Diarrhea of the Mind
The
highly respected staff writer and book critic for The New Yorker James Wood said something to the inveterate book
lover Michael Silverblatt on a Bookworm podcast
interview that called out for a spiritual musing. I don’t remember the exact
words, but in essence he said, ‘When an
apprentice gets hurt on a job, there’s an old saying that the trade is entering
his body,’ which instantly reminded me of Leo Tolstoy’s comment about
writing his novels in his own blood, as illustrated by the oft-quoted line from
his tragic novel Anna Karenina:
"All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own
way.”
In effect, we pay for the gnostic
wisdom of our life’s path, which I can vouchsafe with the blood I spilled
(literally and metaphorically) learning my own trade of drywall taping and
painting (my vocation) and the craft of creative writing (my avocation); but as
I listened to James Wood talking about literature, which for him was the
closest thing to religion, I got the same feeling that I got listening to
another iconic literary critic, Professor Harold Bloom, that literature wasn’t
enough to satisfy our longing for wholeness and completeness; and an old
quandary popped into my mind, the existential dilemma of modern life.
I cannot for the life of me get a
read on Social Media, especially the daily posts on my Facebook feed that
desperately cry out for attention like an Andy Warhol painting, as if the more “Likes”
one gets on their posts the more relevant they will be to the universe, and I
cannot fathom whether society is overwhelmed with too much existential reality or
too little, and I keep asking myself: are we drowning in the deep end of the
pool of life, or in the shallow end? Has our life become a reality show for
Social Media, an endless quotidian stream of routine everyday living like the Norwegian
writer Karl Ove Knausgaard’s “hypnotically spellbinding” (James Wood’s words) six
volume autobiographical novel My Struggle?
I cannot tell, and I have to explore my quandary in today’s spiritual musing.
But in all humility, I don’t know where to begin, and I have to call upon my
Muse to assist me…
I woke up this morning with a spiritually
fatiguing issue on my mind, the archaic mediaeval face-covering niqab and burqa
apparel that a minority of Muslim women insist on wearing for “religious
reasons,” a politically sensitive issue that has polarized the people of Quebec,
and I can’t help but feel that this is my entry into my musing; but what does
it mean?
I’ve already written a spiritual
musing on this issue (“A Tempest in a Teapot,” which I’ve included in The Armchair Guru, my fourth volume of
spiritual musings), and I could quote it here and make my point about our
journey through life much easier; but I feel I have to explore my quandary from
a new angle for a more contemporary perspective, and the only way to do that
would be to revisit my feelings on the dilemma of the irreconcilable outer and inner
journey of our life, the conflicted nature of our being and non-being.
What I’m getting from Social
Media is an endless stream of information on the outer journey of contemporary life,
that aspect of society’s preoccupation with the existential dimension of reality—politics
(sexual harassment is the hot topic of the day), entertainment, religious
beliefs, personal relationships, nostalgic memorabilia, always new selfies and
endless recipes and health tips and cartoonish re-posts and other trivia, what
in his creative genius the writer of his own contemporary world John Updike
would have called “lower gossip” were he on Social Media, leaving one with the strongest
impression that this fleeting life is all we have and we’d better make the most
of it, and dread possesses everyone.
Life has been sped up beyond
comprehension with ever-advancing digital technology, and whatever happens “out
there” is instantly vented (and vetted) on Social Media, giving one the nauseous
feeling that “the world is too much with us,” as Wordsworth wrote in his eponymous
poem in the materialistic throes of the First Industrial Revolution more than two
hundred years ago: another vicious terrorist attack and raging forest fires in Southern
California and consequent social upheaval that’ll take years to recover from,
blaming religious zealotry, climate change, and recalcitrant karmic obtuseness;
every day a new catastrophe, the world going to hell much more quickly than anyone
expected, and we grasp at life a little tighter as writers like Knausgaard vainly
try to make sense of the human condition: the outer becoming the inner and the
inner the outer, a never-ending dialectic of self-individuation teleologically
driven to personal wholeness and completeness but never quite getting there.
After listening to James Wood on Bookworm (who, incidentally, helped
launch Karl Ove Knausgard’s career in the states with his optimistic review of the
first volume of My Struggle), engaging
in his charismatic erudition but no less disappointing than the great Professor
Bloom’s sublime nihilism, I listened to Michael Silverblatt talking with the
new literary genius of Infinite Jest and
messianic hope for literature before Knausgaard came along with My Struggle, David Foster Wallace, who also
could not find a way to reconcile his outer and inner journey and was driven to
suicide at the age of 46 to end the pain of his existential dilemma and
crippling depression, I shook my head and said, in comic jest, “It’s all a
pouring from the empty into the void.” Actually, the phrase that came to me
was, “diarrhea of the mind.” But I took creative
liberties, because that’s what writers tend to do.
——
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