The Meaning of Life (draft, part 1)

We can believe that the world is a text whose meaning the discerning reader understands and which all discerning readers understand in the same way and that all who fail to understand it thus (properly) are misguided for any one of a number of definable reasons from a lack of fundamental perspicacity (they’re too stupid to get it) to an accidental or nefarious being-led-astray (someone or something has tricked and deceived them). Or we can see the world as not a text in the first place but as something which simply is, which therefore is not put in front of us as something to be understand.

We can proclaim that the very notion of “understanding” is a problem, particularly when the thing to be understood is not a text. Language is the tool of understanding. And language runs into problems when it attempts to understand—to come to terms with, to bring into language—that which is not language.

We can represent the world with words. But there is no one, single, right way to do that. There is no full or final way to do that. We cannot bring the world to presence again which has never been present as such the first time. We can represent the world as a way of talking about the world. (If we could do this properly in words, we would not need music or painting.) But when we talk about our representation we are not talking about the world anymore. And the representation itself wasn’t exclusively about the world and didn’t represent it in its totality and didn’t get it quite right.

Even if we could get the world right in representing it, we’d also have to get the representation right by representing it—a rererepresentation. Let me get this right. Well I’ll let you, but you won’t manage it. My permission has never been lacking. And it was never what you needed.

We’ll never get over the inadequacies of language. And even if we could get a perfect language, we’ll never get over the inadequacies of perspective. The implication, however, is not that you stop trying. An imperfect representation is not a wholly false representation. An interested and partly blind interpretation is still work making. If there is no right perspective, no perfect or absolute perspective, there can still be valid or viable or useful perspectives. There can still be good perspectives. There can still be good language. Good for what?

Set you values and argue for them. Life is a value. No one deserves a life and no one deserves happiness. But we can decide that life and the greatest quality of life not for the greatest number but for everyone is the value. Everyone means everyone.

The first value has to be the earth itself. There is no place else for us to live. So earth must be as healthy as possible. The health of the earth should not be compromised. The question to ask is not “will this create jobs and thereby increase the quality of life for some people?” but “will this harm the earth? Will it lead to or contribute to the kind of destabilization that compromises the stability of the planet, its ability to sustain healthy live throughout its complex ecology?”

Right now we’re destabilizing the earth—with misguided fossil fuel use and exploration—not even for the sake of those jobs, which are just a corporate smoke screen, but for the profits of megaconglomerates, for the pockets of those who already have far more than they need. For greed. For power. For the basest animal out there. 

Further Speculations on Time and Eternity (unedited)

One of the most persistent facts about human beings as that they believe they have enough information to make accurate determinations about the state of being. We know enough about “the universe” or “being” or whatever we wish to call “it” to say what it is. The four elements and the four humors and the function of organs and the Linnaean catalogs and the crystalline spheres and human nature and the unconscious mind and the great chain of being and Oxfordian authorship have—along with endless other reapings—been asserted with such unquestioned certainty that it seems that intellectual hubris may be the fundamental condition of the human brain. Nothing’s ever tentative. Revelation, reason, and observation held the stool firm and level—until one of them rotted away. But even the loss of revelation has not been a problem. The stool seems still to be miraculously sound. There’s still nothing we don’t know—or if there is, it’s such a small bit it can safely be ignored. It’s just detail. We’ll get there. The grand unified theory, once we get it, will be the puzzle piece that reveals what’s at the end of that stick that guy is holding. Dark matter, dark energy—we may never know what they are, but it will be enough if we can measure their effects on the stuff with proper names. The puzzle is already essentially complete.

We’ve never not thought that the puzzle was essentially complete. We’ve never been right about this, but that’s never worried us much. We’re always right now.

Evidence suggests that this is a foolish position to take. Evidence suggests that we accept the fact of our lack of sufficient understanding of being—I’ll call it being. We know a lot beyond dispute. We can trust science to tell us what happens if we pump too much CO2 into the atmosphere. But the big picture we don’t have. We don’t have the first idea what reality itself is, what it looks like. In fact our best understanding is that “understanding” is itself a problem. Seeing, modeling, representing—everything is second hand, derivative. And there’s no way around that, not even with math.

We need the best models. But we need to understand that they are models, that the story always has a narrator, and the narrator is always part of the story.

So let’s speculate about time—which we know almost nothing about, despite Einstein’s advancement on Augustine. Does the past exist? If so, in what sense? Science has come up with some elaborate ways in which it would be, in theory, possible to get there. They are not practical ways, of course. We can’t actually do it. They involve things like the expenditure of massive amounts of energy in the field of black holes. But if the past does not exist, or does not exist like a room on the other side of the wall, then our trip back into would come up against unforeseen obstacles even if it were practical. To ask the question another way, is there such a thing as “now”? If there is, we know we’re not all in it, or quite in it or perfectly in it. And yet at the same time, in apparent contradiction, there be no way for anyone or anything to ever not be in it. Everything we see is in the past, however fractionally. We see what was. But we see it now. We’re behind a little. But the fact that the trace of the past exists doesn’t necessarily mean that the past itself exists. We see from earth distant stars that if we were in the vicinity of we’d know they aren’t there. But the trace of the past isn’t the past. We know that time passes at different rates under different conditions. But that doesn’t mean there’s no such thing as now. The twin in his speeding rocket ship goes out into the universe and comes back to find his brother is twenty years older than he. But how is that slowing of time to be understood in relation to “now”? Is it a short cut? Time passes at different rates under different conditions. But “now” is always now. Or is it? Do we know? Is there any way to know? Do we have to live with contradictory vocabularies due to the limitations of our evolved minds?

Or does the past actually exist? Nietzsche thought of time as a line in his myth of eternal return. (How seriously he believed in eternal return is disputed, but that doesn’t matter.) In infinite time and infinite space, the same conditions must repeat forever (he surmised). But he was still thinking of time as a line. If the past exists then eternity returns eternally not in a line but as a static fact, like a movie that’s always playing.

But how much like a movie then is it? The Purple Rose of Cairo. Is there any way to know that the past is set? If Einstein is right and we could go back into it if it were only practical, then we could change it. Then it can change. Then we should not say “the past has happened,” but “the past is happening.” If the past is a wave, we can change now, from the future, if we can alter the wave. Is there any way to know that we don’t? Is there any way to know in fact that this is not something done routinely, at every instant? Changing the past changes the future. But there’s no way to know that we are not constantly changing and being changed. The persistent sci-fi belief is that you don’t want to change the time line. But there’s no way to know that the time line isn’t in constant flux. And there’s no reason to believe there is a proper timeline. (The imperative to maintain the timeline is never fully thought out.) It’s not unreasonable to believe that every life exists for one fleeting moment, less time that it has taken me to type a single word, and that at the same time, every life is eternal.

The Full Weight of the Word

On Language: 

Jabberwocky vs. Anyone Lived in a Pretty How Town: 

How we process sentences: Sound, syntax, "meaning."

My poetry students rarely have trouble with Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky.” They have a lot more trouble with E.E. Cummings’ “Anyone Lived in a Pretty How Town.” The former includes a large number of nonsense words, words which, in the dictionary sense, have no meaning. The latter has no nonsense words. But it does use words in unusual ways, both against the expected meaning (in the dictionary sense) or against the expected part of speech. Both poems tell a story.

My poetry students generally have little trouble paraphrasing the Carroll poem but a great deal of trouble with the E.E. Cummings. There is more than one way to explain this, but I think no matter how much weight we give to the fact that some of Carroll’s nonsense words have made it to the dictionary or to the fact that the students may have been exposed to the poem in one way or another in their youth, students would still always find Carroll easier to understand than Cummings. Virtually anyone whose virgin exposure to the two poems occurred simultaneously would find Carroll’s story easier to follow.

Why is this? Or to ask it another way, how is meaning processed? How do you “get” nonsense? Strictly speaking both poems should be nonsense. The dictionary won’t help you over your troubles with either poem.

Three factors seem to be at play here: sound, syntax, and “meaning” (narrowly defined as “dictionary meaning,” which I’ll distinguish from the more general sense of meaning by the quotation marks).

