The Power of Imperfection
Let Love clasp Grief lest both be drown’d.
We'll get to the above quote in a moment. For now, let’s dive right in.
To what extent is self-transcendence self-betrayal? What’s the point of self-transcendence if you’re going to stay in a society dedicated to self-satisfaction? Why transcend the self only to continue living among those with no self-awareness? Lots of questions. Lots of answers. No way to go into it all. Which brings us to another question. Maybe the most important question of all. So? It's at moments like this that I can hear people I've known over the years, both here and in the States, ask me in so many words:
Who cares about self-transcendence, or whatever it is you’re talking about?
Actually, this is a question everyone should be asking themselves all of the time, or as often as possible. But I’m not here to talk for everyone. Just myself. So I am putting that question, and others, to myself. So let me do it again, only this time in a different way. I'll ask myself these questions in a way that others have asked me, in so many words, in the past. For example,
Why bother with any of this? Who cares? The world is going to shit. Let it. After all, didn't you once say that "There is no honor in stopping an avalanche on Shit Mountain"? If that's the case, and it certainly seems to be, then why bother? Why bother with self-transcendence (whatever that is)? And if you're going to, then why bother worrying about whether or not it could be confused with self-betrayal? Seriously, are you crazy?
I certainly used to think I was crazy. But I don't anymore. Why I don't is indeed the subject of this essay. Today, I would certainly put it differently. Though I may have been for a time, and again, for reasons we'll go into in a moment. I'm not at all crazy today, and I wasn't all that crazy back then. Though, on the surface, it certainly seemed like it. Which was exactly the problem. Everything in the culture in general and the social group I lived in then was on the surface, which is exactly why I don't live in either one now. Though, again, I might have seemed crazy, to them at least, I wasn't - at all.
On the contrary. I was and remain attracted to what is difficult. I'm attracted to problems. In fact, to the entire problem-solving process, from problem-awareness, problem-searching, problem-location, problem-identification, solution postponement, data-gathering, and problem solution, or proposal, knowing all along that any solution can only be temporary and never true.
That's crazy? Really? No it isn't. So, as it turns out, I'm not crazy. So then, what am I? Well, like most people, I'm a lot of things. And like everyone I'm defined, in part, by my interests, and one of the things I'm most interested in or attracted to is whatever is difficult and dangerous.
And what could be more difficult and dangerous than devoting one’s life to continuous learning, change, and growth? Especially in a world gone mad exactly because it's filled with people who pretend to care more about changing the world and saving the planet, and not at all about learning, change, and growth. As if you could do one without the other, and as if you could do both without living dangerously to use Nietzsche's superb phrase.
The short answer for why I'm interested in such a life is a tautology. I'm interested in it is because that's just me. It's what I'm interested in. That’s all. We’re all going to die. True. But I would rather die now if I couldn’t live a life of continuous learning, change, and growth, no matter who difficult and dangerous that life might be. And just to be clear, this is no conviction of mine that I believe to be true, it's a passion for life that I live every day.
Why? Because a life without learning would be a slow death, which is a life most seem to want to live, and a life that I myself was living for a time, but for different reasons I couldn't adequately describe, understand, or explain.
Happily, that's no longer the case.
Anyway, that’s the only answer I have, at least for now. Maybe later in this essay, or further on down the line, I’ll have a more satisfactory answer, at least more satisfactory for me, and for whoever else might be reading this.
But for now, it’s satisfactory enough for me to keep going.
And now it's time we get back to the quote at the beginning of this essay. The quote is from Tennyson’s In Memoriam. Most people, not without reason, think it’s a poem about Tennyson’s faith in the immortality of a dear friend who died so young. I thought so too, for years, until I reread the poem again in my forties during my first few years in Argentina, and then again in my 50’s, a reading that simply confirmed the previous one. I've revisited the poem a number of times since then and am more convinced than ever that the popular, the most common, interpretation is not at all what Tennyson was saying. An explanation is possible. In In Memoriam and other works Tennyson uses an exoteric-esoteric device that artists began to use as a solution to the problem of the gap between artist and society.
