I am that I am

We lived for a time in a place without limits. At least, that is to say, each and every day was our own to do with as we wished. It sounds like a blessing. It was. But it was also an effort. Each day had to be made from scratch.

I suspect many people would prefer boundaries and limitations of some sort, rather than be left contemplating a void that passes itself off as freedom.

But I was talking then about our daily world, with its need for daily bread. What of our spiritual world? Can we live without boundaries there?

Tolstoy said that faith was one of the forces by which we live.

So only with some difficulty then.

And so it is that most people on this earth retain their faith, despite the unflagging efforts of the proselytisers of reason.

The proselytisers of reason are left baffled by those who insist on retaining their communion with a spiritual reality.

The proselytisers of reason have small minds.

A life based on the answer ‘I don’t know’ to the question ‘Why?’ is hard to endure. Why are we here, to what end, for what purpose? Why must there be so much struggle in life—even in the midst of plenty—why so much suffering, so much pain? Why are my days filled with so much I care nothing for? Why so much drudgery? So much tedium?

‘What is missing from the misery of the world, as well as from its moments of happiness, is some principle by which they can be explained’—Camus.

Looking up at the countless stars of the heavens may well give you a sense of stupendous awe, but it will never give you a sense of meaning.

There is a certain irony, methinks, in all this, because we only have ourselves to blame—we have disturbed our own sleep by digging around so much in the earth, by insisting on prising open the secrets of the heavens. The more we have understood this universe and our place in it, the less secure we have become in it—and in ourselves.

We have reasoned ourselves into a state of terrifying doubt.

‘For humankind’s chief malady,’ Pascal once suggested, ‘is its uneasy curiosity about things it cannot know—and it is not so bad for it to be wrong as so vainly curious.’ John Stuart Mill said he’d rather be Socrates, sad but wise, than a happy yet ignorant pig. I think most would opt to be the pig.

But then the prophet of reason exclaims, now look here, I offer you freedom from superstition and myth, I bring light where there was darkness, I give you your liberty!—and the sane response of most is to curse the prophet of reason (who is too stupid and vain to understand why) as a destroyer of the foundations on which alone a tolerable existence might be constructed.

So much freedom, so much burden.

Better, they say, to pass our days according to precepts that tell us why we live as we do, suffer what we must and die as we will, than to believe that our lives and all that is attendant on them, the good and the evil, have no real meaning at all, or at least none that we can discern.

It does not matter in the slightest if what you believe is entirely fanciful—there need be no congruence between belief and reality for belief to be wholly real for the believer. And, if real, in that sense, then the dulling of the psychic pain such belief brings will be as real as that which a dose of morphine gives to the dying.

It is preferable, in other words, to live a life hemmed in, both from without and from within, than to be burdened with a life the entire responsibility for which lies with no one but one’s own self.

I read once of an Epicurean whose epitaph simply read NFFNSNC. It stands for non fui, fui, non sum, non curo—I was not, I was, I am not, I care not. I’m fine with it all until I reach non curo.

God telling Moses who He is.

I Am that I Am, announced the Lord to Moses, thereby setting the template for all of us (which, I suppose, is as it should be—we are, after all, made in His image). And so I am that I am, and I had no say in who I am—no one ever does, it is simply the fate of everyone that we must be someone—and so I am a devout unbeliever, an ardent atheist, who sometimes wonders if it wouldn’t be a fine and pleasant thing to have faith in a benevolent maker who watches over all of creation. But I have no such faith, and no means of conjuring it into existence—I am, perversely, to that extent exactly like that unbending believer Luther—‘Here I stand, I can do nothing else’.

 

H.L. Mencken and life's end

‘The central aim of life is to simulate extinction.’ H.L. Mencken

Henry Louis Mencken (1880-1956) was a journalist very much of the old school, which is to say, he combined immense erudition with an ease and facility of language that makes even the most trivial of matters deeply engaging. The words of Homer, Socrates, and other ancient Greeks meander through his writing as if just uttered in a casual conversation by a good friend; Kant appears to make some profound pronouncement from time to time, while Spinoza jostles with Hobbes to a get a word in. And then there are the literati, the great wordsmiths through the ages, observing on this and commenting on that, adding their lustre to the bright light Mencken’s words possess as naturally as a tree has leaves.

They don’t make journalists like that now, and perhaps they didn’t even make them like that then. He was certainly a rare bird, perhaps even unique among his kind. In fact, Mencken was really no journalist at all; he was an observer of the human condition with eyes like laser beams, who just happened to publish his thoughts in the newspapers.

