Being sick though, comes with its gifts as well. For one thing, the process of recuperation deeply changes your relationship to time, so that, if your relationship with that mysterious entity is usually one of animosity and struggle, well you can give that up right now, because there's no way back to health but to accept time as an ally and friend and to let it pass over you like the waves of the surf or like the notes of a chant. You see, all of that activity and motion that normally places you in opposition to time and in rebellion against the limits of time—I mean the shopping and the bank errands, the driving here and there, the business meetings, the busy ins and outs of your professional life—you have to give this all up, along with the can-do attitude and the bravado of control. You are no longer the “manager” of your time. Time is no longer yours to control. It is no resource of yours. It is its own master and always has been. You must give yourself up to time. Your assignment is to lie back under the blanket and be. It is to give yourself up to the taskless task of recuperation, the laborless labor of healing.
And what I'm saying is that the general experience of lying back and letting the office be an office without you, letting the dirty laundry stay dirty laundry and the cooking stay uncooked—all this has the power to connect us once again with the basic rhythms of the world. And here I mean the sort of world we knew in childhood, in which everything seemed to come with a mysterious signature of its own, which maybe you could not decipher directly or comprehend completely, but which you knew had meaning. Lying there in bed (quietly, receptively, as you did in childhood perhaps waiting for sleep) you hear the traffic outdoors and it communicates something to you. No longer is it faceless and random. Instead it feels like a presence in its own right, full of expressive thought; that stray flick of gravel thrown from the tire says something definite and true, equal absolutely to itself. Or as you watch the sunlight slanting in through the picture window, noting how it changes its slant slowly from hour to hour, somehow the slow fact of its motion fills you with gratefulness and with the simple two words “how beautiful.”
Other transformations unfold themselves, like angels of Van Eyck opening their peacock-rainbow wings. When I was ten years old, and sick with pneumonia, convalescing in an old house (in a town without birches called Birch Run) my mother's houseplants gained character and charisma and presence and soul as I sat with them hour after hour trying to breath: I remember the Hindu rope, complexly knotted with leaves a marbled green and white. And the Christmas cactus, saying "It's December again," in the language of curly shrimp-like flowers. The philodendron that climbed any stick. The rubber plant that bled an immaculate white latex when cut—all these together arranged themselves into a sort of living choir of contemplation, whose song consisted of the modulations of silence—a silence comparable to the one I have savored over the course of my illness here at Sunnyside in the company of my own plant collection: my delicate ivies, my bushy quartet of Norfolk pines, a gnarled jade that used to belong to my mother, and all the rest I love.
It is the great mental tragedy of our wasteful and consumptive times that we take nothing seriously unless we can place it outside ourselves, and doll it up as a metaphysical stranger to us; a not-me that we can comfortably measure with a stick and with properly placed numbers. This mulish reductionism, this tragedy of apartness from the inner truth of things, this puniness of heart, this obsession with surfaces, this insistence on the enoughness of the artificial, this scorn of the imagination, this neurotic turning of our backs on our own inner life, this perpetual epistemology of doubt, this distrust of the competence of the human mind (even a child's!) to place itself in the universe accurately, and to assess the meaning of its life in relationship with that universe: all this is tragic in the deepest sense. For it is was and is preventable.
It is time once again for us all to say, along with Hamlet, that great saint of the Universal-Inward: “Here I am! I am not nothing! I am a mind! I am a will! I am a perceiving soul! A powerful angel of awareness! A stubborn barnacle of thought upon the heaving ship of the infinite!” I am sick of people estimating their minds too low. I am tired of people enslaving themselves to convictions that an intelligent dog would not believe, namely that we have no will, that we are machines, that Consciousness itself—the Thing without which there would in fact be nothing—is, of all things, an illusion! An accidental illusory squirt. A poor and dismissible ghost in the neural machine. These convictions are, in fact, not only questionable, but very unlikely to be true. They are violently extreme. They certainly do not conform to common sense, and the metaphysics on which they are based is perplexed with self-contradictions.
