The Marginalian
The Marginalian

The Light in the Abyss Between Us

Bless consciousness, for making blue different to me than it is to you.

I remember the moment a friend’s son came home from school to recount with something between shock and exhilaration how he realized while talking to a classmate that the notion of a mental image is not merely a metaphor, that other people can conjure up in their minds things not before their eyes. And the moment another friend discovered that the inner stream of language with which most of us narrate our lives courses through neither his mother’s nor his sister’s mind. And always the moment I waded into the winter ocean with someone with whom I thought I shared uncommon understanding, and I exclaimed “Those needles!” as the icy water stabbed at my flesh, and she stared at me blankly, and when I asked what her sensation was, she took a long pause, then said: “Pressure.” Two bodies so seemingly similar, sharing 99.9% of their genome and 100% of their trust, immersed in the exact same environment, governed by consciousnesses so invisibly different as to render the contact between self and world sharp for one and blunt for the other.

Art by Giuliano Cucco from Before I Grew Up — a lyrical picture-book about the artist within

Moments like these jolt us awake from the dream of perfect understanding, stagger us with the realization that no one ever really knows what it is like to be somebody else, that between one consciousness and another there always gapes an abyss black as the inside of a skull, and though we may try to reach each other with love and reason, they twine but a tenuous footbridge across it. The best we can do is hold on to the ropes and hope that they will not fray before we reach the rim of understanding, the outer edge of the other, which is all we can ever touch — and still it is enough, this sliver of salvation from the loneliness of being ourselves, this outstretched hand across the icy blue.

Anne Enright faces this abyss in her lyrical novel The Wren, the Wren (public library), drawing from it not a point of despair but portal of possibility.

She writes:

We don’t walk down the same street as the person walking beside us. All we can do is tell the other person what we see. We can point at things and try to name them. If we do this well, our friend can look at the world in a new way. We can meet.

Looking back on viewing empathy “like it’s the solution (and it is! it is!) to pretty much everything,” the protagonist reflects:

I had a big beautiful cake in my head called “Feeling the Pain of Others” and I sliced it this way and that because I thought that emotion is the bridge between people, sentiment crosses space, sympathy is a gas, exhaled by one, inhaled by the other. Empathy! It’s just like melting. We can merge, you know. We can connect. We can cry at the same movie. You and I.

And yet, she comes to see, we struggle to do this, for it is at bottom a profoundly complicated thing. But perhaps we struggle because we have the wrong goal in mind — merging, in the end, is not the measure of closeness, of understanding, of the proximity between consciousnesses in the icy waters of being. Enright writes:

There is a real gap between me and the next person, there is a space between every human being. And it is not a frightening space. The empty air which exists between people might be crossed by emotion, but it might not. You need something else, or you need something first… Now, I think the word we need is “translation.”

Given the co-evolution of vision and consciousness, this gap in how we perceive the world is reflected in our actual sight — we each see the same photons differently due to variations in how our eyes and brains process light. While science is not there to furnish us with metaphors — its task is truth — we are creatures of meaning who cannot help but turn to metaphor as our best footbridge between truth and meaning. Enright’s protagonist reflects:

These days I am obsessed by light, it is so hard to commodify. I am not talking about a beautiful dawn, or holidays in the sun, or the light that makes a photograph look good. I am talking about brightness itself, the air lit up. The gleam on the surfaces of my typing hands. I love the gift of its arrival. The light you see is always eight and a half minutes old. Always and again. And you think it is shared by everyone but it is not shared, exactly — our eyes are hit by our own, personal photons.

Perhaps, in the end, the measure of understanding — which is “love’s other name” — is not seeing the same light but seeing the light in each other, the shy light shimmering over the ocean of our singularity.

Card from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days, also available as a stand-alone print and as stationery cards.
BP

The Countercultural Sanity of the Irrational: Pioneering Psychiatrist Otto Rank on the Blind Spots of Reason

The Countercultural Sanity of the Irrational: Pioneering Psychiatrist Otto Rank on the Blind Spots of Reason

In one crucial respect at least, the human animal does not pass the mirror test of self-knowledge: We move through the world by impulse and emotion, then look back and rationalize our choices, declaring ourselves creatures of reason. Western civilization, with its structural bias favoring the left brain, has been especially culpable in this dangerous dissociation from ourselves, our full and feeling selves. Despite everything our analytical tools have revealed about how the mind constructs the world, about how our entire experience of reality is a function of that great sieve of emotional relevance — attention — we continue casting ourselves in the theater of rationality, only to find ourselves bewildered again and again by our own nature, by the constant revelation of illusion we mistake for reality.

