Commentaries
I thought that the statement – I am stuck in a pattern – seemed to capture the facts about life, which, I believed, amounted to lamentable repetition. This statement – I am stuck in a pattern – seemed also to have the authority of repetition; a mandatory part of that self-awareness and self-improvement promoted by therapists and everything connected to therapy. But did I really need to accept and repeat I am stuck in a pattern, or was this itself more lamentable repetition? I have heard it said that not acknowledging that one is stuck in a pattern, is refusing to acknowledge one’s vulnerability, and hence being stuck in a pattern of refusing to acknowledge one’s vulnerability. To refuse to admit to being stuck in a pattern is to be stuck in a pattern – it is a non-negotiable formulation.
But if you really think of it, this formulation is not obvious at all, and it can be negotiated and can be refused. The self which states I am stuck in a pattern appears to be passive, finding itself in a prison (a pattern). It is a dark picture. The only crack of light is that the prison would appear to be of my own making, and so, presumably, I can unmake it too.
But another way, among the many other ways of understanding lamentable repetition, is that one part of me – the unconscious? – is trying to show something to another part of me. So what I think of as passive stuckness could in fact be my active attempt to wake myself up. I am ‘stuck’ only in the sense that I have – so far – failed to pay sufficient attention to that inexorable part of me which is trying to show me something.
You could think of Nietzsche’s eternal return as expressing the endlessness of this unconscious attempt to wake oneself up; and you can think of his affirmation of the eternal return as the recognition that this is an uncompletable activity.
We confuse ourselves with opinions and beliefs. Putting so much store by them – identifying ourselves with them – we confuse agreement in opinion with commonality, and disagreement with difference. We like democracy, but only at a distance or abstractly. In our own orbit, we neutralise the range and plurality of opinion. The closer someone is to us, the less difference we can tolerate; we try to convince them of our own views, and if that fails, we bully them into saying they agree with us; and if all else fails, we rid ourselves of them.
By and large, a person’s beliefs get in the way of them. I want the person without the belief. This is why a deeper friendship can exist between people who do not share a language, for they aren’t diverted by the divisiveness of belief, and so it’s possible to find our feet with them in ways that go beyond belief. And perhaps this is also why the relationship between man and animal is so special; and why too that it is better that a lion doesn’t speak; for if a lion could speak, we would get into intractable disagreements with them.
What is it then to wear opinions lightly, in such a way that we don’t come into pointless conflict, but also in such a way that we do not give up on what matters to us for the sake of harmony? Perhaps this has to do with the way our seriousness of opinion is tied up with thinking of ourselves as if we were universal legislators. To remedy this, we must constantly remember that we are not universal legislators; that it is a kind of make-believe we engage in so as to take our opinions about the world seriously. Objectively, however, each person’s beliefs – which we can devote so much to cultivating – matter very little to anyone other than them.
Having said that, not all such conflict is pointless, and sometimes an opinion is so vile that it does too much credit to the person whose opinion it is to be charitable enough to take it seriously and to dispute it as if it were a reasonable position. Instead, we treat such an opinion as a natural fact, and try to defeat not the opinion, but the person who holds it.
This connects to a monological fantasy. Nietzsche thought of the poet as someone who sees multiple spirits around them, and thought of the actor as someone who inhabits multiple bodies. We, on the other hand, think of ourselves as singular, and we try to establish our singularity through sustaining a single point of view, and a set of consistent and correct opinions. But perhaps something like what Nietzsche thought was true of the poet or actor is true of us too, and that what efforts at singularity mask is that our minds are like stages on which many characters converse amongst themselves. I (the metaphysical subject) could say, equivalently: I am not a character, I'm a platform.
