#essential thinking

“Art is the activity that exalts and denies simultaneously. ‘No artist tolerates reality,’ says Nietzsche. That is true, but no artist can get along without reality. Artistic creation is a demand for unity and a rejection of the world. But it rejects the world on account of what it lacks and in the name of what it sometimes is. Rebellion can be observed here in its pure state and in its original complexities. Thus art should give us a final perspective on the content of rebellion.”

-Albert Camus, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt-

Somewhere in the recesses of self, we defy gravity. The defining words for all things hover, after all. We create, construct, reconstruct; elicit conduits unseen. We are keepers, makers. We are wholly ours but given nonetheless. In that long pour, think—it’s not the body that gets undressed. As Camus writes:

“The symphonies of nature know no rests. The world is never quiet; even its silence eternally resounds with the same notes, in vibrations that escape our ears. As for those that we perceive, they carry sounds to us, occasionally a chord, never a melody. Music exists, however, in which symphonies are completed, where melody gives its form to sounds that by themselves have none, and where, finally, a particular arrangement of notes extracts from natural disorder a unity that is satisfying to the mind and the heart.”

Sometimes a hum, sometimes a roar, the impetus drives us, outward bound and inward leaning. And I ask, Is this right? Normal? Place as in the paradox, my space of fertile ground? I know, of course, as do you in all the ways we polyglot the same language; speak as one in foundational form though separate as voice.

A star is the glowing light inside the other person, distantly seen, brave soul’s tiny flame, too bright to approach without great courage and integrity.

We move among surfaces. If we are lucky enough, if we are courageous enough, every once in a while we dive into the depths with another. It is not easy, because even through our best self-awareness, we remain largely unfathomable to ourselves. To reach the nether fathoms with another is a transcendent terror—one we can only bear for a little while before some great gasp of panic beckons us back to the surface.

The willingness to stay is what we call intimacy, and it is the hardest-won, most precious mutual gift two people could exchange.

In the final year of his life, six years after he radicalised the psychology of relationships with his now-iconic book Games People Play, Eric Berne (May 10, 1910–July 15, 1970) took up the intricacies of intimacy by building on his central model of the three ego states that live in each of us: the Child (the most natural, vulnerable, and spontaneous part of our personality, keeper of our creative vitality and our most unalloyed capacity for pleasure); the Parent (the part of us that unconsciously mimics the psychological responses of our parents as we observed them in childhood); and the Adult (the competent and self-possessed part of us capable of making sound decisions in our best interest).

In Games People Play, Berne had codified the basis of all human miscommunication and mutual wounding in the crossed communication channels between these three different ego-states as they converse with one another within and between persons. In Sex in Human Loving (public library), he considers the particular interference that garbles the flow of intimacy and the particular solution to it. He writes:

“The human race has had so much time on its hands, and is so afraid of open intimacy, that it has devised many ways of using its organs for hidden purposes and for frivolous or false relationships.

[…]

Intimacy is a candid Child-to-Child relationship with no games and no mutual exploitation. It is set up by the Adult ego states of the parties concerned, so that they understand very well their contracts and commitments with each other, sometimes without a word being spoken about such matters. As this understanding becomes clearer, the Adult gradually retires from the scene, and if the Parent does not interfere, the Child becomes more and more relaxed and freer and freer. The actual intimate transactions take place between the two Child ego states. The Adult, however, still remains in the background as an overseer to assure that the commitments and limitations are kept. The Adult also has the task of keeping the Parent from barging in and spoiling the situation. In fact the capacity for intimacy depends upon the ability of the Adult and the Child to keep the Parent at bay if necessary; but it is even better if the Parent benevolently gives permission or, best of all, encouragement, for the relationship to proceed. Parental encouragement helps the Child lose his fear of intimacy, and assures that he will not be restrained by a burden or threat of guilt.”

Berne notes that anyone who has embarked on an intimate relationship would recognise the mental voices of the three ego states—the exuberant Child, impatient to dive headfirst into the shimmering waters of the new relationship; the Parent wagging a finger at some supposed red flag or “making some approving comment... at which the Child nods eagerly,” and the Adult coolly evaluating the situation until a pronouncement can me made that this potential partner seems to be “the one.”

Real intimacy, Berne argues, requires that the Child be set free from both the inner Parent and the Adult, for they have corrupted true seeing with notions of knowing: naming things, classifying things, conceptualising things—the interpretive filters we superimpose over raw experience as we grow up.

In Berne’s model—although he doesn’t use those terms, for ancient Eastern philosophy was yet to permeate mainstream Western culture—the Child is the most non-dualistic part of us: the part that inhabits that primeval space before the world has been divided into subject and object, when all is unfiltered experience, spontaneous and pure.

In consonance with Wild Things creator Maurice Sendak’s insistence that a full life is a matter of “having your child self intact and alive and something to be proud of,” Berne writes:

“Most human beings never really see another person after they are five years old. In an intimate relationship, each party returns to the original naïve Child ego state, where he is free of such Parental prohibitions and Adult requirements, and can see, hear, and taste in its purest form what the world has to offer. This freedom of the Child is the essential part of intimacy, and it turns the whole universe, including the sun, moon, and stars, into a golden apple for both parties to enjoy.

[…]

Once the Child is free of Adult caution and Parental criticism, he has a sense of elation and awareness. He begins to see and hear and feel the way he really wants to, the way he originally did before he was corrupted by his living parents. In this autonomous state, he no longer has to name things, as is usually required by his Adult, nor account for his behaviour, as demanded by his Parent. He is free to respond directly and spontaneously to what he sees and hears and feels. Because the two parties trust one another, they freely open up their secret worlds of perception, experience, and behaviour to each other, asking nothing in return except the delight of opening the gates without fear.”