Wagner, for example, used it for his masterpiece Tannhauser (then again, he never wrote anything that wasn't a masterpiece). The point of the exoteric-esoteric device is to present to the reader a perfectly consistent structure of meanings which conforms to the belief-system of that society at that time.
But, on the other hand, the work of art in question, holds an interior meaning that is not just different from the surface, but is actually opposed to it.
Tennyson, a man capable of great practicality, definitely expected most of his readers to respond to the poem in the way that they did, knowing, as he did, his audience, or at least that part of his audience. And what audience are we talking about? Well, the semi-educated, pseudo-sophisticated, self-satisfied and complacent middle class, who had already seized economic power in Western Europe and North America and were now in the process of seizing control of political power (that's why the Civil War in the United States was the first and really only war between the middle class and the aristocracy; spoiler alert! the middle class won*; and civilization has been losing ever since; just look around). And part of that audience included Queen Victoria herself, who though in many ways an aristocratic of the Regency, was also in many ways very much a part of the audience that came from the middle class who as a result of increasing wealth and the communications revolution, made up that new audience of the 19th century.
*In terms of social class, the middle-class have proven to be the great destroyers of the world (though there is one group within that group who far surpass them in that regard). Through their intellectual pretentiousness, social insecurity, and moral conceit, the middle-class, of whatever background, are the one group most responsible for the destruction of the world and of the human race. Making treason against them is loyalty to humanity.
Any great work of literature can be read in three ways.
The first, just skim the surface and be moved, or at least entertained, stimulated, and maybe inspired. The second, to go a little deeper and ask, and possibly answer, a question or two, at least to one’s satisfaction, and third, to go even deeper than that and see things that change you forever, things you can’t unsee, things that make you understand why some would prefer to just skim the surface. Few take the third option. It’s too real.
A good description would be to say that it’s realer than real. In fact, that's phrase I like to use to describe and define the great art of the West, that it is realer than real. Hamlet, a personal favorite, comes irresistably to mind.
One reason is that we learn more from asking questions than from making statements (and nothing at all from making statements asserted to be true, but never proven, because they can't be) and Hamlet is a play of questions.
Be that as it may, most people avoid both questions and the realer than real because they might acquire a knowledge about life in general, and themselves in particular, that they simply do not want to have, at all - ever.
Such people like to become political activists. These are the ones mentioned above who want to change the world and save the planet. They don't want to know about life or themselves, especially themselves. But they want to tell the rest of us what to do, and expect us to do it, or else. In a fair world they'd be lined up against a wall and shot, and the whole thing would be televised.
But we don't live in a fair world. So, such people, who construct their lives around never knowing about life, or themselves, instead prefer to create political parties so they can live in a pretend real, with pretend sinners and pretend saints. No wonder such people are no good at problem-solving. And no wonder they make more problems than they pretend to solve. This is why their preferred reading material is something that will move them. They are the readers who prefer skim, they skim to be moved and this is why Tennyson, again a man of great practicality, knew he'd have to move them.
And let's face it, who wouldn't be moved by a beautiful poem lamenting the death of a dear friend? Queen Victoria was certainly moved, especially when Tennyson read the poem to her in his slightly provincial voice. He wasn't just a sensible man, he was her Poet Laureate and a patriot. So he obliged. But, and this is the key point, though he did sell poems, he did not sell out!
And now we're back to why he employed the exoteric-esoteric device.
In any event, if one survives the third option mentioned above for reading the great literature of the West, the rewards are incalculable. The ultimate reward being a self you can live with, good, bad, right, wrong, straight, crooked, predictable, unpredictable, happy, sad, indifferent, committed, courageous, cowardly, smart, silly, bored, excited, and even not infrequently, estatic, an ecstacy that one can sustain longer than they ever thought possible, to the point where they are in love with life and unafraid of the danger. With the self restored and revitalized, the self-transcending individual can, as Yeats wrote, Rejoice in the midst of tragedy!
In short, with the third option you’re closer to answering (for yourself at least), the question, To what extent is self-transcendence self-betrayal?