And yet again, these pronouncements and estimations of the non-existence of our thoughts are treated as self-evident axioms by people who ought to know better than not to doubt their axioms. Furthermore anyone who does dare to doubt them is dismissed as a throwback to a mathematical Frenchman who sited the soul in the pituitary gland. I am frankly sick of this. I am sick of investigators who never examine their metaphysics. Sick of researchers in neurology and biology who have never considered the perfectly obvious possibility that consciousness might be a primary phenomenon like Time or Space; after all, some of the best physicists (nearly a century ago now!) led by the redoubtable Neils Bohr considered consciousness in the informative act of observation to be the best explanation for how so many interesting and perplexing things happen in the world of the very small. How so much information seems to gets around.
You may think I am getting off my original subject. I assure you I am not. I am on the subject of sickness and health. And here is what I wonder: I wonder if we may need to lie down as a civilization in order to see again, as I needed to lie down in my sickness in order to wake up once again to the speech of the world. I wonder whether our rationalist reductionist materialist take on the world is so far off of the accurate balance that it might be possible to say that we are insane and that our civilization is insane. And again there is no fix but to lie down and "see feelingly" toward a new vision of ourselves and our relationship with the earth.
I think all this is very possible.
Consider after all what our civilization produces. We base our economy on consumption, and so very thoroughly does the practice of consumption rule our world that it can be said that the two most plentiful products of our civilization are waste heat and garbage. That is what we make. Overwhelmingly! Waste heat and garbage! And a poisoned, wasted earth is the outward sign of our “progress” in this endeavor. And in our work of consumption, who are our most intimate and powerful allies but our machines? Our combustion engines and refrigerators, our conveyor belts and lasers, our computers programmed to speculate and sell in order to fan the flames of consumption.
And tell me, dear Reader: is there no connection, none, between how we have thought of ourselves these past two or three centuries of the industrial age, and what we and our machines have made of our world? No connection between the destruction we have wrought with our machines upon the earth, and our insistence that we ourselves are machines, and that the earth we inhabit is a machine? A stranger-machine at that, an enemy machine, a competitor that we must master and overwhelm?
And is it not possible to say that, in this regard, we are insane?
Surely it's time to dismantle this metaphor. Time to lie down and think of other metaphors until the machine-mind evaporates away. Time to look inward to consider a world choked with the beauty of inwardness. With texts that can be read inwardly by us. And read with joy and reverence and sympathy and love.
We are living beings. As is the earth. As is the magical universe itself, that has given rise to us, its children. We are not simply piles of separable parts keeping time. Furthermore our minds are capable of intent. And our intentions culminate and find their most burning accurate center in acts of tenderness, imagination, and love. We can give freely of ourselves! Without reference to the machine! We can speak the word "love," and know what it means and know what it costs, and then not just say it, but make it happen—love. We can dare to say “beauty is what I inwardly see, and infinity too, in the green context of my home the earth, where the fishes swim and the birds take to the air joyously and fly, and nothing can take the reality of beauty from me, nor the infinity of the inward: no not all the reductionist fantasies of “here you are, we've got you, we've pinned you down, little mechanical-computational human being, and you are nothing really, nothing that cannot be explained, or at the least explained away.”
Again, in the words of William Blake the poet and engraver, “We become what we behold.” Thus if we see ourselves as nothing more than computational machinery, and measure everything around us as machinery, we will inevitably become like machinery ourselves: Thoughtless. Inwardly impoverished. Incapable of change or mindful attention, and above all, less given to the practice of love. And in hewing to this vision we will destroy ourselves. There is no question about this. All we need do is look around us and see what that vision of the machine has, over the past three centuries, wrought upon our home the earth. To continue in this path is true insanity. A deep sickness from which we must all awake!
It is a curious and almost inexplicable habit of human beings to enslave themselves to their own metaphors, until they forget they ever made them up, and therefore have the power to change them. But! If we change our metaphors, we change our minds; we behold something new.
So. What will our new metaphor be? Shall we be living beings again with souls? Gardeners of the earth? Guardians of the planet? Crafters of beauty? Lovers of the birds of the air and the fish of the sea, able to speak to them all? Well then! That will not be the end of it, for the world that we inhabit will change as well. And the beauty and the scale of that change will be extraordinary. It will be a beauty, the likes of which we cannot at present even conceive.
This is what I believe.
HB
Next Post Friday, January 9!