A childlike playfulness with language—that supreme castle of concepts—is one way Berne countered the Adult and the Parent. He enjoyed twisting common words deemed obscene, folding them unto themselves by spelling them backward and sideways. Cuff was his preferred phonetic origami of fuck—a superior form of the word, he thought, as a sensory emblem of both our somatic experience and our experiential ideologies:

“A respect for the power of obscenity is not a quaint relic of an antique way of thinking. Rather it is one aspect of a way of life in which the most important quality is grace. Grace means graceful movements, and graceful moments of solitude or communion. This quality is well understood by dancers, rhetoricians, and students of Zen and other Oriental philosophies. It means speaking gracefully and making each hour a work of art.

[…]

Cuff is the only word in the English language that gives the full feeling, excitement, slipperiness, and aroma of the sexual act. Its lascivious “f” sound also helps to give it a realistic punch. [Other synonyms] carefully avoid the idea of excitement and lust, and even more carefully avoid one of the most primitive and powerful elements in sex, which is smell. Cuff takes in all of these, just as a child does, because it starts off as a child’s word.”

Intimacy, Berne argues in the central premise of his model, can only be achieved by allowing untrammelled spontaneity—a function of the inner Child that must remain alive and beloved in each of us as we move through adulthood, if life is to have a fulness of being. In a lovely passage that reads like a poetic children’s book for grownups, he considers what real intimacy means:

“A star is the glowing light inside the other person, distantly seen, brave soul’s tiny flame, too bright to approach without great courage and integrity. Each person lives alone in inner space, and intimacy is out there. Intimacy is outer space, and if that’s where you are, you don’t say “Cuff you!” to a star.”

Complement with Shel Silverstein’s illustrated allegory of the key to true intimacy, then revisit Hannah Arendt on love and how to live with the fundamental fear of loss.

Love is a bet, a wild one, placed on freedom. Not my own; the freedom of the Other… A knot made of two intertwined freedoms.

We love to forget ourselves, but also to remember what we are: mortal creatures lustful of meaning, radiant with life, eternally alone and eternally longing for home—home in ourselves and home in each other. “I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other,” Rilke wrote in his exquisite reckoning with the interplay of freedom and togetherness in love—Rilke, who also knew that “death is our friend precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here, that is natural, that is love.”

The delicate, eternal, life-magnifying relationship between love and death, between union and freedom, is what Nobel laureate Octavio Paz (March 31, 1914–April 19, 1998) explores throughout his timeless book The Double Flame: Love and Eroticism (public library), composed in the final years of his long life.

Paz writes:

“In love, predestination and choice, objective and subjective, fate and freedom intersect.”

This dialogue between fate and freedom permeates Paz’s reckoning with love. Love, he observes, is not merely “the passionate attraction toward a single person” but, in the particularity of that person, requires “the transformation of the erotic object into a free and unique subject.” An epoch after Rilke, Paz writes:

“Love is a bet, a wild one, placed on freedom. Not my own; the freedom of the Other.

[…]

Love… transforms the subject and object of the erotic encounter into unique persons… Its cornerstone is freedom: the mystery of the person.

[…]

The transformation of the erotic object into a person immediately makes the person a subject who possesses free will. The object I desire becomes a subject who desires me—or rejects me. The giving up of personal sovereignty and the voluntary acceptance of servitude involves a genuine change of nature: by way of the bridge of mutual desire the object becomes desiring subject and the subject becomes desiring object. Love, then, is represented in the form of a knot. A knot made of two intertwined freedoms.”

Again and again, Paz returns to “the conjunction of fate and freedom” in love:

“Whether the relationship is the result of accident or predestination, to reach fulfilment the complicity of our will is required. Love, any love, implies a sacrifice; and we choose that sacrifice without batting an eye. This is the mystery of freedom… In short, love is freedom personified, freedom incarnated in a body and a soul.”

Lamenting the deficiency of language as a vessel to hold our most oceanic experiences, he adds:

“How precarious and elusive are the ideas with which we attempt to explain the mystery of love. A mystery that is part of a greater one: the human being, who, suspended between chance and necessity, transforms his predicament into freedom.

[…]

There is an intimate, causal relation between love and freedom.”

Freedom, Paz intimates, is not willed but attained through that most difficult of human achievements—surrender:

“True love consists precisely of the transformation of the appetite for possession into surrender.”

But here is the transcendent, devastating heart of the matter: When we surrender to love, we are also surrendering to time—the entropic emperor of human destiny. Paz writes:

“Human love is the union of two beings subject to time and its accidents: change, sickness, death. Although it does not save us from time, it opens it a crack, so that in a flash love’s contradictory nature is manifest: that vivacity which endlessly destroys itself and is reborn, which is always both now and never.”

With an eye to our destiny as mortal creatures, “playthings of time and accident,” Paz insists that “love is one of the answers that humankind has invented in order to look death in the face.” He writes:

“Love is life to the full, at one with itself: the opposite of separation. In the sensation of the carnal embrace the union of the couple becomes feeling, and feeling in turn becomes awareness; love is the discovery of the unity of life. But in that instant the compact unity is broken in two, and time reappears: it is a great hole that swallows us… Total fusion includes the acceptance of death. Without death, life—ours, here on this earth—is not life. Love does not vanquish death but makes it an integral part of life.”

Observing that love is “bound to earth by the body’s gravitation, which is pleasure and death,” Paz considers the essential polarity of our richest and most life-affirming experience:

“Like all the great creations of humanity, love is twofold: it is the supreme happiness and the supreme misfortune… Lovers pass constantly from rapture to despair, from sadness to joy, from wrath to tenderness, from desperation to sensuality… The lover is perpetually driven by contradictory emotions. Popular language, in all times and all places, abounds in expressions that describe the vulnerability of a person in love: love is a wound, an injury. But as St. John of the Cross says, it is “a wound that is a gift,” a “gentle cautery,” a “delightful wound.” Yes, love is a flower of blood. It is also a talisman: the vulnerability of lovers protects them. Their shield is their lack of defense; their armour is their nakedness.

