01.07.07
The Real Illusion
You will never know the whole of life, not by a long shot, not anything even close to it. What you will know will be yours alone, however much you apparently have in common with another person. The moment you taste something, you will immediately infuse its actual flavor with your own interpretations, associations, biases, feelings, etc. Chocolate merges with passion, which itself is meaty like a tomato but redder. Pomegranates merge with November’s secret fire and the scent of burning wax. Nothing tastes the same for any two people. The same goes for your other senses. It simply can’t be helped.
When I touch you, I touch all the memories I have of touching that which opens me like a knife of living bone as it touches me.
From the moment your mind began to form, before you were conscious of yourself, it began to build a web of relationships, and these became irreversibly intertwined, ineluctably interrelated, so that, eventually, nothing new could be experienced that was not, at the moment of apprehension or conception, caught up and illuminated in this web.
Is every city street the same? No, but the orange tint of sodium lights splashing and dispersing darkness, diluting shadows and smudging their edges, is always associated for me with vigils and loneliness.
This had to be the case. And it has to be the case for all of us. Were we unable to build this web we’d be at sea, awash in a chaotic world of countless experiences we could never comprehend or even fully grasp. I imagine that we would be overwhelmed in the end by events infused with an unsettling paramnesia (déjà vu) made terribly daunting to our sanity, for memories would still be made but they’d be devoid of the anchoring sense of historical-personal context. So it is a necessary trade off, and in the end a perhaps academic one because, unanchored, what sense could we make of the world? A goldfish would be as equipped to deal with life as us. But the cost remains: the raw experiences of life are poignantly fleeting, their truths immediately subsumed, their essential (existential) reality unknown and, finally, unknowable.
Have I touched you, or only the force field evoked by my conceptions of touch? Did I hear your voice, or was that the song of fluid and poignant associations sluicing through the pipes in the walls of my desire to hear you?
We live in individual webs of personal experiences that cannot be shared, cocoons of historical-personal context that will not be breached by “life as it really is” so long as the spider specter of mind that calls itself “I” is there to weave it, and without that spider specter there is only a cobweb devoid of meaning — in fact there is not then even a cobweb. If one becomes (one with) life — that is, if one leaves the web, struggles free of the cocoon (egg?), loses oneself, loses “I” — then there is no one; to leave it is, for all intents and purposes, to die. To live is to exist in the bondage of a de facto individuality that is completely insular and isolated. Yet this is hardly a punishment or tragedy; it is simply the natural state of human beings, and the lives we (or most of us) lead are, for the most part, none the wiser nor any more foolish for not knowing the unknowable.
And yet, did Shakespeare not put these words in Hamlet’s mouth (q.v., II, ii):
- O God, I could be bounded in a nut shell and count
- myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I
- have bad dreams.
There is for me the understanding that I am caught in myself, trapped on my island, ensnared by the web of “my” life’s historical-personal context, the only reality I can truly be aware of. I wonder how it limits me. That it inevitably does is a terrible thorn in my aching and bloody side — at least sometimes, should I happen to take notice of it. Worse, I am aware that it does so more effectively the older I get. How could it not? Every day brings innumerable new relationships to tie into the web… (poetry! stereo instructions! faces, glances, hands! pictures at an exhibition! the latest song by that band, you-know-the-one! driving to the sea!). And so, now, no amount of passion, no amount of desire, no amount of will, no matter the quality, can propel me from its hold for more than a fleeting, bittersweet instant. I long to be free of it, of this web of “mine”; I long to be free of myself, free of me, free of “I” — the specter spider. Yet, to quote another source: “The struggle to free myself of restraints, becomes my very shackles” (Meshuggah, Catch 33).
— § —
How else could I know the world? For all I lose in the endless construction of my web, I gain in terms of being capable of functioning in the world. The web, the web-making, makes sense. Naked reality makes no sense at all, because sense is predicated on there being comprehensible associations, and naked reality is sui generis at any and all points. In other words, what is — just is, — completely, totally, wholly, absolutely, for and in itself. The moment you think about “what (it) is”, you wrap it up in language — in a sense, you encode the raw data, though not into a digital form, so that it may be processed — and the language you know is itself subject to associations. You do not know a single word that is free from personal (ergo limiting or restrictive) understanding or associations (every word to other words, for a start). Again, making the web makes sense, and it is necessary and unavoidable.
But still, there remains the itch and the desire to scratch it, the thirst and the desire to slake it, the urge and the desire to assuage it. Reality (qua “that which is really real”) is the wordless and omnipresent je ne sais quoi of life, and it is what we want to know. It is as if I ache to be the experience I think/feel/believe I am living; I want to be rid of all obfuscating factors, want to rid myself of self-perpetrated illusions or diversions from the experience’s reality.
Or is it that reality, naked reality, is — because it is inherently without meaning — effectively an illusion, insofar as our minds cannot grasp it as it is but only as we make it out to be? Is it that, in the end, the whole of life cannot therefore be known — because, forever outside of the personal experiences of countless beings, its quiddity is a senseless void? And what does this say about our relationships to others? (Please note that I do not suggest this with a view toward legitimizing or even positively acknowledging a solipsistic outlook. There is no reason, so far as I can see or conceive, to believe for a second that “others” do not exist independently of me.) How is it we know others? What is the reality of mutual love, where the desire is strongest for us to experience the reality of the other? With all the associations we have and make, taking every experience into our historical-personal context, weaving them into our web before we can realize them, what do we have?
Perhaps what reality is for us is the meaning discovered where the unknowable outside touches and affects the known or knowable within. And when that touch is brought about by another sentient being with any intensity, perhaps the dynamic — the product of the interplay between two webs — brings us closer to finding our compass, our orientation, in reality. In the limitless sea of the unknowable naked reality, vast as space itself, maybe it’s the interaction consciously engaged that soothes and reassures us that, even locked in our webs, we are real, we are touchable, we are not alone. And possibly that helps dispel the real illusion.
