Indefinite Sabbatical

Undeterred by the sign, I had my first and last kangaroo-burger here, on May 23rd 2012, somewhere in Amsterdam, near a canal.

This blog has been going nearly ten years now. Why? Occupational therapy, mania, addiction? May the world judge. It’s time to take a rest, of uncertain duration. There are other things to explore, other personae to adopt.

The last three posts have touched on life and art, and how they may be entangled. I’ve concluded that they need a holiday from one another. In this connection Kahlil Gibran’s words may be apt:

Let there be spaces in your togetherness, And let the winds of the heavens dance between you. Love one another but make not a bond of love: Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls. Fill each other's cup but drink not from one cup. . . .

Habits die hard. I am weaning myself off this one with another project similar enough to avoid the “cold turkey” effect. It may or may not go anywhere. But there is an important difference. This blog has acquired a cohesion and identity, perhaps by virtue of longevity. Looked at in another way it’s a heap of bricks, delivered one at a time and not firmly cemented to the others. Anything more structured, as the new project is intended to be, must remain sequestered till it’s near complete, fenced off from prying eyes.

I’ve found many friends through posting here, some online only, some face to face. Some have died, or faded from view. Your comments & private communications have been precious. This site will stay. Comments will remain open and unmoderated, including anonymous ones, with their risk of spam, which will be weeded from time to time. I shall read them but please don’t expect me to respond. Nothing is wasted. Energy can neither be created or destroyed. Creativity used to be the work of many hands, largely anonymous. All kinds of things are possible. Let this monument, or ruin, remain.

I’ve received much guidance over the years from readers, without feeling obliged to follow it. “Keep it personal, for the personal is also the universal.” “Don’t try to be a public philosopher.” “Follow your bliss”—this especially:

If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Wherever you are—if you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time. Joseph Campbell

In such manner we let go the old and welcome the new. Thank you.

Hannah Arendt on Action

My last post seemed to demand a follow-up, to set it in a wider context. It was a personal view as seen from this cottage in this valley. I said “I might be the only one to see it this way, or it may turn out to be universal.” No, it was personal. I humbly defer to a person who could see a whole panorama from her mountain-top, her Archimedean point so to speak, viewing across the millennia to all manner of men from the ancients in Greece forward. She was Hannah Arendt. She allowed herself a whole book, The Human Condition, to set out her thoughts.

To try and give a taste of them in this tiny space, I’ve made a diagram, colour-coded to match the headings below, and used her actual words (indented in black) whenever I could.

Mars

She finished writing it in 1957, just after the Soviets put Sputnik 1 into orbit; judging this event noteworthy enough for comment at the start of her Prologue:

The immediate reaction, expressed on the spur of the moment, was relief about the first “step towards escape from man’s imprisonment to the earth”. And this strange statement, far from being the accidental slip of some American reporter, unwittingly echoed the extraordinary line which, more than twenty years ago, had been carved on the funeral obelisk of one of Russia’s greatest scientists: “Mankind will not remain bound to the earth forever”.
. . .
The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition, and earthly nature, for all we know, may be unique in the universe in providing human beings with a habitat in which they can move and breathe without effort and without artifice.
. . .
The future man . . . seems to be possessed by a rebellion against human existence as it has been given, a free gift from nowhere (secularly speaking), which he wishes to exchange, as it were, for something he has made himself.

And so, a half century later, Sputnik 1 has gone forth and multiplied in abundance, till we have the Mars One project, a proposed colony on Mars, currently attracting would-be emigrants with its offer of a one-way trip. Meanwhile, life on earth becomes progressively more artificial, and Arendt’s book, rooted in Aristotle, still holds true; being magisterial in the range and depth of its thought, free from the taint of sentimentality and activism. Reading it, you don’t discover what to think, as with lesser books. You learn how to think, for she offers something approaching pure thought, which leads us to the

Vita Contemplativa

—a Latin translation of the Greek Theoria. Arendt says that thinkers from Classical times until Descartes’ principle of “universal doubt” considered contemplation the highest form of activity. By contrast the active life was a necessary kind of restlessness:

The primacy of contemplation over activity rests on the conviction that no work of human hands can equal in beauty and truth the physical kosmos, which swings in itself in changeless eternity without any interference or assistance from outside, from man or god. This eternity discloses itself to mortal eyes only when all human movements and activities are at perfect rest.