Time passes and we forget much. Some of the tomfoolery and chicanery – particularly that of the booboisie, as he styled them - that caught Mencken’s eye means nothing to us now, yet his writing is so captivating it retains an immediacy, as if we are reading today’s paper. Others, such as the Scopes Monkey Trial, are famous in themselves, and will always warrant our attention. Finally, there are those of his writings which treat of timeless subjects, his musings on mortality, for instance. These will always speak to us, so long as we retain our human concerns.

Mencken - life as a belly-aching laugh.

His writings are filled with a bubbling joie de vivre, a genuine amusement at the circus of it all, even as he gazes, unblinking, into the great abyss of meaninglessness at its heart. A wry smile lurks behind everything he wrote. And behind much of what he wrote there is a belly-aching laugh.
 

Like many of those who think more than cursorily about life and what it’s all about, Mencken thought long and often about death. And he wrote about it well and often. In the end, he concluded, in all that we do, we seek to obliterate the awareness that we are. There are times when literary paradoxes are little more than party tricks, the verisimilitude of profundity standing in the place of actual profundity. But in this instance – as in so many others – Mencken was not dealing in cheap prestidigitation; he was merely speaking the profoundly mundane truth.

In the still hours of the night, we all become aware of our essential nothingness, a dreadful awareness that assaults the misguided but persistent sense we all have of our own significance. Fiercely conscious, as I am, of my Self, I cannot accept this Self is quite literally without meaning. The Self asserts its own importance, and so we await the dawn, when we can rise and busy ourselves with myriad trivia, dressed up as matters of much meaning, so that for a time at least we are no longer aware of pointlessly being. In other words, by busying ourselves with all we can conjure, we strive to achieve the same state we will enjoy when we are dead – a state of being in which we are no longer troubled by the awareness of being, and the fruitlessness of existence. We are ostriches with our heads buried deep in the existential sands. It is an unsurpassable irony that our awareness, however subconscious, of the pointlessness of existence – and all that we do while we exist – leads us to give meaning to all that we do. It is the means by which we hide from ourselves what we could not otherwise face. It is, wonderfully, a paradox of the most sublime truth, the sort of sublime truth that brought a great and knowing smile to Mencken's face.

Knowledge and the Soul

And what, Socrates, is the food of the soul? Surely, I said, knowledge is the food of the soul.

Plato (a really long time ago)

 

I am furious at being entangled in a confounded philosophy which my mind cannot refrain from approving and my heart from denying.

Diderot (not quite so long ago)

Adenine, guanine, cytosine and thymine are, it is true, not words many people are familiar with, and yet we are all familiar, so very familiar, with their manifestation in the physical realm. They are (obviously enough to those who study them) foundational elements within the structure of the DNA double-helix– technically known as nucleotides - helping to maintain the stability of the helix and thus, we might say, the stability of life forms themselves. Linking arms across the divide that separates one DNA strand from another, adenine hangs on to thymine, while cytosine clings obdurately to guanine, and together they are but one necessary part of a complex of chemicals which are the basis of life. Ensconced within the spiralling strands of DNA, they are both beautiful and wondrous, and it takes but a moment’s contemplation to feel awe in the face of such exquisite complexity.

But it is not given to everyone, it seems, to feel this sense of awe, to observe the beauty and the wonder of our world and its chemical constituents. Many are those for whom, so it appears, the world of atoms and elements, chemicals and compounds, and, at the other end of the scale, the vastnesses of space, do not inspire any sense of the majesty of existence. Instead such observers are left indifferent, or uninspired or, even worse, dismayed that the mysteries of existence should be thus explained in such seemingly prosaic and phlegmatic ways. Rejecting science as, at best, simply one alternative way of knowing among many (where no alternative can claim pre-eminence), or, at worst, a manifestation of the West’s ceaseless pursuit of hegemony in the world, such observers turn instead to other explanations of their world. Many and varied are these competing ideas, but they are united in their rejection of science as a way of knowing and their advocacy of systems of thought which emphasise the mysterious and the magical, the spiritual and the metaphysical. They seek transcendence out of the quotidian and into the realm of angels, a transcendence, they believe, that science cannot bequeath.

