Lost in the cosmos

Walker Percy (1983)

• We are unknown, we knowers, to ourselves...Of necessity we remain strangers to ourselves, we understand ourselves not, in our selves we are bound to be mistaken, for each of us holds good to all eternity the motto, "Each is the farthest away from himself" - as far as ourselves are concerned we are not knowers. - Nietzsche
• 1. The Amnesic Self: Why the Self Wants to Get Rid of Itself
  • This version demonstrates that the source of pleasure for the moviegoer is not the amnesia but the certified and risk-free license to leave the old self behind and enter upon a new life, whether by amnesia or mistaken identity.
• 2. The Self as Nought: How the Self Tries to Inform Itself by Possessing Things which do not Look like the Things The're Used as
  • The cobbler's bench has become in fact a table. Tables are now being manufactured which look like cobbler's benches but are not.
• 2. The Self as Nought (II): Why Most Women, and Some Men, are Subject to Fashion
• 3. The Nowhere Self: How the Self, Which Usually Experiences Itself as Living Nowhere, is Surprised to Find that it Lives Somewhere
  • Because a person, particularly a passive audience member who finds himself in Burbank, California, feels himself so dislocated, so detached from a particular coordinate in space and time, so ghostly, that the very mention of such a coordinate is enough to startle him into action?
• 4. The Fearful Self: Why the Self is so Afraid of Being Found Out
  • A wolf howling alone in a wolfpack doesn't get stage fright.
• 5. The Fearful Self (II): Why the Self is so Afraid of being Stuck with another Self
• 6. The Fearful Self (III): How the Self Tries to Escape its Predicament
• 7. The Misplaced Self: How Two Selves Confronting Each Other can Miscalculate, Each Attributing a Putative and Spurious Reality to the Other and Trying to Match it, with the Consequence that Both Selves Become Non-selves
• 8. The Promiscuous Self: Why is it that One's self often not only does not Prefer Sex with one's Chosen Mate, Chosen for His or Her Attractiveness and Suitability, even when the Mate is a Person well known to one, knowning of one, loved by one, with a Life, Time, and Family in common, but rather prefers Sex with a New Person, even a Total Stranger, or even Vicariously through Pornography
  • The Self since the time of Descartes has been stranded, split off from everything else in the Cosmos, a mind which professes to understand bodies and galaxies but is by the very act of understanding marooned in the Cosmos, with which it has no connection. It therefore needs to exercise every option in order to reassure itself that it is not a ghost but rather a self among other selves. One such option is a sexual encounter. Another is war. The pleasure of a sexual encounter derives not only from physical gratification but also from the demonstration to oneself that, despite one's own ghostliness, one is, for the moment at least, a sexual being. Amazing! Indeed, the most amazing of all creatures of the Cosmos: a ghost with an erection! Yet not really amazing, for only if the abstracted ghost has an erection can it, like Jove spying Europa on the beach, enter the human condition.
• 9. The Envious Self (in the root sense of envy: invidere, to look at with malice): Why it is that the Self - though it Professes to be Loving, Caring, to Prefer Peace to War, Concord to Discord, Life to Death; to With Other Selves Well, not Ill - in fact Secretly Relishes Wars and Rumors of War, News of Plane Crashes, Assassinations, Mass Murders, Obituaries, to say nothing of Local News about Acquaintances Dropping Dead in the Street, Gossip about Neighbors Getting in Fights or being Detected in Sexual Scandals, Embezzlements, and other Disgraces
  • satyriasis
  • Nothing makes a man feel better than to be shot without effect. - Churchill
  • In a word, how much good news about Charlie can you tolerate without compensatory catastrophes, heroic rescues, and such?
• 10. The Bored Self: Why the Self is the only Object in the Cosmos which Gets Bored
  • The word boredom did not enter the language until the eighteenth century. No one knows its etymology. One guess is that bore may derive from the French verb bourrer, to stuff.