Labor

Litter-picker on our street this morning

Someone always has to perform the basic activities necessary for the well-being of our species. They connect us directly to the earth, our mother. Machines have progressively reduced the physical effort involved, making it possible to see a kind of nobility in labor. To the ancient Greek thinkers, though, it was at the bottom of the scale of human endeavour. Arendt talks of

. . . the[ir] conviction that the labor of the body which is necessitated by its needs is slavish.
. . .
To labor meant to be enslaved by necessity, and this enslavement was inherent in the conditions of human life. Because men were dominated by the necessities of life, they could win their freedom only through the domination of those whom they subjected to necessity by force. The slave’s degradation was a blow of fate and a fate worse than death, because it carried with it a metamorphosis of man into something akin to a tame animal.

By contrast, Marx valued “labor-power” as the ultimate source of wealth, on account of its material productivity. From Arendt’s point of view he fails to distinguish labor from work, as explained under the heading “Work” below.

Speaking personally, I discover a need and desire to labor each day, for my body’s sake. Sitting at this keyboard must be interspersed with pottering. So I wash dishes, hang out clothes on the line, Dyson the floor (Hoover is passé), rake falling leaves from the lawn. All this is labor—done with the body, with no enduring end product, and requiring to be repeated endlessly. My wayfaring walks, when they are not laboring to bring back groceries, I class as my vita contemplativa. Yesterday on a short cut I passed a busy gym and saw its members working out at their machines. I don’t know how to classify that activity. What could be more artificial than a life too crowded with production and consumption for to find time for contemplative and dignified labor? For such people, exercise has to be squeezed into half-hours here and there. Whenever I see the litter-picker in our street (see pic) I feel impelled to thank him for these efforts. The job can only done by hand, as cars are parked half across the sidewalks, and then there are the alleys where no machine can reach. He’s glad of the plentiful litter, for it provides him an honest job.

Work

How does work differ from labor? She says that work is the making of durable things. She quotes an old saying: “labor is done with the body, work is done with the hands.” She notes that labor is distinguished from work in all languages. The word for “work” can refer to the product as well as the process involved in production. Labor results in no product, or only a short-lived one. I find in myself a need to work each day, by writing, improving this little house and garden, designing, making and repairing things; also earning a few pounds reprising the skills learned in my professional life. These activities result in products which last. In theory they could be displayed in an exhibition of one’s “collected works”. But that is not my purpose at all. The work provides its own reward in the doing.

Action

I think Action is her favourite topic in the book: partly to discover how it supplanted Contemplation as the most respected human activity; partly to explore the way it epitomizes the human condition. She talks of how we are distinct from one another yet each born with the need to speak and say who we are, to establish ourselves in relation to others. There is not space here to encompass it all, but I especially like the following:

Hannah Arendt, 1906-1975. Date of photo unknown

It is in the nature of beginning that something new is started which cannot be expected from anything that happened before. This character of startling unexpectedness is inherent in all beginnings and in all origins. Thus the origin of life from inorganic matter is an infinite improbability of inorganic processes, as is the coming into being of the earth viewed from the standpoint of processes in the universe, or the evolution of human out of animal life. The new always happens against the overwhelming odds of statistical laws and their probability, which for all practical, everyday purposes amounts to certainty; the new therefore always appears in the guise of a miracle. The fact that man is capable of action means that the unexpected can be expected from him, that he is able to perform what is infinitely improbable. And this again is possible only because each man is unique, so that with each birth something uniquely new comes into the world. With respect to this somebody who is unique it can be truly said that nobody was there before.
. . .
Action and speech are so closely related because the primordial and specifically human act must at the same time contain the answer to the question asked of every newcomer: “Who are you?”

I find in myself a need to participate in action: to express my distinctness in speech, to assert who I am; if possible in startlingly unexpected ways. When I spoke of “My Life as Art” in my last I spoke artlessly, that is, in innocence of larger thoughts by others. When I spoke of art as “doing” (as opposed to production, consumption and so forth) I meant something close to what Arendt calls Action. But I must resist the attempt to wrap things up in a neat verbal formula. My diagram above is already super-simplistic.

The main point in my last post was to praise “liking what you do” as an ideal way to live, as opposed to doing what you like, which, if you were privileged enough to have the option, might get you endlessly lost. I glossed over the fact that it’s not always possible to like what you do, for example in conditions of slavery, that is when labor is forcibly imposed by others. In any event our human condition requires labor and work, like it or not, from simple necessity. And then, the artificiality of modern life may hypnotize our sensitivity, so that we allow ourselves to be herded and propelled as though with threats and sticks, without daring to ask whether we like our own selves or the direction in which we are heading. I speak from years of experience. I believe most of us can do better. We can learn to fit contemplation, labor, work and action into our lives in due proportion, so arranging things eventually that we like everything we do. It wouldn’t be possible on Mars, but only here, our true home, the only place where we may attain Entelecheia.