Card from An Almanac of Birds: Divinations for Uncertain Days, also available as a stand-alone print and as stationery cards.

The pioneering psychiatrist Otto Rank (April 22, 1884–October 31, 1939) — who strongly influenced Carl Jung and served as therapist to Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, and other visionary artists — pulls the curtain on that illusion in Beyond Psychology (public library) — a book “pleading for the recognition and the acceptance of the irrational element as the most vital part of human life”; the book he knew would be his last, the wartime publication of which he never lived to see.

A century before philosopher Martha Nussbaum made her rigorous case for the intelligence of emotion, observing that “emotions are not just the fuel that powers the psychological mechanism of a reasoning creature [but] parts, highly complex and messy parts, of this creature’s reasoning itself,” Rank writes as humanity is breaking into its second world war:

Our present general bewilderment… lays bare the irrational roots of human behavior which psychology tries to explain rationally in order to make it intelligible, that is, acceptable… People, though they may think and talk rationally — and even behave so — yet live irrationally.

[…]

Bound by the ideas of a better past gone by and a brighter future to come, we feel helpless in the present because we cannot even for a moment stop its movement so as to direct it more intelligently. We still have to learn, it seems, that life, in order to maintain itself, must revolt every so often against man’s* ceaseless attempts to master its irrational forces with his mind.

Much of our self-delusion, Rank observes, is due to the fact that we live in language — “a rational phenomenon meant to communicate thoughts and to explain actions in rational terms.” (This is what makes The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows so wonderfully countercultural and altogether reality-expanding.) Art in all its forms, from poetry to painting, has tried to find the emotional language of the unconscious, to embrace the surge of the irrational. (Nin herself articulated this memorably in her insistence on the importance of emotional excess for creativity: “Great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them,” she wrote in her diary between sessions with Rank.) And yet we remain storytellers, telling the story of our own lives largely in language. With the exception of dreams — the imagistic language evolution invented in the brains of birds — the mind navigates the world by talking to itself in a constant inner stream of language. And so it may be, Rank intimates, that the “beyond” of language is simply unreachable to us, that we are trying to dismantle our own captivity with the captor’s tools. He considers the paradox:

In their extremely conscious effort to reproduce what they call the “unconscious” modern painters and writers have followed modern psychology in attempting the impossible, namely to rationalize the irrational. This paradoxical state of affairs betrays itself in the basic axiom of psychoanalysis, a mechanistic theory of life according to which all mental processes and emotional reactions are determined by the Unconscious, that is, by something which in itself is unknown and undeterminable. Modern art has adopted this rational psychology of the irrational legitimately, because art itself, like psychology, has been from the beginning an attempt to master life rationally by interpreting it in terms of the current ideologies, that is, it has striven to re-create life in order to control it. The socio-political events of our day amply justify the need for something “beyond” our psychology which has proved inadequate to account for such strange happenings.

René Magritte. The False Mirror. 1929. (Museum of Modern Art.)

Echoing the Scottish philosopher John Macmurray’s haunting observation that “we ourselves are events in history [and] things do not merely happen to us, they happen through us,” Rank insists that the only way of avoiding the socio-political upheavals that periodically rupture humanity is to embrace the irrational within ourselves. A century after Macmurray wrote that “our individual tensions are simply the new thing growing through us into the life of mankind” and that we must recognize them in this universal setting in order for our private difficulties to “become really significant,” Rank writes:

Because of the inherent nature of the human being, man* has always lived beyond psychology, in other words, irrationally. If we can grasp this paradoxical fact and accept it as the basis of our own living, then we shall be able to discover new values in place of the old ones which seem to be crumbling before our very eyes — vital human values, not mere psychological interpretations predetermined by our preferred ideologies. These new values which have to be discovered and rediscovered every so often are in reality old values, the natural human values which in the course of time are lost in rationalizations of one kind or another.

