Two Hundred and Three

I've nothing to live on and no one to live for, so I must die.

Two Hundred and Two

Gregor Samsa wakes to find he's a cockroach.  Or so most English translations render ungeheures Ungeziefer.  I don’t think he undergoes a physical change, but a psychological one.  He wakes to the realisation that he is, and always has been, an ungeheures Ungeziefer.

Kafka’s story is about a metamorphosis, but it’s not Gregor’s.  He’s already an ungeheures Ungeziefer when he wakes and the story begins.  It is Grete, Gregor’s younger sister, who changes.

When she sees what he is, she’s horrified.  But she overcomes her disgust enough to bring him food, and remove furniture from his room so he can crawl about it more easily. 

He stays hidden in his room, listening to the music coming from the other room where Grete plays her violin.  She'd hoped to study at the conservatory, and he'd intended to pay her tuition; but now she must give up her hopes and take a job in a shop to support their parents.

Realizing he's a burden to his family, Gregor stops eating and starves himself to death.  Relieved, their father and mother observe that young Grete has grown into a woman, and it's time to find her a husband.

I’ve been reading about the Fermi Paradox.  Given that there are billions of stars similar to our sun, some probably orbited by planets similar to ours on which intelligent life similar to ours probably evolved, Fermi asked why we haven’t been contacted by any of them.  In order to get the right answer, one must ask the right question.  Fermi assumed answers to questions he never asked.

The building materials of life appear to be common throughout the universe, and planets on which it could take root and evolve appear equally common.  But it probably remains simple bacterial life.  Complex life like ours is probably rare.  Even here on Earth the most common form of life is single-celled bacteria.  Multicelled plants and animals live only on the planet’s surface.  Complex intelligent life, like ours, is even rarer.

All living things, from bacteria to plants and animals, are sentient to some degree; but we make a distinction between sentience and intelligence.  Most of us wouldn’t call plants intelligent, or even other animals, unless we lived in intimacy with them and knew them well.

We flatter ourselves that we dominate this planet because we are the most intelligent species on it.  But we use our intelligence to find better ways of doing destructive and self-destructive things.  We dominate the planet because we are the most ruthless predator on it, preying not only on other animals but on each other, until we're now destroying the planet and everything on it, including ourselves.  That’s not rational by any definition.

Swift said we're not a rational species, but a species capable of reason.  Unfortunately we use reason only after we’ve acted foolishly, to justify ourselves. 

An intelligent species might invent weapons that could destroy a planet, but a rational species wouldn’t use them.  Intelligent life doesn’t long survive if it isn’t also rational.  A rational species would avoid contact with a species as destructive as ours, which explains the Fermi Paradox.  We are an ungeheures Ungeziefern that would arouse disgust in any rational being. 

          

Like Gregor Samsa, we've finally awakened to the fact that we are not what we thought we were.  We are no longer animals guided by instinct, but not yet humans guided by reason.

Music has always been our symbol for the harmony we imagine lies hidden beneath the seeming chaos of the world.  Gregor listens to the music that comes from another room, knowing he can never enter that room.  All he can do is die.

Bunin is dying.  He knows it, and has resigned himself.  He's stopped eating, and lays in my arms all day and night.  I don't eat, either.   

Two Hundred and One

How depressing that I must write in order to have a conversation.  When I read what I’ve written, I don’t always agree with it; but the writer seems to be, or at least tries to be, honest.  How depressing that I’m the most honest person I know.

Two Hundred

We’re social animals, yet we’re alone.  We’re alone because we never learned how to live with each other.

Other animals do it instinctively, as sleepwalkers do.  But we’re no longer asleep. We’re no longer guided by instinct, as other animals are.  Neither are we fully awake.  We live in daydreams, guided by illusions.   

We call ourselves homo sapiens, and decided that in order for us to live with each other the wisest of us must rule, and the rest must consent to be ruled.  But even the wisest of us find it difficult to rule themselves, much less the rest of us.  So we learned to lie.

Every society we've built has been founded on a lie we told each other and ourselves, a conspiracy to which everyone was party. Eventually it became a prison in which we’re both the prisoners and the guards.   

Every society we've built eventually collapsed.  Not because we woke to the reality that it was founded on a lie, because we always knew that.  We pretended the lie was true because we wanted it to be true, and tried to make it come true.  It collapsed because those who didn’t care whether it was true or not used the dream to rule the dreamers, which discredited the dream and persuaded the dreamers that they were fools to dream.

Now we no longer dream, or we have nightmares from which we can’t wake up.  There’s nothing else to do but die.

One Hundred and Ninety Nine

Writing is self-indulgent.

