The Desire for Transcendence

THE WRITER: The desire for transcendence is itself a transcendent aspect of human nature, because it entails an already-present awareness of the transcendent, and a recognition of the possibility of becoming transcendent. The writer, Rodrigo, desires for transcendence through writing, through the act of soul-searching and making discoveries about the human condition. Truth is inwardness, truth is subjectivity and subjectivity is truth. Kierkegaard says that also, in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript. But the cause of his desire to write all of this is something I would argue is something beyond himself. According to Plato’s cosmological argument, the cause of the universe must be something distinct from itself, because the assumption that the universe has caused itself entails the idea of the universe existing and not existing at the same time, as the cause of something must itself exist, making it a logical contradiction. The reason as to why the writer writes, I believe, is not that he simply desires to write, but instead this awareness of the transcendent and the possibility for transcendence. Does he eventually achieve transcendence? I expected him to. But the ending, I argue, was somewhat meagre. It reflects how there is a constant sense of desiring to achieve things that end up never being sufficiently achieved. There should have been something glorious, like a sudden realization, a flash of significance across the snowy hills of unknowingness before the oblivion of death. But Macabéa simply dies, and nothing else happens.

THE: Being. Being qua being. Being as an indefinite dissolution of microcosmic atoms disassembled from the image of the human condition.

THE GIRL: Ghostliness, souls, fear, uncertainty. This “northeastern girl”, this Macabéa, stands in a room with stained yellow walls, with very frail limbs and pale doe-eyes. I can see her in a light gray cotton frock, with trembling pallid lips. Her heart is like a starfish, webbed and succulent, pumping steadily into an ocean of veins; the sea-grape of her lungs breathes some weak drafts of life; her arms are like the branches of a thin tree, stiff and narrow against a cold draft of wind. Her hair hangs down her face in wispy strands. Her face is the kind of face formed by the combination of thousands of human features sent rippling across a single silvery pond, piecing together into a dreary image of what remains from civilization in a meaningless world: a look of isolation, unknowingness, and loss. I can see that she is neither beautiful nor ugly, neither particularly remarkable nor commonplace. She is not very intelligent, but too sensitive to be considered stupid. She lives internally, as if constantly confronted with the shimmering mirror facing the world which is the mirage of her own soul, very vacant of its own nature but full in the sense of receiving and reacting to the world outside. She alone is an empty vessel. But the writer adores her deeply, in the same way that one comes to adore an offspring made from one’s flesh and bones, and I find this surprising, because there is something very hollow about her, as if she is filled with nothing other than little flashes of feeling, empty thoughts, and existential discrepancies. Perhaps that is precisely because it is how the author feels. Since she has difficulty in expressing herself using words, the writer is the one who expounds on her inner feelings, epiphanies, and realizations. Almost as if he is constructing a rag-doll out of bits of old yarn and fragments of driftwood, there is a quality of incompleteness about this girl that he has created, as if she is not fully a human being in the sense of experiencing things fully and speaking in conventional ways, but only a ghost, an embodiment of certain qualities that the reader may find to be relatable, owing to the close association of such qualities with the experience of human life, and all of its unbearable solitude. She seems to float over the text, as if existing only through glimpses of half-sung reveries, never fully birthed from the entrails of language in which her existence is outlined. In fact, it is as if she does not exist, but is merely pieced together by a haze of describable actions and experiences, taken up from the rogueish corners of human existence.

Did Macabéa ever exist?