But let me return to my four nucleotides, to adenine and guanine, cytosine and thymine. I should not wish to give the impression, misleading as it would be, that somehow these four are, in the scheme of life, more important or significant or monumental than any of the other numerous chemical elements which form the basis of life. I have picked them in a somewhat haphazard and random fashion, and I might have chosen any of the multitudinous chemicals of which we are constituted to illustrate the point, to shine a small light on the utterly and bewilderingly magical nature of our existence. Indeed, that is perhaps the essence of this seemingly miraculous thing we call life, the intricate weaving of such a multitude of strands, so very many parts which must all be present, which must all function in their own fashion, if life is itself to function at all. And perhaps, further, we might here discern a possible explanation for the resistance of so many to the evidence of our senses, to the knowledge we have gained, as to how it is that life comes to be. Those things beyond our ordinary comprehension, we prefer to keep in darkness; if the road we must travel is too difficult, it is better not to attempt the journey, but instead to remain looking out from our lonely hilltop to that point in the distance whose magnificence we are content to dream of without every really knowing it. If the sheer complexity of existence as science has thus far shown it to be overwhelms us, if the numbers are too large and the parts are too small, the distances too vast and the length of time too immense, then it is better, seemingly, not to know at all, but instead to turn away and to place in the stead of knowledge myths and stories of our own devising which, because we are the artificers of them, we can comprehend.

But perhaps, too, the poetic sensibility struggles against and resists the insistent demands of science, the seemingly arid and joyless discipline of rational inquiry. This is the view which gained such currency as the Age of Enlightenment (that is, of reason) gave way to the Age of Revolution, the view of William Blake who believed that ‘a robin redbreast in a cage, puts all heaven in a rage’, the view, indeed, of Goethe’s Mephistopheles:

When scholars study a thing they strive

To kill it first, if it's alive;

Then they have the parts and they've lost the whole,

For the link that's missing was the living soul.

Thus, does not science destroy in order to dissect, thereby dismembering and disfiguring what was once beautiful, sublime? In subjecting life and the universe to the cold and disinterested movement of our reason, do we not lose something precious, a sense of awe and mystery, of profundity and significance, without which we stand bare and defenceless on the precipice of existence? Does it not, we might say, leave us with nothing in our hands with which to fend off the dreaded realisation that we exist merely because we do? It is impossible, we think, that the ‘I’ of whom I am constantly and always aware exists only by chance. It is impossible that this ‘I’ should ever cease to exist. I know myself as eternal and all encompassing, and anything which might undermine this must be rejected, disbarred and prohibited as a threat to the order of existence.

So the thinking might go, but such thinking is misguided, callow. Such thinking does not see that we can know the same thing in many ways and from different vantage points. The technical knowledge of science, the knowledge of numbers and signs and symbols, does not preclude at the same time another kind of knowledge of the phenomena of life, the sort of knowledge which is not necessarily expressed in words but is understood and perceived by the intuition, the sort of knowledge which is experienced rather than known, felt rather than comprehended. That I know the sun to be a mass of roiling gasses, a constant chain of fusion reactions converting hydrogen into helium and producing a surface temperature in the order of 5,505°C in no way diminishes my capacity for being enthralled by a majestic sunset or soothed by the feeling of the sun’s warmth on my skin. With Kant, my mind is indeed filled ‘with ever new and increasing wonder and awe’ by the starry heavens above me, wonder and awe that is only augmented by my knowledge of the vastness of space and the distances that separate us from the twinkling lights (and, further, by the knowledge that the vastness is so very great that I cannot, in the end, comprehend it, but must make do with simply knowing that the vastness will escape any feeble human attempt at capturing it in the mind’s eye – such knowledge makes us humble). And if we look backwards through the lens of life at the tiniest constituent parts of life itself, at chemicals and their bonds, my knowledge that water requires the happy conjunction of two hydrogen atoms to one of oxygen cannot deplete the sheer human pleasure I feel when my burning thirst is quenched by water gathered from a cool, mountain stream.

In the face of the edict to know ourselves, why is it that so many persist in not knowing themselves, in deliberately obscuring their own vision of how the world is? Why this desire to remain in ignorance? We are, in the final analysis, nothing more than a magnificent concatenation of chemicals, a miraculous enough occurrence of base elements united in myriad ways, nothing more, and yet surely this is more than enough to satisfy the demand for wonder. If we let our minds explore into the tiniest corners of our universe, and up and into the widest expanses of space, how can we not feel anything but transcendence, that sense of being part of something so very wondrous? ‘There is grandeur,’ Darwin famously observed,‘in this view of life’, and so there is.