And now we’re back to Tennyson’s masterpiece (well, one of them). By the way, I’m not so sure Tennyson got that far himself. But that’s of no matter. He was a pathfinder, he pointed individuals like me in the direction of self-discovery and self-transcendence, toward a separation between the self and the role and, more importantly, between the self and the personality, and that brings us back to the society that inspired the transcendence in the first place, but it also begs the question, the question of this essay, which at this point requires a fuller, deeper answer, than what I’ve offered so far.
To what extent is self-transcendence self-betrayal?
To attempt another answer that does go deeper, let’s return once again to Tennyson’s poem, particularly to the part that follows the opening quote,
Let Love clasp Grief lest both be drown’d. He continues…
Let darkness keep her raven gloss:
Ab, sweeter to be drunk with loss,
To dance with Death, to beat the ground,
Than that the victor Hours should scorn
The long result of love, and boast,
“Behold the man that loved and lost,
But all he was is overworn.”
Hmmm. Let’s dwell on this one for a moment. Shall we?
The common response, the one I once held myself, for years, was that we should learn from our mistakes and rise to higher things. Who wouldn’t want to do that? Well, like many important questions, it's often asked as if there is no answer. But of course there is. A very important answer. For instance, What’s the point of rising to higher things if you’re simply climbing to the peak of Shit Mountain? To get a better view of Shit Valley?
If the world is turning to shit, who wants a better view? And when it comes to the world turning to shit, it's not just that people are saying it, in one way or another, it's that people are living it. People are living like they love swimming in their own shit, and not just their own shit. Ewww! Not surprisingly, many of them are the very ones who long ago called me crazy.
What’s the point of change if it means returning to the same self-satisfied, culture that drove you mad and required that change in the first place?
That’s not change! That’s calculating exploitation! That’s the kind of fake change required by a fake culture that models everything on money transactions! That’s the kind of change that requires a return to a culture based on keeping up with the Joneses, on fitting in, which for someone with a passion for knowledge and life is a form of suicide! It’s why Wether blew his brains out! Because he was too early in the development of this new, exciting, and dangerous way of life, of cultural transcendence, to make enough sense out of it all to keep on going. So he didn’t. But Goethe did!
So did Stendhal, so did Schopenhauer, and even Byron, or especially Byron, since he went even deeper than all of them, before all of them. Which is why all of them admired him so much and why Geothe gave him a high place in the second part of Faust. And Byron earned that praise. Because he was able to dramatize, to symbolize, in extension and depth, what had been merely touched upon in the youthful work of those who came after him.
It’s why Schopenhauer knew his mistress would admire Byron too. Really admire him, if ya know what I mean. That’s why Schopenhauer refused to meet Byron. He knew his mistress well enough to know that she’d be saying “Schopenhauer who?” seconds after meeting Byron as he carried her off to wherever, maybe not forever, but, well, long enough. Ok. Ok. I've drifted away from Tennyson's poem and toward the Romantics. But I haven't drifted away from our question, because of course it was the central question of the Romantics, and still is. So to that question I shall return.
To what extent is self-transcendence self-betrayal? Let's return to the verse quoted above. Observe the things rejected and the way they are rejected. And, again, what is rejected is calculated exploitation which regards all activity as necessarily and properly modeled on money transactions.
Better to dance with death than succumb to self-betrayal for the purpose of "self-improvement" as defined by a society of materialistic narcissists. As someone who danced with death, for years, and survived, I can assure you that, though Tennyson was undeniably recommending what most anyone would consider to be "improper" behavior, he was also undeniably right.
There are many people more than willing to betray themselves in order to fit in, to go along to get along. Maybe that's why they're so unhappy and so angry. Maybe that's why such people always seem to need to find a way to revenge themselves upon the world. The more they possess, the more they're possessed. Poor them. I certainly don't want what they have.
So far, so good. But so what? Now that I have offered an answer to the question To what extent is self-transcendence self-betrayal?, is there still any point to self-transcendence? To that question we shall turn in Part II.
Until then!
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