Absurdity That is You
The most humbling of all thoughts is that you are here. Right here, right now. It’s important to remind yourself of this when boredom and disappointment swell — when you see Ray Winstone advertise bet365, probably only because he’s a bit cockney and looks like a gambler who’s lost everything but can still afford a suit. For you to be here at all is a miracle; a few trillion atoms had to, without any preconceived ideas or agenda, come together and assemble into life. No mean feat. Just one of the illimitable ways to describe your uniquity is to say that there’s a greater chance of someone winning the lottery ten years on the trot than there is of atoms working together to form life as we know it. You only have to look through the lens of the most powerful telescopes into the billions of light-years of the universe to see that you, nested in this infinitesimal nook of space called Earth, are quite a rare thing indeed. Of course if those few trillion atoms that made you could think they’d probably think you were the most unremarkable of things for they make up everything in the universe — celestial moons, Saturn’s rings, Brad Pitt, Babylon’s rivers and all the air and everything in between. All the atoms needed to do to make you was knock up a cocktail of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, calcium, and sulphur, then wait for the conditions to be just right. You’re made out of the same basic building blocks that make up every other thing in the universe. Joni Mitchell put it much more eloquently when she said: ‘we are all stardust’.
‘Purushna is the whole universe: what has been and what is going to be. One fourth of him is all beings, three fourths of him is immortal heaven.’
-Upanishads
The scarcity of us creates an affinity with the everything else — even in the 3.5 billion year history of life, 99.99% of species that have ever lived no longer exist — bringing contentedness, solace and a capacity for companionship with other living things we share this existence with. Though we can’t point to it there is a sense of being part of a universal whole.
‘What an extraordinary situation is that of us mortals! Each of us is here for a brief sojourn; for what purpose he knows not, though he sometimes thinks he feels it. But from the point of view of daily life, without going deeper, we exist for our fellow men — in the first place for those on whose smiles and welfare our happiness depends, and next all those unknown to us personally with whose destinies we are bound up by the tie of sympathy.’
-Albert Einstein
This whole is like a tapestry; a sprawl of interconnected threads and patterns, each of us weaving our own self-portraiture. Imagine your thoughts as loose threads in this great tapestry, each with its own colour, weight and potential energy. Bonded to a single mirrored needle, propelled with an arrow-like motion and straightness, giving action to thought. The needle pierces and pulls your loose thoughts through the gunky fabric — with varying success! — and gives form and permanence to your nebulous ideas; in and out through the cold sink of space and time, moving only forwards in motion, owing only to what’s behind.
‘Something that you feel will find its own form’
- Jack Kerouac
If the threads are our thoughts and the needle is our action, the pattern is our purpose. We are all what Aristotle called teleological beings, defined by a purpose or an end (telos) for which we strive. Our behaviour and actions are all explained by reference to it: we do good things to serve an end, we do bad things to serve an end. So why so glum? Much of life is nothing but a doodle — certainly not a doddle. We fill our time trying to define this pattern or purpose, but if you’re anything like me, half the time is spent trying to fist and fiddle the thread through the needle! Sometimes clumsily, almost always frenetically, we repeatedly stitch until we find the form and shape to unveil this grand purpose. Often we feel it fleetingly, like cold water on our toes before it recedes to the ocean, leaving us moored on the shoreline with a faint spume and staring out to the vast sea of hidden life, reflecting an empty sky.
Through the process of learning and repeating — both our successes and failures — we realise that the forces that create and unite the patterns are the same forces that destroy and divide them. Society as a whole has continually divided itself into separate patterns: nations, racial groups, political ideologies, football teams, girl groups, boy bands. Pluralism ad infinitum. Even at an individual level we divide ourselves into separate and often conflicting compartments according to life’s demands — work, family, mental, physical. We serve as a means to an end for each of these different fragmented compartments of our lives, and yet depend on them for our own personal advancement and happiness. It seems inevitable then that this fragmentation leads to a terrible tangle, which brings despair, fear and isolation, whilst limiting our individual happiness as we try to satisfy every requirement of every compartment and weave the perfect pattern. Sew every loose thread.
‘The endless cycle of idea and action, endless invention, endless experiment, brings knowledge of motion, but not stillness’
-T.S Eliot
Let’s pause for a second from all this metaphysical hubajuba and explore an analogy in Freud’s theory of drives to show how this duality works on a psychological level. Freud describes these drives as forces that aim to satisfy the tensions caused by the needs of the Es (an individual’s basic purpose or function in life). The two basic drives are the Eros Drive which seeks to create and maintain unities and the Destructive Drive (Death Drive) which exists with the aim to destroy things and dissolve unities to their original state (the whole). These two drives can work together or against one another but if one drive has a greater energy or momentum than the other it can lead to major physical and psychological consequences as is so often seen in relationships with people, things and one’s own self.
To some extent, fragmentation and the process of division has always been necessary. Nature is a master of this and forms its patterns with great overlocking beauty; watch with wonder in late summer as migratory birds fly in formation to escape the cold winter, arranging themselves into an aerodynamic ‘flying v’ shape to conserve the energy required to reach their destination — a strategy now replicated by fighter jets to conserve fuel. The bird that breaks from the flock will not make it alone. Even in the civilized world fragmentation has always carried a practical use, such as dividing farmland into crops. But when fragmentation of purpose becomes so widespread and pervasive — especially in us as individuals — it becomes unmanageable and in severe cases can be a destructive force. We carry with us many fragmented versions of our self, each with varying and punishing requirements, allowing ourselves to be defined in some way by each constituent part of our own personal worlds. We defend each part vehemently as we incorrectly identify them as things belonging to us and not to the whole. This misappropriation interferes with our clarity of self awareness and creates endless unsolvable problems as we measure our own happiness by the importance and success we hold in each of these fragments or patterns. Look up the etymologoly of the word the word ‘Health’ and you’ll see it comes from the Anglo-Saxon word ‘Hale’ meaning ‘Whole’, suggesting we’ve always been aware of the importance of a so-called wholeness and our integration into it. And yet, the proliferation of fragmentation; the blending and blurring of patterns — to the point of becoming a fetishised proclivity — only increases in speed and severity, leading to many urgent crises confronting us today.
William Blake’s stunning poem acts as a sobering note to self:
‘To see a World in a grain of sand,
And a Heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And Eternity in an hour’
-William Blake
