Ere Time and Place were, Time and Place were not,
When primitive Nothing Something straight begot,
Then all proceeded from the great united—What?
— John Wilmot, “Upon Nothing”
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The naîve idea that there is first of all empty space and then things filling it underlies the classical problem of how the world came out of nothing. Now the problem has to be rephrased, “How did something-and-nothing come out of…what?”
— Alan Watts, Nature, Man and Woman
Some people predict that it’s only a matter of time until our ordinary telephones disappear and are replaced by individual devices about the size of a pocket watch—one side will have a TV screen and speaker; the other will entail a set of buttons you can use to activate various functions or dial world information for any given individual. And if that person doesn’t answer, it will mean that they are dead. Under such circumstances, absolutely no one can get lost anymore.
—Alan Watts, Just So: Money, Materialism, and the Ineffable, Intelligent Universe
I had noticed over the last few weeks that my phone seemed to be slow to receive emails, and I was having problems getting texts to go through to certain people. I didn’t think much of it, because a smartphone is little more than an mp3 player to me. Today, though, I rebooted it and promptly received five voicemails and a couple texts that had apparently been in limbo for who knows how long. I know full well that various corporate and political actors would love to eliminate the possibility of true “private time,” and that the little surveillance devices we all carry around make it easier for them to do so, but it still pleases me to see how, for no particular reason, things just sometimes stop working as expected, introducing just that little bit of unpredictability into events again.
Then you have this extraordinary feeling that comes from looking at life without having to do anything about it—you can just let it happen with no sense of hurry and with no wish to improve it. That’s why the images of the Buddha always present him as looking blissful. Cats look like this, too, because they can sit for ages and simply watch. You might say it’s because they have nothing better to do because we think we’re supposed to be constantly improving somehow or doing something beneficial for the world. But hermits who live solitary lives and meditate all of the time are doing an enormous amount for the world, and just the suspicion that people such as that still exist today is marvelous for everybody. The contrast of their presence reveals how the rest of us are busy raising so much dust. We think we’re going somewhere, but we’re already there. Meanwhile, all the dust we kick up rushing about everywhere is getting in everybody’s nostrils and polluting everything. So to know that there are hermits deep in the forest is like knowing there’s a world beyond the dust—a world of streams and flowers that few of us ever see.
— Alan Watts, Just So: Money, Materialism and the Ineffable, Intelligent Universe
[On that note, here’s this week’s Thursday Throwback, originally published Apr. 19, 2017.]
Knight said that he didn’t really know why he left. He’d given the question plenty of thought but had never arrived at an answer. “It’s a mystery,” he declared. There was no specific cause he could name — no childhood trauma, no sexual abuse. There wasn’t alcoholism in his home, or violence. He wasn’t trying to hide anything, to cover a wrongdoing, to evade confusion about his sexuality.
— Michael Finkel, The Stranger In the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit
God is all-powerful, all-knowing, and completely free to act according to his own uncaused will — these are a few of the logical necessities that are essential to Christianity’s existence. Anthony Kronman, in his book Confessions of a Born-Again Pagan, argues that such axiomatic assumptions have long motivated the desire of Westerners to usurp the power and position of the God they invented. Modern science has dismissed the idea of free will as a superstitious relic of a pre-scientific age, but the quest for total knowledge of, and total control over, the universe still motivates us today. For at least a few centuries now, the assumption of the universe’s inherent intelligibility has never been seriously in question. If something can be experienced, it can be explained — in principle, if not immediately in practice. Nothing comes into existence uncaused, and if something seems to, it’s only because we don’t have enough of the surrounding jigsaw pieces of the causal context to fit around it. When we have all those pieces, we will no longer be at the mercy of forces beyond our control or understanding.
Yuval Noah Harari has written a new book precisely about this theme. In strict materialist fashion, he celebrates the possibility of humanity achieving Godhood through means of omniscience and omnipotence. Personal satisfaction, political disagreements, and even death itself are all seen as technical problems to be solved by means of increased scientific power wielded by enlightened elites. Begged questions abound, obviously — John Gray, for example, notes that if humans are to become gods, they are far more likely to resemble the polytheistic schemers of Olympus than billions of individuals melded into one unified suprahuman deity. And if society is to be reinvented along the lines of a beehive or anthill, it can be safely assumed that dissent will be treated as a neurochemical disorder, as pluralistic, democratic politics will be done away with due to their inefficiency. Harari is well aware that this eerily resembles Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, but if it wouldn’t be fair to say that he’s eagerly anticipating it, he’s at the very least resigned to it being inevitable.
