~by David Aiken~
Sometimes the life we live is not completely our own. In addition to
certainly being one’s own, for example, one’s life is also, at times, simply so
full of moments when one’s own personal experience is so representative of just
about everyone’s experience of the Human
Condition that, even if merely for the blink of an eye, one becomes Everyman.
Dream a Little Dream of Me. Let us imagine a philosopher
who is also a dreamer. Rising with the morning sun, the philosophically-minded
dreamer is informed by his wife that she was once again awakened in the middle
of the night by another of his dream-world lectures. Now, obviously, the
night-lecturing philosopher is dead asleep at the time he is holding forth, and so he has to trust his
wife that she is in fact telling him the truth: that he apparently speechifies as
only a sleeping philosopher can—on the damnedest subjects. On this particular
night, his wife informs him with a giggle, the philosopher’s particular
middle-of-the-night thematic was “Wielding a sword.” From what she was able to
divine from his nocturnal ramblings, her philosopher-dreamer was discoursing on
some Epic Hero, as was his wont, but then the point of his oration was, or at
least it appeared to be so, that our hero’s “sword” was not really his sword at
all, but rather a metaphor for the hero “wielding” some other and more
Freudianly banal object for piercing asunder.
Even
afterwards, as our dreaming philosopher first records, and then reads this paragraph
aloud to his bride, she reminded him in a very sniggering and distinctly
ungracious tone, that she had told him the story truly, and that the sword was
not a sword at all but some interestingly comparable human body-part apparently
gone berserk.
So, this is a reflection about piggyback
worlds—worlds that contain a surplus of realities none of which are ever exactly
what they seem; worlds within worlds, or more precisely, worlds in which every
other world carries along with it, inseparably and almost indistinguishably, still more other worlds – piggyback
worlds. Like the Story told by his wife to the dreamer, who, unawares, dreamed
the Story of an Epic Hero holding a sword, which may also have been a sword,
but which was certainly perceived by the Dreamer (and giggling wife) to be
something rather more. Intruding realities from piggyback worlds are always
somewhat vague, their boundaries fluid and unclear; and sometimes these essences
of a piggyback sort will be less, but most of the time they will be more, than
they seem. The piggyback nature of our Worlds is nicely reflected in the
classic onion metaphor where, peeling back layer after interminable thin layer
of enfolding skins of meaning, we discover a rather small and not terribly
tasty “tendril-like” root hiding at the core.
“Being”
Invisible. There are many things that I do in the
world. I do the things that a teacher does, a husband, a dog-owner, a philosophical
blogger, a hardy olive-tree planter, an untalented house painter, a laborer, a traveler—all
of which are noun descriptors of a verbalizing sort being used appositionally, which
is to say that they point back to the subject/individual in the midst of some
activity. The verbalizing nouns may then also be strengthened afterwards by adding
any number of adjectives, depending on how much obfuscation or clarification is
desired.
These
verbalizing nouns describe, in fact and in deed, how I am acting out my life;
but they collectively beg the question as to whether there is any “tendril-like”
“being” invisibly stashed underneath all these actions… some true and authentic
“I” that has integrity and inherent worth apart from these myriad life-actions
and activities. How are we to interpret or understand the individual body-being
who is acting out the functions of living? Some philosophers, like Heraclitus,
clearly think that the individual, as such, is not some “thing” separable from
its acting; indeed, the individual self has no distinct or unique being apart from its performance of it-self. Therefore,
Heraclitus famously writes, “What we do habitually is who we are or who we become.” What- or who-ever
I think I am is inseparable from what
I do—an observation that has, in
Heraclitus’ eyes, almost as much importance metaphysically as ethically. This
observation about individual authenticity,
of course, will resurge many centuries later to become the “tendril-like” root out
of which the tree of modern existential thought will spring.