[…]

Yet despite all the ills and misfortunes it brings, we always endeavour to love and be loved. Love is the closest thing on this earth to the beatitude of the blessed.”

All of our situational vulnerability springs from the supreme existential vulnerability we are born into—our mortality, the haunting fact of it, the stark assurance of it in every smallest act of dissolution pointing the arrow of time at death. A generation before the poet Mark Doty observed in his superb Whitman-lensed meditation on love and death that “you need to both remember where love leads and love anyway,” Paz writes:

“Love does not preserve us from the risks and misfortunes of existence. No love, not even those that are most peaceful and happy, escapes the disasters and calamities of time. Love, any love, is made up of time, and no love can avoid the great catastrophe: the beloved is subject to the assaults of age, infirmity, and death.”

Echoing Borges’s timeless refutation of time and Kierkegaard’s insistence that “the moment is not properly an atom of time but an atom of eternity,” he adds:

“There is no remedy for time. Or, at least, we do not know what it is. But we must trust in the flow of time, we must live.

[…]

We are time and cannot escape its dominion. We can transfigure it but not deny it or destroy it. This is what the great artists, poets, philosophers, scientists, and certain men of action have done. Love, too, is an answer: because it is time and made of time, love is at once consciousness of death and an attempt to make of the instant an eternity. All loves are ill-starred, because all are made of time, all are the fragile bond between two temporal creatures who know they are going to die. In all loves, even the most tragic, there is an instant of happiness that it is no exaggeration to call superhuman: it is a victory over time, a glimpse of the other side, of the there that is a here, where nothing changes and everything that is, truly is.”

What emerges is a conception of love not as an antidote to death but as its vitalising antipode:

“Love does not defeat death; it is a wager against time and its accidents. Through love we catch a glimpse, in this life, of the other life. Not of the eternal life, but… of pure vitality.

[…]

Love is not eternity; nor is it the time of calendars and watches, successive time. The time of love is neither great nor small; it is the perception of all times, of all lives, in a single instant. It does not free us from death but makes us see it face to face… We are the theatre of the embrace of opposites and of their dissolution, resolved in a single note that is not affirmation or negation but acceptance… the presence that dissolves into splendour: pure vitality, a heartbeat of time.”

The Double Flame is a superb read in its entirety. Complement it with Hannah Arendt on love and how to live with the fundamental fear of its loss and French philosopher Alain Badiou on why we fall and how we stay in love, then revisit this florilegium of two centuries of great minds reckoning with time.

“What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?” the Proust Questionnaire asked David Bowie. “Living in fear.” Partway in time between Proust and Bowie, the young Hannah Arendt examined the eternal paradox of how to love and live with fear in her earliest published work, observing: “Fearlessness is what love seeks. Such fearlessness exists only in the complete calm that can no longer be shaken by events expected of the future... Hence the only valid tense is the present, the Now.”

And yet a hallmark of our complex animal consciousness is our prospective imagination—the ability to tense into the future and everything that could possibly go wrong in it, aware that at any given moment we could be making the wrong choice, aware that even if there were a right one, and even if we had the wisdom to discern it and the will to make it, chance will always play a greater role than choice. This is the price we pay for the chance-miracle of being alive at all, each of us the improbable product of chance events that long prefigure our consciousness and its capacity for choice. (Just ask James Baldwin.) So we find ourselves here, cosmic castaways living with the perennial burden of figuring forward in an uncertain universe, discovering again and again in this burden the greatest blessings of beauty and meaning—the object of every theorem and the subject of every work of art, followed to its deepest source.

How to live not without fear but with it, how to let it be the foothold to our capacity for kindness and beauty, is what artist Charlie Mackesy explores in The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse (public library)—a serenade to life, in all its terrifying and transcendent uncertainty, sung in ink, watercolour, and wonder.

The book is less a story than a sensorium for meaning, rendered in spare words and soulful pictures. In a series of encounters and conversations with three other animals, each the keeper of a different kind of wisdom, a small boy confronts life’s big questions: how to live with fear, what it means to love and be loved, where to find the deepest and purest wellspring of fulfillment.

There is an Odyssean quality to the path they travel together, but it is not that of the archetypal hero’s journey. At its heart is a celebration of friendship as life’s supreme collaborative heroism, which saves us from ourselves (the way anything that unselves us saves us).

To a jaded grownup eye, this painted meditation might at times appear as the moral of a Zen parable or an Aesop fable, delivered without the storytelling and poetic rewards of the parable or fable—a little too obvious, a little too simplistic, a little too fortune cookie. But wherever it risks being trite, the story is saved by tenderness.

It helps, too, to remember to take Mackesy’s hand and step into the perspective from which the story unfolds—that of a child wide-eyed with wonder, asking the simplest questions, which are also the deepest questions, with unselfconscious sincerity; it helps to remember Aldous Huxley’s admonition against our fear of sincerity as he contemplated the two types of truth all artists must reconcile, reminding us that while “not all obvious truths are great truths,” “all great truths are obvious truths.”

In this regard, the book feels like a spiritual heir of Winnie the Pooh. And who, this side of 1943, can encounter a fox in a picture-book without thinking of The Little Prince?

Leafing through it, I find myself thinking of the Stoic strategy for overcoming fear: “If you would not have a man flinch when the crisis comes,” Seneca wrote two millennia ago, “train him before it comes.” Better yet, this uncommon book intimates, train him before he becomes a man—train the child that becomes the man, the child that goes on living inside him, the eternal inner child for whom Maurice Sendak made all of his books, knowing that the highest achievement of adulthood is “having your child self intact and alive and something to be proud of.”