Carroll’s poem gives the student familiar syntax and suggestive sounds but strictly no meaning at crucial points. “Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun The frumious Bandersnatch!” We don’t know what kind of bird a Jubjub is, what a Bandersnatch is or what makes a Bandersnatch frumious. But we do have a sense of what kind of bird a Jubjub bird would be, what kind of monster a Bandersnatch would be and what would make it frumious. “Snatch” helps. And the sense we each have is probably pretty similar. The sounds themselves and the positions of the nonsense in the sentence create meaning despite a complete lack of “meaning.”

Cummings’ poem presents us with both overlapping and different problems: “someones married their everyones laughed their cryings and did their dance (sleep wake hope and then)they said their nevers they slept their dream.” It’s not hard for an experienced reader to take meaning from this sentence. But it’s nonetheless more challenging than it is with Carroll’s nonsense, harder still for students new to the study of poetry. Despite the lack of dictionary support for “Laughed their cryings” each word is familiar. And the familiarity it seems to me actually blocks the student trying to render the sense. But there is no such block in Carroll. And so the meaning flows out almost familiarly.

I doubt that any of this will meet much resistance from English teachers. Why it matters is this: What we processors of language do with Jabberwocky is what we do with language in general. Learning to read poetry is just learning to read period. Poetry often blocks new or inexperienced readers for at least two reasons worth thinking about: because the words are familiar and because the words are all presented with something like their full weight. In everyday language the looseness of usage and the ease of head nodding or shaking comes from the way that meanings are processed with an acceptable level of vagueness, the “you know what I mean” deployment. We can get away with not quite knowing what we want to say because our interlocutors are perfectly happy with processing as much or as little as they want, picking up on sounds and syntax and not really bothering so much with “meaning.” The trick with poetry, and a practical value of poetry for life, is that it trains readers to pay close attention to “meaning” in the production of meaning. 

When we're dealing not just with students but with anyone at any time, we're dealing with someone whose strategy for processing language may be more on the Jabberwocky level than the Cummings. They may be after a sense rather than a meaning. And people who go through life demanding nothing more than a sense from language do just fine, at least in conventional terms. They do well in school--particularly if their degree isn't strongly language centered, but often even if it is, since there are tricks to pretending to knowledge so successful that even the student thinks he's actually learning. They get good jobs. (They may become president.) They have as much chance at "success" as anyone. A lot of it comes down to luck and social supports, but you can't pick them out of the crowd. They are the crowd. But they struggle in the most important ways people can struggle. 

From Fear to Blood without Return

Irrational fear leads to

Irrational hate.

Irrational hate leads to projection.

(I don’t hate them. I’m the good guy. They’re the ones that hate me.)

Projection leads to imitation.

Imitation leads to hate projected back.

Hate leads to more hate.

Mutual hatred leads to violence.

Violence needs to more violence.

Once started violence is very hard to quell

And impossible to extinguish.

However cold it seems, all it needs to burst back into heat is

The match of irrational fear. 

Cover Art The Burzee Rose

Cover art by Dennis Anfuso

GOAAAAAAAAAAAAL!

At 55 I have a ready excuse I did not have at 20

For not managing to score the goal from the odd angle
on the penalty. Though I couldn’t do it then either.

If anything my chances now are probably better.

I haven’t lost anything in accuracy or stamina—just speed.

And I’ve had 35 years of practice. But they’ve seen me play

And so it does not surprise me when I put the ball down

And I hear a teammate say, “don’t try to shoot it.”

No it doesn’t surprise me, it just pisses me off.

So I shoot it. I was probably going to do that anyway.

It passes by the heads of three stupified defenders

And it’s already by the keeper and in the goal before he realizes
He should get ready to defend it. I have twenty missed shots

I know between now and the next time I manage this feat again
Plenty of time for the whole team wonder,

Why are we letting him do this? (For the record,

They’re not letting me. I got the ball. I put it down

And they’re too polite in this rec league of aging men

To do any more than mumble.) Yes, I’ll miss badly the next

Time I try this and many times after that. But for now,

Fuck you, I scored.

Mastering French

Some days I fear that at the rate I’m going I’ll die

Before I ever master French.

And then I think if that’s the race, and it’s more or less a photo finish,

What difference could it possibly make who wins?

And then I think, no one ever really masters a language.