How the Petty Secures the Profound

How the Petty Secures the Profound (opposites contract)

            Certainly, there are few differences more notable than that between the sublime and the ridiculous, but as we move closer together in our comparative concepts, the apparent distinctions tend to be overblown. Bliss is sublime, love merely profound, and no one would call every and all the individual ‘slings and arrows of officials’ ridiculous, though all are petty. The ends of the human emotional and experiential spectrum are also most brief. We hear and read, in song and in text, about the proverbial ‘moment of bliss’, as well as a sudden feeling that life itself may be lensed as one big joke, played upon us, of course; perhaps the outcome of a God’s ridicule. Just as, however, a routine become otiose, and in its own way extremely so with seemingly endless repetition, even the sublime may be misunderstood, misrecognized and indeed, even become unrecognizable without the ongoing background noise of the quotidian. We require a regular basis upon which to compare our experiences, shared or no, and the day-to-day quality of waking consciousness is almost overfull with the expected and the rote, much of it in itself without a lot of other merit. The petty does after all secure the profound, and in a contractuality of opposites, but in exactly what manner?

            First, through majority. The petty acts of the powerful and powerless alike contain another kind of combined force. Just as, in military matters, we understand that at a certain threshold, quantity becomes its own unique quality – both Russia and the United States have used this tactic; strength in sheer numbers metastasizes itself – so the pettiness of everyday life becomes an entire social world. Not only do we expect others to run along certain rails, narrow-gauge to be sure but also travelling more or less straight down the line, we have the same expectation of ourselves. Putting ourselves ‘out’ carries more of a meaningfulness than a meaning. This ‘outness’ is very much the stepping away from normative rules and policy regulations, and in so doing, we are required to make an unusual effort. It is not only noted by others when we do contrive to countermand the orders of the day, but also by our own sense of what should have been done. Thus the ‘must’ of any action does, in general, come against the ‘shalt’ of any act, for it is the latter that carry the weight of ongoing human life on their experiential shoulders; shoulders which only gain in strength the more often the ‘same’ experience is rendered in the world. The vast majority of time is spent engaging with and in petty acts, and these are committed as well by the vast majority of people. We may bemoan their overbearing, and indeed, sometimes as well overweening, presence, but nevertheless they contain the necessary, if not sufficient, measure for the profound to take its relatively rare place.

            Second, through ritual. The orison of the day is always directed below. My thoughts may be noble, my vision afar, but I am well aware that everything in this life is but, and thus requires of me, a single step at a time, perhaps even conjuring a cliché-ridden image if such action is paused and viewed overlong. Even in spaces labeled sacred, ritual functions in this same way: it is the bringing together of community so that it can place itself in the way of the profound, not itself create it. To judge mundane life as ritualistic is correct but unfair. It’s very mundanity takes the world into a closer proximity to my being, for through ritual I myself am also placed within the folds of an existential envelope that then becomes the vehicle for the Kerygma of both history and contemporary life to be posted to me. In this, I am adjacent to experience in the hermeneutic sense, the novel and the unexpected, just as I am alongside, tarrying perhaps, as a Dasein filled with curiosity at best, the meaning of said world in its worlding. Ritualism may be scorned as both a dimwitted excuse for meaning as well as the resonance only of a tired tradition, but in fact it serves, by its very repetition, the same deity as does bliss. Its work is by far greater and its demands upon us mighty when compared to what is sublime, blissful, or even profound. Without an endless parade of prosaic parodies and petty paradiddles the both, what with suddenness and uncanniness overfills our senses with a glimpse of the shared soul, the otherworld, or the collective consciousness, could not occur at all.

            Thirdly, through sharedness. Just as does the petty occupy the efforts of the majority of people and fill up the majority of time, so too these acts create a world which is shareable without much corresponding effort. The work has already been done, one might say, and while we tend not to enjoy any fruits of this combined labor, we also tend to define what is pleasurable far too narrowly. Is it not a pleasure, in the sense of being relieved of a task or duty, to go through one’s day without any hitches of any kind? Is it not as well pleasureful to return home to find it intact and exactly the way in which I left it, pending the scope of its untidiness or lack of staples? And surely it must also be something to be enjoyed to engage in the usual pleasantries in the shower alone or at the workplace with colleagues each day; the morning breakfasts, the scuttlebutt of work-breaks, the promise of affection without affectation but as well, without the sense that my mate and I should reconquer paradise on a nightly basis.  Speaking of the ridiculous, our mostly vain attempts to conjoin the sublime, to literally sublimate ourselves, are also pleasurable in their amusement simply because we know they are bound to fail. In failure too there is relief, for to succeed each time we set ourselves to love, to work, or to yet to play, would nullify any of the humanity held within such categories of shared experience. Their most authentic value rather lies in their being shared, as vehicles for, and expression of, Mitsein.

