...for in every one of us a mad rabbit thrashes
and a wolf pack howls, so that we are afraid it will be heard by others....
—Czeslaw Milosz

It would be easy to work up an essay on the theme, “We live in very unspiritual times.” Just make a few references to mass culture, widespread chemical dependency, Grand Theft Auto, the knavery of political life, and the continuing break-up of the family. The point being? Either that we must return to an earlier time, when such-and-such prevailed, or that we must hold true to our little cells of enlightenment or faith, weather the storm, and promulgate our message for the future, whatever that might happen to be.

It would also be pretty easy, though it would require more technical expertise, to devote an essay to the theme of how far we’ve come as a civilization, how alive with possibilities the present age is, and how truly transplendent things will soon be—if such an era has not dawned already.
Just now I saw a swainson’s thrush out in the garden in the midst of the drizzle. He’s been out there all day. I’ve been watching him.

*

We don’t need Whitman, Hegel, or anyone else to tell us that spirit is everywhere. But there is some degree of confusion as to what this “fact” entails. The dumbstruck lover, as he treads down the avenue toward his girlfriend’s house, sees radiant beauty in the sign advertising the Muffler-replacement service. But the jilted lover sees blackness everywhere, and finds it inexplicable that people all around him have come up with a reason to live. Is the spirit, then, in the ecstatic visage of hopeful youth? Only that?

For myself, I love the new growth on the yew bush under the living-room window. I love the voice of Duquende at an exciting moment in a soleá. I love it when Hilary calls to tell me that she’ll be home from work early and expresses an interest in sharing a frozen pizza by candle-light while seated on the kitchen floor. That really sets me to chopping the onions and peppers.

These feelings, I believe, are manifestations of a rapport between inner and outer life. Not a correspondence, mind you, and certainly not an identity, but a rapport.

“Rapport” comes from a French word rooted in the idea of “carrying back,” or “carrying again.” It’s a noble concept, and it becomes more significant as we age, because we have more places and things and people to return to. But perhaps we risk being led astray by etymology here. The word “rapport,” after all, refers to a comfortable, pleasant relationship, less often talked about than felt, between two or more things that exist NOW. It’s a good in itself, though not an end in itself. For even in the midst of a beautiful rapport, we still feel ourselves called upon to do things. Unlike love of the romantic type, which has a narrative arc, and involves the individual in mirroring, interdependence, and the pursuit of an ideal of union, rapport consists in mutual esteem and affection within the comfortable environment of which the individuals involved pursue ends that may not be precisely the same, though they sometimes are.
The spirit that is everywhere is the one that sustains rapport. It inspires people to write poems, among many other things—and also to read them.

*

The universe is interesting in the same way that a campfire is interesting: It’s active, ever-changing, dangerous, mysterious, and you can stare at it as long as you want to without worrying that it will start up a conversation, or turn away, or stare back. But a fire has many advantages as a focus of reverie. You can stare into it from a comfortable position, either standing or sitting, without craning your neck. Its intricacies, though less dazzling, perhaps, are more absorbing, its alterations more rapid and musical—and to top it all off, there is the fact that you made it yourself.
And then there is the smoke.

*

I think highly of the Italian writer Primo Levi. Primo Levi thinks highly of the French writer Rabelais. But I don’t like Rabelais. That bothers me.

*

Among the wise folk who were active during that golden zone of world consciousness when religions were being formed—Confucius, Buddha, Lao Tzu, Pythagoras, Moses and all the rest—the one who consistently receives short shrift is the Greek thinker Heraclitus. This may be because Heraclitus never founded a sect.
But perhaps that’s the point. His views were not of the type that people become inspired by or devoted to. Nor are they intentionally nonsensical, in the manner of a Zen koan. They are simply brief enigmatic expressions of the way things are.
I made a broadside once, using cold type, of Heraclitus’s twelve finest sayings. I don’t know where that thing went, but I rmemeber several of the one-liners I included:

One or another of these sayings returns to me from time to time, like a tune I heard long ago and subsequently forgot.

*

The difference between the scientific and religious approaches to experience, in a nutshell, is this. Science has the proper tools at its disposal—reason, investigation, observation—to get at the truth, but it’s constitutionally incapable of asking the Big Questions. Religion asks the Big Questions. In fact, it exists for the sole purpose of satisfying our desire to know why we’re here and how we should live; and it does a pretty good job of satisfying those desires, by means of myth, tradition, and ritual. Its reliance on these sources of imaginative insight come at the expense of reason, investigation, and empirical observation, however, and that’s too bad, because these are the tools best suited to exposing the truth.
Metaphysics combines the best elements of these two disciplines. It makes use of reason and observation—the tools of thought—to answer the Big Questions. Yet all too often the answers arrived at by the metaphysicians don’t satisfy us either. In the first place, they can only rarely be sighted in the midst of an ocean of arcane verbiage that’s being employed, consciously or subconsciously, to mask the embarrassing simplicity of the principles being ennunciated. And when those answers do occasionally rise to the surface, like an oxygen-starved whale, we’re likely to find them unsatisfying anyway, because they too closely resemble the folk wisdom of the ages.

