[:en]To Think or Not To Think[:]

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The ability to think does not distinguish human beings from animals.  The higher animals are able to think; that is, they can work out the best way of accomplishing a task.  But only a human being is able to come to the conclusion – that something should not be done at all.

                                                                                                                          – The Urantia Book

 

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When you think you’re green, you’ll ripen; and

When you think you’re ripe, you’ll rot.

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How does one transcend himself; how does he open himself to new possibility?  By realizing the truth of his situation, by dispelling the lie of his character, by breaking his spirit out of its conditioned prison.  The enemy, for Kierkegaard as for Freud, is the Oedipus complex. The child has built up strategies and techniques for keeping his self-esteem in the face of the terror of his situation.  These techniques become an armor that holds the person prisoner. The very defenses that he needs in order to move about with self-confidence and self-esteem become his life-long trap. In order to transcend himself he must break down that which he needs in order to live.  Like Lear he must throw off all his “cultural lendings” and stand naked in the storm of life. Kierkegaard had no illusions about man’s urge to freedom. He knew how comfortable people were inside the prison of their character defenses. Like many prisoners they are comfortable in their limited and protected routines, and the idea of a parole into the wide world of chance, accident, and choice terrifies them.

                                                                             – Ernest Becker The Denial of Death

 

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If you read my essay of three weeks ago (March 13th … on  ‘Free Money’) you may have been able to detect … that as I was writing … I was learning.  I came to the realization that ‘acting out of one’s Ideology’ / (or ‘taking a position’) … is a (very common) substitute for (and alternative to) thinking.

 

Another way of describing this is  – “Knowledge is Finished”.

 

For example – if you belong to a church – does that community regard itself as ‘seekers for the truth’ ? … or does your church see itself as a ‘custodian of the truth’?

If you believe that Knowledge is Finished … the the second one will make sense to you.   But if you think that Knowledge is Not Finished … then the first one will make sense to you, but the second one will not.

 

[You may wish to have a look at my essay on Fundamentalism (24 Oct. 2018).]

 

The main thing we hate about Fundamentalists is that they think that Knowledge is Finished (and they happen to have taken a position that is at odds with ours)

 

Suppose you had the opportunity to converse with a (‘dangerous’) fundamentalist.  Suppose you were to ask him some questions –

 

Can you share with me your intellectual journey?  Can you tell me HOW you came to believe that ‘all infidels (non-believers) must be put to death’?

 

Do you think that they would (if they were actually willing to speak with you candidly) tell you about some long and complicated personal struggle? involving a great deal of genuine questioning and truth seeking?

I don’t think so.

 

I think we would find that they ‘arrived at’ their position … in the same basic way that they inherited their language or their culture … just by showing up and accepting it.

 

[Any culture is comprised of :   language … shared beliefs … customs … etc.  We basically HAVE NO CHOICE about whether to accept the Language we are born into.  But we DO have a choice about whether to accept the beliefs which surround us.

Of course – it is a CULTURAL VARIABLE – whether or not an individual is encouraged (or even permitted) to question the shared beliefs which surround us all.]

 

And this is (we think) one of the responsibilities of Education  – to encourage people to question the ‘normal’ beliefs.

 

And even if it’s true that the super-rich people (the ruling class) manage to keep our education system (here in America, anyway) crippled … (we avoid teaching Critical Thinking skills here) … even SO .. we can still take responsibility for our own personal education.  Mmm?

 

You know –   we really should treasure our great poets (and try to ‘hang out’ with them) … in order to learn from them … to receive from them something of their (superior) way of seeing the world.

 

I had never even heard of Wislawa Szymborska … till after she died.  

(which was in February of 2012 … and my main channel for education was NPR radio.  Some people there were talking about her, and shared a few of her poems)

Now I think she was one of the greatest poets ever … anywhere.

 

Though she lived a very modest and ‘ordinary’ life … in December of 1996 she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

And (because of her comments on [what she likes to call]: “I don’t know”)  … I include here her Stockholm Nobel Prize acceptance speech. I hope you enjoy it –

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The Poet and the World

They say the first sentence in any speech is always the hardest. Well, that one’s behind me, anyway. But I have a feeling that the sentences to come – the third, the sixth, the tenth, and so on, up to the final line – will be just as hard, since I’m supposed to talk about poetry. I’ve said very little on the subject, next to nothing, in fact. And whenever I have said anything, I’ve always had the sneaking suspicion that I’m not very good at it. This is why my lecture will be rather short. All imperfection is easier to tolerate if served up in small doses.

