Letting Go
Lately, I’ve found myself looking at the horizon of the human endeavor on this planet and not searching for clouds of affirmation about what people are doing here. In one sense, this is nothing new for me. I’ve tended to believe that the ancient Greeks put their finger on the matter when they invented, as it were, drama, that sense of purblind action and interaction that typified human doings. As creatures of appetite and purpose, what else could we do beyond protesting that at any very random moment we knew what we were doing, swearing that our clashes in the night made sense? Meanwhile, the sheer intensity of our doings, for better and often for worse, has kept us riveted to our own screen.
The larger screen of the planet (yes, the electronic metaphor is precisely wrong hence at this time apt), the one that extends beyond our anthropomorphic proclivities, is clearly something else. The notion of us somehow subduing our egos and understanding that our well-being is tied up with the planet’s well-being and all the creatures on the planet’s well-being is a nice notion but, given the track record called “civilization,” a dubious one. We don’t seem to have it in us as we oscillate between the poles of entertainment and nightmare. Whether we take solace in identifying with the Romans or whether that frightens us is irrelevant. What comes first is the news, which means the primacy of our relentless doings—movie stars and Gaza, elections and soccer matches. The irony of the news is that it is comforting because it is news. Something, whether momentous or trivial, ghastly or amusing, is happening. Understandably, we fear the void.
Hope may not be available in any easily dispensable form but the search for truth remains. The search may be secular as with Socrates or spiritual as with the Buddha. In both cases, it is, given the nature of those who are doing the searching, provisional. No pat answers are offering themselves. The salvation known as “heaven” is elsewhere, which has been the point of heaven. The first order of business, as James Baldwin pointed out, has been our fear of death, though that hasn’t stopped us from our wars. We are good at creating dilemmas that issue in dramas and that go nowhere. Peace, in that regard, seems little more than exhaustion before one more inflammable cause rears its slogan-spouting head. Neutrality has been the best we could do, which is something. Many of us would be glad to live in a neutralized world and let power drift out on the depleted sea. Other earthly matters are certainly calling to us.
In various wisdom traditions the first step of knowing is the admission of unknowing. Addicted as we are to the excitement that goes with invention and all the hubbub about progress of whatever sort (“Version 9.8, get it now!”), we have little interest in the stasis of mystery. The more we are subjected to the pressures of mass society with its relentless bombardment of corporate messages, all centered around the primacy of wanting, then the more the mystery of our being here bores and annoys us. Surely, we know it all. Facts are us and whatever “it” may be, we can look “it” up in a jiffy thanks to our ingenious machines. They can do most anything for us and, with the advent of artificial intelligence, more than anything. Our high road keeps getting higher.
Superficial knowing puffs us up but truth has a withering quality. It takes the air out of rhetoric. It kicks certainty in the shins. I think of Orwell, a stubborn man who refused all the usual bromides. He didn’t, however, refuse feeling. When he wrote about the Spanish Civil War in which he almost died, he was unsparing. He recognized, however, the passion and attendant drama that distinguished the bloody events. He knew the people on the various sides and looked at them as steadily as he could, which meant their bravery, their treachery, their brutality, their foolhardiness, and their insolence. No one comes out looking very splendid and some come out looking very bad indeed but isn’t that how it’s been here on Earth? Isn’t that the wisdom of the middle path? Or is there no wisdom?
Orwell’s search for truth in whatever matter seems to me a form of wisdom in the sense that, at the least, he pointed out the murderous dangers of certitude, whether it be ideological, class-bound, religious-dogmatic, or otherwise. This is not to say that we have to be irresolute. We are, thanks to habit, manifold distractions, and our daily inertia, full of irresolution. It is to say that the main project of our education, an education that goes on as long as we are drawing breath, is that sense of acknowledging the possibility of truth, a possibility that is vivifying and, to use a word with which I began this essay, affirming. Not because it offers any optimistic answers but because it tries to touch actuality. It is, after all, actuality that sustains, not the virtual. We eat the food not the recipes. We would, I assume, rather kiss the person than the image of the person. If the actuality is harrowing, as in facing up to our confused yet grasping natures, then it is harrowing. Greek tragedy didn’t lie.
Such searching for truth doesn’t set us free in the sense that we are somehow above it all. It’s more that it throws us in the maelstrom and leaves us there to sort things out as best we can. The letting go, however, is stimulating and liberating in that we can be something like honest. I don’t mean as in spilling our guts about whatever miseries we have endured but as in admitting that we are very dependent creatures. Truth, as it seeks to look at the whole of any matter, advises appreciative wariness—look and look again. Alas, this caution makes no one any money. We prefer to be profligate and give it whatever good name we can find at hand. Partisanship becomes us. So does the business of busyness.
Perhaps the truth of our matters will always elude us. That elusiveness is who we are. We are using up billions of years of energy without a real second thought. What are “billions of years” to us, the happiness-pursuing creatures of a lifetime’s duration? Not much but we can be truthful about our shoddy ways. Perhaps it would humble us. Perhaps failure has something important to say to us.
One of my takeaways from this essay is the mystery of what people ARE seeking? Truth? Hmmm not certain of this these days. Would anyone recognize a ray of truth if it appeared before them? Or, is what you are saying that humans as far back as the Ancient Greeks are seeking Truth without realizing they doing so?
The truth, where to find it, is the issue. The Greeks had their chorus probing, mocking and ever ready.