by Fraser Hibbitt for the Carl Kruse Blog
I was speaking with someone in sophisticated despair – what a sorry state – he had worked himself into quite a frenzy. He had not only given a critical assessment of our age but had himself fallen into the labyrinth of his own creation. They say a cell that is taken over by a virus is effectively dead: it only serves to produces more of the virus; the virus itself not having the vitality able to reproduce. Cells have defence mechanisms for this and so we ought also to have defence mechanisms against this kind of mental virus. Fortunately, cells work unconsciously, unfortunately our minds are rarely filled by that unconscious completeness – if ever.
Now, what was he saying? Oh, the age! An age of superficiality, of the absurd destruction of all manners and morals, of a truth that is decent. If it sounds hackneyed, well you are right on the world-weary’s side. But mostly, he said, the absurdity of rulers, the overt right-wingisms etc. There is actually a trick to getting past all this and to know that is to be brought into the fold of the mysteries. Well, it is nothing new, but first an attack on sophisticated despair.
I have been waiting for someone to come along, hang up their boots, and say: it’s time for me get better from trying to get better. Much more I hear about breakthroughs, so much so that I start to imagine the whole lot walks around in Satori. Only to find that breakthrough was temporary, now there is a breakthrough from that breakthrough, and on and on it goes, never seeing the cycle for what it is. Without entering an Eastern religion, you can see that there is a cycle, if you are prone to such things; this is nothing to do with trying to break away from living. Rilke said: Live the questions for now, you may, one day, live yourself into the answer.
I think a lot of issues take hold because there is a presumption that the mind is a kind of machine, or rather it is treated like a machine. An input A should have the output B, but any one with a few breakthroughs under their belt knows that this is not the case. Life is, of course, to be lived, and living does not mean questioning every step, demanding an answer at every step, and vying for optimisation, an optimisation you believe is optimal. You can believe in optimal states for several reasons: customs, culture, friend group. Life is, among other things, to be experienced. We cannot stop the questioning, though there is likely a mode of questioning and riddling that is not so machine-like. The Zen Koan is particularly effective in that. Remember: equilibrium is also entropy; there is no meaning left in equilibrium. Our bodies are constantly out of joint. Every time you step out of your house you are upended constantly and that is good; that is why people prescribe going for a walk.
This is not an ask for more dissociation, more neglect of emotion, but rather a sensitivity to how emotion is treated. Everybody knows from those psychological movies that there is always something ‘underneath’ what you feel. Only a few would sigh and say “sure, if you give up with the first spadeful…eventually you’ll reach a bottomless pit”. That is wonderful news. But that has gone too far, persisted right through into dissociation, and thrown everything out. Yes, a deep thinker may get there, a religious type may get there, but then you have to wonder how do they even find the strength to communicate anything, or come back to put things in perspective; it is likely their bodies are so attuned, withstood every brutalisation at every broken rung of the ladder down. We get a piece of information and go wild with incomprehension; masked as despair, masked as learnedness, masked as pretension.
Sophisticated despair. The despair in question is for tinkerers of social-philosophy. As soon as you begin to sophisticate, you should always be wary, to prick those ears, because you should always be aware of the sound of your own construction. Unfortunately, as this is rarely done in the desert, you cannot hear your entering the labyrinth, which, let’s face it, is often of another’s constructing. But why fall into despair? Because, you believe, things are actually going to shit; it may be the way in which things are going to shit hurts the most; like watching the liar get the love interest, watching the phoney win the game. Sophisticates forget about action and they forget about what is in their power to do. Their variables are too abstract, everything is in vague philosophical-speak; they enter the game half-asleep and fall in love with the sound of their own voice – how can you relinquish what you have tried so hard to learn – fortunately with ease, if you have a mind for it, and this doesn’t mean forgetting the matter; how do you know your problems wouldn’t be lessened, a slight order restored, by you yourself being the decency you want to see in the world?
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The Carl Kruse Blog homepage is at https://www.carlkruse.com
Contact: carl AT carlkruse DOT com
Other articles by Fraser include On My Failure to Write Anything About the Music I Hear, Some More Bullsh*t, and Thoughts on Science Fiction..
Also find Carl Kruse at Kruse Page BOINC Number Fields.