Speaking is self-indulgent.  It would be naïve of me to think anything I could say would be of interest to anyone else; but writing down what I have to say, as though it had lasting interest to others, would be even more self-indulgent.

Not because I’ve learned nothing during my long life.  Each of us learns something no one else does, no matter how long or short our lives, because we all live different lives.  But it’s difficult for us to learn from others when we pretend we’re all the same.

Ours is an ignorant age because we don’t listen to others hoping to learn from them what they’ve learned.  We listen to them to confirm that we’re all alike, that they know what we know and there’s nothing more to know.

But I don’t write for others.  I write only for myself, trying to make sense of my life and writing down what I’ve learned before I forget it.  Because I’m old and forgetful.  When I read something I wrote when I was young, I’m awed by how much wiser I was then than I am now.

I write for myself because it’s the only way to tell the truth to someone who’ll listen.  Few people in this ignorant age tell the truth, to each other or to themselves, because they fear that if they did they’d kill each other and/or themselves out of despair at what they’ve done and what fools they’ve been.

But they know the truth.  They have to know it, in order to know what to forget.

One Hundred and Ninety Eight

I’m as alone as I'd be if I were living on a desert island.  We’re all alone, but not all of us admit it because we’re social animals by nature, herd animals.  There’s safety in numbers, so in this increasingly unsafe world we huddle together as close as we can get.  But not too close.  Talleyrand said we invented language so that we could conceal our thoughts from each other.  We need the company of others in order to survive, and will lie—to ourselves as well as to others—in order to get it.

Some of us seek the company of our own kind, or those we think are our kind, thinking it the easiest to get; but the search can be difficult because although we’re all alike in some ways, in others each of us is unique (We’re all alike in being unique).  Each of us lives a life that’s in some ways not like anyone else’s, and learns things from it no one else knows.  Communicating those things to others can be difficult. 

Many of our problems are due to our pretending we’re all alike, therefore communication between us should be easy.  When it’s not, we assume the other person is lying because that’s what we would do; and we’re all alike.

Some of us seek the company of those who are, or seem to be, different—not only different from us, but from our kind—people to whom and/or with whom we can do things we can’t do to and/or with our own kind.  And some of us seek people who are not just different, but unique.  We may want to emulate them, or we may want to destroy them in order to assure ourselves it’s dangerous to be unique, so we’re safer being, or pretending to be, like everyone else.  Usually we want to do both, because our heroes are never as heroic as we want them to be, nor our villains as villainous, and they must be punished for disappointing us.

People are too much alike in their willingness to lie, to others and to themselves, in order to get what they want, or think they want, which usually isn't what they really want.  I’ve always thought of dealing with others as a game in which I had to overcome the obstacles they set for themselves as well as for me.  I used to play that game well, and took pleasure in doing so. But as I grew older, I grew tired of it. 

Dealing with other people, all of them pretending to be alike, saying the same things and doing the same things, grew painfully boring.  Je suis Sisyphe, et mon enfer, c'est les Autres.

One Hundred and Ninety Seven

I’ve been binge watching kabuki for the last few days.  I don’t know why.

Why ask why?  Nothing happens for a reason.  Cause and effect are an illusion.  Or so they tell us.  Telling us what we already know, as usual.

Perhaps I’m doing it because kabuki’s as far away as I can get from the chaos of the West.  The East is in chaos, too; but it originated in the West and spread to the rest of the world, like a cancer.

Art attempts to tame, to impose order on, what seems to us the chaos of the world.  But having failed to tame it, the West now celebrates chaos' most destructive avatar: war.  Only in the East are traditional arts like kabuki still revered, even if ignored by most easterners, just as traditional western arts like opera are ignored by most westerners.

We are actors, performers.  Traditional arts eschew the naïve illusion of naturalism and display the artificiality of our rôles and our language.

I used to smile when people said they preferred listening to opera in a language they didn’t understand because knowing the words distracted from the beauty of the sound; but I understand now.  Words are a distraction.  We communicate more through sound and gesture than through words.  Giving names to things deceives us into thinking we know them.  That’s why most of us speak to each other not to communicate information, but to assure ourselves we’re not alone; and we speak to ourselves to assure ourselves we’re real.  In both cases, we lie.

Every bard knows poetry and song communicate information better than does prose; but dance, and/or music without words, do it best.

In kabuki, as in ballet, every gesture has a meaning; but not for me, because I don’t know the language and don’t care to learn it.

I could probably learn it easily enough.  I have a gift for languages.  But learning what sounds and gestures mean is not enough to understand.  Too much is lost when we put what we’ve learned into words we think others will understand, and/or others think they understand.