In a world dominated by people who think like this, what makes someone like Knight so interesting is his passive defiance of such totalizing schemes. Like Bartleby the Scrivener, he seemingly just looked at life in society one day and decided “I would prefer not to.” People obviously looked for a psychological or neurological angle to explain Knight’s strange choice to simply walk away from civilization and live alone in the Maine woods for twenty-seven years — is he autistic? Schizoid? Angry? Depressed? There must be an intelligible cause! But as far as anyone has been able to tell, Knight simply did it because he felt like it. He knew what he was doing and made rational choices to cope with challenges along the way. One doesn’t have to be traditionally religious to feel delight at this apparent assertion of obstinate will, this flickering possibility of hope that maybe, just maybe, the world won’t be capable of being completely explained, mapped, dissected, perfected and predicted by omniscient experts. Maybe the possibility of radical freedom still exists, even if it has to hide in a tiny corner of the northern woods. It’s heartening to think that some mysterious something in human nature, perhaps even intrinsic to life itself, resists and evades control.
Doomsday scenarios are capturing the headlines at an accelerating rate. Scientists from all over the world tell us that emissions in 10 years must be half of what they were 10 years ago, or we face apocalypse. School children like Greta Thunberg and activist movements like Extinction Rebellion are demanding that we panic. And rightly so. But what should we do to avoid disaster?
Alan Watts once suggested that no one really believes in the reality of hell. It’s evident in their actions, he said, or, rather, in the lack thereof. If you saw your mother’s name on a list of people scheduled to be rounded up by the Gestapo, the immediacy of the threat would occupy your entire attention. You wouldn’t rest, you wouldn’t take no for an answer, you would do whatever it took to get her to safety, even over her objections. And yet, when it comes to the possibility or the likelihood of your unsaved mother facing an eternity of torment, you’re content to shrug if your tepid efforts at persuasion fail. If hell truly exists and promises to devour many if not most of your friends and loved ones, how could you simply go on about your business, complacent and unruffled?
Likewise, I doubt that many of our devout climatarians genuinely believe in the likelihood of an environmental “apocalypse,” let alone that “panic” would be a wise response; it’s just that the rising cost of positional goods requires higher rhetorical outlays. They seem to love the emotional/spiritual tension of the apocalyptic mindset, true, but Gaian retribution still seems like an abstract fantasy to them. They’re not going to retreat to the primitive living conditions of survivalist hermits, or to the impoverished economies of rural, medieval villages. They’re not going to sacrifice any of their modern conveniences. None of them honestly expect floods and tornadoes and wildfires to increasingly threaten their homes. To judge purely by their actions, it seems that climate change is of interest to them primarily as a means to “win” petty arguments online. An added bonus is that, as with thoughts of hellfire, it allows people of sour, curdled character to revenge themselves upon their enemies through imagination. “I told you so, but you wouldn’t listen, and now you’ll be sorry!” If some chemist ever finds a way to put that sentiment in pill form, the results will dwarf the opioid epidemic.
What is this joie de vivre that they talk about nowadays? Our hunger for God, our thirst of immortality, of survival, will always stifle in us this pitiful enjoyment of the life that passes and abides not. It is the frenzied love of life, the love that would have life to be unending, that most often urges us to long for death. “If it is true that I am to die utterly,” we say to ourselves, “then once I am annihilated the world has ended so far as I am concerned—it is finished. Why, then, should it not end forthwith, so that no new consciousnesses, doomed to suffer the tormenting illusion of a transient and apparential existence may come into being? If, the illusion of living being shattered, living for the mere sake of living or for the sake of others who are likewise doomed to die, does not satisfy the soul, what is the good of living? Our best remedy is death.” And thus it is that we chant the praises of the never-ending rest because of our dread of it and speak of liberating death.