My own explorations of this realm have led me to the conclusion that the single most important thing we can learn from metaphysics is to come to grips with CONTRARIES.

A remark made by Aristotle, in his charmingly matter-of-fact way, may be to the point here.

It is plain, then, that [all thinkers] in one way or another identify the contraries with the first principles. And with good reason. For first principles must not be derived from one another nor from anything else, while everything has to be derived from them. But these conditions are fulfilled by the primary contraries, which are not derived from anything else because they are primary, nor from each other because they are contraries.

But what are “the contraries”? We might take up the One and the Many as an example. The One and the Many are contraries. The One is unified, the Many are all over the place. Could anything be more obvious? Yet it’s worth pointing out that if there had always and forever been only one thing, the idea of One-ness would never have occurred to that one thing. The expression “unified” requires multiplicity. A single undifferentiated thing cannot be said to be unified, it’s simply, purely itself. One-ness is the dream of the many, not the one.

The reverse is no less true, however. For the idea of the Many suggests that a collection of disparate things are being considered together as a group. At least theoretically they make up a single whole, incohoate though it may be.

In short, the concepts of the One and the Many, though they are opposed to one another, are logically meaningless outside their association with one another.

This kind of language drives most people up the wall, I know, but the thrust of the argument should be clear: Because the one and the many are logically inseparable concepts, neither unity nor individuality will serve us well as ideals. On the other hand, a concept like Harmony brings order and proportion to the dynamic opposition of the one and the many. In family life, in art, in community participation, in all things, what we actually seek is a stable harmony within which individual exuberance and development can thrive in the context of a broader personal and social ethos, atmosphere, or rapport.
In actual life, the Many is an ever-present reality, while the One remains a theortical ideal—except for those deeply enlightened individuals who can actually see and feel it.

*

The attempts by physicists to uncover a theory for Everything is rather vain, and it also tends to obscure the fact that we actually know very little about anything.

Similary, the pronouncements of theologians about how their God encompasses, overrules, knows about and subsumes everything must be recognized for what it is—empty rhetoric, resembling the expressions used at a high school pep rally to insire the school body with enthusiasm for an upcoming athletic contest. But metaphysicians are no less prone to hyperbole, as any student of Hegel should recognize. Hegel exposed and analyzed the logic of contraries more fully than anyone before him, and in so doing, became the most important thinker of the modern age. But he spent an awful lot of time fleshing out an Absolute that has no place in his brilliant theory of dialectic.

In short, the desire to be done, once and for all, with the complexities and vagaries of life by submitting to, or discovering, a unifying force, (which will also be a point of rest), is understandable, but it’s also spiritually dubious. The universe is made up of many things and they are never at rest. What we ought to be exploring is how that collection of things is arranged, and how we ourselves, who are just one further item amid the sea of the Many, relate to all the rest of it. It might also be worth determining how the various parts of which we are made relate to one another, and how we can arrange them more harmoniously.

*

One of the many defects of the idea of monotheism is that it deprives the diety of conversation with equals. Lacking that source of stimulation, he becomes withdrawn, morose, and irritable.
Maybe Hegel got it right after all: Monotheism of reason and the heart, polytheism of the imagination and of art, that is what we need.

*

“The infinite qua infinite is unknowable,” or so Aristotle says. On the other hand, E. M. Cioran observes—

...nihilism is neither a paradoxical nor a monstrous position, but rather a logical conclusion wrecking every mind that has lost intimate contact with mystery (mystery being a prudish term for the absolute.)

There is no contradiction here, however. It is one thing, after all, to develop a formula proporting to predict the behavior of “everything,” or a doctrine describing omnipotence in excruciating detail; and quite another to sustain intimate contact with the absolute.

Children often meet up with the absolute at an early age, when they begin to ask themselves why there is something rather than nothing, or “Why am I me, and not you?” The frisson generated by such thoughts is powerful, and it’s worthwhile for us to keep this pathway to the absolute open as we age, because it provides that invaluable point of perspective of which Cioran speaks, if I read him right. For the lucky few, this perpective becomes engrained, and every aspect of experience takes on the luminous shine of a MIRACLE.

By the way, we stand at the opposite end of the realm, here, from the point at which Camus remarked that suicide is the first, and perhaps the only real philosphical question. He could not have been more wrong. Suicide is the last dreadful question, arising from a point of despair that most people never reach (not to be too glib about it), simply because they’ve got more interesting things on their minds.
Things were looking pretty grim on the European scene when Camus was writing. The German thinker Ernst Bloch, writing at about the same time, struck to the root of its cause when he wrote:

Our current habituation to nightmare is not only a safeguard...but also an adherence to the “reality principle.” In Fruedian terminology, we have come of age. But at a price. We have lost a characteristic élan, a metaphysic and technique of “forward dreaming.”

