Month: January 2004

Should hermits work, or does work in the world contradict being a hermit? Self-sufficiency is still largely possible to hermits in wilderness and small towns, but perhaps the definition of hermit should be adaptable to times and circumstances, for the hermit is not necessarily a survivalist. Even accounts of mountain and desert hermits of the past show them going to towns and villages for supplies once a month or once a year, trading woven baskets or hemp garments or herbs and picked fruit for other comestibles. Physical isolation and social isolation is relative, too, as the examples of urban hermits show. An ideal hermit does not actively hate people and culture, but simply avoids them as unnecessary and dispiriting. If we insist on too precise a definition or lifestyle, we verge on the ideal and create an image always outside of reality. The paradox is that we are striving for that ideal despite it being outside of reality. Not because we are deluded. Perhaps a good image is that of an asymptote, the mathematical concept of a line that approaches but never reaches a particular point. Our lives are like spiritual asymptotes, closer to our goal the more solitude nurtures us, regardless of the fact that we will never get there.

A few years ago the notion of “jamming” culture arose, from Kalle Lasn’s book Culture Jam: How to Reverse America’s Suicidal Consumer Binge and Why We Must. “Jamming” differs from voluntary simplicity movements in consciously opposing modern popular culture, essentially created by corporations to stoke consumption — of corporate logo apparel, unhealthy food and habits, exploitative entertainment, competitive sports, etc. The idea is that by withdrawing from consumption and the use of what drives the moneyed economy of profit one could pursue an authentic life of simplicity and frugality. Simplicity is not merely a subjective phenomenon or a matter of personal taste. The premise is that the individual succeeds best (and the world benefits) when conscious of the sources of the products he or she consumes. Being conscious of simplicity and the degree of change it brings in the world as well as to the individual is a useful model for solitaries, who already have a psychological disposition for what young people call “jamming.”

According to some scientists, the brain works as much in sleep as in waking, busy problem-solving and prioritizing what should go into memory. This is why the “sleep on it” advice for decision-making works — or is it? Clarity and insight may develop in sleep precisely because there is no work, no doing of mathematical-logical processing at all. Instead, the mind in sleep registers impressions and sorts feelings. What it resolves for waking is based on the innate sense of consciousness we possess simply as human beings. Our busy modern culture wants to work out its contrived problems “24/7.” But insight and wisdom come from “not-doing” or wu-wei. For this reason eastern sages have always seen the absence of dreams as confirmation of not-doing, as a high point of progress towards enlightenment.

Apologists for society, institutions, and the state, insist on the necessity of social and civic duty above all other virtues. Hence Cicero, the defender of Roman character, insists that “service is better than mere theoretical knowledge” and that “men of ability either choose a life of private activity or, if of loftier ambition, aspire to a public career of political or military office. …” (De Finibus, 5.57). Whatever the public career today, it serves to perpetuate a contrived system incompatible with natural and humane values. In Western religious culture, the virtues of service were once pressed upon the majority, while a non-active life was reserved for the few. But secular culture of today returns moderns squarely into Cicero’s mode of thought. And with it comes an authority to enforce civic duty — an authority defined, of course, by the powerful. All this is anathema to eremitism, where spiritual and natural virtues define the solitary’s chief object as retirement of self from the marketplace and social halls of society and institutions, which are the cause of so much sorrow and the banishment of virtue.

The ancient Greeks warned that we must call no one happy until they are dead. Our present good fortune may change and our disposition with it. But a more important corollary follows: Call no one wise until they are dead. We can trust no judgment thoroughly or make it our own without the possibility of that other person having a change of mind or heart, and thereby dashing our trust and esteem. Such a realization would certainly underlie the psychology of many a solitary. The hermit is not automatically a recluse, and even the solitary may have dealings with others, even intimate dealings, but their insight may well be this one, though not conscious. Meanwhile, even the solitary must guard against delusion, the delusion of permanence in human affairs. The point is to maintain a philosophical attitude as the ever-changing river of life, opinions, emotions, and desires floats around and past us. We can hope that we are ready to cede all as never really having been ours to demand when our tun comes to die. And may we die happily.

