Liverpool opinions
Know thyself - Clipping time's wings
By John Williams
There is a commonplace injunction, which states,
'Know thyself'
How many people have embarked on an inward looking journey in the hope of finding their real selves? Is this what the phrase really means, navel gazing to inner infinity and beyond? I don't think so. You see, in order to know, say, the nature of a Painting, you have to have in your sight a finished work; something to evaluate as it is, and always will be. How then can we know ourselves when we are always in a state of becoming the finished 'work', a work that is only 'completed' by death?
Surely the only way one can know oneself is by fulfilling one's potential in every way. Then we can say I know myself as a painter, a writer, and a parent, a gardener and so on. Unless we try to realise, that is, know our potential then we remain ignorant of the only worthwhile knowledge, that of knowing what and who we really are. This knowledge cannot be solely obtained by sitting in the Lotus position, unless all you want to know is whether you can perform yoga.
Erich Fromm* pointed out that when human beings first grasp the idea that they are mortal, and as such doomed to death, they are so profoundly shocked that they simultaneously acknowledge their mortality while subliminally etching into their consciousness the phrase,
" Since I am going to die what is the point of anything?"
This attitude leads to what Fromm described as 'deep rooted boredom'. His reasoning is easy to understand. What is the point of living if one is only going to die? Fromm argued that mankind has developed several strategies to combat the deeply rooted boredom that is a consequence of our deadly knowledge.
They mainly involve frantic and futile attempts to arrest the passage of time, by continually re-creating specific events or feelings from their past in the hope that by so doing the flow of time will somehow be frozen. This explains our endless quest for novelty, buying a new car to re-create the thrill of one's first automobile acquisition, new girlfriends, new clothes etc, which helps us to 're-live' our lives on an almost daily basis.
The problem is that none of these strategies even begins to allay the panic and horror that we all experience at a subconscious level when first we become aware of death and non-existence. Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote a poem that dealt specifically with this timeless dread.
Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! As the heart grows older
it will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie,
And yet you will weep, and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow's springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of Ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.
Like Margaret, who was eight years old when she discovered the truth of death and corruption, we all grieve for ourselves. But the answer lies not in the sensation seeking quest for novelty and the hope that by re-creating moments in time we will preserve time at that point forever. The poet Ted Hughes pointed to this in this poem,
Terrifying are the attent sleek thrushes on the lawn,
More coiled steel than living ; a poised
Dark deadly eye, those delicate legs
Triggered to stirrings beyond with a start, a bounce, a
stab
Overtake the instant and drag out some writhing thing.
No indolent
procrastinations and no yawning stares,
No sighs or head-scratchings.
Nothing but bounce and
stab
And a ravening second.
Is it their single-mind-sized skulls, or a trained
Body, or genius, or a nestful of brats
Gives their days this bullet and automatic
Purpose? Mozart's brain had it, and the shark's
mouth
That hungers down the blood-smell even to a
leak of its
own
Side and devouring of itself: efficiency which
Strikes too streamlined for any doubt to pluck at it
Or obstruction deflect.
With a man it is otherwise. Heroisms on horseback,
Outstripping his desk-diary at a broad desk,
Carving at a tiny ivory ornament
For years: his act worships itself while for him,
Though he bends to be blent in the prayer, how loud and above what
Furious spaces of fire do the distracting devils
Orgy and hosannah, under what wilderness
Of black silent water weep.
Here man is distracted from his main purpose by distractions
appropriately described by the words orgy, Hosanna and weep. Where the
pursuit of sex, heaven and consolation is prompted by our fear of
death.
The only strategy to successfully deal with the terrifying sense of our own futility, according to Fromm, is not to waste our existence trying to kill time, but to engage in activities that annihilate the concept of time itself. What activities are these? Those activities into which you become so immersed as to forget the existence of time itself. You have all done it at some time or other, become so involved in a drawing or writing that the passage of time is a shock to you when you have finished your activity and emerged into 'real' time.
What? You say you have never done anything like that! But you did, when you were a child, like Margaret, before you discovered the blight man was born for. Remember, all those hours scrawling away with paper and pencil? No thoughts of death and boredom then. So find yourself an activity that absorbs you so completely you will, for a while, annihilate time and its twin children, boredom and fear of death.
Time flies, but only if we provide the wings