About twelve, thirteen years ago I woke up in the middle of the night, rubbed my eyes, turned over, stretched out my right arm to grab my pillow and, instead, felt another hand, not my own, and I sure as hell knew that there hadn't been anybody else sleeping beside me when I crawled into bed, but there it was, the hand, and my fingers roamed downwards, against my will, and there was an arm attached to that hand, and I thought it was a dead body, was sure it was a dead body, until, suddenly, a strange but familiar tingling sensation emanated from this mysterious arm, transferring its energy into my own flesh, and I just about screamed before I realized that this energy was, in actuality, my energy, that this unknown arm was my arm, that my left arm was, in fact, asleep, and while it had felt like my left arm was align with my horizontal frame, that was a lie, a trick of the mind, because my left arm had actualy been lazily sprawled outwards, and now the feeling was coming back, not the gone-to-sleep feeling but the normal-arm feeling, and with it the realization there was only me in that bed, me and no corpse, and within moments the feeling was back, my arm was back, independent no more.
(Which made me kind of sad, because nobody likes to sleep alone.)
Tuesday, February 22, 2005
THE (NON-EXISTENT) BEST MOVE IN CHESS, or WHY ENVYING PAULY SHORE IS ACTUALLY A REALLY GOOD THING
How can we learn to know ourselves? Never by reflection, but by action. Try to do your duty and you will soon find out what you are. But what is your duty? The demands of each day.
-- Goethe
Unless you don't have a shred of empathy for your fellow human beings, living in a country like Cambodia forces you into some heavy-duty existential inquiries, most of them centred upon your own mobility as a reasonably healthy, reasonably wealthy westerner, crossing paths, on an hourly basis, with some of the poorest people on earth.
Why am I here? Why are they there? We inhabit this same earth, we breathe the same air, and we are all mortal. (To crib from J.F.K.) But we ain't equal. What's it all about?
I'm reading this book right now called The Doctor & the Soul: From Psychotherapy to Logotherapy by Viktor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor and creator of logotherapy, which essentially puts the 'soul' into psychological therapy. It's very readable, understandable, credible. All the answers you need to know about life's problems in three hundred pages. And for three-fifty American.
A precis:
1) Why are we here?
As Neil Peart, the brilliant drummer and lyricist from the Canadian rock band Rush put it: "Why are here? Because we're here. Roll the bones."
In other words, we are here to do the tasks before us. Period. If we have a task before us, a task worth doing, then we have found our meaning and purpose in life.
2) Why is life not giving me what I want?
The question is phrased backwards; it is not what life is not giving us -- it's what we are not giving life.
We tend to view life as this swimming pool that we're wading through -- not even swimming, usually, just wading, as if it's separate from us, as if it is remote from us.
When things go wrong, we lash out at life itself.
Ain't gonna work, according to Frankl.
It is not what we are demanding from life that's crucial -- it's what life is demanding from us. What are we putting back into the biosphere? What are we not living up to? When you invert the question, the onus comes back to us, and our own responsibilities towards those around us.
3) What if I consider myself a loser, a has-been, a good-for-nothing yahoo who makes
Pauly Shore look like Kofi Annan?
Not to worry, says Frankl. Feeling this depressed and wretched is actually a good thing.
Why?
It's proof that you have an ideal in your head, an image, an oasis of sucess and prosperity that eludes you.
Ah, but the image is there, you see. It exists. It emanated from inside of you.
And once you have that kind of picture in place, you now have a task before you -- the
ideal that you wish to move towards. If you have a task, you can now have a responsibility. If you have a responsibility, you can take action. You may not ever reach those ideals, but
so what? You know what they are, and you know what you're striving towards.
4) What's the meaning of life?
I now quote Frankl, 'cause he's more educated than me. He didn't watch as many episodes of Who's the Boss or Growing Pains as I did, no, but his analysis still tops my paraphrasing:
...In the light of existential analysis there is no such thing as a generally valid and universally binding life task. From this point of view the question of "the" task in life or "the" meaning of life is -- meaningless. It reminds us of the question a reporter asked a grandmaster in chess. "And now tell me, maestro -- what is the best move in chess?" Neither question can be answered in a general fashion, but ony in regard to a particular situation and person. The chess master, if he took the question seriously, would have had to reply: "A chess-player must attempt, within the limits of his ability and within the limits imposed by his opponent, to make the best move at any given time." Two points must be stressed here. First, "within the limits of his ability"; that is to say, the inner state, what we call temperament, must be taken into consideration. And, secondly, the player can only "attempt" to make a move which is best in a concrete situation in the game -- that is, in relation to a specific configuration of the pieces. If he set out from the start with the intention of making the best move in an absolute sense, he would be tormented by eternal doubts and endless self-criticism, and would at best overstep the time limit and forfeit the game...To ask the meaning of life in general terms is to put the question falsely because it refers vaguely to "life" and not concretely to "each person's own' existence...
Couldn't have said it better myself.
All the answers to life, it seems, in the paragraph above.
So:
Life is meaningless, pointless, filled with endless human suffering -- a logical conclusion, after almost two years in Cambodia.
Ah, but there is no such thing as 'life' -- there is his life, and her life, and your life, and that guy over there's life.