As
I think of all the things I “am,” what I come up with are the typical interpretive anthropological categories
of sex, gender, race, religion, color, etc., etc., etc. (remember to pronounce
this like Yule Brenner in the King and I,
just for the fun of it!), which are really not “me,” but rather piggyback
groups of nouns that normalize qualities, allowing us to categorize ourselves
into sets of all those who are such-as-me. On this view I “am” by analogy.
Alternatively,
as I think of all the things I “am,” I peel back an almost infinite number of layers
of all the things I can be or become as a result of my actions. Through my
actions I can position my-doing-“self” in a variety of narrative categories or Archetypes,
as Hero, Anti-hero, Villain, Rascal, or Savior. In this case I “am”
allegorically.
“Me”
by analogy or “me” by allegory – in either case Heraclitus called it correctly:
“me” equals the sum of all the piggyback versions of me-interpreted and
me-doing or me-having-done.
The
Acts of Living. What a philosopher Shakespeare was…
and a phenomenologist of Heraclitean persuasion to boot! Remember Jaques in As You Like It, (Act 2, Scene 7) who translates Heraclitus’ vision of man into theatrical
terms:
“All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages.”
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages.”
Theater, or film or literature, provide
wonderful analogies for the piggyback nature both of Human Understanding and of
the Human Condition. In the best cases the analogy is informative precisely
because theatrical re-presentation tends to blur the lines between the layers
of our onion-worlds as easily as it blurs the lines between genres, and it seldom
makes any pretense of finding some “tendril-like” essence at the center.
The
winner of the Golden Bear at Berlin’s 2012 International Film Festival was the
Italian film, Cesar Must Die (Cesare deve morire). What makes this
film so challenging, which is also precisely what makes it so very interesting,
is that it seems deliberately to confuse the “edges” between metaphor,
allegory, social philosophy, cinema, and straightforward theatre. This film,
which used real (and some formerly real dangerous) prison convicts as the
actors, can be interpreted as a meta-type applied-reworking of Shakespeare’s Julius Cesar; or it can be read as a
socially engaged visual text, a docu-drama, although in a radio interview aired
on France Inter’s Cosmopolitaine
(Sunday, 21 October 2012) the director brothers denied this
interpretation. Similarly, Cesar Must Die
could also be considered a simple updating of Shakespeare’s piece, i.e., a recasting
of the Julius Cesar narrative in the modern arena for modern viewers; or,
again, as a statement about social politics and the penal system. So what are we
members of the audience actually supposed to do with this narrative? How are we
intended by the directors to interpret this Story, and is there only one
interpretation, or even a best interpretation? Are we supposed to seek some
kind of meaningful application to our lives through this narrative, or to
become informed on issues of social justice and redemption? Or are we simply to
let the visual event wash over us as “entertainment,” with no more thought or value
than we might attribute to a Mozart divertimento?
This
brings us to one of the very interesting problems associated with theatrical
devices, such as metaphor or social commentary, when they are used in marketing
and advertising, and where the goal is to get the dollars out of our pockets
and into someone else’s bank accounts. Oh, the dangers of irony on this stage
of our world, which becomes even more pocked should advertisers
become “playful” with the already blurry lines between motivated information,
i.e., information with an agenda, and deliberate dis- or misinformation.
Sometimes
the life we are living is not fully our own. The edges of all of our lives, and
the identity of the various personae we
play in the course of our lives, are not clear and distinct essences, as a Descartes
might have said, but rather are full of blurred lines and abandoned layers of onion
peels. Heraclitus gives the preferential philosophical reading on the question
of our human authenticity: ours is more of a fire-sort of reality. It is
inevitable, then, that the roles we play will cross over the boundaries of
tragedy and comedy, farce and drama, and that all of our lives will be plagued
by interpretations and misinterpretations, hearings and mis-hearings, takings
and mis-takings, errors and corrections.
(Reworked from an essay originally
published in October 2012).
Further Phrontisterion readings around the theme
of ‘becoming’:
