Just finished this remarkable book called “Free Fall” by William Golding. Yes, thats the guy who wrote The Lord of the Flies, which I’m sure most of you probably read back in high-school. Well, Golding is a Nobel Prize winner and author of several other fascinating and complex books, but most of them well beyond the capabilities of the average high-school reader. In any case I finished “Free Fall” in a state of elation; that coursing, elevated feeling I get when I have gone through something I know is far more important than the meaning I can unpack at this very moment. For the book deals with the nature of freedom, and how it is necessarily lost in the course of one’s life, how one must sacrifice one’s freedom in order to live. Of course it is far more complex and involved than this petty explication, but needless to say I was enthralled.
In many ways I feel like I am always teetering on the cusp, of being continually presented with vivid projections of myself, and then becoming conscious of the choice presented to me: that of refusal and freedom, or surrender and sacrifice. I am on this cusp. What is it that I want? What is it that I am willing to sacrifice my freedom for? Is it my idea of love, my idea of service, or my idea of myself? I do not know. But to be forever on this balancing edge, to see the roiling and unpredicatable waters on one side, and the dusty slopes of a brown savhanna spread out on the other, to teeter but never fall, what is this living? Is this living? This continual refusal, this careful negotiation between narcisism (if you wish to call it that) and pricipal (if you wish to call it that), is this a stuggle fated to occur till my death? I do not know, and therefore will always be left to shiver and clatter on the plank, above the churning Pacific, leering faces behind me goading me to the depths, a fierce but gentle sky above, calling me back to its black comfort.
Samuel Monutjoy, the protagonist of “Free Fall”, has this to say of the struggle:
“All day long the trains run on rails. Eclipses are predictable. Penicillin cures pneumonia and the atom splits to order. All day long, year in, year out, the daylight explanation drives back the mystery and reveals a reality usable, understandable and detached. The scalpel and the microscope fail, the oscilloscope moves closer to behaviour. The gorgeous dance is self-contained, then; does not need the music which in my mad moments I have heard…
All day long action is weighed in the balance and found not oppurtune nor fortunate or ill-advised, but good or evil. For this mode which we must call the spirit breathes through the universe and does not touch it; touches only the dark things, held prisoner, incommunicado, touches, judges, sentences and passes on.
[This] world is real, both worlds are real. There is no bridge.”
The world of reason, the world of the spirit. The world of freedom, the world of service. One denies the other: negation, devaluation. I am forever on the cusp. I am, like Sammy, the world in which worlds forver fight.
I meet many different people in my life. People who are sometimes antithetical to each other, people who would tear at each other’s throats if ever they were to meet. But I take care not to let them meet. I like it this way: it keeps me balanced, it keeps me sane. But it also keeps me from inhabiting any one of those worlds completely. This is the wall, this is the tight-rope.
It seems to me that every person constructs their world-view, their ideas about things, their ontology and even methodology, by devaluing and negating those ideas, ontologies and methodologies that oppose or negate their own. The extent to which one is able to self-justify in some part depends upon one’s knowledge-base, the depth to which one has examined one’s self. Sometimes, with very intelligent and self-possessed people like Melon or Sinecure, these negations and devaluations are well-thought out, logically sound and rational. But we know that logic is a fickle servant. We know it bends to a strong will. No matter how foolproof and unsinkable their thought might be, they are based on the fact of negation and devaluation. Of course, the joke of the matter is that while person A might be able to defend his position to the death, person B can have an entirely opposing notion and be as secure and comfortable in its truth as person A. These defenses and negations need not be entirely rational. In fact, sometimes the are blatantly irrational, but this does not and can not vitiate the argument in any way.
This devaluation is, unfortunately, a necessary component of intellectual maturity. As one learns and becomes more adept and aware of the complexities of the world (beware of people who tell you the world is simple), and how to make sense of them in order to move forward – to actually MOVE at all – one must necessarily congeal and cohere a world-view, an idea of reality, a way-things-work. This idea obviously cannot encompass everything – that is impossible and a fool’s game – but it IS an idea. Without this foundational coherence one cannot ACT; one cannot effectively function in the world in anything but the most erratic and irreverent manner. This was the problem the Underground Man faced in Dosteovsky’s “Notes…”: how do you act when there is no foundation to act from? But of course, the realization of this necessary devaluation is also a form of intellectual maturity, in fact a later and more complex stage of it. For to realize that there MUST be a foundation while there really is NO foundation, that is knowledge, that is a workable truth. For we know, there are no Ideas, only ideas about Ideas. The Platonic Form does not exist, or if it does, it is irrelevent. There is no love, only our ideas about love. There is no freedom, only our ideas of freedom. But we MUST have our idea of love, even if it means, as so often it does, that we must necessarily devalue and negate all other ideas of love.
Devaluation, negation: these are the necessary steps for action.
So what does this mean? What does this realization change in my life? It means I have very little patience for people who proclaim their ideas as if they were Ideas, or of people who say they speak of true things as if truth were a singular matter. It is the difference between arrogance and intelligence and I do not wish to engage with the former.