Complement The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse—many fragments of which Mackesy has made available as cards and prints—with poet Joseph Pintauro’s wondrous vintage picture-books for adults about life, love, mortality, and the wonder of uncertainty, then revisit the Nobel-winning Polish poet Wisława Szymborska on fairy tales and the importance of fear and beloved Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh on the four Buddhist mantras for turning fear into love.

“When we really know something we feel we’ve always known it. Yet also it’s terribly distant, farther than any star... beyond the world, not in the clouds or in heaven, but a light that shows the world, this world, as it really is.”

When Nietzsche weighed our human notion of truth, he regarded it as “a movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished.” This is true of truth in the human world, and this is where science and society differ. The disparity is the reason why the scientific perspective can offer such gladsome calibration and consolation for our human struggles.

In the world of science, we endeavour to uncover fundamental laws and elemental truths indifferent to our opinions of them—those selfsame truths and laws that made us and govern the electrical impulses coursing through our cortices at 100 metres per second to forge the thought-patterns of opinion. But in the human world where we live, we swirl in the movable host of human relations and rationalisations, vaguely aware that there is no universal truth and therefore no universal good, because every utopia is built on someone else’s back. We devise frameworks for righting our relations, which we call morality, but in our helpless confusion about what goodness is, we too readily mistake certainty for truth and self-righteousness for truth, then lash one another with our certitudes and rightneousnesses, mistaking the lashing for the light of morality.

When our species was younger and more frightened of reality, myths and religions have provided the comfort of easy causalities and easy moralities to salve the confusions of complexity. But as the epoch of scientific discovery began disproving some of those sacred certainties—first ejecting us from the placid plane of the flat Earth, then from our self-soothing centrality in the Solar System, then from our grandiose exceptionalism in the order of living things, then from our galactic exceptionalism—the moral certitudes about goodness also came unloosed, for they too were built upon the same self-righteous foundation as the old delusions about the geometry of the universe and the immutability of life-forms.

The dazzling-minded Iris Murdoch (July 15, 1919–February 8, 1999) took up these questions in her play Above the Gods—one of two Platonic dialogues she wrote in the 1980s, later included in the posthumous Murdoch anthology Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature (public library), which remains one of the finest works of writing and thinking I have encountered.

Set in Athens in the late fifth century B.C. and structured as a conversation between a sixty-something Socrates, a twenty-something Plato, and four fictional Greek youths, the dialogue tussles with the question of whether the age of science has knelled the death toll of religion and, if so, where this leaves our search for truth and our longing for goodness—that elemental hunger for the ultimate meaning of reality, for our responsibility to reality.

When Murdoch’s Socrates observes that a distinction between religion and morality is yet to be made, without which the central question of reality and truth cannot be answered, an impassioned Plato responds:

“Religion isn’t just a feeling, it isn’t just a hypothesis, it’s not like something we happen not to know, a God who might perhaps be there isn’t a God, it’s got to be necessary, it’s got to be certain, it’s got to be proved by the whole of life, it’s got to be the magnetic centre of everything.”

And yet this more-than-feeling aims at something beyond religion, beyond even explicit knowledge, at the centre of which is the idea—the existence—of goodness:

“In a way, goodness and truth seem to come out of the depths of the soul, and when we really know something we feel we’ve always known it. Yet also it’s terribly distant, farther than any star... beyond the world, not in the clouds or in heaven, but a light that shows the world, this world, as it really is... In spite of all wickedness, and in all misery, we are certain that there really is goodness and that it matters absolutely.”

Goodness, in Murdoch’s lovely conception, emerges as both object and background, both knower and known. This renders moot the objectifying question, voiced by one of Plato’s sparring partners—a young Sophist—of where goodness resides in relation to reality: either outside us, existing in something like a god, or within us, as an internal image we refer to. Observing that it is both inside and outside, Murdoch’s Plato responds:

“Of course Good doesn’t exist like chairs and tables, it’s not... either outside or inside. It’s in our whole way of living, it’s fundamental like truth. If we have the idea of value we necessarily have the idea of perfection as something real... People know that good is real and absolute, not optional and relative, all their life proves it. And when they choose false goods they really know they’re false. We can think everything else away out of life, but not value, that’s in the very ground of things.”

The question of goodness permeates Murdoch’s entire body of work, but she plumbs this particular aspect of it—its bearing on truth and morality, lensed through Plato—in greater depth in an essay titled On “God” and “Good,” also included in Existentialists and Mystics. With an eye to the relationship between the good and “the real which is the proper object of love, and of knowledge which is freedom,” she considers what it takes for us to purify our attention in order to take in reality on its own terms, unalloyed with our attachments and ideas.

What it takes, she suggests, is “something analogous to prayer, though it is something difficult to describe, and which the higher subtleties of the self can often falsify”—not some “quasi-religious meditative technique,” but “something which belongs to the moral life of the ordinary person.” Half a century after the existentialist and mystic Simone Weil liberated this raw mindfulness from the strict captivity of religion with her lovely observation that “attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer,” for it “presupposes faith and love,” Murdoch writes:

“The idea of contemplation is hard to understand and maintain in a world increasingly without sacraments and ritual and in which philosophy has (in many respects rightly) destroyed the old substantial conception of the self. A sacrament provides an external visible place for an internal invisible act of the spirit.”

Beholding beauty in nature and in art, Murdoch argues, can serve as a sort of sacrament for the spirit—the experience provides (in one of her loveliest phrases, and one of the loveliest concepts ever committed to words) “an occasion for unselfing.” But this experience, she cautions, is not easily extended into matters of people and actions—the matters morality aims to negotiate—“since clarity of thought and purity of attention become harder and more ambiguous when the object of attention is something moral.” With an eye to Plato and his conception of beauty as the visible dimension of goodness, which is inherently invisible, she writes:

“It is here that it seems to me to be important to retain the idea of Good as a central point of reflection, and here too we may see the significance of its indefinable and non-representable character. Good, not will, is transcendent. Will is the natural energy of the psyche which is sometimes employable for a worthy purpose. Good is the focus of attention when an intent to be virtuous co-exists (as perhaps it almost always does) with some unclarity of vision.”

