Thirteen Ways of Looking at Twilight—10
A man woke up one morning tired of being himself. Bone tired. Carrying around all that baggage, and even worse, beginning to realize he was not the person he had long assumed he was, and thinking: “Who can I be if I’m not him?”
A new self with a fresh self-justifying story, or a patched-up version of the old?—like battling entropy with an old car, or a needy house. The man was, to his credit, too honest for either the evasion of the first, or the futility of the second.
He yearned for something else.
What is it about human nature that begs to be overcome? What is it in the human soul that longs to be transformed into something beyond itself? Whatever it is, it is the basis of all transcendental philosophy or religion. A declining to associate biological death with consciousness. An insistence on the paradox of being human.
The problem—or you might say, the solution—is that the perspective of being outside yourself is possible only if “you” don’t exist. I think we can all agree there is something rather than nothing—when you add it all up you call it “everything”—an infinite pool of possibility, a primordial plasma from which all things rear up into temporal existence. The distinction between real and potential is like that between mass and energy—there is no loss when the real sinks into the soup again. Realizing this is true of yourself gets rid of “you” and sets free whatever’s left.
You can’t both be in something and observe it from without. Consider the Big Bang—if you could have been there to witness it. But where? The only where at the Big Bang was the Big Bang. There was nowhere to stand, nowhere to put the camera. Imagining being outside of something confirms that you’re in it.
Transcendence cannot be a maintenance of self, but a return to the plasma. It’s only natural for people to grow tired of themselves as they age—I mean, how long can you really keep this up? So how in the world do certain religions come up with the idea of an afterlife where you are still you? You don’t even get that during your life. They must have glossed over that key line in their guiding text: “Whoever shall seek to save his life shall lose it; and whosoever shall lose his life shall preserve it.” (Luke 17:33 KJV). The human paradox. We are blocked from the infinitude of the pool as long as we hold onto ourselves. The problem, as I said, is that we get tired of ourselves.
Don’t get me wrong: being human is pretty wonderful. You get to be a part that enjoys the illusion of being separate from the whole. It’s a gift, an extraordinary adventure, and proof that God loves a good story, Even if it’s fated to become an unbearable weight, when “you” will long for the ecstatic dissolving of ego and a return to the oneness it only seemed to have left. How foolish to want to retain forever that which is most ecstatic to lose.
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I have contemplated Rainer Maria Rilke’s sonnet “Archaic Torso of Apollo” over the years, trying to grasp the connection between the body of the poem, and the famous concluding line—“du muβt dein Leben ändern” (“you must change your life”)—one of those haunting lines of verse that won’t leave my brain. The body of the poem describes the poet’s unaccountable feelings while gazing at all that is left, the torso, of a statue of that Übermensch, Apollo. He is confronted with an incomplete representation of the complete man that contains the essence of the whole. They aren’t physically there, but he can feel the radiant eyes, the burning energy within, and knows his own self falls short and is laid bare: “Here there is no place that does not see you.”
The statue has moved from a lower to a higher ratio of spirit to matter. More effect than object. In fact, the thing can crumble away until the effect is all. The creative inspiration of the statue, and its creative effect, are the same energy—preceding and succeeding the life of the material object.
The poet experiences a lucid moment of being both in and outside himself, reflected in the synthesis we expect from the conclusion of a sonnet—in this case, a fantastic leap.
The poet’s ratio of separation to oneness is out of joint, and there is only one conclusion.
You must change your life.
June 15, 2022