            Fourthly, through their self-disdain. Our very derision of the petty becomes it; the shoe fits, as it were, and it is of the utmost that the quotidian in life wear that same footwear as do we ourselves when tasked with simply walking forward, oriented to the futurity of our being’s being-aheadedness. The horizon of the future proper ever recedes from us, but this too is both necessary and a good in itself, for the new can only be new once, and we must understand that balance between the living-on of the historical horizon and the motion of that other one, existential this time, and indeed travelling in the very opposite direction as the former. Mine ownmost death, as the singular function and sole iteration of this existential horizon, already owned by me through the fact of my birth and the reality of individuated life, provides the profound ingredient by which all those petty are assembled. It is the keystone of the historical arch, steadying the gateway through which I alone must walk. It is, once again, the aloneness of existential acts which adds to their profundity, and just as dreams may not be shared, so too I must face completing only my own being, and no others. I disdain death only in youth, as a necessary aspect of being young and feeling the immortality of a life which is just now becoming mine own. In and for youth, only love is real, and this befits a specific and passing phase of human life. But in this same phase I thus learn to disdain everything else, for the time being, and it is this lesson that carries me forward into a maturity in which I know how to tell the difference between the petty and the profound, even if the adoration attached to a singular gravitas has itself left me.

            Between and among these four elemental aspects of the value of pettiness – majority, ritual sharedness, and the disdainful – we find present almost all of our unthought goings-on, our relations with others as ‘the others’, our internalization of the norms of the generalized other, and the expectations of the looking-glass self. There is a mute beauty to their amalgam, a minor alchemy in their admixture. For we are not led to rare metals let alone the philosopher’s gem, but rather gain a hearth and home, sustenance and subsistence through them. The sorcerer must have a cauldron, the priest an altar, the thinker a study, the alchemist a laboratory, just as today’s heroes have their dwellings; the athlete his training facility, the entertainer her stage, and so on. The only reason we so unreasonably judge the mundane is so we can remain open to the irruptive; the more petty shall be the routine the more gravity shall have the extramundane. We are not jealous of the petty, and seek indeed to share it as one strives to share misery. We envy not the otiose and so we are more than willing to let the majority of our time overtake it. And we scoff at the meandering mumble of ritual, knowing as we do that its only function is to merely prepare the at first grudging ground. Securing the profound in human life cannot be over-planned, nor is it the stuff of magic, and just as the petty seems to reign uncontested in the social world, just so, it can never fully rein in the worlding of the world itself. For it is within this other movement, alien and anonymous, that the profound is brought home to us.

            Yet what is momentous must too be realized historically just as it must be recognized socially. It cannot retain its uncanniness and its visionary quality overlong. On our parts, we try not to utterly absorb it into the flux of mundane time, and in this we are mostly successful. Memory does not itself baulk at the uncanny, for there is no immediate danger in mere recollection. We must react, and even act, to place ourselves within the post-traumatic reliving of a profundity, and, other things being equal, what is profound to humanity is only half-buried in shadow. What I find, in taking the lighted space of Overbeing which also occurs to me from time to time, into that twilight, is that what is momentarily hidden too comes alive with its own luminosity. The darkling angels which convene at our bedside in times of crisis are not there to offer reprimand nay yet gloat; their act is to guide us through the landscape which their colleagues, as is known, fear to tread.

            Illness and loss, the parting of lovers and the parturition of children, the shipwrecks of projects taken and the abortions of those only planned, provide profound counterbalance to all of my successes, and their graven gravity is an anchor to all the levity of my fantastic dreams. For a human life cannot be lived solely in the brightest climes; this as well is the lot of well-spent youth alone. Most of human life is petty in both its design and its outcome, and this is why the vast majority of history remains unknown to us. And yet what delight we take in the rediscovery of even the most homely vessel of the ancient imagination; the clay pot or jar, the stone tablet, the primordial obsidian tool, for their craft and their work made our species what it is today, light and shadow the both. And through their utterly mundane presence do we realize the unutterable profundity of our species-essence in and as existence itself.

            G.V. Loewen is the author of over 60 books, and was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

Do this Thing for Me

Do this Thing for Me (the idea of the last request)

            When I almost died last summer, my thoughts were entirely for my spouse. In a deliberate manner, my final request to her was that she carry on, take up her promotion in a new city, and move there with or without me. She assented to this demand, for that is what it was in the end, and only later, given my survival, did I realize that this had constituted my last request. I had no thought for myself or my own ‘fate’, and had been compelled to come to terms with my existence as lived. Never necessarily a pretty sight, nevertheless, one feels in turn a demand that the arc of life imposes upon each of us; life has itself of us a last request.

            Famous or no, the idea of ‘last words’ is an intriguing one, implying a number of related assumptions. Mostly this is taken to mean that after death, one can no longer issue ‘earthly’ requests or demands, commands or beggary; all are now abruptly moot. But it might also imply that there is no afterlife at all, and one’s final requests are indeed final for one’s consciousness entire, and not merely its passing embodiment. But if indeed an afterlife is held to be at least a possibility, the phrase itself might also suggest that once present ‘in’ this other realm of being, no further requests can be made of anyone or anything. And cross-cultural ideas of paradise, first arising in the archaic agrarian period and coming to a discursive end with the Enlightenment and the beginning of our own time, do tend to vouchsafe this third interpretation; that once in heaven there are allowed no further demands simply because none are necessary.