She invokes Plato’s famous allegory of the cave—humanity’s first great thought experiment about the nature of consciousness and its blind spots, in which the prisoners of unreality mistake the flickering shadows cast by the fire on the cave wall for the light of reality; but then, once set free by goodness and knowledge (and here is another exquisite formulation of Murdoch’s) “the moral pilgrim emerges from the cave and begins to see the real world in the light of the sun, and last of all is able to look at the sun itself.”

Shining the sunbeam of her own intellect on Plato’s blind spot to reveal the deepest meaning of morality, she writes:

“Plato pictured the good man as eventually able to look at the sun. I have never been sure what to make of this part of the myth. While it seems proper to represent the Good as a centre or focus of attention, yet it cannot quite be thought of as a “visible” one in that it cannot be experienced or represented or defined. We can certainly know more or less where the sun is; it is not so easy to imagine what it would be like to look at it. Perhaps indeed only the good man knows what this is like; or perhaps to look at the sun is to be gloriously dazzled and to see nothing. What does seem to make perfect sense in the Platonic myth is the idea of the Good as the source of light which reveals to us all things as they really are. All just vision, even in the strictest problems of the intellect, and a fortiori when suffering or wickedness have to be perceived, is a moral matter.”

In consonance with her famous assertion that “love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real”—a realisation that is both the basis of morality and the motive force of science—she adds:

“The same virtues, in the end the same virtue (love), are required throughout, and fantasy (self) can prevent us from seeing a blade of grass just as it can prevent us from seeing another person. An increasing awareness of “goods” and the attempt (usually only partially successful) to attend to them purely, without self, brings with it an increasing awareness of the unity and interdependence of the moral world. One-seeking intelligence is the image of “faith”. Consider what it is like to increase one’s understanding of a great work of art.”

Complement these fragments from the wholly indispensable Existentialists and Mystics—which also gave us Murdoch on what love really means, art as a force of resistance, and the key to great storytelling—with philosopher Martha Nussbaum (who, is in many ways, Murdoch’s intellectual heir) on what it means to be a good human being and physicist Alan Lightman on our search for the meaning beyond reality’s truths.

“Don’t loiter, girl! Do you think I shall lose appetite for the meal if you are so long about serving it? No; I shall grow hungrier, more ravenous with each moment, more cruel... Run to me, run! I have a place prepared for your exquisite corpse in my display of flesh!”

-Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber-

If Simone de Beauvoir’s ultimate assessment of the Marquis de Sade was to assign a broadly positive, proto-psychoanalytical value to his work, Andrea Dworkin—characteristically, of course—takes quite the opposite approach in her 1981 book, Pornography: Men Possessing Women. Here, she devotes an entire chapter to Sade’s cultural toxicity and its pervasive effect on the sexual politics of our times, going so far as to position him as “the world’s foremost pornographer.” As she writes:

“In him, one finds rapist and writer twisted into one scurvy knot. His life and writing were of a piece, a whole cloth soaked in the blood of women imagined and real. In his life he tortured and raped women. He was batterer, rapist, kidnapper, and child abuser. In his work he relentlessly celebrated brutality as the essence of eroticism; fucking, torture, and killing were fused; violence and sex, synonymous. His work and legend have survived nearly two centuries because literary, artistic, and intellectual men adore him and political thinkers... claim him as an avatar of freedom.”

Her unflinching appraisal of what Sade both embodies and symbolises in attaining respected status within the rigid spectrum of contemporary Western canonical traditions, leads her to assert—in direct rebuttal of Beauvoir’s earlier point—that Sade’s “...ethic—the absolute right of men to rape and brutalise any “object of desire” at will—resonates in every sphere.”

In literary terms, she highlights the myriad ways in which women’s roles, bodies, voices have been routinely diminished; female experience relegated to mere utility; objectification the norm:

“What happens to men is portrayed as authentic, significant, and what happens to women is left out or shown not to matter. Women are portrayed as the shadows that tamely follow or maliciously haunt men, never as the significant beings who matter.”

Marginalised in this manner, women become types—and in Sade’s “fiction”—wholly dehumanised in service of masculine insatiability. By contrast, Sade has been lionised by large swathes of the academic establishment and is seen almost exclusively in terms of anti-despotic and emancipatory triumphs:

“Throughout the literature on him, with some small qualifying asides, Sade is viewed as one whose voracious appetite was for freedom; this appetite was cruelly punished by an unjust and repressive society. The notion is that Sade, called by Apollinaire “that freest of spirits to have lived so far,” was a monster as the word used to be defined: something unnaturally marvellous. Sade’s violation of sexual and social boundaries, in his writings and in his life, is seen as inherently revolutionary. The antisocial character of his sexuality is seen as a radical challenge to a society deadly in its repressive sexual conventions. Sade is seen as an outlaw in the mythic sense, a grand figure of rebellion in action and in literature whose sexual hunger, like a terrorist’s bomb, threatened to blow apart the established order.”

These “Sadeian sycophants” have, therefore, portrayed him as “victimised, unjustly imprisoned, persecuted, for daring to express radical sexual values in his life.” No harm, no foul, springs to mind—straight from the rape apologist’s playbook. As for Sade himself, Dworkin interprets his letters as containing rhetoric indicative of a man who is “militant, with the pride of one martyred in righteousness,” and who accepts no personal responsibility whatsoever for the degradations, asphyxiations, immolations and exsanguinations he both rendered incarnate—and inspired.

