How to Build an Origin
A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.
Lao-tzu
The First Step
I’ve developed a crude toolbox of gimmicks and half-formed heuristics for my interaction with the world. I’ve raised my hands at some firmamental ghost(s); I’ve wondered if the trees weren’t telling me secrets they’ve kept in the deepest of their sweaty roots; and I’ve let the orphaned light of long-dead stars beguile me with the promise of a past or a future I’ll never know. I inherited some of these, and some of them I stole and repackaged.
We often execute our inherited convictions presuming that, while we may not be right, we’re close enough; yet, for all the thousands of movements toward some brand of enlightenment or another, for all the protests and pamphlets and city hall rallies, still we eat and defecate and huddle together and fight and steal and give and kill and run and fall and climb and laugh and cry. We are no more nor less human than it seems we ever have been.
Why should it be any different?
Hallowed Cages
Sometimes, I try my hardest to look down on the planet from a convenient orbit, high enough to see our frenzy without losing its resolution. I think about calamity and starvation and wars and peace and governments and fashion and love and lust and moral conviction and all our various machinations. I don’t get the sense that there’s any intrinsic point to any of it, outside (a) survival and (b) a conflation of survival with pettiness. We go about our business with great gusto and color, but it often seems little more than business, little more than the compulsion to keep busy. And survive. In whichever order in which it might happen.
I don’t expect that that’s what we mean to accomplish. I certainly don’t set out to spend the day increasing our collective noise. Nevertheless, I can’t claim to have done much else, ever.
No, we set out with a hasty grab bag of ideas and designs, hoping that today’s draw is better than yesterday’s. If ever it is, it isn’t by much. Buoyed by music or a mother’s pat on the back or a bible (King James, the Principia, an Elmore Leonard joint, or whatever), we walk the sidewalk, navigate the onramps, and come back home roughly as empty or full as when we left. The world revolves and rotates, things live and die, stars break open in glorious death, rather independent of how many sales we made or how many children we saved or taught or abducted. A stroke of evil on the canvas of time is indistinguishable from a stroke of good. Maybe that means that neither exists. I don’t know.
If we are only here to be here, to survive long enough to enable the survival of others, is there a point to the pretense that we are here for anything else?
The Calculated Ignorance
What happens when we no longer believe in the sacred?
It’s a question that bounces around my brain from time to time, and I can’t seem to decide whether loss of the sacred is a good, bad or indifferent thing.
On the plus side, of course, is the dismantling of beliefs and systems that hold us captive, stifle our free will and spirit. So the destruction of the sanctity of empire, of royalty, of apparently defunct gods (where did they go?), and all systems that thrived on oppression is an indisputably good thing—except, perhaps for those who got their heads lopped off.
…
On the downside of the loss of the sacred is the floodgates being opened for all that is most vile in us, secure in the belief that we have no-one to answer to but the shareholders. I was reminded of the awful possibilities as I wept my way through The Corporation, the neo-feudalism, taxing rainwater, the greed, the greed, the greed. Knowing that it is naïve to believe that, left to their own devices, the majority will take the righteous path, the path of common good, so wondering whether the awe induced by what is universally held to be sacred is not crucial for keeping all our worst impulses in check.
Even if sometimes we have to fake it.
Gail Armstrong, “Sacrebleu“, Open Brackets
Even if we accept, as some do, that we have no purpose but propagation, does that necessarily mean we cannot err, that without a discernible story arc there is no point to dividing the world into protagonists and antagonists, no point to settling a conflict to allow for denouement, no point to see existence as anything but a sequence of unmetered moments of caprice and whimsy threaded together by causality, if they’re threaded together at all? Unless that’s so, we’re left to demarcate for ourselves what is error and what is not, the only remaining (potentially) universal fundament being that, whatever happens tonight, we want to wake up again in the morning.
So far as I can tell, these decision structures, e.g. our “beliefs”, are at best a collection of axioms of limited internal consistency: life is simultaneously miraculous and expendible; science employs the weight of collective opinion as an approximation of objective truth; our gods are the supreme creators and managers of all that exists, yet are somehow powerless to our need to mold them into justifications for just about anything we feel like doing. Axiomatic systems are only as stable as the definitions on which they’re built. In the absence of any objective measures of good, bad, ugliness, and beauty, we must create our own. Are they so arbitrary? Seems so. That’s a different question than whether or not they’re random, which they wouldn’t appear to be.
I won’t pretend owning a capability to fathom from where we pull our beliefs, our axioms, but I can’t see them as much more than gussied-up animal impulses. Even that insight is a product of our inescapable anthropocentricity, but it’s the best I can divine. When I’m looking down from my imaginary orbit, I don’t see much that sets our conventional übersociety apart from our Neanderthal ancestors, save population size. Without any measure of good or bad or moral or immoral that doesn’t happen to be our own contrivance, there’s nought but to say that what has happened has happened, free of qualitative judgement. While I’m not denouncing the human race, then, I am questioning our self-importance, our proclivity to grab existence, the sum of all things that are, to wrap it in our “world”, that clumsy tapestry of mismatched, knotted yarn, and to confuse our shadowplay thereupon with truth.
I was asked once, not too long ago, how, in the face of no obvious (or not-so-obvious-but-still-effable) clues as to a purpose to which we might aspire, no extant basis on which to decide what to do and what not to do, how can we go about our lives in anything but throes of ignorant energy? My response was that, if we don’t know what kind of world it really is, maybe we decide what we want the world to be and hope for the best. The more I think about it, the more inescapable a state this seems to be.
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