I had an interesting reflective experience recently. One of my sons took me to an Art Garfunkel event at a nearby library. Garfunkel is making appearances in small locations (like this library's theater) while recovering from a loss of voice in his upper range. He sang some great old songs and read some poems of his own and then answered some questions. It was a wonderful, soothing trip into the past. At several points Garfunkel spoke of his current wife, once using one name and once using a different name that might have been her nickname but was not obviously so. It was a slightly confusing moment—wait, you just said her name was X, and now you are calling her Y! I registered the discrepancy, thought about it for a bit, then let it go. But I also noticed that several of the women sitting in the row in front of me looked at each other, eyebrows raised in query. These women had been talking steadily among themselves before the show started and continued their interrelations during the show with looks, smiles, etc.--ongoing social contact. On the other hand, my son and I rarely spoke during the performance, processing all the events internally and separately—at least until we got home and talked it all over.
The looks and smiles the women exchanged with each other during the performance stuck with me as an image of something that I mostly don't participate in. I'm an introvert and need a lot of time to myself to think in order to function well psychologically, but most other people seem to be extraverts who need ongoing social interaction to maintain themselves. In the week following the performance I began to remember an image from a fantasy series that my son introduced me to maybe ten years ago. The image is a forest canopy, and it appears in the book Elven Star, which is volume two in the Death Gate Cycle by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman (1990). In this cycle, there are four worlds, one based on each of the four elements of “sky, fire, stone, and water.” The world in Elven Star is Pryan, the world constructed around fire—the sun is at the center of this world, literally. Here's part of the synopsis of the book: “On steamy Pryan, Realm of Fire, never-ending sunlight and plentiful rain have created a jungle so vast that humans and elves dwell high in the trees and only dwarves live anywhere near the ground.”1 In other words, the more sophisticated beings in this world live in a canopy of leaves and moss, and many of them don't even know they are not on solid ground.
I began to see the ongoing web of social interactions that the women in front of me at the concert were weaving as similar to the canopy world of Pryan. This is a good metaphor, I think, for the social world of culture all humans inhabit—it is woven of human creations and human interactions, and many people accept it as the real world, whereas it is really hovering over the original, more obdurate world of nature. And it's only during and after a significant natural disaster, like Sandy last year here on the East Coast, that some humans are forced to admit that their everyday lives do not play out on solid ground, even while they insist that the social canopy be rebuilt immediately.
Of course, we all want the safety and comfort that social institutions usually provide us—we all want to rebuild schools and hospitals and homes, though we might begin to question rebuilding homes on barrier islands. But many people insist that even the trivial parts of the social canopy are reality. There's a game going on among some truant youths in Brooklyn these days that they apparently call “the knock-out game.” The goal is for one of them to knock out another person with one punch. Unfortunately (and not saying much for their machismo), these youths have been mostly choosing unsuspecting women walking on the street to knock out. When I heard of the most recent female victim on the radio, the announcer mentioned twice that she had just come out of a nail salon when she was punched out. I wasn't sure what to make of this detail. Was I supposed to worry that her expensive nail job might have been ruined when she hit the sidewalk? Or was I supposed to lament the fact that we live in a world where a woman's nail job can't always be safe? Wasn't this just a bit beside the point? But then the announcer played a tape of another woman in the neighborhood shouting that everyone had the right to go to a nail salon and that they wouldn't be stopped from doing so by these thugs. That's living in a tissue-thin canopy, if you ask me.
The social world of culture that is constructed by human interactions is quite impressive on the whole. But I often find myself very uncomfortable with more local manifestations of it. I know that I'm different from most people in this, and I'd like to get a little personal here for a moment to conjecture why. I grew up in a family atmosphere of emotional instability. My parents were fighting an ongoing psychological battle with each other and were themselves, each one, very emotionally needy in different ways. We kids had to support or tolerate our parents in their neediness, though we very often did not get the emotional support that we needed from them. The most important thing we could do for our parents, especially our mother, was to be the perfect family in the eyes of outsiders. There was a very strict division between what went on inside and how we presented ourselves outside. I always felt the social canopy was false, in other words—made up of appearances rather than reality.
And nature was always the closest I came to security and consolation. The world of nature is just what it is; it doesn't ever intend you any harm, though it may occasionally do you harm. The animals and plants are just trying to survive with the simple means they have to do so. They will mostly leave you alone unless you threaten them; they do not make unreasonable psychological demands upon you. I found I could rely on nature much more than I could rely on people. There was a small woods behind our house (before it was all chopped down by people in order to make more houses for more people), and I used to walk in the woods a lot and commune with myself and nature and achieve some small amount of serenity out there. I truly cannot understand how other people can trust people more than nature, or how they can see getting their nails done as a right, as an important event in their lives.