Contemporary poets are skeptical and suspicious even, or perhaps especially, about themselves. They publicly confess to being poets only reluctantly, as if they were a little ashamed of it. But in our clamorous times it’s much easier to acknowledge your faults, at least if they’re attractively packaged, than to recognize your own merits, since these are hidden deeper and you never quite believe in them yourself … When filling in questionnaires or chatting with strangers, that is, when they can’t avoid revealing their profession, poets prefer to use the general term “writer” or replace “poet” with the name of whatever job they do in addition to writing. Bureaucrats and bus passengers respond with a touch of incredulity and alarm when they find out that they’re dealing with a poet. I suppose philosophers may meet with a similar reaction. Still, they’re in a better position, since as often as not they can embellish their calling with some kind of scholarly title. Professor of philosophy – now that sounds much more respectable.

But there are no professors of poetry. This would mean, after all, that poetry is an occupation requiring specialized study, regular examinations, theoretical articles with bibliographies and footnotes attached, and finally, ceremoniously conferred diplomas. And this would mean, in turn, that it’s not enough to cover pages with even the most exquisite poems in order to become a poet. The crucial element is some slip of paper bearing an official stamp. Let us recall that the pride of Russian poetry, the future Nobel Laureate Joseph Brodsky was once sentenced to internal exile precisely on such grounds. They called him “a parasite,” because he lacked official certification granting him the right to be a poet …

Several years ago, I had the honor and pleasure of meeting Brodsky in person. And I noticed that, of all the poets I’ve known, he was the only one who enjoyed calling himself a poet. He pronounced the word without inhibitions.

Just the opposite – he spoke it with defiant freedom. It seems to me that this must have been because he recalled the brutal humiliations he had experienced in his youth.

In more fortunate countries, where human dignity isn’t assaulted so readily, poets yearn, of course, to be published, read, and understood, but they do little, if anything, to set themselves above the common herd and the daily grind. And yet it wasn’t so long ago, in this century’s first decades, that poets strove to shock us with their extravagant dress and eccentric behavior. But all this was merely for the sake of public display. The moment always came when poets had to close the doors behind them, strip off their mantles, fripperies, and other poetic paraphernalia, and confront – silently, patiently awaiting their own selves – the still white sheet of paper. For this is finally what really counts.

It’s not accidental that film biographies of great scientists and artists are produced in droves. The more ambitious directors seek to reproduce convincingly the creative process that led to important scientific discoveries or the emergence of a masterpiece. And one can depict certain kinds of scientific labor with some success. Laboratories, sundry instruments, elaborate machinery brought to life: such scenes may hold the audience’s interest for a while. And those moments of uncertainty – will the experiment, conducted for the thousandth time with some tiny modification, finally yield the desired result? – can be quite dramatic. Films about painters can be spectacular, as they go about recreating every stage of a famous painting’s evolution, from the first penciled line to the final brush-stroke. Music swells in films about composers: the first bars of the melody that rings in the musician’s ears finally emerge as a mature work in symphonic form. Of course this is all quite naive and doesn’t explain the strange mental state popularly known as inspiration, but at least there’s something to look at and listen to.

But poets are the worst. Their work is hopelessly unphotogenic. Someone sits at a table or lies on a sofa while staring motionless at a wall or ceiling. Once in a while this person writes down seven lines only to cross out one of them fifteen minutes later, and then another hour passes, during which nothing happens … Who could stand to watch this kind of thing?

I’ve mentioned inspiration. Contemporary poets answer evasively when asked what it is, and if it actually exists. It’s not that they’ve never known the blessing of this inner impulse. It’s just not easy to explain something to someone else that you don’t understand yourself.

When I’m asked about this on occasion, I hedge the question too. But my answer is this: inspiration is not the exclusive privilege of poets or artists generally. There is, has been, and will always be a certain group of people whom inspiration visits. It’s made up of all those who’ve consciously chosen their calling and do their job with love and imagination. It may include doctors, teachers, gardeners – and I could list a hundred more professions. Their work becomes one continuous adventure as long as they manage to keep discovering new challenges in it. Difficulties and setbacks never quell their curiosity. A swarm of new questions emerges from every problem they solve. Whatever inspiration is, it’s born from a continuous “I don’t know.”

