Month: March 2005

Susan Sontag among others described illness as a metaphor for what culture does to the individual, as much as what germs and cells do to us. Why do we speak of social maladies as plagues and cancers, much like “bad” weather and “evil” regimes? Our very language and imagination is permeated with illness, illness induced by culture, as R. D. Laing used to say.

I am not prepared to assume, as do some New Age advocates, that one brings about one’s illness, but when we consider the foods we eat, the air we breathe, and the water we drink — plus the stress of modern existence and an admixture of genetics and personality — we might well concede that we do indeed bring illness upon ourselves. Not as directly as a scientific equation or as obviuosly as a one-to-one cause and effect, of course. Not even individually, perhaps, but collectively. We plead that we have less control over these cultural products than we think, but we are obliged to exercise the control that we can.

One of Gotama Buddha’s first insights was the inexorability of illness as a form of suffering to which all humans are susceptible. Here, however, the insight was of an absolulte regarding the frailty of the body, not the predominance of culture over what we consume or is in our atmosphere. Every culture has had its equivalent of Paradise or a Golden Age which it has now forgotten, a time or place where sickness does not invade us, where happiness does not falter. To recover that sensibility — even as an exercise of imagination — is a useful element in determining for ourselves what Buddhism calls “right livelihood.”

Wilderness hikers with an appropriate sense of nature follow the practicel of leaving no trace of their presence in the wild. There is a skill in learning not to destroy, break, or tred heavily around trees, underbrush, or paths, or leaving campsite use invisible to others. A satisfaction results from the notion that a sucessor-hiker will not have realized that someone else recently passed this way, just as the original hiker will appreciate the same ennobling experience. To be the first or to be the last — it would have made no difference.

Shouldn’t it be the same in life, especially for the solitary?

The thin line between simplicity and eccentricity is easily crossed. Doubtless we have all discovered secrets of simplicity that others might deem eccentric. For example, I have discovered that certain brands of green tea will yield two cups per bag versus one. Composting kitchen scraps may seem a pointless fetish to some, while in Europe such small household efforts have yielded beneficial social, environmental, and economic results.

One writer I came across, who had grown up in the 1930’s U.S. economic depression, basked in her thriftiness — or miserliness — in getting a bargain at one store, driving to another for another sale, and so forth throughout her day, never totaling fuel and time into life’s equation.

For simplicity to succeed in one’s life there must be an ethical component. We must see consumption in relation to production. We must relate everything we do to everything others do for us or to us. And acknowledge the role of nature in this cycle, of which we are an inextricable part. By being conscious of the contrived human cycle of desire and consumption, we become aware of so many other aspects of society and culture. And in that process, we become better prepared to understand the deepest aspects of why we do what we do.

One of the characteristics of science is to reduce phenomena to a set of simple explanations. The medieval Occam’s razor was the inspiration for this process: shaving away extraneous causes and reducing processes to what is taken to be the most obvious explanation. This may seem wrong or inadequate or simplistic, but humanity conspires to prove this approach true. For despite the lofty and complex justifications from this or that temple of power, the unprecedented war and violence of human beings over the centuries points to nothing more simple than a primitive brain stem or amygdala.

It seems no longer possible for humanity as a whole to reach a point of peaceful equilibrium. Can humanity evolve to some point where mature brain functions of the cortex can overtake primitive instincts? We can call these instincts sin or ignorance. We can call our efforts ethics or philosophy or reason. Still, Occam’s razor wants to do away with the ideologies and the cultural superiorities and point to our collective incapacity.

Only enlightened individuals can at least begin the breakthrough in their own lives. This is what sages, regardless of what science they knew, have been telling us all aong.

Sound has the capacity to conjure sensibilities in us, or rather, we interpret sounds in certain ways. Perhaps the highest refinements of this giving of meaning to sound is in Japanese haiku poetry, where the cry of a bird or the rasp of cicadas in autumn take on a universe of meaning. Such an exercise reflects a self-conscious culture and a sensitivity to nature and emotion.

Music ought to be this high point of creativity as well, and music is often evoked for its ability to express or anticipate meaning. But music is always a cultural contrivance. Music reflects a collective culture, or subculture, from the primitive to the complex. It depends almost entirely on the technology of the moment as much as the composer’s affinities to the zeitgeist, the spirit of the age. Music imitates and overrides natural sounds, and in this there lies a caution: music can override the flow of responsiveness to natural sounds themselves, to nature itself. Of course, in an urban civilization, music is white noise.

We spend a life time cultivating likes and dislikes, points of view and threads of arguments, grooming how we appear to ourselves and to others. We are able to put up with habits and attitudes in ourselves that we would disdain or qualify in others. And yet, in moments of silence and meditation, when the noise and chatter abates, when nothing intrudes or disposes itself, we even forget who is there and wonder why any of this bundle of contingencies should matter more than any other bundle.

It used to be said that the ultimate philosophical question is “What would you do if you had 24 hours left to live?” This is the execution view of life, the invitation to put on a good party, say your farewells, and strap in. It begs the “eat, drink, and be merry” answer. But it is the wrong question. Because we always have death before us. That is not the issue. Stephen Batchelor phrases it more appropriately as something like this: “Because death is certain, and because the time of death is not certain, what are we to do?” It is as certain as is our birth, an inexhorable passage from one point to another. But it is not a matter of 24 hours or even 24 years but just a matter of life itself, of living itself. How do we choose, prioritize, assign value? How do we interpret, pursue, find a path? What are we to do with this consciousness we have? These are the questions that should occur to us as the ultimate philosophical questions.

Is it not the fate of hermits to fail in worldy standards of authority and persuasion? Their authority and their persuasiveness are only in their example, and cannot be transferred into the so-called “real” world. Like a sage, the good hermit expresses his virtues in daily life itself, silently, anonymously, without fanfare.

Ponder the fate of the eleventh-century hermit Pietro di Murrone, who took his name after his favorite place of seclusion in native Italy. There he thrived as a kind of John the Baptist, austere, roughly clad and fasting regularly. Inevitably he attracted followers, founded hermitages for them and called his followers Celestines. This apparent success and popularity attracted unscrupulous clerical factions. Given the political and ecclesiastical turmoil of the time, they managed to get Pietro elected pope (he was 79 years old) under the name of Celestine V. They created an order for themselves, also called Celestines, much to the confusion of historians. But Pietro despised the world, especially the world of ecclesiastical politics, and spent most of his time in reclusion. In contradiction, of course, to his administrative responsibilities. The new Celestines took advantage of him, as did the Holy Roman Emperor. For five months, chaos reigned, until a highly-placed cardinal persuaded Pietro to retire — not altruistically, because the same cardinal then declared himself Pope Boniface VIII and had Pietro imprisoned for the rest of his life.

Rouault’s portrait of a clown is a self-portrait and yet a portrait of all of us. As Rouault himself said of the painting, “The clown?… but that’s me … that’s you … almost all of us.” The sadness looking out on the world, the ironic laughter dissolving into melancholy, the clown as different, outsider, stranger, solitary. Rouault is not depicting a fool, though the clown must play the fool to entertain others. He must play the fool and become complicitous with people, with society. Like the Italian pagliacci figure, he is on the brink of tears, not of self-pity or of loneliness and estrangement but over the cruelty and ignorance of others. The fool of the tarot is not conscious of what he ventures into, but the clown is painfully conscious of the role he must play in society. That is what makes him like “almost all of us.”