Overall, Dworkin is succinct in her measure of Sade’s nature:

“Sade was a sexual predator and... the pornography he created was part of that predation.”

So, in light of this, how might Sade be reconciled with a more empowered feminist reading? If, as Dworkin claims, Sade endures as a proverbial “Everyman” in a misogynistic nightmare women find only too “true,” is it possible—even by the smallest degree—to find in him the empathetic kinship that defines a work as human?

Enter Angela Carter—Dworkin’s “pseudo-feminist” other—and her controversial 1979 treatise on Sade, The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History. Now I feel I should preface this by saying that the last time I read the text in its entirety was when I was twenty, a few months out from finishing my degree and blissfully ensconced in love with a man attuned to reciprocity. Nothing about my life then—or now, to be quite honest—should make Sade in the slightest bit deserving of my consideration. But this book and its bold assertions concerning Sade’s Justine/Juliette dialectic spoke to me. So let’s call this, and my preliminary musings, an attempt to work out why.

“Pornographers are the enemies of women only because our contemporary ideology of pornography does not encompass change,” Carter writes. Whilst acknowledging that myths and abstractions are inseparable from cultural and religious notions of female sexuality—which are, by their very nature, a conscious method of reducing sex to the penetrative act alone and thereby consigning women to the role of passive vessels subject exclusively to phallocentric dominance and its procreative imperative—she also posits that pornographic literature has “several functions.” However, by extension, this means that pornographic content largely “reinforces the false universals of sexual archetypes” and ignores “social context.” Thus, she wonders at the possibility of “the moral pornographer” whom she defines as:

“...an artist who uses pornographic material as part of the acceptance of the logic of a world of absolute sexual licence for all genders... His business would be the total demystification of the flesh and the subsequent revelation, through the infinite modulations of the sexual act, of the real relations of man and his kind. Such a pornographer would not be the enemy of women, perhaps because he might begin to penetrate the heart of the contempt for women that distorts our culture even as he entered the realms of true obscenity as he describes it.”

The shift in emphasis here has been most generously described as an embrace of lateral thinking although, in the main, modern critics have roundly repudiated this “polemical preface” used to build a moral case for Sade. Yes, we may falsely believe that “we fuck stripped of social artifice” and continue to struggle with regards to eliminating harmful stereotypes of “female acquiescence,” but to sanctify Sade and normalise him as feminist saviour runs a gamut of pitfalls that, frankly, suggests democratisation in one form—that which has gone disturbingly awry.

Sade may be the revolutionary republic celebrated by Apollinaire and the like. But of his ardent devotees, how many of them appreciate the reality of having a vagina or the way that it impacts upon one’s life?

By Carter’s own admission, Sade is a “connoisseur of these [vaginal] mutilations.” But she sweeps aside any robust probe of the oft-invoked defence—that of him ushering forth egalitarianism in the bedroom as in the political sphere—with the fanciful conviction that “I would like to think that he put pornography in the service of women,” when there is, in fact, a paucity of evidence to support it.

However, to give Sade—and Carter—their due, Justine and Juliette are, at least allegorically, portrayed with a view to highlighting the corrupt practices of oppression rife in society in the latter half of the eighteenth century. Justine, “martyrised” in consequence of her virtue; and Juliette, transformed into the libertine “monster” herself, are the dichotomous virgin/whore of Original Sin brought to its rawest conclusion. Under Sade’s direction, no offence is left untouched—the lines between pleasure and pain, consent and refusal not blurred but eradicated in pursuit of the ultimate trespass. As Carter goes on to write in her short story, The Bloody Chamber:

“In the course of that one-sided struggle, I had seen his deathly composure shatter like a porcelain vase flung against a wall; I had heard him shriek and blaspheme at the orgasm; I had bled. And perhaps I had seen his face without its mask; and perhaps I had not. Yet I had been infinitely dishevelled by the loss of my virginity.”

Purchased with “a handful of coloured stones and the pelts of dead beasts,” the narrator is imprisoned here, in the skin of her sexual inertia and fated for slaughter in the elaborate manner of her husband’s—coincidentally, another Marquis’—choosing. Although Carter subverts, arguably reinvents, the Bluebeard tale and thwarts her protagonist’s brutal decapitation via the “eagle-featured, indomitable” mother who saves her, she seems only too at ease to overlook the fiendish machinations Sade inflicts on—or through—his own heroines. The intertextual echo of Hamlet’s lament that death is “the undiscovered country from whose bourne/ No traveller returns,” sits askance of mere foreboding and, in this way, we are left to wonder if Carter would deign to rescue Justine from her abuses with quite the same Amazonian zeal.

Yet, like Simone de Beauvoir before her, Carter finds that there is, indeed, a point at which she must diverge from apologia of Sade. In the final chapter, she writes:

“Sexuality, stripped of the idea of free exchange, is not in any way humane; it is nothing but our cruelty. Carnal knowledge is the infernal knowledge of flesh as meat. The fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil is cooked up and served for breakfast... So flesh becomes meat by magical transition about which there is nothing natural... In Sade, Nature is a version of the Cruel God of the Old Testament.”

Finally, she is repulsed. This is where “transgression becomes regression” and, by unleashing Freud’s unbridled id, Sade’s libertine flounders into madness, the solipsistic world of his creation as unfathomable to him as the rest.

It is, then, with relief that I approach Carter’s conclusion:

“The annihilation of the self and the resurrection of the body, to die in pain and to painfully return from death, is the sacred drama of the Sadeian orgasm. In this drama, flesh is used instrumentally, to provoke these spasmodic visitations or dreadful pleasure. In this flesh, nothing human remains; it aspires to the condition of the sacramental meal. It is never the instrument of love.”

