Dear Bleaders,
When I was in college my French history professor presented
me with his existential philosophy in the famous quotation, “Life is a tragedy
– Hurrah!” which quote he attributed to the Enlightenment philosophe Denis
Diderot, but which I later discovered was actually first uttered by our own
Eugene O’Neill. This has been the
winter of my discontent made glorious summer by Prozac and a truckload of talk
therapy, not that I’m not still sometimes to be seen looking like the first
pictures in an ad for antidepressants, dressed in the same fabric as the couch,
or at the shutters, shuddering, but the daylight is obviously staying longer
now. I saw a serious patch of sun
sit out my window for a good stint today.
I used to have a poem that went: “Something let me tell you of my own
dark heart, man it is a dark dark.”
I can’t remember the first word.
There are two main models for thinking about the meaning of
life: The first is that it has no meaning, the second is that there is a hidden
world that provides the meaning.
I’ve been giving a lot of thought to what I think of as “poetic
atheism,” as I’ve often bled about to you bleaders in the past, and by which I
mean a third way, where we believe
there is no hidden world that provides the meaning, but there is meaning
anyway. My thesis is that the
feelings we have that suggest meaning are sufficient to the definition of
meaning. It is a romantic
claim,
by which I mean it is a very active rhetorical device, but it seems to me that
what we think of as the real situation (atomized meaningless animals on a dirt
ball) is also a very active rhetorical device, and one that is neither normal
nor encouraging. Normally (in most cultures through history, everywhere)
human beings notice interdependence a lot more than we do and the feeling of
living in a web of meaning is so intense that even the most sober descriptions
of reality show human company as the asset that is our excellent true answer to
cosmic meaninglessness. Think of
how safe the child feels with parent sitting on the bed as compared to all
alone in the darkness. If we
invent a third-party invisible friend, we have to work to believe, and then
commune. If we notice that we are
all right here in front of one another, actual visible friends, then we can
commune. You still need faith to
believe that we can help each other and are willing to do so, you still need
faith to believe life is worth the trouble and humanity is basically good, a
lot of faith. But at least the
people you are talking about actually exist, right?
A hundred years ago the French philosopher and founder of
sociology, Emile Durkheim said that what humanity mistook for God was actually
the community, that when you get together in a large group, especially around
some shared idea, you feel something amazing, something you usually do not have
access to. The feeling of one-ness
is not a mistake. Following Durkheim,
when religious people get together and have transcendent experiences they
associate their feelings with their culture’s supernatural stories. Those supernatural stories are always
inventions, but the experience is real.
Human existence is strange and secular writers about
religion often explain the weirdness of religious belief – paradoxes like the
monotheism/trinity idea – as necessary because such fanciful inventions reflect
the weirdness of our real circumstance.
Nothing could ever be stranger than consciousness. The meat thinks. No magical legend could be weirder than
each of us appearing suddenly in the universe, knowing it, looking out at it
from within our skulls, trying to communicate with others, also locked in their
skulls and peering out, and eventually disappearing again. How strange to find our little thinking
and blinking faces amid a universe that is for the most part not alive at
all. Believers say, “If this weirdness is true, why not
believe angels,” but adding nonsense is not helpful.
Just because we don’t believe in the supernatural, why
should we ignore the ways in which that natural situation of the human is
paradoxical? I am claiming that
despite the truth of science, the experience of being a human being is filled
with feelings and impressions that are irrational. The irrational is real. Absurdity is a real part of our experience. A display of the irrational and absurd
is the most accurate description of the schism between how things feel to us
and how they are in anyone else’s reality – or in the reality of the nonliving
universe. The science of actual
life, not in life in the lab, is poetry.
Again, just because life isn’t rational doesn’t mean you
make up stuff, like a thinking universe.
As far as I can tell, the universe is a place, not a mind. But we are minds. And together, our minds form something
that is greater than our individual selves. Beyond our evolutionary explanations for it, we humans have
the grandeur of art and love.
We have to take note of the way that we can help each other, through art
and love.
Imagine God came down and said life has meaning, it all
makes sense. Why would we be
comforted by any justification of the suffering that goes on around here every
day? What could a third party be
hiding behind his back that would justify all this absurdity? All we ever had was the feeling of
meaning, and we still have that and it loses nothing now that it is no longer
associated with a third party. It
is what it is, no more, but no less.
Feelings of right and wrong are sufficient to prove morality, though
they indicate nothing unseen lurking behind them. The feelings of right and wrong, the feeling that it matters
what you do and what happens to you, the experience of kindness, listening, and
generosity, the thrills of art, all of this is extra-rational and it makes life
– the real life that we actually have — worth living.
We can talk about these things in terms that value them as
real, and do not merely explain them away, but don’t add any heavens or
buddahverses because the truth matters.
An atheist believes you don’t make up extra stuff in the
universe to help you make sense of it all and feel safe and cozy. But what we sometimes miss is that an
atheist can, in fact, have a positive relationship with the irrational, can
notice that existence is too weird to fit in any purely rational box. We can glory in that without duping
ourselves with false beliefs.
I’m saying all of this here and now because the post I
posted after I learned about Rachel Wetzsteon’s suicide has gotten a lot of
attention -here, and here, for example, and on a whole lot of people's websites. I’m still stunned
that I’m never going to see her spot me across a poetry event again and make
that lit-up face she could make.
The post got a lot of attention in part because a lot of people were
also missing her and feeling freaked.
Also, many don’t have a robust secular argument against suicide and they
were glad to get one.
This experience has made me feel more inclined to write
publicly what I’ve been privately thinking because I’m still just feeling my
way about how to talk about this idea, but it still seems worth saying. The feeling of meaning is sufficient to
the definition of meaning. We can
help each other. The help that we
can give each other has to do with believing in one another, and is a medicine sufficient
to our wounds — protection sufficient to our fear.
Or so, with your leave, I am surmising.
Love,
Jennifer
PS The above picture is at a Children's Museum on Long Island, the blue spot reads "Get inside a Bubble!" Here's some more bubbles.