CHAPTER 14
The Existential Conundrum
Professor Harold Bloom
brought me to tears, again. For all of his literary genius, he could not transcend
the existential paradigm that burdened him with the unbearable anxiety of
unknowing; and by the logic of his own wisdom, drawn primarily from his
unbelievably expansive knowledge of literature, he resigned himself to the
Shakespearean inspired injunction to bear his life with equanimity, because he
could not complete the work that
Rabbi Tarphon’s injunction said he should not desist from doing; that’s why I
was brought to tears again when I listened to the Harold Bloom Interview on RTE on YouTube the other day, his voice
so full of longing that my heart went out to him, as it did to professor Jordan
Peterson who was also up against the wall of his own unknowing. Here’s professor
Bloom:
“William Hazlitt
got it right, it is we who are Hamlet; women and men alike, we are all of us
Hamlet. We are all of us, our mind struggling with the prospect, with the imminence
or delayed, of annihilation. The rest is indeed silence for him, because he
knows that whether you take the rest as remainder or as solace and sleep,
that’s all there is, silence. But then, I differ from most people who write
about Shakespeare these days. I think
that ultimately the elliptical burden of what he gives us is a breathtaking
kind of nihilism more uncanny than anything that Nietzsche apprehended. I
think in the end he, among so much else, (is) telling us that there are no
values, or value except those that we create or imbue events, people, or things
with. Emerson beautifully said, no world; there is no next world. Here and now
is the whole fact. And I think Hamlet understands that very well indeed that
here and now is the whole fact; or (in) that beautiful phrase, is it a Victor
Hugo that the sublime Walter Pater repeats? ‘We have an interval and then our
place knows us no more.’ But that I think is what the highest literature is
finally about. I tell my students that appreciation, to use Pater’s wonderful
word, is what I think our stance towards the highest imaginative literature
should be, and that what we have to appreciate are the only values that matter
in the highest literature, which are cognitive and aesthetic values quite cut
off from societal and even historical considerations. Immanuel Kant, I think it
was in the first Critique, says that
time and space are indeed appearances and therefore in a sense illusory. But
nevertheless, he says there is something numinal, there is something permanent
in these appearances, and I think you don’t need Kant if you have Shakespeare.
Of course, Hamlet, among so much else, is telling you that. Our yearning is at
least transcendental…”
What a conundrum! Good old Bloom, doomed by his own
logic to be but an interval in time and space and then to be no more but whose
yearning for the transcendental cannot be sated by literature, resigning himself
to take the rest of his life as it comes, bearing it with equanimity; but what’s
the difference from Bloom’s resignation and Camus’s “one must imagine Sisyphus
happy”? Both have imprisoned themselves in the same existential paradigm of
meaninglessness and absurdity, and it doesn’t matter if one bears life with
equanimity or imagines Sisyphus happy, Sterling Professor of the Humanities or
Nobel Laureate of Literature, one will never satisfy the longing in their soul for
wholeness and completeness until they find a way out of the conundrum that man
is born into. This is the dilemma that inspired a spiritual musing that I
posted on my blog Saturday, January 27,
2018:
A Way Out of the Darkness
I’ve
been steered in this direction for quite some time now, and I went online the
other day to research David Foster Wallace, who wrote the novel Infinite Jest that stirred up the
literary world with the promise of a new literary light, but DFW committed
suicide on September 12, 2008 at the
age of 46, just when he was coming onto his own as a writer, and I wrote a poem
to air out my feelings on this literary genius:
Deeper and deeper
into the mix,
he’s the zeitgeist
behind the chaos
of a tortured
mind, exposing himself
like a
trench-coated compulsive proudly
showing himself to
strangers, an aberrant
tick, never
telling us why he is this way
(wearing a bandana
because he can’t stop
perspiring), only
doing what he must do to
satisfy his
self-obsession. DFW, what a
genius, what
prophetic wizardry, what a
tortured soul you
are; no wonder you chose
to exit to the
other side, this world was too
much for your
rapacious mind to process,
resolve, and
understand, a joke, an infinite
jest; but your
light will continue to shine
until another
light shines brighter, and
there will always
be another light from
the eternal fire
of man’s struggle, a
new zeitgeist for
a new time, for
such is the way of
literature.