…And they come seeking to deceive us with a deceit of deceits, telling us that nothing is lost, that everything is transformed, shifts and changes, that not the least particle of matter is annihilated, not the least impulse of energy is lost, and there are some who pretend to console us with this! Futile consolation! It is not my matter or my energy that is the cause of my disquiet, for they are not mine if I myself am not mine—that is, if I am not eternal. No, my longing is not to be submerged in the vast All, in an infinite and eternal Matter or Energy or in God; not to be possessed by God, but to possess Him, to become myself God, yet without ceasing to be I myself, I who am now speaking to you. Tricks of monism avail us nothing; we crave the substance and not the shadow of immortality.
— Miguel de Unamuno, Tragic Sense of Life
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That man desires immortality is understandable, but were it not for the influence of the Christian religion, it should never have assumed such a disproportionately large share of our attention. Instead of being a fine reflection, a noble fancy, lying in the poetic realm between fiction and fact, it has become a deadly earnest matter, and in the case of monks, the thought of death, or life after it, has become the main occupation of this life.
…Many people have substituted for this personal immortality, immortality of other kinds, much more convincing—the immortality of the race, and the immortality of work and influence. It is sufficient that when we die, the work we leave behind us continues to influence others and play a part however small, in the life of the community in which we live. We can pluck the flower and throw its petals to the ground and yet its subtle fragrance remains in the air. It is a better, more reasonable, and more unselfish kind of immortality. In this very real sense, may say that Louis Pasteur, Luther Burbank and Thomas Edison are still living among us. What if their bodies are dead, since “body” is nothing but an abstract generalization for a constantly changing combination of chemical constituents! Man begins to see his own life as a drop in an ever flowing river and is glad to contribute his part to the great stream of life. If he were only a little less selfish, he should be quite contented with that.
— Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living
****
However, in an entirely friendly spirit, I would like to take issue with Alan Harrington’s fascinating article “The Immortalist” (May 1969), on the desirability of abolishing death, and the possibility of doing so through medical techniques.
The immortalization of any biological individual runs into the same logistic problems as building indefinitely high skyscrapers: the lower floors are increasingly taken up with channels for elevators. It’s called “the law of diminishing returns.” A brain that continues intact for 100, 500, or 1,000 years is increasingly clogged with memories, and becomes like a sheet of paper so covered with writing that no space is left for any visible or intelligible form. Thus a human being 500 years old would be as inert as a turtle of the same age.
Consider the following points: (a) Death is not a sickness or disease; it is an event as natural and as healthy as childbirth or as the falling of leaves in the autumn. (b) As the “natural childbirth” obstetricians are training women to experience the pains of labor as erotic tensions, there is no reason why the “pangs of death” should not be reinterpreted as the ecstasies of liberation from anxiety and overloads of memory and responsibility. (c) Suppose that medical science achieves a method of getting rid of the overload of memories and anxieties: Isn’t this what death accomplishes already? (d) The funk about death is the illusion that you are going to experience everlasting darkness and nothingness as if being buried alive. (e) The “nothingness” after death is the same as the “nothingness” before you were born, and because anything that has happened once can happen again you will happen again as you did before, mercifully freed from the boredom of an overloaded memory.
Along with most of us, Alan Harrington doesn’t see that this “nothingness” before birth and after death is simply the temporal equivalent of, say, the space between stars. Where would stars be without spatial intervals between them? The problem is simply that civilized and brainwashed human beings lack the perception that we are all one Self, marvellously varied and indefinitely extended through time and space with restful intervals. As St. Thomas Aquinas said, “it is the silent pause which gives sweetness to the chant.”
— Alan Watts, The Collected Letters of Alan Watts
And we oughtn’t to be contrasting the imaginative, dreamy outlook of children with the realism and objectivity of adults. It is children who are the true realists: they never proceed from generalities. The adult recognizes the general form in a particular example, a representative of the species, dismisses everything else and states: that’s lilac, there’s an ash tree, an apple tree. The child perceives individuals, personalities. He sees the unique form, and doesn’t mask it with a common name or function. When you walk with children, they enable you to see the fabulous beasts in tree foliage, to smell the sweetness of blossoms. It isn’t a triumph of the imagination, but an unprejudiced, total realism. And Nature becomes instantly poetic. These outings are the absolute reign of childhood: You lose its charm in growing up, because you end by acquiring ideas and certainties about everything, and no longer want to know more of things than their objective representation (sadly called their ‘truth’).