  • Is it because there is a special sense in which for the past two or three hundred years the self has perceived itself as a leftover which cannot be accounted for by its own objective view of the world and that in spite of an ever heightened self-consciousness, increased leisure, ever more access to cultural and recreational facilities, ever more instruction on self-help, self-growth, self-enrichment, the self feels ever more imprisoned in itself - no, worse than imprisoned because a prisoner at least knows he is imprisoned and sets store by the freedom awaiting him andthe world to be open, when in fact the self is not and it is not - a state of affairs which has to be called something besides imprisonment - e.g., boredom. boredom is the self being stuffed with itself.
  • It is because of a loss of soverighty in which the self yields up plenary claims to every sector of the world to the respective experts and claimants of these sectors, and that such a surrender leads to an impoverishment which must be called by some other name, e.g., boredom?
  • It is because the self first had the means of understanding itself through myth, albeit incorrectly, later understood itself through religion as a creature of God, and now has the means of understanding the Cosmos through positive science but not itself because the self can perceive itself only as a ghost in a machine? How else can a ghost feel otherwise toward a machine than bored?
  • Under the circumstances in which a man gets bored, a dog goes to sleep.
• 11. The Depressed Self: Whether the Self is Depressed because there is Something Wrong with it or whether Depression is a Normal Response to a Deranged World
  • Because the self, despite an embarrassment of riches, is in fact impoverished and deprived, like Lazarus at the feast, having suffered a radical deprivation and loss of sovereignty? With the multiplication of technologies and the ascendence of experts and expertise in all fields, the self has consented to the expropriation of every sector of life by its appropriate expert - even the expropriation of its, the self's, own life. "I'm depressed, Doctor. What's wrong with me? If you are not an expert in the field, a doctor of depression, can you refer me to one?" Thus, the rightful legatee of the greatest of fortunes, the cultural hertiage of the entire Western World, its art, science, technology, literature, philosophy, religion, becomes a second-class consumer of these wares and as such disenfranchises itself and sits in the ashes like Cinderella yielding up ownership of its own dwelling to the true princes of the age, the experts. They know about science, they know about medicine, they know about government, they know about my needs, they know about everything in the Cosmos, even me. They know why I am fat and they know secrets of my soul which not even I know. There is an expert for everything that ails me, a doctor of my depression, a seer of my sadness.
  • Thought Experiment: A new cure for depression: The only cure for depression is suicide. This is not meant as a bad joke but as the serious proposal of suicide as a valid option. Unless the option is entertained seriously, its therapeutic value is lost. No threat is credible unless the threatener means it. This treatment of depression requires a reversal of the usual therapeutic rationale. The therapeutic rationale, which has never been questioned, is that depression is a symptom. A symptom implies an illness; there is something wrong with you. An illness should be treated. Suppose you are depressed. You may be mildly or seriously depressed, clinically depressed, or suicidal. What do you usually do? Or what does one do with you? Do nothing or something. If something, what is done is always based on the premise that something is wrong with you and therefore it should be remedied. You are treated. You apply to friend, counselor, physician, minister, group. You take a trip, take anti-depressant drugs, change jobs, change wife or husband or "sexual partner." Now, call into question the unspoken assumption: something is wrong with you. Like Copernicus and Einstein, turn the universe upside down and begin with a new assumption. Assume that you are quite right. You are depressed because you have every reason to be depressed. No member of the other two million species which inhabit the earth - and who are luckily exempt from depression - would fail to be depressed if it lived the life you lead. You live in a derangled age - more deranged than usual, because despite great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing. Begin with the reverse hypothesis, like Copernicus and Einstein. You are depressed because you should be. You are entitled to your depression. In fact, you'd be deranged if you were not depressed. Consider the only adults who are never depressed: chuckleheads, California surfers, and fundamentalist Christians who believe they have had a personal encounter with Jesus and are saved for once and all. Would you trade your depression to become any of these? Now consider, not the usual therapeutic approach, but a more ancient and honorable alternative, the Roman option. I do not care for life in this deranged world, it is not an honorable way to live; therefore, like Cato, I take my leave. Or, as Ivan said to God in The Brothers Karamazov: If you exist, I respectfully return my ticket. Now