These elemental values, Rank observes, lie beyond reason — we rediscover them when we cease trying to control life by rationalizing it and surrender to its experiential flow, inherently irrational and pulsating through the life of the body, which, we now know, is the true locus of consciousness. He writes:

We are born in pain, we die in pain and we should accept life-pain as unavoidable — indeed a necessary part of earthly existence, not merely the price we have to pay for pleasure… Man* is born beyond psychology and he dies beyond it but he can live beyond it only through vital experience of his own.

And this precisely why you must not spare yourself.

BP

Do Not Spare Yourself

The only thing more dangerous than wanting to save another person — a dangerous desire too often mistaken for love — is wanting to save yourself, to spare yourself the disappointment and heartbreak and loss inseparable from being a creature with hopes and longings constantly colliding with reality, with the indifference of time and chance, with the opposing hopes and longings of others.

We have, of course, always invented institutions of salvation — religion to save us from our sins, therapy to save us from our traumas, marriage to save us from our loneliness — in order to salve our suffering, which is the price we pay for the fulness of living. And salve it we must, yet there is no damnation greater than spending our allotted days in the catatonia of comfort and certainty, our inner lives automated by habit and halogen lit by convenience. To try to save ourselves from the despair by which we contour hope, to spare ourselves the fertile doubt and the gasps of self-surprise by which we discover who we really are, is to live a safe distance from alive.

Card from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days, also available as a stand-alone print.

That is what the Uruguayan novelist, journalist, and poet Mario Benedetti (September 14, 1920–May 17, 2009) explores in his astonishing poem “No Te Salves” — part indictment, part invitation, reminding us that we most often break our hearts on the hard edges of our own fear of living, on the parts of us so petrified that they have become brittle to the touch of life, the touch of love.

Since I didn’t feel that the standard English translation quite captures the urgency and intimacy of the original language, I have translated it anew. It is read here in the original Spanish by my friend Karen Maldonado (who introduced me to the poem), in English and Bulgarian by me, and in Russian by my mother (who translated it into Russian and our native Bulgarian), to the sound of Bach’s Cello Suite No. 4 in E-Flat Major.

NO TE SALVES
por Mario Benedetti

No te quedes inmóvil
al borde del camino
no congeles el júbilo
no quieras con desgana
no te salves ahora
ni nunca
                    no te salves
no te llenes de calma
no reserves del mundo
sólo un rincón tranquilo
no dejes caer los párpados
pesados como juicios
no te quedes sin labios
no te duermas sin sueño
no te pienses sin sangre
no te juzgues sin tiempo

pero si

          pese a todo no puedes evitarlo
y congelas el júbilo
y quieres con desgana
y te salvas ahora
y te llenas de calma
y reservas del mundo
sólo un rincón tranquilo
y dejas caer los párpados
pesados como juicios
y te secas sin labios
y te duermes sin sueño
y te piensas sin sangre
y te juzgas sin tiempo
y te quedas inmóvil
al borde del camino
y te salvas
          entonces
no te quedes conmigo.

DO NOT SPARE YOURSELF
by Mario Benedetti
translated by Maria Popova

Don’t stand motionless
by the side of the road
don’t petrify your joy
don’t desire with reserve
do not spare yourself now
or ever
          do not spare yourself
don’t fill up on tranquility
don’t claim from the world
only a quiet corner
don’t let your eyelids fall
heavy as judgments
don’t remain lipless
don’t fall asleep unready to dream
don’t think yourself bloodless
don’t deem yourself out of time

but if
          in spite of it all you can’t help it
and petrify your joy
and desire with reserve
and spare yourself now
and fill up on tranquility
and claim from the world
only a quiet corner
and let your eyelids fall
heavy as judgments
and remain lipless
and fall asleep unready to dream
and think yourself bloodless
and deem yourself out of time
and stand motionless
on the side of the road
and you have been spared
          then
do not stay with me.

