Time, Timelessness

This past year has been one to eat away at a sense of progress, a belief that, in the end, we come up ahead. For the most part, we are fed myths of victories and great accomplishments; most fiction preserves the myth, essentially creating a positive feedback. Doesn’t the hero (in most works) always come ahead? Aren’t insurmountable dangers always surmountable in the end? Don’t we look at images of lone warriors facing enemies taller than mountains and just know that the warrior, at a millionth of her enemy’s volume, will defeat the giant in battle?

And at the same time, we only have to check the news in whichever way we do to feel something like despair—or outright despair, helplessness, loneliness, darkness closing in (or light leaving you; the description is at your discretion). I know, this is a huge generalization, and certainly some readers will be quick to disagree—perhaps even the majority. But these two things are not mutually exclusive: we may die, we may be defeated, our country taken, our people devastated and pushed close to a fate of darkness. Still, in the end we may remain. We’ll be stories or teachings to kids who will never have to face extinction of their people.

There! That’s where tape is peeling off, where the shadows flicker and we realize we’ve been hidden in a cave our whole lives and we await anxiously, shivering of cold as we emerge from the exhausting sleep and terrifying nightmares, waiting for Plato to come and undo the shackles, as we try to stretch legs and arms that are all but petrified, turned to stone, and there might be a beautiful Sun or it might yet be another show but I can’t turn my head, and Plato promised to guide us out and why are the shadows on the wall laughing and—

And so on. Or, why, if we always come ahead, is everything still going to shit?

The Weather Will not Change

Some 8 years ago, I found something I still treasure to this day. Before telling you—as I can’t help to—, I’ll show you:

“Last night Boris discovered that he was lousy. […] We might never have known each other so intimately, Boris and I, had it not been for the lice.
Boris has just given me a summary of his views. He is a weather prophet. The weather will continue bad, he says. There will be more calamities, more death, more despair. Not the slightest indication of a change anywhere. The cancer of time is eating us away. Our heroes have killed themselves, or are killing themselves. The hero, then is not Time, but Timelessness. We must get in step, a lock step, toward the prison of death. There is no escape. The weather will not change.”

Thus begins Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. Of the hundreds of books I’ve read, only a few passages have impacted me enough to spontaneously come to mind now and then (and most are Henry’s). The passage, to me, has change shapes since I first read it. Good, I’ve learnt something.

In a sea of love stories, of heroes that limp through the finish line, of underdogs who always end up in some pinnacle, Miller acknowledged the rest of life.

Because it is true, isn’t it? The weather will continue bad, it will not change. For every headline that describes humanitarian relief in a country stricken by a hurricane, there is a hurricane and thousands left without a home, children scarred by a horror only many unfortunate others can understand. And more extreme, violent hurricanes are sure to follow. For every grand discovery in cancer research, there are approximately .0001 novel therapeutics that (in the U.S.) will set you for a life of indebtedness. For every tree planted a thousand more are burnt for the delicious Nutella we will shit out tomorrow.

And so forth.

Time

Moreover, there were no more heroes. Back then, I was still hopeful, despite everything. I held grand dreams not just for me, but for everyone, too. In time, bruises would leave marks, broken bones would mend with only a callus to show, and the most peaceful time in the human era would only more peaceful. In time, economic development would reach every country, and decency would become a human right. In time, clever minds would correct climate, fix food insecurity, grant us all a 4-day-workweek. In time, there would be no use for hate anymore, no need to defend what little we have from others; no envy, no jealousy, no loneliness. Not that there would be no pain—even then I was sure pain is a necessary human experience—but any barriers to self-actualization would be demolished, leaving us free to be in just the way we wanted to be.

My dreams, at least, would happen in my lifetime. For the rest of humanity, it was a matter of time.

Things here and there began taking huge strides backward. The most impactful would be two Presidential elections in two different countries that, through dissimilar means, arrived at similar leaders—an ugly flaw of civilized era. It is not necessary to say more—those who agree are too familiar with the feelings of being warped into an absurd dream, and those who don’t are helpless at understanding.