notcie that as soon as suicide is taken as a serious alternative, a curious thing happens. To be or not to be becomes a true choice, where before you were stuch with to be. Your only choice was how to be least painfully, either by counseling, narcotizing, boozing, groupizing, womanizing, man-hopping, or changing your sexual preference. If you are serious about the choice, certain consequences follow. Consider the alternatives. Suppose you elect suicide. Very well. You exit. Then what? What happens after you exit? Nothing much. Very little, indeed. After a ripple or two, the water closes over your head as if you had never existed. you are not indispensable, after all. You are not even nothing. Your fellow townsmen will have something to talk about for a few days. Your neighbors will profess shock and enjoy it. One or two might miss you, perhaps your family, who will also resent the disgrace. Your creditors will resent the inconvenience. Your lawyers will be displeased. The priest or minister or rabbi will say a few words over you and down you will go on the green tapes and that's the end of you. In a surprisingly short time, everyone is back in the rut of his own self as if you had never existed. Now, in the light of this alternative, consider the other alternative. You can elect suicide, but you decide not to. What happens? All at once, you are dispensed. Why not live, instead of dying? You are free to do so. You are like a prisoner released from the cell of his life. You notice that the door to the cell is ajar and that the sun is shining outside. Why not take a walk down the street? Where you might have been dead, you are alive. The sun is shining. Suddenly you feel like a castaway on an island. You can't believe your good fortune. You feel for broken bones. You are in one piece, sole survivor of a foundered ship whose captain and crew had worried themselves into a fatal funk. And here you are, cast up on a beach and taken in by islanders who, it turns out, are themselves worried sick - over what? Over status, saving face, self-esteem, national rivialries, boredom, anxiety, depression from which they seek relief mainly in wars and the natural catastrophes which regularly overtake their neighbors. And you, an ex-suicide, lying on the beach? In what way have you been freed by the serious entertainment of your hypoethetical suicide? Are you not free for the first time in your life to consider the folly of man, the most absurd of all the species, and to contemplate the comic mystery of your own existence? And even to consider which is the most absurd state of affairs, the manifest absurdity of your predicament: lost in the Cosmos and no news of how you got into such a fix or how to get out - or the even more preposterous eventuality that news did come from God of the Cosmos, who took pity on your ridiculous plight and entered the space and time of your insignificant planet to tell you something. The consequences of entertainable suicide? Lying on the beach, you are free for the first time in your life to pick up a coquina and look at it. You are even free to go home and, like the man from Chicago, dance with your wife. The difference between a non0suicide and an ex-suicide leaving the house for work, at eight o'clock on an ordinary morning: The non-suicide is a little traveling suck of care, sucking care with him from the past and being sucked toward care in the future. His breath is high in his chest. The ex-suicide opens his front door, sits down on the steps, and laughs. Since he has the option of being dead, he has nothing to lose by being alive. It is good to be alive. He goes to work because he doesn't have to.
• 12. The Improverished Self: How the Self can be Poor though Rich
  • What is more boring than hearing Heisenberg's uncertainty relations enlisted in support of the freedom of the will?
  • importuned
• A Semiotic Primer of the Self
  • At any rate, a triadic event has occurred and it is unprecedented in the Cosmos. Thus, there is a sense in which it can be said that, given two mammals extraordinarily similar in organic structure and genetic code, and given that one species has made the breakthough into triadic behavior and the other has not, there is, semiotcially speaking, more difference between the two than there is between the dyadic animal and the planet Saturn.
  • Another unique property of the sign-user, of special significance here, is that as soon as he crosses the triadic threshold, he not only continues to exist in an environment but also has a world. The world of the sign-user is not identical to its environment or the Cosmos.
  • But the oddest thing of all is your status in my world. You - Betty, Dick - are like other items in my world - cats, dogs, and apples. But you have a unique property. You are also co-namer, co-discoverer, co-sustainer of my world - whether you are Kafka whom I read or Betty who reads this. Without you - Franz, Betty - I would have no world.
  • You are Ralph to me and I am Walker to you, but you are not Ralph to you and I am not Walker to me. (Have you ever wondered why the Ralphs you know look as if they ought to be called Ralph and not Robert?)
  • For me, certain signifiers fit you, and not others. For me, all signifiers fit me, one as well as another. I am rascal, hero, craven, brave, treacherous, loyal, at once the secret hero and asshold of the Cosmos.