My Life as Art

At the end of my last I promised to be a guinea-pig for the proposal that “we each and everyone be conscious artists, painting our existence on to the canvas of each new day”. What could it mean? Could it be played out practically? Natalie had a suggestion that

“to be an artist in one’s life” could simply mean accepting to be ourselves, with all our flaws, and perhaps even turning those flaws into some kind of art.

That certainly appealed to me, and offered a route for further exploration. Where else but in my own life? It’s all too easy to theorize and have opinions about others. Everyone does it. I must stop myself adding to the pile of pronouncements, and go easy on the distillations too. (I’m referring to a comment Ellie made on my last.) Most everyone seems to have an answer to everything. It’s a comfort to know I don’t need to. I can always go back to the personal, say how it is for me. I might be the only one to see it this way, or it may turn out to be universal. Either way, it’s worth a try. So I took this project on seriously and started to scribble a lot of personal stuff about my daily life, especially my flaws, current and historic. We were discussing “letting one’s guard down” too, in the last two posts. Was I prepared to do that? It feels uncomfortable, of course. One has to dress things up. The oyster feels the grit, resents the irritation, coats it with multiple layers of nacre. Pearls are the oyster’s way of “turning those flaws into some kind of art”.

At an early stage in my week of self-experimentation I succumbed to vainglory. I thought I was already the conscious artist, painting something-or-other on the canvas of my day. So my task was easy. I just had to report back on how it was done. I was hanging out clothes at the time, with blue sky above and birdsong in the air. Beyond the ivy-clad fence came excited cries and murmured conversations from the small children’s playground, in twenty languages. All I could heard was the lilt of their voices, even when they spoke in English. Children and parents were at the swings, while drinkers sat on the low wall, reminiscing about Poland perhaps, or Rumania. I looked at the lawn, my border of flowers, herbs and climbers: a work in progress, trial and error, evolving, like everything. I saw chimneypots, bright terracotta in the sun, there since 1901, when they used coal fires. All these are given things, found objects if you like. I was simply basking in the sense of having got my living “down to a fine art”, acquiring a competence in doing and seeing, honed through repetition; knowing what I can do, doing it better. Or in Beckett’s words:

All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

The quest for “my life as art” remained an open one. Perhaps I could rummage through my own past, find inspiration there. I count as my biggest achievement the fact of coming from there and ending up here, being who I am today. Things have turned out well in the end. Was there. Am here.

And then there’s “The Art of Living”, a phrase with twenty million hits on Google. I can define it merely as something I never managed to grasp. I was blessed with a good education, but handicapped with scant nurture in childhood. So I’ve stumbled, clumsy and uncouth, with nothing but trial and error to guide my way, like a blind man in strange territory. Perhaps I have an inkling of it now, having become a recipient of Grace, where sufficient guidance is given when it’s needed, and as Simone Weil says:

Our thought should be empty, waiting, not seeking anything, but ready to receive in its naked truth the object that is to penetrate it. *

And this is how my question, as to how my life could be art, was answered. A simple thought arrived unheralded, a thunderbolt out of a blue sky. You become an artist through doing. Not doing whatever you like, if you’re privileged enough to have that good fortune: but in unconditionally liking what you do.

And so, in the last few days, I’ve been prompting myself to practise that. It’s appealing, easy to practise. It has potency. This is how I paint my existence on the canvas of time, by fully engaging with my action. It’s been raising my consciousness to an unusual level of awareness. It’s been making me focus on my own doing, rather than the situation I find myself in. It’s been challenging my unreflective habits. Suppose I’m in a situation which provokes an emotion. I’ll do the thing that feels right, which satisfies my conscience, my sense of beauty & honour. The emotion is a messenger, not for me to wallow in the feeling of the message, like someone endlessly repeating the words in a telegram just received. Not an invitation to victimhood, but the opportunity to create a worthy action. And if I am cornered, with no place to go in face of this onslaught? There is always a choice. Even my thought is a form of action.

Perhaps what I’ve said is just a personal view, and those who learned the art of living as far back as they remember, unconsciously and without thought of naming it, will tell me I’m stating the obvious, welcome to the world, applause for the marathon runner who’s completed the course after nine hours. Others might say it’s all very well for people who have it easy like me. I’ll merely say that it’s neither a pronouncement nor a distillation, let alone a proposed remedy for the world’s ills. It’s my experiment, and I like it so far.

Or perhaps the concept—of deciding to like what you do, moment by moment—needs more description. For now, I’ll just say it sharpens the attention.
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* For Weil’s original words in French,see the new epigraph above.