НЕ СЕ ЩАДИ
Марио Бенедети
превод от Лилия Попова

Не стой неподвижно
край пътя
не вкаменявай радостта си
не желай неохотно
не се щади сега
и никога
          не се щади
не се изпълвай с покой
не искай от света само едно тихо кътче
не позволявай на клепачите ти да паднат,
тежки като присъди
не оставай беззвучен
не заспивай без сънища
не се мисли за безсилен
не се съди без време

но ако
          все пак не успееш
и вкамениш радостта си
и желаеш неохотно
и се щадиш сега
и си изпълнен с покой
и искаш от света само едно тихо кътче
и позволиш клепачите ти да паднат,
тежки като присъди
и останеш беззвучен
и заспиваш без сънища,
и се мислиш за безсилен,
и се съдиш без време
и стоиш неподвижно край пътя
и си пощаден
          тогава
не оставай с мен.

НЕ ЩАДИ СЕБЯ
Марио Бенедети
перевод Лилии Поповой

Не стой тихо на краю дороги
не загораживай свою радость
не желай с неохотой
не щади себя сейчас
и никогда
          не щади себя
не исполняйся покоем
не проси у мира только тихий уголок
не дай опускаться векам твоим,
тяжелыми, как приговор
не оставайся безмолвным
не усыпай без снов
не думай, что безсилен
не суди себя без времени

но если
          однако не сможеш
и загораживаешь свою радость
и желаеш с неохотой
и щадишь себя сейчас и навсегда
и исполнен покоем
и просишь у мира только тихий уголок
и даеш опускаться векам своим,
тяжелыми, как приговор
и остаешься безмолвным
и засыпаешь без снов
и думаешь, что ты бессилен
и судишь себя без времени
и стоишь тихо на краю дороги
и щадишь себя
          тогда
не оставайся со мной.

BP

The Hot Shower as Uncommon Prayer

The Hot Shower as Uncommon Prayer

One of the paradoxes of being alive is that it is often through the extremes of sensation, through the shock of having a body, that we come most proximate to the subtleties of the soul. Walt Whitman knew this: “If the body is not the soul,” he sang electric, “what is the soul?” William James knew it: “A purely disembodied emotion is a nonentity,” he wrote in his pioneering theory of how our bodies affect our feelings. You and I know it, perhaps know it daily: Few things ensoul us more readily than a hot shower.

Having spent swaths of my childhood without hot water, I never take a hot shower for granted, and it is by not taking the mundane for granted that we contact the miraculous — the shimmering unlikeliness of this water world adrift amid the cold austerity of spacetime just the right distance from its star to neither freeze nor evaporate, the unfaltering fundamental laws that keep the entire orrery in motion, the miracle of the human mind and its immense Rube Goldberg machine of ideation, thoughts setting thoughts into motion across lifetimes and civilizations, to give us tile and the electric heater, pipes and the hydraulic pump. There is, after all, no way around John Muir’s observation that “when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe” — for the moment we relish the tiniest miracle, we partake of the total miracle. And is there a better way to start a day, or to end one, than awash in the miraculous?

Art by Sophie Blackall from Things to Look Forward to

That is what Brian Doyle, patron saint of the miraculous, explores in one of the short, exultant pieces collected in his Book of Uncommon Prayer: 100 Celebrations of the Miracle & Muddle of the Ordinary (public library).

Under the heading “Prayer in Celebration of the Greatest Invention Ever, the Wicked Hot Shower,” he writes:

O God help me bless my soul is there any pleasure quite so artless and glorious and simple and unadorned and productive and restorative as a blazing hot shower when you really really want a hot shower? When you are not yet fully awake, when you are wiped from two hours of serious basketball, when you are weary and speechless after trip or trauma? Thank You, Inventiveness, for making a universe where there is water, and heat, and nozzles, and towels, and steam, and hairbrushes, and razors for cutting that line that distinguishes your beard from your chest, and toothbrushes. Thank You most of all, Generosity, for water. Deft invention, water. Who would have ever thought to mix hydrogen and oxygen so profligately? Not us. But it is everything we are. It falls freely from the sky. It carries us and our toys and joys. It is clouds and mist and fog and sleet and breath. There is no sweeter more crucial food… And so: amen.

Couple with another prayerful exultation in a simple pleasure — Rose Macaulay on the pleasure of being left alone — then revisit Brian Doyle on how to live a miraculous life.

BP

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