Paul knew it to be, it was easier to understand and do. When he said, “The Just shall live by faith,” he meant belief (hope) and trust.

If we must wager, then, which direction is best to wager on? Trust or mistrust, faith or hope, religion or science, God or self? That is, assuming that the wager we’ve already made about “existence” is itself true? So many wagers rest on the backs so many others that, in the end, I would wager that wagering will someday end, and us with it.

© 2023 Richard Hiatt