What spoke to me, therefore, isn’t the latitude Carter offers Sade in her opening, but this statement that places him firmly as “the source of all opposition to the emancipation of women.” And it is the fundamental lack, the dearth of human connection, that carries us past estrangement to the essential truth Emma Goldman writes in The Tragedy of Women’s Emancipation:

“The demand for equal rights in every vocation of life is just and fair; but, after all, the most vital right is the right to love and be loved. Indeed, if partial emancipation is to become a complete and true emancipation of woman, it will have to do away with the ridiculous notion that to be loved, to be sweetheart and mother, is synonymous with being slave or subordinate. It will have to do away with the absurd notion of the dualism of the sexes, or that man and woman represent two antagonistic worlds.”

It will have to dispense with Sade as illumination; challenge the critical lens that grants his iniquity a moral equivalence—and simultaneously, allow his implications to breathe, as if to proffer caution.

As for me? Here I see my brighter things and what Goldman notes to close:

“Pettiness separates; breadth unites. Let us be broad and big. Let us not overlook vital things because of the bulk of trifles confronting us. A true conception of the relation of the sexes will not admit of conqueror and conquered; it knows of but one great thing: to give of one’s self boundlessly, in order to find one’s self richer, deeper, better. That alone can fill the emptiness, and transform the tragedy of woman’s emancipation into joy, limitless joy.”

At its core—and, indeed, in its surface horrors—this is what Sade’s work cannot be. Joy speaks to triumph, transcendence, and to allow the women he rails against to experience anything of the sort would be to render himself obsolete. In Sade’s world, freedom may only be conceived of “as existing in opposition” and “defined by tyranny.” Female liberation—often signified by climactic ecstasy and the implied irrelevance of biological function or limitation—is thus denied before it can be realised, the text stripped to the blank but crude slate of a “masturbatory device,” and Sade categorically cast as the coward “still in complicity with the authority he hates.”

“Origin is ever-present. It is not a beginning, since all beginning is linked with time… not just the ‘now’… or a unit of time. It is ever-originating, an achievement of full integration and continuous renewal.”

“Time is being and being time, it is all one thing, the shining, the seeing, the dark abounding,” Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in her splendid “Hymn to Time” shortly before she returned her borrowed being to eternity.

In 1932, when Le Guin was only just beginning her being, when humanity was still reeling from its first global war and seething with the forces about to stir the second, the Swiss poet, philosopher, and linguist Jean Gebser (August 20, 1905–May 14, 1973) saw, in what he later described as a “lightning-like flash of inspiration,” the elemental disruption of the human spirit pulsating beneath the savage tumults of the surface: our altered relationship with time—a transformation catalysed by the Galilean dawn of timekeeping in the sixteenth century, accelerated by the invention of motion photography in the nineteenth, and exploded by the birth of relativity in the twentieth.

Gebser, who swam in Jung’s circles and drank at Rilke’s fount, realised that for us creatures of time, creatures whose very consciousness is woven of temporality, an altered relationship with time is an altered relationship with ourselves—inner upheaval so profound on the scale of the individual, and so total on the scale of the species, that every major upheaval in the outer world can be traced to it when followed back closely and lucidly enough. To live more harmoniously with ourselves and each other, Gebser concluded, demands nothing less than a recalibration of our relationship with time itself.

For seventeen years, through the next World War and its aftermath, he turned these ideas over in his mind, turned them into poetry and turned them into prose, eventually distilling them in the 1949 masterwork The Ever-Present Origin (public library)—an effort “to render transparent our own origin, our entire human past, as well as the present, which already contains the future.”

Gebser writes:

“Origin is ever-present. It is not a beginning, since all beginning is linked with time. And the present is not just the “now,” today, the moment or a unit of time. It is ever-originating, an achievement of full integration and continuous renewal. Anyone able to “concretise,” i.e., to realize and effect the reality of origin and the present in their entirety, supersedes “beginning” and “end” and the mere here and now.”

Writing at first for his own generation, Gebser came to find as the years unspooled into decades that the subject was not only timeless but rediscovered with ever-growing urgency by the next generation. In a passage of astonishing resonance for our own time, he observes:

“The crisis we are experiencing today is not just… a crisis of morals, economics, ideologies, politics or religion. It is not only prevalent in Europe and America but in Russia and the Far East as well. It is a crisis of the world and mankind such as has occurred previously only during pivotal junctures—junctures of decisive finality for life on earth and for the humanity subjected to them. The crisis of our times and our world is in a process—at the moment autonomously—of complete transformation, and appears headed toward an event which… can only be described as a “global catastrophe.”… We must soberly face the fact that only a few decades separate us from that event. This span of time is determined by an increase in technological feasibility inversely proportional to man’s sense of responsibility—that is, unless a new factor were to emerge which would effectively overcome this menacing correlation.”

To ward off the menace, Gebser cautions, we need to find this “new factor,” to seize it for all it is worth and wrest from it the transformation—which he calls a “mutation” of consciousness—necessary for ensuring our continuance as a planetary species.

In a sentiment evocative of the Buddhist nun and teacher Pema Chödrön’s insight that “only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible be found in us,” he writes:

“If we do not overcome the crisis it will overcome us; and only someone who has overcome himself is truly able to overcome… Either time is fulfilled in us—and that would mean the end and death for our present earth and (its) mankind—or we succeed in fulfilling time: and this means integrality and the present, the realisation and the reality of origin and presence.”

Gebser anchors his argument in the fundament fact of time, out of which arises the poetic truth of the present:

“As the origin before all time is the entirety of the very beginning, so too is the present the entirety of everything temporal and time-bound, including the effectual reality of all time phases: yesterday, today, tomorrow, and even the pre-temporal and timeless.”