In David Foster
Wallace, I saw the dilemma of life writ large, the same dilemma that Albert Camus
(about whom I had recently heard on CBC’s Ideas,
asserting to how much influence his philosophy still has in the world today)
explored in The Myth of Sisyphus, the
dilemma of man’s inner and outer self; and despite his literary genius, which
was acknowledged by most critics who reviewed Infinite Jest (he also received a “genius grant” from the MacArthur
Foundation in 1997), David Foster Wallace, who saw life as a joke not unlike
the fate of Sisyphus, was unable to resolve the dilemma that finally drove him
to suicide, a fate that Camus considered to be the only truly serious
philosophical problem; an act or courage, or desperation?
Of course, they
blamed it on his life-long depression for which he took medication; but despite
all the medication and therapy that he received for clinical depression and
drug and alcohol addiction (which were central to Infinite Jest), he still got swallowed up by his shadow and hung
himself to put an end to his suffering, which leads to today’s spiritual
musing—that aspect of human consciousness that is responsible for inducing the
insufferable conviction that life is meaningless and absurd, that dreaded state
of consciousness that we all experience at one time or another in life as our
own nothingness, and which in literature was given the most exquisite expression
by Macbeth’s much-too-blithely quoted, “Life
is a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothing.”
This is not an
easy state of consciousness to apprehend, let alone explain; but it’s felt by
anyone who suffers from life-long depression, like David Foster Wallace. And
even those who do not suffer from deep depression experience it, because this
state of consciousness defines the dark shadow side of our personality. But
herein lies the quandary, because who wants to believe that our shadow self is
real? It’s much easier to repress our dark shadow self than to acknowledge it,
until it’s too late.
Three years ago I
wrote The Lion that Swallowed Hemingway
in which I explored the shadow side of Ernest Hemingway’s personality, because
I wanted to flesh in this concept of the elusive shadow with the real life story
of my high school hero and literary mentor, but even after all the fleshing in
that I did with Hemingway’s shadow-afflicted personality, I still feel some
apprehension as I write today’s spiritual musing; but I must be true to my
calling, because this unresolved state of consciousness is responsible for the
existential dilemma that can pull one so deep into the despair of their own
nothingness that it can drive one to desolation and suicide, like it did Ernest
Hemingway and David Foster Wallace.
So, what is this
consciousness of our own nothingness? How does it come about? This is the
mystery of the repressed dark side of our personality. The novelist John Irving
made a comment so arrogantly offensive that I had to respond to it by writing a
spiritual musing, “Chicken Little Syndrome and the World According to John
Irving,” that I posted on my blog; he said, “You don’t choose your demons, they
choose you.” This is why I was never attracted to read any more of his novels
after reading The World According to Garp
that launched his career, because
the central motif of his life was delusory, which I confirmed by quoting
something in my John Irving musing that America’s greatest seer Edgar Cayce
revealed:
“While we are all at different
stages of development and may be working on different lessons, we do not make
much progress until we can recognize our problems as opportunities. We begin to
grow when we face up to the fact that we are responsible for our trials and misery.
We
are only meeting self. Our present circumstances are the result of
previous actions whether long removed or in the recent past. So if we are beset
with problems, blame not God, for they are of our own making. Our miseries are
the result of destructive or negative thoughts, emotions, and actions. We can
avoid trouble and misery if we live lives of noble thought and action” (Edgar Cayce’s Story of Karma, by M.
Woodward, pp. 219-220; bold italics mine).
In Meeting the Shadow: The Hidden Power of the Dark Side of Human Nature,
editors Connie Zweig and Jeremiah Abrams tell us why we have a problem,
especially writers who are always trying to come to terms with the human
condition and the existential dilemma of life, the seemingly irreconcilable
problem of our paradoxical nature: “Our shadow self remains the great burden of
self-knowledge, the disruptive element that does not want to be known.” And why does our shadow not want to be known?
The editors of Meeting the Shadow
tell us: “The shadow is by nature
difficult to apprehend. It is dangerous, disorderly, and forever in hiding, as
if the light of higher consciousness would steal its very life” (Meeting the Shadow, Introduction, pp.
XVII and XXI).
But didn’t Edgar Cayce say, “We
can avoid trouble and misery if we live lives of noble thought and action”?
Doesn’t this suggest that there is a way out of the darkness of our own
nothingness?