            Our shared world is of course very different from such a communitarian ideal. In the here and now, the ‘by and by’ of higher worlds and altered forms of being occurs rarely. In wage-labor societies, retirement, if possible at all, can be seen as a dress-rehearsal for a further life in paradise. Recused from work, all such demands issued by or upon me have now also been removed. Most direct obligations are, for those advanced in age, absent. Children are long grown and out of the premises, one’s own predecessors are already dead, and grandchildren, if present, provide no serious burden, at least in the folklore of the family, as ultimately, they are not my kids, not my problem. One’s failing health does present new challenges, issue new demands upon us, pending our druthers regarding quality of life and longevity, but this is seen as part of the ultimate democracy of species-essence, a signage of the fuller presence of finitude and a sign of oncoming finiteness. For Dasein, nearing its second solstice, mine ownmost death may be of growing concern, and even though yet abstract, yet I find that this unknown moment with its unknowable outcome can speak to me ‘ahead of time’, as it were, and thus as well ahead of its time.

            I was not at all ready to die at age 58, with my wife just turned 40. To be a widow at that age seemed ludicrous, absurd, and even tragic, not that I was ever the hero I so planned to be. But such an experience, my first brush with death since I was 32 – then still too young to understand it as an ‘event’, or believe in its irruptive non-presence – gave me a fresh perspective on what it meant to live on in the day to day. At first, this kind of reaction can be summarily rejected as trite, yet upon a more patient examination, I found myself comparing the days I live now with those deemed as final. The contrast is stark, those few days staring at me with vacant sockets into which no corrective tool will fit. Indeed, the empty skull of inward cast, casts rather a wrench into one’s future plans, as it were. These days, now back to their indefinite and even repetitive status, pull one back from the precipice only to land one in a uniform meadow of mostly grass. The villains of the day, weeds them all, or the heroines, beautiful flowers ever in Spring, are both unlikely and indeed, might the both even be welcome for their very rarity. The key to the day-to-day is, however, its absence of any ultimate demand, any last requests.

            There are other rehearsals, other practices, a goodnight kiss as surrogate mortuary ritual, a ‘now I lay me down to sleep’ a child’s shield against death’s subito, possible, if highly unlikely, even for the young. The habits are worn, with intent, not to pretend that life is itself, and as already stated, immortal and in touch with infinite doings all on its own, but rather as part of the ongoing if mostly tacit acknowledgement that we are present only insofar as we are unaware of our coming absence, to borrow from Gadamer. This odd awareness-of-being-unaware could be seen as the basic motive of life itself, akin to an instinct perhaps, or at least, a necessary evolutionary development that cloaks, with a Promethean proprioception and profundity, a consciousness intelligent enough to become all too aware of its finite character. It is well known that in one’s final days, all plans must be abandoned, given over to one’s successors, however indirectly, and thus the very idea of a singular future begins to slip away. It is an error of culture to conflate this personal future, which must end at some point, with the wider conception of the future, which is part of the being-aheadedness of Dasein and as such is an existential fact.

            And yet, in flirting with disaster at many a turn, from warfare to climate to plague to dictatorship, our global society seems to desire more realism in its theatre than the drama of human history can allow; that is, if history is itself to continue. The feigning of death might be referred to as a kind of ‘hyperdrama’, at once hyperbole in its mockery of finitude, hypostasy in its attempt to short-circuit finiteness. It certainly retains the human drama while at the same time aspiring toward the dramatis deus of the epic or the mythical. This rhetorical presence of the larger-than-life brought into the ever-worldly sphere of human doings does us, however, a disservice. For human life cannot be larger than itself. This is another perspective which is presented by the ‘near death’ experience: that we should live on, if we will in fact do so, with less of a demand upon the very day given to us; serially, consecutively, but not automatically, not perpetually. This experienced ethic can also be applied to a number of other ‘sacred’ aspects of social life where we tend to hyperbolize our demands in the day to day, giving others a sense that we are always already euthanizing ourselves as leverage to simply attain our desires.

            This is the entanglement of manipulation; how much can I get away with because I am either ill, close to death or dying, or worse, returned from a premature burial by chance and timely health care? It is worse that curiosity or tarrying along, for its malingering quality entangles others in a skein of fraudulent theatre. By this I simply mean that the drama of existence is never actually lived larger than its quotidian demands. There are no last requests in the mundane sphere, in which the vast bulk of life is lived and within which we ourselves humanly dwell. And thus, there are no final expectations of the other to be possessed. I give the other her chance but she must take it up; it is only a gift and nothing more. But in the last request, made upon a closing-off of Dasein’s daily rounds, the sense of expectation becomes more like an anticipation; that one can be confident that the other will acceded to my demand, whatever it might be. The leverage of dying is applied to living in a moment of dramatic presence which touches upon the mythic. Just as sleep is the brother of death, so too my last request is the sibling of my now absent presence. The corpse displays by a lurid twilight the corpus of its past life, acting now only as a memento mori to the final demand which its just then living breath issued forth.

            G.V. Loewen is the author of 60 books in ethics, education, aesthetics, religion, social theory and health, as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.