There is a person, at a point in time, in a specific place. The meaning is found based on the specific tasks faced before them. If they have the means to radically invigorate their life, this could be known as creative. If they are stuck there, against their will, this could be experiential. If their situation is terminal or life-threatening, it is attitudinal. Even when you have nothing at all left in life, when you're on your way to the gas chambers, as Frankl was, you still have the ability to judge how you react to it; you still have the capacity to choose your view.
Impossible to boil life's insanity down to all of these platitudes, isn't it?
But they makes sense to me.
They have a form and a shape, Frankl's words, that I can grasp.
They allow the petty demands of each day to acquire a meaning and resonance that not only explains life, but justifies it, too, allowing all of our duties and actions to be seen as what they are: expressions of will, and grace, and direction.
-- Goethe
Unless you don't have a shred of empathy for your fellow human beings, living in a country like Cambodia forces you into some heavy-duty existential inquiries, most of them centred upon your own mobility as a reasonably healthy, reasonably wealthy westerner, crossing paths, on an hourly basis, with some of the poorest people on earth.
Why am I here? Why are they there? We inhabit this same earth, we breathe the same air, and we are all mortal. (To crib from J.F.K.) But we ain't equal. What's it all about?
I'm reading this book right now called The Doctor & the Soul: From Psychotherapy to Logotherapy by Viktor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor and creator of logotherapy, which essentially puts the 'soul' into psychological therapy. It's very readable, understandable, credible. All the answers you need to know about life's problems in three hundred pages. And for three-fifty American.
A precis:
1) Why are we here?
As Neil Peart, the brilliant drummer and lyricist from the Canadian rock band Rush put it: "Why are here? Because we're here. Roll the bones."
In other words, we are here to do the tasks before us. Period. If we have a task before us, a task worth doing, then we have found our meaning and purpose in life.
2) Why is life not giving me what I want?
The question is phrased backwards; it is not what life is not giving us -- it's what we are not giving life.
We tend to view life as this swimming pool that we're wading through -- not even swimming, usually, just wading, as if it's separate from us, as if it is remote from us.
When things go wrong, we lash out at life itself.
Ain't gonna work, according to Frankl.
It is not what we are demanding from life that's crucial -- it's what life is demanding from us. What are we putting back into the biosphere? What are we not living up to? When you invert the question, the onus comes back to us, and our own responsibilities towards those around us.
3) What if I consider myself a loser, a has-been, a good-for-nothing yahoo who makes
Pauly Shore look like Kofi Annan?
Not to worry, says Frankl. Feeling this depressed and wretched is actually a good thing.
Why?
It's proof that you have an ideal in your head, an image, an oasis of sucess and prosperity that eludes you.
Ah, but the image is there, you see. It exists. It emanated from inside of you.
And once you have that kind of picture in place, you now have a task before you -- the
ideal that you wish to move towards. If you have a task, you can now have a responsibility. If you have a responsibility, you can take action. You may not ever reach those ideals, but
so what? You know what they are, and you know what you're striving towards.
4) What's the meaning of life?
I now quote Frankl, 'cause he's more educated than me. He didn't watch as many episodes of Who's the Boss or Growing Pains as I did, no, but his analysis still tops my paraphrasing:
...In the light of existential analysis there is no such thing as a generally valid and universally binding life task. From this point of view the question of "the" task in life or "the" meaning of life is -- meaningless. It reminds us of the question a reporter asked a grandmaster in chess. "And now tell me, maestro -- what is the best move in chess?" Neither question can be answered in a general fashion, but ony in regard to a particular situation and person. The chess master, if he took the question seriously, would have had to reply: "A chess-player must attempt, within the limits of his ability and within the limits imposed by his opponent, to make the best move at any given time." Two points must be stressed here. First, "within the limits of his ability"; that is to say, the inner state, what we call temperament, must be taken into consideration. And, secondly, the player can only "attempt" to make a move which is best in a concrete situation in the game -- that is, in relation to a specific configuration of the pieces. If he set out from the start with the intention of making the best move in an absolute sense, he would be tormented by eternal doubts and endless self-criticism, and would at best overstep the time limit and forfeit the game...To ask the meaning of life in general terms is to put the question falsely because it refers vaguely to "life" and not concretely to "each person's own' existence...
Couldn't have said it better myself.
All the answers to life, it seems, in the paragraph above.
So:
Life is meaningless, pointless, filled with endless human suffering -- a logical conclusion, after almost two years in Cambodia.
Ah, but there is no such thing as 'life' -- there is his life, and her life, and your life, and that guy over there's life.
There is a person, at a point in time, in a specific place. The meaning is found based on the specific tasks faced before them. If they have the means to radically invigorate their life, this could be known as creative. If they are stuck there, against their will, this could be experiential. If their situation is terminal or life-threatening, it is attitudinal. Even when you have nothing at all left in life, when you're on your way to the gas chambers, as Frankl was, you still have the ability to judge how you react to it; you still have the capacity to choose your view.
Impossible to boil life's insanity down to all of these platitudes, isn't it?
But they makes sense to me.
They have a form and a shape, Frankl's words, that I can grasp.
They allow the petty demands of each day to acquire a meaning and resonance that not only explains life, but justifies it, too, allowing all of our duties and actions to be seen as what they are: expressions of will, and grace, and direction.
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