Reconciliation of the Self and Meaning in the World

I'll get to the self-servingly grandiose title of this entry in a moment. But first, I have to explain my absence from this blog for the last month. In short, I'm still trying to figure out what to do with myself (the second half of this entry will be a return to some essays I wrote in college, which are ironically, more relevant to my life than they ever could have been when I wrote them).

I finished my residency in Vermont and was simultaneously offered a job in the lobstering industry on Matinicus Island in Maine, which is the most fiercely independent, clannish, don't-fuck-with-us stretch of land on the Atlantic Seaboard, if the locals are to be believed. I visited some friends in Boston and then made my way up to Portland, where I met up with my friend Kristen, who got me the job alongside getting herself a job, and then we took a tiny jumper flight out to the island.

I've been here two weeks now. The first remarkable thing (I'll describe Matinicus culture in a separate entry) for me was that I didn't actually have a job waiting for me when I arrived. I had to ask for one, which has led to three separate engagements - working for the lobstering middle man who buys all the lobsters off the boats and then ships them to the 'major' buyers on the mainland; painting buoys; and actual lobstering - the third of which has been my favorite...by far.

The rest of my time has been spent exploring the island, reading, writing, and engaging Kristen in sometimes too intense explorations of the substance of our souls, and by that I mean a lot of complaining about how we don't quite know what to do with ourselves, where to put ourselves, how to live, what to live for, where to live, how to make money and still be happy, how to be happy, when we feel our best, given all options in life what we would truly like to pursue, yadda yadda yadda.

Which brings me to part two of this entry: reconciliation of the self and meaning in the world.

The two essays I've revisited were both written for grad level courses in my final semester at NYU. Something about feeling young and naive in those classes forced me to perform at my best and I still look at these two essays (written in my apartment in Brooklyn under the intense care and supervision of Kate Ray and Nik Hanks in December 2008) as perhaps the two best I ever wrote in my life.

The first I read is an investigation of the similarities between Joyce's Finnegans Wake and Lacan's The Functions and Field of Language in Psychoanalysis and how they both grappled with the meaning of life and death. The life, or libidnal drive, Lacan concludes is defined by our desires and it is through them that we seek out self-recognition. But there's a major difference between recognizing the self through its lusts and finding 'True' meaning in life, something he claims is only discoverable only in Death - the return to the pre-symbolic. The essay ties that idea into Finnegans Wake, but that's not relevant here. The point is that True meaning is only discovered at the moment of Death, which is not helpful for someone looking for meaning now, or helpful only insofar as it forces home the point that it's a lost cause.

The second essay is about 19th Century novels and how all of the ones we studied presented the world at large and a protagonist (usually male, but not always), who was out to find meaning in it. The endings of all these books were presumably the author's conclusions on how, ultimately to live a meaningful life. The form was known as the bildungsroman, or coming-of-age novel. I believe that's all you need to know for the excerpt I'm going to copy and paste below to make sense:

[This suggests] that the true philosophical discovery of the novel was not the human experience so much as the experience of the world itself, apart from any human engagement in it. At the apex of the form, the heroes are not the fictional characters, but the flow of time itself (as in Flaubert) or the language of society (as in Balzac). With regards to the human quest for meaning and reconciliation, both authors would throw up their arms and declare it a lost cause. Since Dante merged with the transcendent light of God at the end of his Paradiso, no author has been able to portray the world as an epic totality that also contains “the sphere of pure soul-reality in which man exists as man, neither as a social being nor as an isolated, unique, pure and therefore abstract interiority.” (Lukács 152) This was the self-appointed task of the Bildungsroman, but, as Moretti concludes, after Flaubert it was all but abandoned in the face of the conclusion that either a character must submit to the way of society (as in Goethe, Austin), follow his own individuality to its inevitable tragic end (Stendhal, Pushkin), or simply recognize the fundamental irreconcilability, as did Balzac, who “ended up dismantling one of [humanity's] greatest illusions: that social progress and individual growth could be parallel processes.” (Moretti 163)

Sitting here on a stool in my little cabin on Matinicus, I'm once again forced to look at life in that light. [WARNING - existential angst to follow, anyone who gives me shit about this later on down the line is in denial about how universal this feeling is even if it moans out like Holden Caulfield when it actually comes around] That inability to pick a direction in life and to simply follow it, smiling and confident. A belt, heavily-laden with tools (or weapons) for the road: a diploma, a portfolio, a resume, a wardrobe of snappy outfits, manual strength and skills, a polytropical mind, a dash of faith sweetened with mysticism, the love and support of a diasporic community, confidence and experience from thousands of miles of walking hitchhiking flying training bussing and driving, and a strange kind of literacy that perpetually whispers 'you should know better by now.' Maybe Balzac said it best: the impossibility of making social progress and individual growth parallel developments. To constantly want to cultivate the two and in trying, to cultivate neither: too nervous about money and a lost future to truly commit to the journey inward, too convinced that the journey inward is the only one worth taking to actively pursue a job, a skill set, or even the publication of my better work.

This is the dilemma (in the classic, two-horned sense). The solution: pick one and pursue it sleeplessly. Of course I choose the journey inward, but still, trailheads are lacking, mentors and guiding footsteps, or maybe those are just excuses. The nomadic pilgrim, a student of life with wax in his ears, and the drain cap forgotten at the base of his memory's receptacle. Larry Darrell returns from India, penniless, ready to be a mechanic or a taxi-driver. The hour grows late and misshapen bones begin to calcify. Twosome twiminded, only the road for restless soles, but tattered and lost potential floats softly off on the slightest breeze echoing the question, 'potential for what?' Who's to say, it just seemed present and for brief moments, palpable. Weariness takes over, and frustration is its own little coup d'grace. O lost bemoans Eugene way down yonder in Ashville. 'You'd fit right in there,' they say, 'lots of likeminded folks.' Yeah? Doing what? I've minded and reminded myself of all the great works being done all over the world but somehow can't convince myself that that plunge is where my heart truly lives. Home! I go back to you as the oldest refrain in this stumprotten folk song, strung over and over in the cords of my mind: tangled. Maybe a few more steps? In which direction? Why Home of course: to the people that you love. I'd walk every latitude if that were the case, and when I arrived, I would softly say, I'm here. And they would each in their turn rise, arms around my shoulders and whisper quietly, "It's good to see you." And our souls would catch up until the stay was worn and work would need to be resumed. But what is that work? Walking from home to home: the harbinger of news, like the winged-sandled Mercury, patron saint of poets, traveling merchants, alchemists and con-men? Just like him. My God! I see you over my left shoulder, twiddling your thumbs, shaking your head at me in disappointment, then wandering off to the bars, stumbling back to me in the morning, reeking of stout, whiskey, gin and sex, grinning with the question on your lips, "Did I miss anything?" And then me looking shamedfacedly at the floor, blushing and muttering, "Nothing much." You smirking and us conspiring, but you far too hungover to contribute much to the conversation, so I lighten my load, send belongings home, and begin to walk, feeling holy and righteous until my feet start to hurt and the weather gets a little cold and I haven't talked to anyone in awhile and so I lay down my pack, feeling like I felt years ago, seeing so little spiritual progress, the impotent pilgrim and once again begin to grumble...God damned it.