The Mathematics of Life
Over coffee in my
writing den this morning, Penny and I shared our dreams and tried to decode
their message (like C. G. Jung, we both believe that “dreams are the guiding
words of the soul”); and in the course of our discussion my transcendent
function (what Jung called “superior insight”) kicked in, and I was given a
magnificent metaphor to help explain my literary hero’s dilemma.
I had just
finished re-reading his book The Western
Cannon and was well into my second reading of his book The Daemon Knows, and Professor Harold Bloom’s dilemma was fresh in
my mind and which just happened to relate to Penny’s dream and mine because
they both spoke to the guiding words of our “superior insight.”
Penny’s dream was
about someone stealing her Singer sewing machine. A man had put it into his
yellow truck and was driving away and Penny shouted, “Hey, that’s my sewing
machine!” And in my dream I had just written five or six pages of a new story
which I was showing to an old acquaintance from my home town, and the first
line of my story said: “He was different.”
My story was
autobiographically inspired, and I knew what my narrator meant by the first
sentence—true to Hemingway’s literary aesthetic to begin every story with “one
true sentence”, as Penny vouchsafed with her comment, “You’re different, alright!”— I let my old acquaintance read the
first few pages of my story because I wanted to introduce him to the mystery
that eluded the great literary scholar Professor Harold Bloom his entire
life—the mystery of the secret way of life implicit to the archetypal impulse of
all literature, the secret of our becoming.
I saw Penny’s
dream as a good sign, the yellow truck symbolizing the mobility of Divine
Spirit (yellow is always associated with the spiritual dimension of life), and
I saw her sewing machine as a symbol for “stitching things up,” which Penny has
been doing all of her life (a metaphor for always making do), so I said to her:
“That’s a good dream. Your unconscious is telling you that you won’t have to
stitch things up anymore. It augurs good fortune, believe it or not.”
True to her
sceptical nature, Penny just looked at me quizzically, but I didn’t explain further
because symbolic dreams take a while to sink in; and my dream also augured well
for me because I’ve been called back to creative writing and am working on a
new book of stories with a conscious guiding principle—the resolution to man’s
existential dilemma that literature cannot seem to conjure; and giving the
first few pages of my new story to an old acquaintance (a retired grocer) who
wanted to read them, my dream was telling me that my stories will find public
consumption; that’s how Professor Harold Bloom popped into the picture.
As Professor Bloom
came to see with terrifying clarity, literature is all about individuation, the
realization of self-identity—his best example at the center of his cannon being
Shakespeare’s conflicted Prince of Denmark, which he expounds upon in Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human,
and with deeper conviction in Hamlet:
Poem Unlimited; but in the American bard Walt Whitman, Professor Bloom
found his most eloquent and poignant expression of individuation, especially in
Whitman’s signature poem “Song of Myself” which Bloom described as “a psychic
cartography of three components in each of us: soul, self, and real me or me
myself.”
The great tragedy
of literature and personally for Professor Harold Bloom who suffers from what
he calls a “beautiful kind of nihilism,” is that literature cannot resolve the
three aspects of man’s nature—soul, self, and real me or me myself; and that’s
what Penny and I discussed this morning over coffee, because the central theme
of all my books has to do with reconciling the three aspects of our nature.
“The unconscious
is neutral. It’s neither good nor bad, neither right nor wrong; it just is what
it is, a magnificent process of becoming,” I said to Penny this morning. “Let me give you a metaphor to explain what I
mean. This is what Professor Bloom figured out about literature, but he got stuck
in the labyrinth of his own brilliant mind and can’t find his way out. Let’s
consign a number to every variable of life. Let’s say one experience is
consigned a number, and another experience, thing, thought, idea, or emotion are
all consigned a number. Let’s say that all of life is mathematical in nature,
which is what the philosopher Pythagoras believed; so when the variables of our
life are put together in a certain many, there will be a mathematical truth to them.
One plus three plus seven has to equal eleven. That’s a mathematical certainty.
That’s life in a nutshell. It just is. But we have free will. We are primarily
responsible in how we arrange the variables of our life, and when added up
these variables make up who we are, the mathematical certainty of our life if
you will. But what if we get stuck in our life and can’t move on? What happens
then?”
“Life can get
pretty boring,” Penny said, and laughed.
“Yes, or really
sad,” I added. “This is where I part company with my hero Professor Bloom,
because I happen to believe in an omniscient guiding principle of life that
comes to help us get unstuck. That’s what my book The Merciful Law of Divine Synchronicity is all about. And I think
this was the message of our dreams last night; yours to get you unstuck from
your fear of always having to make do, and mine confirming my call to writing
stories now to expand my literary horizons.”
“I’ve been telling
you that for years,” Penny said, with a big smile.
“I know,
sweetheart; but you know me, I have to do what I have to do to do what I’m
called to do. That’s why I’m different.”
“You’re different, alright!” Penny said, and laughed
again.
——
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