  • You are not a sign in your world. Unlike the other signifiers in your world which form more or less stable units with the perceived world-things they signify, the signifier of yourself is mobile, freed up, and operating on a sliding semiotic scale from negative infinity to infinity.
  • One semioticist defined the subject of his study as the only organism which tells lies. The exile from Eden is, semiotically, the banishment of the self-conscious self from its own world of signs. The banquet is still there, but is Banquo in attendance. The self perceives itself as naked. Every self is ashamed of itself. The semiotic history of this creature thereafter could be written in terms of the successive attempts, both heroic and absurd, of the signifying creature to escape its nakedness and to find a permanent semiotic habiliment for itself - often by identifying itself with other creatures in its world.
  • The scientist, through transcenent and "in orbit" around the ordinary world, has minimal problems with reentry. That is to say, he is able to maintain a more or less stable orbit so that in ordinary intercourse he is generally seen as no more than "absentminded", like Einstein, who thought for twenty years about his general theory, and von Frisch, who pondered bee communication for forty years. Reentry problems become noticeable in less inspired scientists. The divorced wife of an astronomer at the Mount Wilson Observatory accused her husband of "angelism-bestialism". He was so absorbed in his work, the search for the quasar with the greatest red shift, that when he came home to his pleasant subdivision house, he seemed to take his pleasure like a god descending from Olympus into the world of mortals, ate heartily, had frequent intercourse with his wife, watched TV, read Mickey Spillane, and said not a word to wife or children. But at the peak periods of scientific transcendence, he, the scientist, becomes the secular saint of the age: Einstein is still referred to as a benign deity. With the waning of transcendence, reentry problems increase. One manifestation, which always amazes laymen, is the jealousy and lack of scruple of scientists. Their anxiety to receive credit often seems more appropriate to used-car sales-men than to a transcending community. Other examples of reentry failures: the general fatuity of scientists in political matters, their naivete and credulity before tricksters. The magician Randi says that scientists are easier to fool - e.g., by Uri Geller - than are children. More distressing consequences occur when the zeal and exitement of a scientific community runs counter to the interests of the world community, e.g., when scientists at Los Alamos did not oppose the bomb drop over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The joys of science and the joys of life as a human are not necessarily convergent. As Freeman Dyson put it, the "sin" of the scientists at Los Alamos was not that they made the bomb but that they enjoyed it so much.
  • their obliviousness of their own immanence is the worst alienation of all
  • If Kafka's Metamorphosis is presently a more accurate account of the self than Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, it is the more exhilarating for being so. The naming of the predicament of the self by art is its reversal. Hence the salvific effect of art. Through art, the predicament of the self becomes not only speakable but laughable. Helen Keller and any two-year old and Kafka's friends laughed when the unnamable was named. Kafka and his friends laughed when he read his stories to them.
  • If poets often commit suicide, it is not because thier poems are bad but because they are so good. Whoever heard of a bad poety committing suicide? The reader is only a little better off. The exhilaration of a good poem lasts twenty minutes, an hour at most. Unlike the scientist, the artist has reentry problems that are frequent and catastrophic.
  • Different Reentry Problems of Artist and Art-Receiver: Mainly Quantitative: It is one thing to write The Sound and the Fury, to achieve the artistic transcendence of discerning meaning in the madness of the twentieth century, then to finish it, then to find oneself at Reed's drugstore the next morning. A major problem of reentry, not solved but anaesthetized by alcohol. It is something else to listen to a superb performance of Mozart's Twenty-first Piano Concerto, to come to the end of it, to walk out into Columbus Circle afterwards. At best, a moderatetely sustained exalatation; at worst, a mild letdown.
  • The pleasure of such transcendence derives not from the recovery of self but from the loss of self.
• 13. The Transcending Self: How the Self Characteristically Places intself vis-a-vis the World, paricularly through modes of Transcendence and Immanence
• 14. The Orbiting Self: Reentry Problems of the Transcending Self, or Why it is that Artists and Writers, Some Technologists, and indeed Most People have so much Trouble Living in the Ordinary World
  • But what is not generally recognized is that the successful launch of the self into the orbit of transendence is necessarily attended by problems of reentry. What goes up most come down. The best film of the year ends at nine o'clock. What to do at ten? What did Faulkner do after writing the last sentence of Light in August? Get drunk for a week. Spend three days and nights at the roulette table. What does the reader do after finishing either book? How long does his exaltation last?
