Words per Minute #29: Potok on Meaning
We live less than the time it takes to blink an eye, if we measure our lives against eternity. So it may be asked what value is there to a human life. There is so much pain in the world. What does it mean to have to suffer so much if our lives are nothing more than the blink of an eye?
I learned a long time ago, Reuven, that a blink of an eye in itself is nothing. But the eye that blinks, that is something. A span of life is nothing. But the man who lives that span, he is something. He can fill that tiny span with meaning, so its quality is immeasurable though its quantity may be insignificant. Do you understand what I am saying? A man must fill his life with meaning, meaning is not automatically given to life.
It is hard work to fill one’s life with meaning. That I do not think you understand yet. A life filled with meaning is worthy of rest. I want to be worthy of rest when I am no longer here.
April 22, 2013 Leave a comment
Until another love poem comes along
The sudden sight of you is like a one-two punch in the stomach;
A double insult, once to my constitution and once to my pride.
I swore I wouldn’t write a word for you, my words were wasted too often before,
But that punch in the gut doubled me up, and the words just came out,
Spilling onto this page like children rushing from the school gates
Filled with nothing but enthusiasm for the summer evening stretched ahead.
Here’s the thing: I knew I was going to see you, I knew I’d feel this way,
But every time you open your eyes upon me, every time you smile that smile,
I’m caught unawares, I’m caught on the corner, I’m blindsided by that old truck,
And as I kneel in the road, checking my bones for breaks, I look up,
Try to catch sight of the number on the plate on the truck that just struck,
But I already know how it reads, I already know that it has only one word:
Love. And I’ll write that one word for you, I’ll write it down in my notebook
Every day until the pages fall like leaves in autumn, every day until the night
Draws a curtain across our drama, until the notebook is filled with nothing but
Love. I’ll take the pages one-by-one, and pop them in my mouth like gum,
Swallowing them whole while they’re still fresh, ink still wet on the page,
The juice of the fruit coating my throat, filling my stomach with pulp
Until I’m satisfied. Then you’ll call, and I’ll meet you by the bus stop,
And the moment that you open your eyes upon me, I’ll feel that punch in the gut,
And I’ll double up, I’ll double up joyfully – I’ll triple up if you ask nice –
As long as all the words come flooding out, and you see that all the words are
Love. You were never so embarrassed as you are now, embarrassed by my
Inappropriate smile, my adolescent eagerness, my lack of self-control,
Wiping the words away from my mouth and waiting for you to pick me up
Until finally you give in, haul me to my feet, and brush off the dirt of the day.
You’ll need to get your hands dirty if you want to play with me,
Though I know you hate dirt; you want things tidy, you like all your toys
Placed back in neat lines in the cupboard at the end of the day.
I’m afraid you’ll take all the leaves I’ve laid at your feet – all that mess! –
Sweep them into a mountainous pile, a colossus of autumn, and take a match,
Watching as the smoke rises in a column of forgiveness, sending a signal,
A smoke signal to all the other indians & cowboys & pirates & gangsters of
Love, that another of their number has fallen, and won’t be playing any more.
Fear is just an act, though; I’m not really afraid of you burning my love notes;
I’m just afraid that one day you won’t punch me in the stomach any more.
-March 2013
March 20, 2013 Leave a comment
Grendels
Grendel I:
You eat words,
Snapping and crunching
Until only the letters are left,
Hanging from your chin like spittle,
Or a necklace of spikes and spines and spills
Threaded together to make my efforts look like laughter
On the empty page; a silent kind of laughter
Enjoyed only by you, my great enemy,
The one thing I can’t kill.
Spitting and hissing,
I back down.
Grendel II:
You eat words,
Snapping and crunching
Until only the letters are left,
Hanging from your chin like spittle,
Or a necklace of spikes and spines and spills
Threaded together to make my efforts look like laughter
On the empty page; a silent kind of laughter
Enjoyed only by you, my great enemy,
The one thing I must kill.
Shaking and shouting,
I close in.
- January 2013
January 16, 2013 Leave a comment
In praise of death
This post isn’t meant to be depressing, but you’ll probably find it a little depressing. You’ll find it depressing because by nature and nurture you are inclined to avoid thinking about death as nothing better than a curse, a cross that humanity must bear.
Stop for a moment. Ask yourself: is that what I really believe, or is it just what I’ve been told? Is the idea of a cross that humanity must bear a reasonable belief, or is it just the legacy of a religion that tried to take the sting of death away by putting something even worse in its place?
One of the things that we’ve lost is a way of dealing with death in a meaningful way. I don’t care that we’ve lost the religious beliefs that helped us to deal with death by imagining that it wasn’t the end, but that we’ve lost the rituals that went along with those beliefs.
Rituals are important, but you can’t create rituals out of thin air.1 Once you’ve lost the religious beliefs, death becomes utterly terrifying, and once you’ve lost the rituals, you no longer have the tools to deal with your terror. Terror becomes your only response.
You should always face your demons down, you should always spit in the face of fear. Some people go in the wrong direction, however, and think of death as a tyrant to be overthrown.2 Unfortunately this is also a legacy of religious thought – death as the last enemy – rather than a rational response.