He presented himself as an enigma, but then felt alone when others were interested in him merely as an enigma, and were drawn to him merely as an enigma. He didn’t want to be known as he was, perhaps ashamed of who he thought he was, but he wanted to be known nonetheless – so as an enigma was the compromise. To be known as an enigma was not to be known as no one or as nothing, but to be known specifically as the person wearing a mask or the person who doesn’t want to be known as such. Did this amount to his being known as he was – for after all, he did wear a mask – or known as he wasn’t – for after all, he wasn’t the person and the mask, just the person?
Of course, it wasn’t enough for him to be known as the person wearing the mask. Something compelled him to want to be known without the mask. And in fact, being known as an enigma, wearing a mask, was taken as a provocation to unmask him. We wanted to know who it was that wants to be known as an enigma, and why they don’t allow themselves to be known without the mask; that is to say, we wanted to know what secret he was hiding. But as we moved towards him, wanting to unmask him, he moved away from us. He danced, moving between wanting to be known and wanting to control how much he was known, and how he was known. And he saw the paradox in this: if you control how you are known, and how much you are known, then the essential thing – this controlling element, the controlling self – is always left out as unknown.
But was this right? Was this controlling ‘I’ the essential thing, who he really was? Surely it was only who he thought he was, only a fearful part of him. As we kept moving towards him, hoping to remove his masks, and as he kept moving away, replacing one mask with another, we became tired of the pursuit, and started to wonder if who he was really was the man with the masks, and we wondered if indeed there was anyone behind them. In any case, and more truthfully, we were tired, and began speaking of respecting his privacy and of his autonomy to choose not to be known, and such like; slowly, we stopped chasing him, and eventually lost all interest.
And he saw us as we retreated from him and turned our backs on him, and he, bereft, finally lifted his mask, exposing a hollow darkness, this void which he had been hiding, his secret – but our backs were turned, and we were retreating from him, and would never see what it was he was showing us.
My mistake. The time to listen to the birdsong is when the birds are still singing, not when I want to listen to them, for when I want to listen, they have already stopped.
When it is said that music is the pure expression of will – primordial, before all words and conceptualisations – how do we account for song, which is articulate and contains thoughts and meanings? Surely the human voice playing with sound-words – words becoming sounds, and sounds, words – in something like the way a child does with language, constituted early song, which was among the earliest forms of music, along with clapping and banging things – that is, music which can be made with the body and the things around it.
On holiday. In a foreign country, you don’t care about why things happen, and who people are, and how they are. They are in your life only for a moment, and they are not your people, so you cannot be proud of them or ashamed of them, and cannot expect them to differ from how they are and who they are, so you accept them and their ways, and can even marvel at how they can do things in ways which in your home country you would find repulsive; here, in the sun, in the sea air, we can accept anything (everything perhaps). And like the people, you accept the dog barking outside your window in the morning – in the Mediterranean morning – and you accept its owner who lets it out in the morning, and lets its bark wake you up in the Mediterranean heat from which there is no going back to sleep. And you do not think of blame nor of their inconsiderateness nor of their irresponsibility; and you do not think of the unreasonable hour, for this is their way, and you are on holiday in their country, and so you accept this and them as part of your holiday experience. You even smile at their absurdity and foolishness and childlikeness, for anything is permitted on this holiday island and in this holiday mind.
But compare: at home, you know whose dog it is that wakes you up, and at home, you think and dwell on them and their inconsiderateness; you think of how it is possible that they cannot think of their neighbours, and such like. At home, you expect things from people, you are disappointed by them, you find their indecency a failing. In this way, you do not accept anything happening around you, and do not accept people for how they are and who they are. You live in your head, in the sense that you constantly have in mind a set of standards and expectations of civilised people, which they constantly fail to meet. And so you live, at home – the home in which you should be safe – in disappointment, darkness, resentment and dejection.