There aren’t many such people. Most of the earth’s inhabitants work to get by. They work because they have to. They didn’t pick this or that kind of job out of passion; the circumstances of their lives did the choosing for them. Loveless work, boring work, work valued only because others haven’t got even that much, however loveless and boring – this is one of the harshest human miseries. And there’s no sign that coming centuries will produce any changes for the better as far as this goes.

And so, though I may deny poets their monopoly on inspiration, I still place them in a select group of Fortune’s darlings.

At this point, though, certain doubts may arise in my audience. All sorts of torturers, dictators, fanatics, and demagogues struggling for power by way of a few loudly shouted slogans also enjoy their jobs, and they too perform their duties with inventive fervor. Well, yes, but they “know.” They know, and whatever they know is enough for them once and for all. They don’t want to find out about anything else, since that might diminish their arguments’ force. And any knowledge that doesn’t lead to new questions quickly dies out: it fails to maintain the temperature required for sustaining life. In the most extreme cases, cases well known from ancient and modern history, it even poses a lethal threat to society.

This is why I value that little phrase “I don’t know” so highly. It’s small, but it flies on mighty wings. It expands our lives to include the spaces within us as well as those outer expanses in which our tiny Earth hangs suspended. If Isaac Newton had never said to himself “I don’t know,” the apples in his little orchard might have dropped to the ground like hailstones and at best he would have stooped to pick them up and gobble them with gusto. Had my compatriot Marie Sklodowska-Curie never said to herself “I don’t know”, she probably would have wound up teaching chemistry at some private high school for young ladies from good families, and would have ended her days performing this otherwise perfectly respectable job. But she kept on saying “I don’t know,” and these words led her, not just once but twice, to Stockholm, where restless, questing spirits are occasionally rewarded with the Nobel Prize.

Poets, if they’re genuine, must also keep repeating “I don’t know.” Each poem marks an effort to answer this statement, but as soon as the final period hits the page, the poet begins to hesitate, starts to realize that this particular answer was pure makeshift that’s absolutely inadequate to boot. So the poets keep on trying, and sooner or later the consecutive results of their self-dissatisfaction are clipped together with a giant paperclip by literary historians and called their “oeuvre” …

I sometimes dream of situations that can’t possibly come true. I audaciously imagine, for example, that I get a chance to chat with the Ecclesiastes, the author of that moving lament on the vanity of all human endeavors. I would bow very deeply before him, because he is, after all, one of the greatest poets, for me at least. That done, I would grab his hand. “‘There’s nothing new under the sun’: that’s what you wrote, Ecclesiastes. But you yourself were born new under the sun. And the poem you created is also new under the sun, since no one wrote it down before you. And all your readers are also new under the sun, since those who lived before you couldn’t read your poem. And that cypress that you’re sitting under hasn’t been growing since the dawn of time. It came into being by way of another cypress similar to yours, but not exactly the same. And Ecclesiastes, I’d also like to ask you what new thing under the sun you’re planning to work on now? A further supplement to the thoughts you’ve already expressed? Or maybe you’re tempted to contradict some of them now? In your earlier work you mentioned joy – so what if it’s fleeting? So maybe your new-under-the-sun poem will be about joy? Have you taken notes yet, do you have drafts? I doubt you’ll say, ‘I’ve written everything down, I’ve got nothing left to add.’ There’s no poet in the world who can say this, least of all a great poet like yourself.”

The world – whatever we might think when terrified by its vastness and our own impotence, or embittered by its indifference to individual suffering, of people, animals, and perhaps even plants, for why are we so sure that plants feel no pain; whatever we might think of its expanses pierced by the rays of stars surrounded by planets we’ve just begun to discover, planets already dead? still dead? we just don’t know; whatever we might think of this measureless theater to which we’ve got reserved tickets, but tickets whose lifespan is laughably short, bounded as it is by two arbitrary dates; whatever else we might think of this world – it is astonishing.

But “astonishing” is an epithet concealing a logical trap. We’re astonished, after all, by things that deviate from some well-known and universally acknowledged norm, from an obviousness we’ve grown accustomed to. Now the point is, there is no such obvious world. Our astonishment exists per se and isn’t based on comparison with something else.