Some modern moralists say that a state or government should never be labeled as “evil” because this label obliterates accountability and moral responsibility, presumably to change or conform to the accusatory’s morality. But when Confucius recommended to serve the state when it is good and recluse when it is evil, he recognized the existential circumstance of the individual forced to make a decision. The individual must determine that the intrinsic character of the state or government will not change based on anything anyone’s service can bring about. The label of good or evil is, of course, a moral contrivance, especially given the utter ambivalence of morality in any state or government that relies on labels as propaganda. But the moralist misses the eremitic insight that the state is a contrivance and not an entity, a tool of human beings and their culture, not a moral reservoir. Accountability is itself a moral issue. The expectation that the state or society will be accountable to any high standard of morality is not something for which to wait indefinitely. All the more urgent for the solitary who must decide, and quickly.

Going out late at night (for the dog), I consciously look for the moon. The full moon is hidden among dark pines; a huge silver globe is not obscure. The moon is familiar and, as part of nature, a friend, but an enigmatic, aloof, and mysterious one. As a child I was always wary of the “man on the moon” — not the one on the moon as such but the portraits and images of the anthropomorphic crescent moon man, smiling wanly, his smug gaze reminiscent of the joker in an antique deck of playing cards, or a satyr. He still intrudes on my peaceful gaze. He interrupts solitude like a childhood phantom, perhaps a projection of some buried but restless memory. Best not to contrive a pattern in moon craters and seas, best to leave the moon to its simple mystery.

The poignancy of traditional hermit writing the world over is in the hermit’s contrast of society (cities, temples, palaces) with the freedom of the deserts, forests, and mountains. Deserts, forests, and mountains are not just symbols of the unchanging, but true habitats for a viable life of reclusion. But modern solitaries (and everyone else) have virtually lost this habitat, and with it even the symbols. The danger to the viability of life itself can be gradual or sudden: logging, mining, drilling, spoliation, pollution, dumping, poisoning, radiation. Human menaces have reduced deserts, mountains, and forests to environmentally endangered status. This has effectively reduced the possibilities for wilderness eremitism for moderns to a minimum. And government, corporations, and society would gladly eliminate privacy as well.

After many years of desert eremitism, the hermit Paul is recorded as asking a famous visitor: “How fares the world? What great cities have risen and fallen? What empire now holds sway?” Echoing these questions, we might today add: “And what desert, forest, or mountain is still viable habitat for a hermit?”

Wilderness survival books usually address emergency conditions of stranded hikers, skiers, hunters or accident victims. They focus on clothing, shelter, wood, food, the perfect knife, etc. All this can be practical but sometimes crude or full of bravado. Seldom are these books addressed to the conscious solitary. In browsing a handful of survival books, however, the fact that Alan Fry lives alone and once lived year-round in a tepee, in Canada, is notable, as is this passage from his Wilderness Survival Handbook, first published in 1958 when nobody else was making survival books a business or avocation:

When I go out from my camp on a very cold winter’s night [minus 50 degrees Celsius or -58 degrees Farenheit] to walk in the moonlight along the shore of a frozen lake … and I see the glint of moonlight caught by flakes of frost in endless sparkles over the perfect surface of snow that stretches nearly a mile away to the spruce forest bordering the distant shore, and when I look up and in the distance see a great mountain range gleaming in snowclad perfection by the light of this brilliant winter moon, when I have all this before me I all but burst with the joy of it.

In probably every culture much is made of the end of the calendar year and the beginning of a new one. But we must remember that this arbitrary assignment of days, months, and years are for convenience and have no natural necessity. Only the seasons represent more faithfully the passage of time. Herewith, part of a poem by the fourteenth-century Chinese hermit Ch’ing-hung:

The year is ending
the month is ending …
the moon lights the window the same as before
only the plum blossoms are different
but who cares
the Yangtze rolls on
the sun and moon do not slow their pace
a black dragon lurks in the clouds.