(a tiny critter just crawled into my computer's air vent and reminded me of this joke: It's a Temel joke. Temel is the quintessential Laz, a resident of the Black Sea region in northern Turkey, and the jokes about him are somewhat similar to Polish jokes in the U.S., but not exactly. Temel is half fool half genius, as the Laz people are known for doing everything in a different kind of way-- they might seem really absent-minded at times but they can also be incredibly shrewd. The best way I remember it being described is, when told to grab their ears the Laz take their right arm over their head and grab their left ears.... Anyway, the joke: Temel is a watch repairman. One day his friend Dursun comes to him with a beloved watch, an heirloom from his grandpa, that has stopped working. Temel shakes the watch, puts it to his ear, turns the knob and stares at it for a while. Then he opens it up and what does he find inside but a dead ant. Uyy, Dursun! he exclaims. Of course your watch has stopped. Can't you see, the machinist is dead!)
Anyway, back to the whole exile thing. I got to thinking about it again lately because 1) I'm moving again, after having lived somewhere for four years (a long time for me) and 2) I just read this passage in Joseph Campbell's The Hero With a Thousand Faces which reminded me of the exile trope in an urgent way. I'll quote at length:
In his life-form the individual is necessarily only a fraction and a distortion of the total image of man. He is limited either as male or as female; at any given period of his life he is again limited as child, youth, mature adult, or ancient; furthermore, in his life-role he is necessarily specialized as craftsman, tradesman, servant, or thief, priest, leader, wife, nun or harlot; he cannot be all. Hence, the totality--the fullness of man--is not in the separate member, but in the body of the society as a whole; the individual can only be an organ. From his group he has derived his techniques of life, the language in which he thinks, the ideas on which he thrives; through the past of that society descended the genes that built his body. If he presumes to cut himself off, either in deed or in thought and feeling, he only breaks connection with the sources of his existence.[...] From the standpoint of the social unit, the broken-off individual is simply nothing--waste. (pp.382-383)
So, after I read this, I felt kind of depressed. I mean, it's admittedly old-fashioned, what with all those universal men and medieval job descriptions, but what he's saying makes a lot of sense to me overall. The word that buzzes about me, settles on my brow, walks sticky-toed on my earlobe, creeps on my upper lip and rubs its legs together always is Contingency. Our consciousness is necessarily contingent, there is no getting around it, unless very consciously we try to get around it through meditation, etc. And why should we try to get around it, you might ask. Well, once you realize how contingent all those news and views are, how arbitrary the choices (and how culturally delineated the range of choices) are that people define themselves by, you kind of stop believing in anything. It's as though, afloat on a sea of signifiers, you are permanently shipwrecked, but without land in sight. This is when folks like me who are spiritually inclined look to religious traditions for the definition of self, for something unifying that exists among all, something to plant your feet on. Roots.
Shoots.
Leaves.
Not unimportant metaphors. I even have a poem about this, it goes like this:
Contingency Serenade
You all roll very funnily toward the grave!
You are extraneous:
spring ants in the airy house
all the ridiculous weathers you carry like reasons
You wince and shrug your maybe shoulders,
eat your macaroni dinners rubbing elbows
with bosses presidents and
your sons and your mysteries
you carry in cages!
Your: news views smells
your: dandelions knees spit buttocks
your: bozoukis
your: coffee rings and all the wealth of two spoonfuls of secrets stashed away in your snatches under your mattresses, your blistered tongues
Your brains are like birds
flung at walls
rub rub rub til the lamp is raw
tell the genie sing sing sing
damn you thwack you can't get enough
of this rubber ball bird this so very resilient thing
that breaks nonetheless it breaks
thwack sing you sonofabitch
You rain on the rooftop your plink plunk song your little ditty your broken charm bracelet.
That poem was born out of a sense of outrage at anyone's claim at legitimacy. And from the frustration of not being able to have that claim myself. By legitimacy I partly mean confidence. I am profoundly insecure at times but also sort of committed to being insecure. Not in the petty way that undermines people but like another version of humility. Who are you to say? Who are you anyway? That sort of thing. So I was glad to see Campbell go on like so:
But there is another way--in diametric opposition to that of social duty and the popular cult. From the standpoint of the way of duty, anyone in exile from the community is nothing. From the other point of view, however, this exile is the first step of the quest. Each carries within himself the all; therefore it may be sought and discovered within. The differentiations of sex, age, and occupation are not essential to our character, but mere costumes which we wear for a time on the stage of the world. The image of man within is not to be confounded with the garments.[...] The preliminary mediations of the aspirant detach his mind and sentiments from the accidents of life and drive him to the core. "I am not that and not that," he meditates: "not my mother or son who has just died; my body, which is ill or aging; my arm, my eye, my head; not the summation of all these things. I am not my feeling; not my mind; not my power of intuition." By such meditations he is driven to his own profundity and breaks through, at last, to unfathomable realizations. No man can return from such exercises and take very seriously himself as Mr. So-and-so of Such-and-such a township, U.S.A.--Society and duties drop away. Mr. So-and-so, having discovered himself big with man, becomes indrawn and aloof.
This is the stage of Narcissus looking into the pool, of the Buddha sitting contemplative under the tree, but it is not the ultimate goal; it is a requisite step, but not the end. The aim is not to see, but to realize that one is, that essence; then one is free to wander as that essence in the world. Furthermore: the world too is of that essence. The essence of oneself and the essence of the world: these two are one.[...] Thus, just as the way of social participation may lead in the end to a realization of the All in the individual, so that of exile brings the hero to the Self in all.
The process Campbell talks about, though, is an arduous one. In The Conference of The Birds, an epic allegory from the 13th Century, Fariduddin al-Attar writes of this journey (towards enlightenment, finding one's true self) as one that ultimately lays most aspirants by the wayside. I think the popularization of such practices as Buddhism and Yoga in the west is a good thing but brings with it the danger of 1) missing the ultimate goal of the practice and 2) underestimating the length and difficulty of the journey itself. In fact, insofar as that goes, I wonder if it's not misleading to even think about the goal when pursuing a spiritual practice. I know you've got to know what you're going for, but the point in this case is you can't know, you can't Imagine what it is that you are in fact pursuing. So I feel when Campbell writes about this nice newly minted all essence self, he is in fact retelling a Myth not a fact. I don't doubt that people have reached that stage, but I doubt that Campbell himself has, and without the experience, all he can relate to us is the legend, like the City of Atlantis.
So, back and forth, on the waves, we bob. I bob you bob and she bobs. I know the postmodernists say enjoy the free play and don't look for land, but sometimes it gets exhausting to doggie-paddle.
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