If we could only think of our home with our holiday minds – our truly Christian accepting, unjudging holiday minds – we would become peaceful and totally accepting of our country and the people in it. But this would be altogether wrong, amounting to not facing reality and its conflicts; it would be sheer childishness to accept everything around us. Is it then only when we feel no part of a community that we can totally accept? Perhaps what would be ideal would be to fuse our home and holiday minds, and so to meet our home conflicts with a holiday irony, remembering that, in some sense, our lives at home are themselves holidays from eternity, and that in our conflicts our seriousness is misplaced, and acts as a mask of this unpalatable fact.
He tried to explain how, in our theories, we oversimplify, losing all nuance, lumping together as the same what is in fact different. And I agreed. But to explain this, he lumped together what was in fact different, and oversimplified all the theories he discussed, losing all nuance. I thought: if even he, who wants to make this case whose conclusion I agree with, cannot do so without falling into error, then what hope remains for us?
At the therapist: I can see the therapist trying to fit me into their scheme and experience – he is this, or he is like that, or he is like him or like her – and I resist such moves, and I might even change my story just to ensure that it does not fit into a familiar pattern. I must complicate myself for the therapist. But why? It isn’t simply that I am recalcitrant or oppositional, or contrary, and nor is it that I am merely resistant, for that matter. There is a logic to what I do. I fight the therapist’s categories because I want to be seen, and that means to be seen directly for who I am, not through a category or a system or a theory, nor through ideas or intermediaries or stories. If I disappear into the therapist’s interpretation and categorisation, I am not seen, and so am not helped; it is only as someone unique that I can be seen, and so helped.
Of course, it goes without saying that my refusal to accept being therapeutically categorised, and likewise, my compulsion with being seen directly, will be taken by some to express what my real need is in therapy, which relates to the root of my problem – and indeed, they would say, this need (to be seen to be different or unique) can best be understood according to certain classical theories and classical therapeutic categories which they are too discreet to mention to my face.
I suppose, on reflection, that to think that I cannot be categorised, or do not want to be, is to think that I am fundamentally different from any other person, such that what is true for them is not true of me – and this, to feel that I am special, is precisely what I want from being directly seen by the therapist.
Is it possible that a man drops a bomb in a city to produce the image of that bomb being dropped in that city? Could it be that he finds it clever to drop a bomb in a city to produce the image of a thick smog, which is the image of people suffocating in that city? He gives an order which returns an image. He creates fires for the image of fires. But would it have been better had he loved the fire itself? Would this have made him more or less mad, or more or less obscene? On TV, the military experts assured us that the bombs are strategic – dropped in order to force an agreement. But ‘forcing an agreement’ only sounds like an agreement insofar as a confession extracted by torture is a confession.
The reverse architecture – or the reverse of architecture – in war produces a new structure, or rather the opposite of a structure, a pile of rubble, expressing the asymmetry in the universe, that it is easier to destroy material things than to give form to them. We, looking on, are shaken too by seeing this and seeing how the industrial and political system that sustains us is held up by a thread, not by metaphysical rules, but just conventions and promises. Now these agreements too are in rubble, and a new architecture will emerge, and this is the creativity of war, which doesn’t lie in the visible side of explosions, but in the recalibration of all forms, in particular in the invisible relationships.
She said that I needed to be renewed. She said, in the same breath, that my poor old hems and cuffs and tatty shoes needed to be renewed. It’s not so much that she thought that I would be renewed in virtue of the renewal of my wardrobe, but they came to the same thing for her. Or at least: she didn’t disentangle them in her thinking of me. I explained to her that what she sought for me could only be obtained by me myself wanting the new wardrobe and new clothes; that is, the transformation she hoped to see in me would already have taken place (or would already be in the process of taking place) were I to be concerned with my poor old hems and cuffs and tatty shoes and were I to want to seek a new wardrobe to replace them. I tried to make the case that the renewal would already have to exist inside of me, and for the renewal of clothes and shoes to be an expression of the inner renewal; that the outer renewal could only be the expression of the inner renewal – and were I to impose it from the outside, then it would be only the image of a renewal. In short, she mistook cause and effect.