— Fréderic Gros, A Philosophy of Walking
In his 1951 essay “The Negative Way,” Alan Watts also wrote about trees — specifically, the difference between our conceptual and linguistic ideas about them, and their immediate, mysterious reality:
Yet this world, this reality that we experience at every moment is Brahman. For example, I point to a tree and say, ”This is a tree.” Obviously this and tree are not actually the same thing. Tree is a word, a noise. It is not this experienced reality to which I am pointing. To be accurate, I should have said, “This (pointing to a tree) is symbolized by the noise tree.”
If, then, the real tree is not the word or the idea tree, what is it? If I say that it is an impression on my senses, a vegetable structure, or a complex of electrons, I am merely putting new sets of words and symbols in place of the original noise tree. I have not said what it is at all. I have also raised other questions: “What are my senses?” “What is a structure?” “What are electrons?” We can never say what these things are. We can symbolize them by sundry noises and patterns of thought. We can in turn, symbolize these noises by other noises — “Tree is a word,” or “A pattern of thought is an idea” — but this does not really explain anything. We still do not know what a tree, a word, a noise or an idea actually is. And yet we have experienced mysterious “somethings” which we have arbitrarily paired off with each other — the sight of the tree with the noise tree, the process of thinking with the noise idea, and the noises tree and idea with the noise words.
Human beings are very much bewitched by words and ideas. They forget that they are mere symbols. They tend to confuse them seriously with the real world that they only represent. The reason for this confusion is that the world of words and ideas seems to be relatively fixed and rational, whereas the real world is not fixed at all. Thus the world of words and ideas seems to be so much safer, so much more comprehensible than the real world. The word and idea tree has remained fixed currency for many centuries, but real trees have behaved in a very odd way. I can try to describe their behavior by saying that they have appeared and disappeared, that they have been in a constant state of change and that they flow in and out of their surroundings. But this does not really say what they have done, because disappear, change, flow, and surroundings are still noises representing something utterly mysterious.
Many rigorous thinkers would impatiently brush this off as pointless mysticism. Yes, yes, it’s all very strange, but humans are a tool-using animal, language and concepts are our most effective tools, and they don’t have to be perfect in order to be effective, they might harrumph. It doesn’t matter what it ultimately is, what matters is what we can do with it. And true enough, it’s impractical to try to inhabit this outlook for more than a few minutes at a time. But during those few minutes, I’ll be attentive toward this red-bellied woodpecker at my feeder. Like Stephen Pentz’s robin, I’ll reflect on this woodpecker as an individual, not a representative of a species. Like Brad Warner’s crow, I’ll contemplate how the same intelligence that looks out at the world through my eyes also looks back at me through the eyes of this woodpecker. “Why is there something rather than nothing?” may be the oldest philosophical question of all. “How wonderful that this, whatever it is, should be happening right now,” is only a slightly younger relative, I think. Watts sometimes called this, in a lighthearted manner, “the which than which there is no whicher.” Whatever it is, words would be the wrong tool for this job.
The “moment” is brokenly understood by moderns who assign it a hedonism of spirit, a false epicureanism. For the ancient Chinese poets, as Taoists or Buddhists, the moment is the instance of the Tao to be understood. It is to treasure the snow in winter and not long for the flowers of spring. It is to treasure the fruit of summer and not rue the coming autumn; it is to treasure the falling leaves of autumn and not reflect on the snows of winter. It is to appreciate the moment before it is gone and not to resent its passing, not to rue what is gone or what is to follow.
Alan Watts wrote about the way self-consciousness interferes with our ability to do this — “as when, in the midst of enjoying myself, I examine myself to see if I am getting the utmost out of the occasion. Not content with tasting the food, I am also trying to taste my tongue. Not content with feeling happy, I want to feel myself feeling happy—so as to be sure not to miss anything.” I recognized the reflection of my own restless monkey-mind in these words when I encountered them, but even now, two decades later, it hardly seems to have aged a day.
It has been a very busy, tiring week. Too often I found myself out of sorts, wanting to be somewhere else doing something else, even as I recognize that the grass will be just as dry and brown on that side of the fence too. In a moment of late-night reflection, I remind myself that if I can’t return to these necessary tasks in good humor tomorrow, when will I ever? What miracle do I imagine will come along and transform the tedium of everyday maintenance into playfulness? It will come from me or not at all. And yet, as Auden wrote:
We would rather be ruined than changed.