Granted, in daily speech, where we don’t stop to consider every word, we all use phrases like “the ordinary world,” “ordinary life,” “the ordinary course of events” … But in the language of poetry, where every word is weighed, nothing is usual or normal. Not a single stone and not a single cloud above it. Not a single day and not a single night after it. And above all, not a single existence, not anyone’s existence in this world.

It looks like poets will always have their work cut out for them.

 

                                                        

                                                                         (Translated from Polish by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh)

 

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So … are you green, or are you ripe?

 

Is your life about   ‘I don’t know’? (or the alternative?)

 

Is your life organized around ‘Knowledge is Finished’?  … or around ‘Knowledge is NOT finished’?

 

Do you think? … or do you (merely) have a Position?

 

Find out.

 

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“CLASSIFIEDS”

 

WHOEVER’S found out what location

compassion (heart’s imagination)

can be contacted at these days,

is herewith urged to name the place;

and sing about it in full voice,

and dance like crazy and rejoice

beneath the frail birch that appears

to be upon the verge of tears.

 

I TEACH silence

in all languages

through intensive examination of:

the starry sky,

the Sinanthropus’ jaws,

a grasshopper’s hop,

an infant’s fingernails,

plankton,

a snowflake.

 

I RESTORE lost love.

Act now! Special offer!

You lie on last year’s grass

bathed in sunlight to the chin

while winds of summers past

caress your hair and seem

to lead you in a dance.

For further details, write: “Dream.”

 

WANTED: someone to mourn

the elderly who die

alone in old folks’ homes.

Applicants, don’t send forms

or birth certificates.

All papers will be torn,

no receipts will be issued

at this or later dates.

 

FOR PROMISES made by my spouse,

who’s tricked so many with his sweet

colors and fragrances and sounds –

dogs barking, guitars in the streets –

into believing that they still

might conquer loneliness and fright,

I cannot be responsible.

Mr. Day’s widow, Mrs. Night.

 

        – Wislawa Szymborska

 

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Notes from a Nonexistent Himalayan Expedition

 

So these are the Himalayas.

Mountains racing to the moon.

The moment of their start recorded

on the startling, ripped canvas of the sky.

Holes punched in a desert of clouds.

Thrust into nothing.

Echo—a white mute.

Quiet.

 

Yeti, down there we’ve got Wednesday,

bread and alphabets.

Two times two is four.

Roses are red there,

and violets are blue.

Yeti, crime is not all

we’re up to down there.

Yeti, not every sentence there

means death.

We’ve inherited hope —

the gift of forgetting.

You’ll see how we give

birth among the ruins.

Yeti, we’ve got Shakespeare there.

Yeti, we play solitaire

and violin. At nightfall,

we turn lights on, Yeti.

Up here it’s neither moon nor earth.

Tears freeze.

Oh Yeti, semi-moonman,

turn back, think again!

 

I called this to the Yeti

inside four walls of avalanche,

stomping my feet for warmth

on the everlasting

snow.

–  Wislawa Szymborska

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“On Death, Without Exaggeration”

 

It can’t take a joke,

find a star, make a bridge.

It knows nothing about weaving, mining, farming,

building ships, or baking cakes.

In our planning for tomorrow,

it has the final word,

which is always beside the point.

 

It can’t even get the things done

that are part of its trade:

dig a grave,

make a coffin,

clean up after itself.

 

Preoccupied with killing,

it does the job awkwardly,

without system or skill.

As though each of us were its first kill.

 

Oh, it has its triumphs,

but look at its countless defeats,

missed blows,

and repeat attempts!

 

Sometimes it isn’t strong enough

to swat a fly from the air.

Many are the caterpillars

that have outcrawled it.

 

All those bulbs, pods,

tentacles, fins, tracheae,

nuptial plumage, and winter fur

show that it has fallen behind

with its halfhearted work.

 

Ill will won’t help

and even our lending a hand with wars and coups d’etat

is so far not enough.

 

Hearts beat inside eggs.

Babies’ skeletons grow.

Seeds, hard at work, sprout their first tiny pair of leaves

and sometimes even tall trees fall away.

 

Whoever claims that it’s omnipotent

is himself living proof

that it’s not.

 

There’s no life

that couldn’t be immortal

if only for a moment.

 

Death

always arrives by that very moment too late.

 

In vain it tugs at the knob

of the invisible door.

As far as you’ve come

can’t be undone.

 

              – Wislawa Szymborska

 

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