So maybe you shouldn’t anthropomorphise death, pretty as she might be. I’m in love with narrative. Treating your life as if it was a story that you’re telling is the best way to live, and death is the full stop at the end of the last sentence of the story; the story’s not complete without it, but it’s not the point of the story.
That might not work for you, and there’s another way to think about this. Presumably you believe that life has value, but where does that value come from? Value comes from scarcity: if we have an unlimited supply of something, we don’t place much value on it.
Think of air. We don’t usually think of air, because there’s so damn much of it, and so we don’t value it. Take away somebody’s air supply while maintaining the same level of demand, however, and its value to them goes through the roof. The same goes for pretty much anything.
If we manage to eliminate death, then our supply of life would become infinite, and it would be worth nothing. That doesn’t mean that we wouldn’t enjoy life, although hedonic adaptation3 suggests that we would enjoy it precisely as much as we currently enjoy life.
It would however mean that the joy we take in this sunset, or that friendship, would be less than it would be if we knew that we only had a certain number of sunsets in our time, or that our friendship would not last forever. This is the curious paradox of immortality: not boredom but banality.
Raging against death is a war without the possibility of a real victory; indeed, the very idea of victory becomes meaningless. It might make you feel better about yourself – reassuring you that at least you’re doing something – but it’s no more reasonable than the religious response.
By all means we should seek to extend peoples’ lives, but more importantly we should seek to improve their quality of life. And it’s here that death plays its role, because it’s only because of death that we are able place any value on life in the first place. Embrace death; although not as a lover.
- Although some people try very hard, as you can see in this Solstice Eve Book of Rituals [pdf] [↩]
- To be fair, I’ m deliberately mischaracterising Bostrom’s argument, which is actually against senescence and not death. However his line of thinking fits right in with the anti-death tendency in rationalist circles, best described by Yudkowsky in his elegy for his brother. [↩]
- More in Hedonic Adaptation to Positive and Negative Experiences [pdf]. [↩]
January 5, 2013 2 Comments
every object can be detected
I tread upon the bones of the universe
Like it was some great monster of time,
Beached on this shore of mine;
Cruelly diminished by my lens
Until I take away the telescope,
Returning my gaze to the sky unlit,
Unassisted – merely human – and then –
The speed of the tilt of the planet
Catches me up and under breathlessly,
Pitches me into that same silvered sky
Like a loose ball on a field of lights,
Explaining gently:
“When you
Put away your glass into its box,
I’ll still be here; and when your fate
Reaches the same wooden ends,
Taken to rest by six strong friends,
My stars will continue to hesitate,
Eyelike blinking in their sky.
Maybe one of yours will look up
The same time one of mine looks down.
Their gaze will meet and hold;
Something will pass between them
Before they both go on their way,
Yours tracking across snow to home,
Mine spinning across space to end.”
Revelations such as these bring me out
Night after night, month after month,
Year after year – however long it takes –
My glass in its wooden box by my side
Like a faithful dog in dark woods.
Opening your eyes is never so simple
As you imagine or expect; the question
Asks itself of the world, and the world?
The world answers in its own time,
Be it nights, or months or years, or never;
So sit with me, and while we wait,
We’ll talk of other things that matter.
Early draft (Belgrade, December 2012)
The Carina Nebula, ESO/T. Preibisch
December 16, 2012 Leave a comment
After We Met
I want to show you with my body what
I cannot say with words. I’ll tangle you
In limbs and fingers; work to see you caught
In ropes of love that bind as fast as glue.
When you weigh the days out, unseeing,
I want to curl around you just like smoke.
Fool that I am, fool that you are, being
Foolish together may be our only hope;
Hope so thick you could eat it with a spoon
Fills me up like five fingers in a glove.
I’m Cerberus barking at a wafer moon
Until he’s triply, truly hoarse from love.
Yet is it love? Or is it the disaster
That follows love, sure as dog follows master?
(December 2012, Belgrade)
December 4, 2012 Leave a comment
Cottonmouth
When she tells me she tastes death on my tongue, I know
She’s right: I taste death too, when I wake in the morning
Before I clear my lungs of devices; and where does it start?
It starts with the heart, as all things start with the heart,
A heart bruised until it’s become nothing but the bruise,
And beaten until it beats no more. When the music stops,
The dance stops too. The body swings from side to side;
Nothing keeping it moving except sheer force of habit.
Bodies walking through the crowd, not recognising life.
Slowly but surely the heart eats the body, starting with
The most profitable parts: stomach, gut, lining and liver,
Moving on to other organs as soon as the time is right.
Death comes at you unexpectedly, from the inside out.
That’s the death she tastes on my tongue, the sour bite;
Already dead on the inside, and waiting to finally fall.
It’s oh! A cottonmouth kiss that gets under her skin,
Plants doubts like seeds in the dark soil of her soul,
Grows whether she wants them or not, until they bloom.
She tells me suddenly she tastes death on my tongue.
Somehow I know this already, but it’s the last thing I know.
The music stops; the dance stops; and finally I can fall.
What do you say when she tells you about the taste?
That’s right – you say nothing – for what can you say,
When even the words in your mouth taste of death?
Mouth zippered shut tight, eyes squeezed against night,
Still hearing her talking, somewhere beside you, still
Moving the body from side to side until you finally fall.
(November 2012, Belgrade)
November 9, 2012 Leave a comment