My hopes vanished. No, we haven’t been annihilated in nuclear war because of one rambling tweet at odd hours of the night, but it is naive to ring the bell after the fact… Of course, a lot of people would not think twice before calling me an alarmist, among other things. The clouds above are getting heavy, and it seems that the few that have some certainty of the trouble ahead are getting drowned out by those who are unmovably confident in their own ideas and pride.

I could easily continue describing these things, but it is not necessary. The weather will continue bad. We can’t steer the ship ourselves. What can we do, then?

Timelessness and the Creative Process

A couple of sentences after the paragraph above, Miller continues:

“I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive. A year ago, six months ago, I thought that I was an artist. I no longer think about it, I am.”

Unlike Boris and his lice, I am not a weather prophet. I am, however, a writer–not because I like writing (finding a writer who likes to write is rare), but because I feel like I have to write, if just for myself. Writing is a shortcut.

And as a shortcut, instead of hurting your eyes with my words, I’ll leave another passage from Henry Miller’s Sexus: The Rosy Crucifixion I. The sentence I’ve emphasized is enough to make the point.

“The creative individual (in wrestling with his medium) is supposed to experience a joy which balances, if it does not outweight, the pain and anguish which accompany the struggle to express himself. He lives in his work, we say. But this unique kind of life varies extremely with the individual. It is only in the measure that he is aware of more life, the life abundant, that he may be said to live in his work. If there is no realization there is no purpose or advantage in substituting the imaginative life for the purely adventurous one of reality. Every one who lifts himself above the activities of the daily round does so not only in the hope of enlarging his field of experience, or even of enriching it, but of quickening it. Only in this sense does struggle have any meaning. Accept this view, and the distinction between failure and success is nil. And this is what every great artist comes to learn en route—that the process in which he is involved has to do with another dimension of life, that by identifying himself with this process he augments life. In this view of things he is permanently removed—and protected—from that insidious death which seems to triumph all about him. He divines that the great secret will never be apprehended but incorporated in his very substance. He has to make himself a part of the mystery, live in it as well as with it. Acceptance is the solution: it is an art, not an egotistical, performance on the part of the intellect. Through art then, one finally establishes contact with reality: that is the great discovery. Here all is play and invention; there is no solid foothold from which to launch the projectiles which will pierce the miasma of folly, ignorance and greed. The world has not to be put in order: the world is order incarnate. It is for us to put ourselves in unison with this order, to know what is the world order in contradistinction to the wishful−thinking orders which we seek to impose on one another. The power which we long to possess, in order to establish the good, the true and the beautiful, would prove to be, if we could have it, but the means of destroying one another. It is fortunate that we are powerless.”

Though Miller is a writer, and certainly, the passage is with respect to writing and other arts, I would argue that it is not the expression which commands the artist, but the state of development in which creation occurs. We have to tap into the internal life to create something of value [for ourselves]. Being in this state, touching what is intangible, untangling what exists only as a shape-shifting mass of cords, we alter what we explore. Or perhaps we find better ways of navigating these internal waters. Nevertheless, spending time there we become more adept at realizing the figures that lie just beyond our grasp. We build upon things that are already there.

But it’s the process of creating what compels us. It’s a shortcut to self-actualizing. Long ago, millennia before Maslow devised his hierarchy, artists all around were in on this secret. A lot of artists work on empty stomachs, actualizing themselves with each stroke of the paintbrush, feeling the need for little more–at least for those timeless moments.

Inevitably, the outer world bleeds into this inner world; thankfully, the converse is true. Exploring our inner world, our ideas and the ideas of others, is a way of adapting to an inadaptable world. Exploring the outer world through our ideas is also advantageous.

This has been a year full of death, of despair. I no longer have the certainty that we have accrued favor with the gods, that Time is on our side. These years have been a reality check for the societies we’ve built up, to these monuments of what the human spirit is capable of with hard work and a sharp eye.

Though there is no end in sight, and though the sky will not clear even after this pandemic is past us (not to speak of the ones to come), for me, it’s enough to dream of being a writer to remove myself from the insidious death that, even almost a century after Boris prophesized it, continues to triumph over everything.