*

No age can accurately be characterized as entirely this or that, however. At more or less the same time that Europe was going to rack and ruin, and intellectuals like Bloch were disecting the malaise with poetic exactitude, their contemporaries were hot on the trail of Big Game. Ortega y Gasset, for example, was spinning an elaborate theory of “Who am I?” the long and the short of which can be stated briefly:
—I identify myself with my past—I am the individual who has designed the local water tower, fathered these three children, and voted Democrat is every recent election.

—Yet who I am is actually my project, the things I am consumed with the desire to do soon, my aspirations, my way into the future. This is what Bloch refers to as “forward dreaming.”

The notion of identity as “project” or aspiration has always had its critics, and it has been under severe attack for at least half a century now. We are advised at every turn to divest ourselves of our anxieties and preoccupation and learn to “be in the moment.” That’s not a bad idea. It’s also a good idea to take a shower every once in a while. But it would not be an impressive show of wisdom, I think, for us to live in the shower. Once again we run up against a pair of inseparable contraries, and the tension that we maintain between them determines the quality and flavor of our daily lives.

*

I referred a while back to the embarrassing similarity we often find between metaphysics and folk wisdom—embarrassing to the metaphysicians, that is. Ortega detailed his theory of ‘identity as project’ in several of his works—History as a Sysyem, Man and Crisis, Concord and Liberty? I don’t remember which—and the nuances he provides are certainly worth exploring, but the same theory was more trenchantly expounded by the Argentine poet Antonio Porchia (1886-1968).

He who has made a thousand things and he who has made none, both feel the same desire: to make something.

Here are a few more of Porchia’s golden nuggets of wisdom:

*

We compliment someone by saying “Well, you were certainly in fine form today.” But we criticise him or her by remarking “Your behavior was rather formal this afternoon.” This contrast highlights the fact that form is of the essence of value—yet it is not to be valued in and of itself. An infatuation with “form itself” invariably leads to uninteresting expressions of “mere form,” which sometimes go by the more flattering but no less empty name of “pure form.”
What “pure form” lacks, of course, is content. It is an abstraction derived from genuine forms, and as such it is just one more example of the desire for absolutist escape we discussed earlier. In fact, Form and Content, like the One and the Many, are inseparable contraries. They always appear together, they tussle with one another, and occasionally they arrive at a point of energetic equipoise. It is at this point that the going gets good.

*

When Pilate asked Jesus if he was King of the Jews, and Jesus replied, ”So you say,” was he exhibiting good form? When Rollo the Norman kicked the king of France in the face and then observed that it was the customary greeting among his people, was he exhibiting good form?

I don’t know the answer to these questions, though I suspect that Rollo was simply being a jerk.
Discussions of form often center on the analysis of more or less static works of art—vases, statues, paintings. I bring up these famous episodes from history and folklore as a way of suggesting that form is an aspect of action. Tennis players, cellists, and talk-show hosts can be in good or bad form.
The French philosopher Maurice Blondel once remarked that metaphysics is the logic of action. Along the same lines, I might suggest that Form is the shape of action. This is no less true of a work of art than of any other act. The great merit of art is that it brings greater durability to the forms of action.
There are some areas of life—the Japanese Tea Ceremony may be taken as an extreme case in point, if my understanding of it is accurate—where actions have been formalized to the point where their static and art-like qualities are painfully obvious. Yet most of our social interactions are driven by formal considerations of which we’re often only dimly aware. The degree to which our behavior is guided by such forms may be suggested by the fact that few qualities are sought more eagerly nowadays than those of authenticity and sincerity—as if we had lost sight of what genuine living actually entails. (Perhaps Schiller’s infatuation with the naiveté of nature arises from the surmise that animals and plants live their lives with uninhibited artlessness. In point of fact the natural world is “hard-wired” to a much greater degree than the human one.)

The drive of young people to escape from form may be criticized as immature, but it exposes the content of living with refreshing emotional candor, and that exposure often comes to us in new forms that are lively, sound, and appropriate to the content.

*

It’s difficult to sustain a discussion of “form” for long without resorting to gassy generalities, however, because forms vary as do the materials of which they consist. The “classical” forms that were pleasing to Wincklemann in the eighteenth century differ greatly from the Gothic forms of an earlier age, and also from the campy post-modern forms of today. You and I may be attuned to all of these “styles,” or to none of them. Yet every thing we come upon in life displays marks of proportion, balance, fiber and texture, motion, and incidental detail, to a greater or lesser degree. Our familiarity with these things pleases, stimulates, and also elevates us. In this way forms differ radically from norms. Norms underscore and promote mediocrity—that is to say, the middle. Forms underscore and promote excellence, excitement, inspiration—that is to say, the heights.