The test of ambiguity

...man always has to decide by himself in the darkness, that he must want beyond what he knows.

Why do you run away? What is hidden there – beyond the blurry images frantically moving, obscuring the view? Stand still and look past them, look into the centre. There what do you see? 

You see only ambiguity. Neither good nor bad, it’s only the feeling you have when you climb to a great height and you look down. Vertigo. You are dizzy. You want – in the most panic stricken way – to stay alive but at the same time you want to jump. You dream about it, you obsess about it and you can’t look down because of it.  You want to stop fighting, stop trying. You want the ambiguity of whether you can cling onto the surface of that high tower to end - and you want to do it in a way you can be certain of. Anything is bearable if it’s not a surprise.

But this is the lesser known test of life and it will not leave you alone. What do you do with your share of ambiguity? Make no mistake – as Beauvoir sets out in her Ethic of Ambiguity – it comes with freedom. They’re one indivisible package. You are free to create the meaning of your life and the meaning is unlimited. And yet you start in the mud as a worm, struggling, wriggling, turned blindly towards the sky but not knowing what you are reaching for. You do not know that ambiguity is the same thing as freedom and freedom the same thing as responsibility. And so you put it down.

Its unbearable, the ambiguous depths you can fall into, just like the dizzying heights from the top of that tower. 

 

Circular ruins

Gradually, in this way, she came into possession of what was already hers. 

I wasn’t sure what I was trying to convey. Maybe it was the ceaseless aroma of eucalypti in the gardens of a villa of infinite symmetry; maybe it was the humid garden saturated with time that forked, time that diverged, converged or ran parallel to each other, unawares, for centuries; maybe I was trying to capture the invisible persons of all times, busy in that saturated garden in their multiple forms. I know I wrote about someone who woke from sleep and wasn’t sure if she dreamt, while the day and night turned above her. She mistook dusk for dawn. I know I wrote about someone who had arrived with no past and no future in the ‘unanimous night’, dragging herself nauseous and bloodstained to the circular ruins.

I know there are no new metaphors –none that matters I mean – so I am only a mirror, reflecting back in a slightly different light what has been said already (and will be said again). We spend most of our time repeating things. That’s why it’s possible, for Borges in this quote to form time into a circle in a sentence – with no awkwardness at all in grammar or tense. That possibility was always there, in the language, in our psyche.

But inside that labyrinth, at its centre, what I really wanted to convey was the depression, the mourning that we are all engaged in, constantly, because of the selves that die every minute we are alive. You yearn most for the things that were once intimately yours, you crave and you search but you cannot come into possession of what was already yours; you cannot catch up with the selves you’ve already lost. They are always ahead of you, in a circle, in earth’s gravity, in orbit, falling away from your grasp. So you fall together continuously. You mourn because there is no way to change that fate, you cannot escape time’s progression.

Except in dreams. They discovered that the brain doesn’t just respond, it anticipates and it creates a world for our selves to inhabit before that world has had a chance to intrude. It is its own mirror. So in dreams you are reunited with your selves, the things that were already yours; big vivid dreams that take up the whole day – or even a whole lifetime. But then you wake up and have to actually live again. Wouldn’t you be exhausted? Wouldn’t you think, you had lived two lives? And which one makes a deeper impression? There is a part of me that can’t tell the difference.

Infinite sides to every story

Imagine you arrive at your destination late at night. Your destination, you thought, is a castle. But search as you might when you ’arrive’, you find no turrets, no towers, nothing that looks like a castle. No matter which path you take – and you take many, this way and that - you get neither closer nor further away. You begin to wonder and are disappointed by the thought that the ‘castle’ is just the loose collection of buildings you are in.

What would you do? How would you cope? What if the ‘castle’ is not a castle but your dreams and goals, and the journey to ‘arrive’, your assumption that the years are well spent, planning, doing and hopefully getting. You expect a beginning, middle and end, but it turns out: there is only a middle.

This is the disconcerting world Kafka creates in The Castle and his character K responds with an odd mix of emotions that do not obviously fit together. But that’s not the point. The point is that their meandering logic lead to an irrational defiance, a determination to see things through to the end, though he doesn’t even know what ‘things’ might refer to.

‘...they knew all about him at the Castle…they had weighed up the strengths and weaknesses and were ready to do battle with a smile. On the other hand… it showed that they underrated him... And if they thought they could keep him in a constant state of terror with this lofty acknowledgement… they were mistaken.’

It’s a hard book to read. The experience of reading it is like K’s fraught search. He finds nothing except that there are infinite sides to the story. Every character has a story to tell which sheds another, different light on the unfathomable situation.  He pulls off veil after veil from its opaque face, only to reveal a more and more complex picture, one that pushes meaningful understanding away into an explosion of details.

Some people get bogged down in elaborate interpretations. In the end though I don’t think it’s hard to unravel, it’s just hard to accept. Impossible in fact. The fragmentary world of The Castle where there is only a ‘middle’ is a lot more realistic than our insistence that things should make sense, that we should be able to understand and therefore have something to strive for, or hope for or search for. This means we prefer only to see one version of events out of an infinite sided circle and so, our grip on it is fragile - dangerously stretched by every other side that comes into view. We react to this threat with rage. We hold on.

Identity is an endeavour we can fail at

It's not just our bodies that die - it is our lives that we lose, which is why we experience hope, despair, longing, regret and the like. In the chronological passage of time, we grapple with phenomenological time: the past, present and future; time that flies and drags; and time that can be made up or squandered - Kim Atkins. 

I don't know yet if there is a philosophical question at the heart of all writing. I think it might be true but I'm not sure. But there is a philosophy that suggests a sense of self - an identity - is a sustained effort to tell a story, a narrative. Like all narratives, it is subject to revision and retelling as new evidence emerges to make it all add up. This story links past, present and future. We look in the past to understand the present and project into the future.

We can cope with most things, including new information and contradictory evidence, through this process of retelling the story. That's why none of us are truthful: not to ourselves or to others. But there can come a point when, if the incoherence is too extreme, the story breaks down and the narrative ruptures. This means that identity is really a verb and it's an endeavour we can fail at. And then what happens?

The Crow, a native American tribe that was assimilated by the US, famously answered as follows:

'And then, nothing happened.'

I wonder if all the developing nations are trying to answer this question, in response to the spread of Western culture and the fact that modernity is synonymous with Westernization.

I wonder if my answer would be the same (i.e., 'And then, nothing happened'). I'm not sure; this one will take a long time; but I don't think so.