  • Options of reentry into such a world are: (1) reentry uneventful and intact, (2) reentry accomplished throuh anesthesia, (3) reentry accomplished by travel (geographical), (4) reentry accomplished by travel (sexual), (5) reentry by return, (6) reentry by disguise, (7) reentry by Eastern window, (8) reentry refused, exitus into deep space (suicide), (9) reentry deferred, (10) reentry by sponsorship, (11) reentry by assult
  • It has been observed that artists live longer and drink less than writers. Perhaps they are rescued from the ghostliness of self by the things and the doings of their are. The painter and the sculptor are the Catholics of art, the writer is the Protestant. The former have the sacramentals, the concrete intermediaries between themselves and creation - the paint, the brushes, the fruit, the bowl, the table, the model, the mountain, the handling and muscling of clay. the writer is the Protestant. He works alone in a room as bare as a Quaker meeting house with nothing between him and his art but as a Scripto pencil, like God's finger touching Adam. It is harder on the nerves.
  • Why Writers Drink: He is marooned in his cortex. Therefore it is his cortex has must assult. worse, actually. He, his self, is marooned in his left cortex, locus of consciousness according to Eccles. Yet his work, if he is any good, comes from listening to his right brain, locus of the unconscious knowledge of the fit and form of things. So unlike the artist who can fool and cajole his right brain and get it going by messing in paints and clay and stone, the natural playground of the dreaming child self, there sits the poor writer, rigid as a stick, pencil poised, with no choice but to wait in fear and trembling until the spark jumps the commissure. Hence his notorious penchant for superstition and small obsessive and compulsive acts such as ling up the paper exactly foursquare with desk. Then, failing in these frantic invocations and after the right brain falls as silent as the sphinx - what else can it do? - nothing remains, if the right won't talk, but to assult the left with alcohol, which of course is a depressant and which does of course knock out that grim angel guarding the gate of Paradise and let the poor half-brained writer in and a good deal else besides. But by now the writer is drunk, his presiding left-brained craftsman-consciousness laid out flat, trampled by the rampant imagery from the right and a horde of repilian demons from below.
  • Home may be where the heart is but it's no place to spend Wednesday afternoon.
• 15. The Exempted Self: How Scientists Don't Have to Take Account of Themselves and Other Selves in their Science and Some Difficulties that Arise when they have to
• 16. The Lonely Self: Why the Autonomous Self feels so Alone in the Cosmos that it will go to any Length to talk to Chimpanzees, Dolphins, and Humpback Whales
• 17. The Lonely Self (II): Why Carl Sagan is so Anxious to Establish Communication with an ETI (Extraterrestiral Intelligence)
• 18. The Demoniac Self: Why it is the Autonomous Self becomes Possessed by the Sprint of the Erotic and the Secret Love of Violence, and how Unlucky it is that this should have Happened in the Nuclear Age
• St. Augustine The triumph of the love of God in the City of God over lust in the city of man, but - "Grant me the gift on continence, but not just yet."
• World War III: The year 2000+, the demoniac spirit of the erotic no longer postied by Christianity but triumphant in its own right, perfected as a genitial technique but deprived of the charm of the forbidden, the secret, the "dirty," "sinful," "extramarital," "fornication," "adultery" - even the word fuck has by now lost its homonymous semantic chargic and is neutered as fish, fowl, fix; the perfection of contraceptive technique; the conquest of Herpes II virus and all homosexual "aids" diseases; the perfection of visual and tactile aids (no longer called pornography, from porne, harlot) as sexual stimuli; erotica elevated to a major literacy and art form. War without passion: one billion dead.
• A Space Odyssey (I) - 19. The Self Marooned in the Cosmos: What would you say if you met a man Friday out there? What do you think he would say to you? Could you understand him?
• A Space Odyssey (II) - 20. The Self Marooned in the Cosmos: What do you do if there is no man Friday out there and we really are alone?
  • He was like a Christian who had lost his faith in everything but the Fall of man.

Page last revised on: 2024-05-05