Many aspects of the social world scare me, because they seem very fragile and unrealistic to me. I am very aware of how high off the ground they are, so to speak—how far removed from natural reality. What I did growing up was to create a psychological hammock for myself, if you like. It's like a social canopy, in that it is woven from human interactions, but it is woven from my own thoughts and relations with myself and just a few other trusted intimates and it is very close to the ground (the reality of nature), so that if I fall out I believe I can get back in again, even if I get hurt. I am constantly in my head weaving together past and future and present into a whole structure that I can exist within, much as extraverts do with their social contacts. This worked very well for me for several years; my “real” world inside gave me the stability that the dangerous social canopy outside did not give me. I kept the two carefully separate, even though I participated in both. But it seems to me that more and more social media are threatening the hammock and insisting that everyone live together in the canopy. Even more, the social media seem to demand disruption rather than continuation in thought and emotional relations—it's a Twitter world, not an epic or lyric world. I feel less and less comfortable in this world as the days go by.
Perhaps I am just a member of a vanishing species that cannot adapt. I could actually accept that, as an individual, but I also keep having fears that the social canopy is in a way becoming a threat to all or most humans and other living things, not just to me. There was a very scary essay in the Stone series in the New York Times a few weeks ago that renewed my fears: “Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene,” by Roy Scranton.2 Scranton believes that we have “passed the point of no return” in the process of global warming and that we must accept that the world of relative abundance many of us have lived in over the past few centuries in the West is in effect “already dead”--the nail salons may still be open for business, but not for much longer. In the future, we will be scrambling for food and water, not worrying about the appearance of our nails. Scranton concludes, “The sooner we confront this problem, and the sooner we realize there's nothing we can do to save ourselves [as we are now], the sooner we can get down to the hard work of adapting, with mortal humility, to our new reality.”
The problem is, as T.S. Eliot memorably put it, “human kind / Cannot bear very much reality.”3 Many people, who cannot entertain the possibility that nail salons are not a right or even a permanent part of human culture, choose denial over the acceptance that Scranton advocates. They don't even really choose denial; the unconscious mind simply doesn't allow the threatening reality to filter into consciousness. This is a big problem, which is in part responsible for the environmental mess we are in now and probably will be in part responsible for the demise of the natural world that we have evolved to live in so successfully. The social canopy may well bring about the demise of the earth that supports it. Scranton describes this fearful situation:
“The human psyche naturally rebels against the idea of its end. Likewise, civilizations have throughout history marched blindly toward disaster, because humans are wired to believe that tomorrow will be much like today — it is unnatural for us to think that this way of life, this present moment, this order of things is not stable and permanent. Across the world today, our actions testify to our belief that we can go on like this forever, burning oil, poisoning the seas, killing off other species, pumping carbon into the air, ignoring the ominous silence of our coal mine canaries in favor of the unending robotic tweets of our new digital imaginarium. Yet the reality of global climate change is going to keep intruding on our fantasies of perpetual growth, permanent innovation and endless energy, just as the reality of mortality shocks our casual faith in permanence.”
This is why I keep writing about the process of metaphorical thinking. Of course, we should enjoy the parts of culture that help us, but it seems to me that we should also work very hard to remember that culture is not all there is of reality—in fact, that culture is the less durable part of reality. If we think of culture as an abstract phenomenon and nature as a concrete phenomenon, then it would be metaphorical thinking to keep the natural reality in mind as we move through our lives primarily in the cultural realm. The “knock-out game” is really a good metaphor for this way of thinking. We might like to believe that we live in a world where getting our nails done is an important event, but every once in a while something more basic punches us in the face and knocks us down. Jonathan Swift also provides a helpful metaphor in his great satirical novel, Gulliver's Travels. In part III, “A Voyage to Laputa...” (and other places), Swift satirizes intellectuals who are not in touch with reality. The Laputians are so wrapped up in intellectual speculations that they need to hire servants called “flappers” to tap them on the eyes or ears or other sense organs if they are in danger from the outer world they are so oblivious to and need to perceive that world, if only momentarily. It seems to me that we humans (as a whole) are so proud of our abstract speculations and so oblivious to the possible negative consequences of becoming so removed from the natural reality that we also need flappers!
One more metaphor to conclude this post, this time from Shakespeare's Hamlet. In Act I, scene ii, Claudius uses a series of paradoxes to describe the emotional conflict inherent in his marriage to Hamlet's mother so soon after the death of Hamlet's father: “. . . with a defeated joy, / With one auspicious and one dropping eye, / With mirth in funeral and with dirge in marriage, / In equal scale weighing delight and dole . . . .” I would think that Shakespeare has Claudius speak this way at least in part to indicate that Claudius is not a man who respects natural boundaries. But that very awkward and even comic image of one eye looking up while the other looks down sticks with me as a telling image. Isn't that what we should be doing these days, metaphorically? It's fine to cast one eye forward into a future world of abstract relations via the social media, or to keep one eye focussed on the artificial worlds of culture, but it also behooves us to keep one eye trained on the real world, the world of nature, the world we have evolved from and into which we fit. If Rome is burning, we should do more than just watch TV.
1Both
quotes are from the back cover of the Bantam 1991 paper edition.
2http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/learning-how-to-die-in-the-anthropocene/?emc=eta1
3From
“Burnt Norton” I, in Four Quartets.
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