TOWARDS THE CIRCUMFERENCE
The cogito is tautological: if thought generated
by me exists, then to say that I exist is
not an inference; it is a repetition. Cogito,
ergo illud est, while no more logical than
Descartes' axiom, says something more.
It says that the eternally
dormant, waking suddenly and briefly into
time, cannot create its own dream. Dream
and dreamer are created by an inanimate world
beyond them; they are part of that world,
but not all of it.
The mind is the world incarnate,
a parcel of matter become sentient; diverted
momentarily from thingness, it has grown
estranged from matter; alienated, it is the
Other, the Stranger.
Facing a world so totally insensible
that it cannot even be indifferent to him,
the dreamer sees what seem to be other dreamers.
They are peripheral: if each dreamer were
as acutely conscious as he, he would have
no way of perceiving this; he could merely
conjecture it. Looking into inner ocular
darkness or holding a torso in his arms,
he wants to apprehend by some mysterious
gnosis the me-ness of eyes and chest that
continually orbit around him, substance without
essence, a palpable hologram. Most of these
'other beings' are like meteors, returning
infrequently, or not at all; some few are
planets that for long periods of time revolve
barely out of reach; and the sun of his being
is unable to draw them any closer.
In the vast Nothing, insentient
matter - like so many impulses repressed
at the back of God's mind - non-existed for
trillions of years till, here and there,
certain amino acids began to grow in ever
more complex molecular patterns, a fungus
in the old age of the Nothing. The molecules
formed colonies, became pinpricks of pain
in the universe, isolated visions of inanimate
matter. And throughout the circles of terrestrial
Hell the fractured dream generated by these
short-lived organisms flickered intermittently,
each dream a sun to itself, the others merely
satellites reflecting its light, surviving
a short space by cannibalising other organisms,
returning at last to the inanimate matrix
in a microbiological Eucharist.
As one such organism,
I am part of the Cosmos and at the same time
distinct from it by my very hereness, by
my awareness of a brief fragment of it enveloping
me. I repeat the conjugations of God and
wonder whether I am or It is.
Antonin Artaud saw himself
as a part of the universe that could be experienced:
'I know myself, and that is enough for me,
and it should be enough; I know myself because
I am a witness, I am a witness to Antonin
Artaud.' In a similar way, I am a witness
to Nicholas Hancock.
However, beyond this
image is the Other, which can also be experienced
if the eye and the ear are turned towards
it in quiet contemplation. The beyond-myself
that Nietzsche failed to see is there. If
words and sounds are 'rainbows and, between
beings that are forever separate, make-believe
bridges,' this simply means I cannot communicate
verbally with the beyond-myself in the sense
of communion, of a fusing of me with the
Other; but this Other does not thereby cease
to exist.
Furthermore, there is
an aspect of my psyche - the atman - that
I only become fully aware of from time to
time; it seems to reflect something beyond
me, which Hindus call the Atman-Brahma; it
is a reflection, I repeat, and not a communion.
Perhaps it is merely a hormone reflecting
some apparently cosmic Hormone engendered
by the mind. But, hormone or atman, it is
there, waiting to burst into flame. 'What
is here is also there,' says the Katha Upanishad,
'and what is there is also here. Who sees
the many and not the One wanders on from
death to death.'
The atman, on the other
hand, is not something we can observe: it
is an experience like Antonin Artaud - one
that we might call atmanising if it didn't
make us think of simonising. Proust wrote
in La Prisonnière:
As a human being spends his life constantly
thinking a number of things, and as he is
nothing but the sum of the thought of these
things, when chance removes them from before
his eyes and he suddenly thinks of himself
he finds nothing but an empty box, an unfamiliar
thing to give which some semblance of reality
he adds the memory of a face he has seen
reflected in a mirror. |
This is because Proust was searching
for
an underlying thought that would remain
after
the bric-à-brac was swept away. The
atman
is not a thought; it is not 'personality';
and if one is not 'looking in the right
direction'
it will not be seen.
Now, though the godhead is often spoken
of
in terms of the Other, we can conjugate
God
in all persons singular:
I am what I am.
.You are what you are.
He/she/it is. |
Elohim - I am - is the
most
sacred name, and only He can use it:
for
a human to say I am would be to usurp
the
place of God. Yahweh - He is - remains
at
the opposite pole: it is what is both
outside
us and beyond our senses, whereas Tat
tvam
asi - you are that - is the Sanskrit
bridge
between the two, a union of atman and
Atman,
of this and that.
Thus, while the cogito remains
a rag
of culture to wave at the end of a
stick
- the 'intellectual's' cross of St
George
-, it means much less than it did in
1637.
We might now say more aptly: I feel,
therefore
the Other exists, or even I feel because
the Other exists - and, through the
Other
or beyond it, the Atman.
|