With an eye to how the Renaissance discovery of perspective in art and architecture radicalised our relationship to space, thus revolutionising our consciousness itself, Gebser argues that a similar transformation needs to take place in our relationship to time—a shift from the “unperspectival” past to a properly perspectival present that opens the portal to an “aperspectival” future, something beyond perspective, implying a fully integrated and interconnected consciousness indivisible into separate perspectives—the ultimate way of achieving perspective, we might say. In a sentiment of staggering prescience nearly a century later—which is also a touching testament to our being a perennial work in progress that continually mistakes itself for near-complete—he writes:

“The condition of today’s world cannot be transformed by technocratic rationality, since both technocracy and rationality are apparently nearing their apex; nor can it be transcended by preaching or admonishing a return to ethics and morality, or in fact, by any form of return to the past.

We have only one option: in examining the manifestations of our age, we must penetrate them with sufficient breadth and depth that we do not come under their demonic and destructive spell. We must not focus our view merely on these phenomena, but rather on the humus of the decaying world beneath, where the seedlings of the future are growing, immeasurable in their potential and vigour. Since our insight into the energies pressing toward development aids their unfolding, the seedlings and inceptive beginnings must be made visible and comprehensible.”

A new consciousness and a new reality, Gebser cautions, can only arise from a more intimate and examined knowledge of the past and its pitfalls—“a consciousness of the whole, an integral consciousness encompassing all time and embracing both man’s* distant past and his approaching future as a living present,” which is not an intellectual but a spiritual orientation to time. In a lovely antidote to the diffusion of responsibility that marks our social species—and that, in its most urgent present manifestation, has landed us in our climate catastrophe—he roots us back into the tiny, infinite locus of our personal potentiality:

“If our consciousness, that is, the individual person’s awareness, vigilance, and clarity of vision, cannot master the new reality and make possible its realisation, then the prophets of doom will have been correct. Other alternatives are an illusion; consequently, great demands are placed on us, and each one of us have been given a grave responsibility, not merely to survey but to actually traverse the path opening before us.”

Gebser argues that it is only by rendering transparent “the concealed and latent aspects” of our dawning future, in those vital periods of transition, that we come to fully “clarify our own experiencing of the present.” Affirming humanistic contemporary Erich Fromm’s insistence on the need to move beyond the simplistic divide of optimism and pessimism, Gebser calls for “overcoming the mere antithesis of affirmation and negation” as essential to this evolution in consciousness by which we can attain the new reality—“a reality functioning and effectual integrally, in which intensity and action, the effective and the effect co-exist; one where origin… blossoms forth anew; and one in which the present is all-encompassing and entire.”

He adds an essential disclaimer consonant with the basic ethos of The Marginalian, reverberating with the reason I spend my days and nights with long-gone visionaries like Gebser:

“Before we can discern the new, we must know the old.”

Looking back on the history of ideas—which is the history of our resistance to change, strewn with what David Byrne called “sleeping beauties”: creative and intellectual breakthroughs that lay dormant for centuries and millennia, rejected by their contemporaries, only to be affirmed and accepted epochs later—Gebser considers Democritus’s atomic theory, two millennia ahead of particle physics, and Zeno’s anticipation of relativity, worlds ahead of Einstein, and writes:

“These inceptions were all anticipations, the seedlings as it were, of later blossoms that could not flourish with visible and immediate effect in their respective ages, since they were denied receptive soil and sustenance.”

In a sentiment Bertrand Russell would echo two years later in the seventh of his ten commandments of critical thinking for a more possible future—“Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.”—Gebser adds:

“Acceptance and elucidation of the “new” always meets with strong opposition, since it requires us to overcome our traditional, our acquired and secure ways and possessions. This means pain, suffering, struggle, uncertainty, and similar concomitants which everyone seeks to avoid whenever possible.”

In the remainder of The Ever-Present Origin, Gebser goes on to explore the three consciousness structures that have marked the history of our species—the magic, the mystical, and the mental: all springing from origin, but each successive one increasing the intensity of consciousness. Dismantling the limiting dualism of Western thought along the way, he delivers a lucid, luminous vision for a different way of being: freer, more present, more whole.

In the postscript to the book, penned in the early 1950s amid a world scarred by two World Wars and newly petrified with the terror of the Cold War, Gebser calls out to the highest and most courageous part of us, the part even more assaulted by the mass cowardice of cynicism in our own time, amid the transitional world we live in, the world Gebser presaged:

“At a time when mankind is suffering… from scepticism and suspicion or… from ideological anxiety, anyone audacious enough to recall some basic values that run counter to the superficial course of events and seem to lack any immediate “efficiency” in a world given over to quantification is all too readily dismissed as being, in the familiar clichés, “unrealistic” and “idealistic.” These are perhaps the most innocuous of the terms used by those who confuse realism with material utility and thus fall prey to a dualistic fallacy even where it has nothing to do with idealism. As a type, they lack perception of those powers of which realism and idealism are only conceptual and classifying aspects. In addition there is the obstinacy resisting change which emerges even where it is obvious that it is unable to resolve an intractable problem. A person for whom the present, even during his or her finest hours, is no more than a time-bound moment, will not participate in the emerging transformation. Only those will succeed for whom the present becomes a time-free origin, a perpetual plenitude and source of life and spirit from which all decisive constellations and formations are completed.”

A short verse from “Das Wintergedicht”—the long 1944 “Winter Poem” through which Gebser first gave shape to the ideas that became The Ever-Present Origin, composed in a single forty-five-minute burst of creative force—captures the heart of his timeless and atemporal insight into the urgency of being:

“Who speaks of the future? Who counts in saying: “It shall be”? Look outward and you see within: It is.”

Complement with physicist Alan Lightman’s poetic meditation on time and the antidote to our existential anxiety, then revisit the nineteenth-century psychiatrist and mountaineer Maurice Bucke’s pioneering theory of cosmic consciousness, formulated half a century before Gebser, and cosmologist Stephon Alexander, writing a century after him, on dreams, consciousness, and the nature of the universe.