It certainly does for me, which
is why I made this moral imperative the guiding principle of my life and my writing;
but then, as they say, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and unless
one lives a life of noble thought and action one will never know why they are
the author of their own misery, because living
a life of noble thought and action makes one a good person, and the law of
karma has to bring goodness into one’s life, not misery! This is the
logic of life that every person must see to make sense of suffering.
A
tad presumptuous? But where does a writer go when they have come to the limits
of their paradigm of meaning? Depression and suicide, like Hemingway and
Wallace, both gifted but self-obsessed writers who wanted their cake and eat it
too? “Literature is not enough,” said Katherine Mansfield, who tragically died
of tuberculosis at 34 at the Gurdjieff Institute for the Harmonious Development
of Man in Fontainebleau, France where she sought out a teaching to expand her
paradigm of meaning, as did I with the same teaching; but to expand the
paradigm of literature by including the principles of karma and reincarnation
as Cayce deemed would seriously tax the credulity of the literary world, which
is why the light of literature will never be bright enough to resolve the
consciousness of our nothingness, and one must imagine Sisyphus happy in his
struggle as the celebrated philosopher of the absurd was forced by his own egocentric
logic to do.
But we keep hoping against hope;
because, as the dystopian writer Margaret Atwood said in one of her poems, “All
we have is hope, but what hope is there?” And another brilliant writer will
always come along, like the Norwegian Karl Ove Knausgaard with his six-volume angst-ridden
autobiographical novel that he, ironically, called, “My Struggle.”
———
Perhaps
one can now understand the gravitational attraction that Jordan Peterson’s book
12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos
has for today’s crazy world; his message has awakened the world to the existential
vacuum that religion, science, and politics can no longer address with
conviction, and with the passion and certainty of an ancient prophet the good
professor has dared to stare the archetypal shadow of life in the eye and make
it blink.
In
the Overture to his 12 Rules for Life: An
Antidote to Chaos, he tells us that while he was working on his book Maps of Meaning, he had what his hero C.
G. Jung called a “big dream” that gave him the insight he needed to break
through his unknowing. “Dreams shed light on the dim places where reason itself
has yet to voyage,” he explains, with Jungian conviction (if anything, Jordan Peterson
owns his knowledge, and he speaks
with a gnostic certainty that gives him the authority of the hierophants of old),
and he writes:
“My dream placed me at the centre
of Being itself, and there was no escape. It took me months to understand what
this meant. During this time, I came to a more complete, personal realization
of what the great stories of the past continually insist upon: the centre is
occupied by the individual. The center is marked by the cross, as X marks the
spot. Existence at that cross is suffering and transformation—and
that fact, above all, needs to be voluntarily accepted. It is possible to
transcend slavish adherence to the group and its doctrines and, simultaneously,
to avoid the pitfalls of its opposite extreme, nihilism. It is possible,
instead, to find sufficient meaning in individual consciousness and experience.
“How could the world be freed
from the terrible dilemma of conflict, on the one hand, and psychological and
social dissolution, on the other? The answer was this: through the elevation
and development of the individual, and through the willingness of everyone to
shoulder the burden of Being and take the heroic path” (Overture to 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, by
Jordan B. Peterson, p. xxxiii; bold italics mine).
This is pure Jungian logic, and
it’s the same realization that the Logos (the
omniscient guiding principle of life) grants to every person who has been
made ready by life for the secret way (although I also had a number of “big
dreams,” I also had an incredible visionary symbolic “squaring of the circle”
mandala experience in my second year of philosophy studies at Lakehead University
that confirmed my path to wholeness and completeness in Gurdjieff’s transformative
teaching of “work on oneself” that I
had been introduced to through Ouspensky’s book In Search of the Miraculous, which I wrote about in my memoir The Pearl of Great Price that I sent to
the good professor to help him break through his own wall of unknowing); and
Jordan Bernt Peterson, being true to his own oracle no less than his hero Carl
Gustav Jung, accepted the challenge of his remarkable dream to make the
individual self the sacred center of life when he was called to stand up for
free speech, and he gave his book 12
Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos to the world to help complete the work which the world cannot desist
from doing, the work that satisfies the
longing in one’s soul for wholeness and completeness; that’s why life came
knocking on the good professor’s suburban home in Toronto “the Good” (how
ironic) to be a hierophant for today’s crazy world…
No comments:
Post a Comment