We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die.
If we do not know the ultimate reality, we stand in somewhat the same relation to it as blind men to color. If I am to describe color to a blind man, I can do it in one of two ways. I can tell him what color is like, or I can say what it is not. I cannot possibly tell him what it is. I can compare it to variations in temperature, speaking of red as “warm” and blue as “cold,” though this will perhaps mislead the blind man into thinking that red is warm. On the other hand, I can say that color is not hard or soft, round or square, liquid or solid. The danger here is that the blind man may easily suppose that I am talking about nothing, for I have denied to color every positive quality that he knows.
To some extent this is the difference between the religious doctrines of the West and the metaphysical doctrines of Asia. The former wants to say what reality is like, and the latter what it is not, but the average mind supposes that both are trying to say what it is. Hence the confusion.
— Alan Watts, “The Negative Way,” Alan Watts — In the Academy: Essays and Lectures
In one of my dictionaries, the French word animateur is defined as “one who is capable of simplifying difficult concepts for the benefit of a general audience.” (I’ve never seen this particular definition backed up by any other source, but never mind that.) As soon as I read it, I thought of Alan Watts. There are many things I love about Watts’s books, but his gift for explaining things in clear, memorable images is possibly the quality I love best.
The material in this book was compiled by a couple of scholars who feel that Watts has been given short shrift by academia for being a mere “popularizer.” The 45-page introduction struck me as an unnecessary justification of their efforts. Those who care more about credentials than substance will remain unimpressed. Watts was representative of the mid-20th century golden age of the middlebrow, when there was a widespread, optimistic belief that ordinary people would be interested in hearing philosophy and literature discussed in a straightforward manner, minus all the status-seeking and turf-defending common to intellectual life. I remember being at a library sale last fall and being greatly impressed by the quality of some of those old Book of the Month club publications. What a shame that that sort of aspiration became something to be embarrassed about, but what a joy it is to be reacquainted with it in this book.
As the kids like to say these days on their social medias and whatnot, “it me”:
I managed to restrain myself this week, though:
I find myself increasingly interested in biographies, and I haven’t read one of Orwell yet. A positive blurb on the jacket from John Gray convinced me that this one was worth three dollars and a couple evenings of my time. I’ve seen a few reviews of Setiya’s book about midlife, none of which made it seem compelling, but again, for a few dollars, I’m open to being surprised. And with a birthday coming later in the month, I’m particularly interested in reflections on this stage of life. I had never even heard of this book of Alan Watts’s scholarly output, and I’ve been searching out his writings ever since I first got online! This is why I love patronizing library sales in big cities with universities nearby.
There was a bit of discussion this week, kicked off by Kevin Mims in the NYT, and encompassing Jessica Stillman, Micah Mattix, and Patrick Kurp, with cameos from Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Umberto Eco, on the vexed question of having “too many” books, especially unread books. I like the idea of using a personal library as a research tool which requires unread books for future reference, though I fear my credentials as a scholar wouldn’t pass a cursory background check. “I’m sorry; you bought all of these to furnish material for…some blog posts?” Still, there is a large number of books that I wouldn’t necessarily want to read, but nevertheless find attractive. Some of them are just handsome objects, and I think they’d look sharp on my shelf. Others are attractive because they’re about some weird and wonderful topic that I had never thought of before, and it gladdens me to know that they exist. They’re like compact reminders of Hamlet’s admonishment to Horatio that the world is far more diverse and interesting than we typically realize, little portals to undreamt-of places scattered throughout space and time. In that sense, I could see myself being a devoted, if superficial, collector — “That one? Oh, I don’t know, I’ve never read it. I just think it’s great that someone wrote it, and besides, isn’t it nice to look at? Only cost me three dollars!” Perhaps the magpie, rather than the owl, should be my spirit animal.
I’m currently re-reading all of Alan Watts’ books, so it was especially interesting to discover that Bruce Lee was also a devotee of him. The only biography of Lee that I’ve read is Bruce Thomas’ Bruce Lee: Fighting Spirit, and a glance through the index reveals no mentions of Watts throughout the book. I suppose I’ll have to get a copy of John Little’s book as well.