A little philosophising, reflections on an iPod, The Animals, the pig cooler, my concept of ‘onceness’, and a hard death

Philosophising

Even simple thinking can confuse us — the child’s focussed desire, the wish for God, the sudden fear of death.

I was reading a couple of essays: Mindy Mandell, ‘Seeing the World through Philosophical Glasses’(Mandell, 2007), and Charles Lowney, ‘What I Learned the Day I was not a Philosopher’ (Lowney, 2007). They set me thinking about the way we experience life. This is a reflection born of those thoughts. For me, it helps show that life is a strange once only experience, that there is nothing more to it than that experience, that the experience has value, and that the greatest value is in its loss.

I began wondering why Mindy Mandell calls herself a ‘Platonist’? Does she simply find herself one, as though there is some Platonic absolutism existent in the world, something you can fall into like a disguised animal trap? Or has she become one, modelling herself against the Ancient Greek Terminator himself? Then I wonder why Charles Lowney is concerned about the day when he was not a philosopher? There’s nothing wrong with being a Platonist, I suppose — understanding something of love, truth, the ideal — but, for me, there is definitely something more significant about not being a philosopher. Now that really strikes me as important. Philosophers working in university department offices denying the academic life, philosophers using philosophical method to denounce method, philosophers listening to the voices of other philosophers from the past, philosophers trying to convince the world that philosophy really is useful — that it truly does say something, even against all appearance to the contrary — it’s all so wearying. And does anyone that is not a philosopher really care? Not being a philosopher — now that’s something I can sympathise with. It’s easy for me because I’ve never thought of myself as one, and I think of myself as less of one as time goes by.

As far as I can see, as individuals, the only thing that we are really concerned about is being. When it comes down to it, that’s all that matters to us — being myself, acting as I would wish myself to act, spending my life in an appropriate way, facing my death. All things which form part of what I call the ‘meaning sequence’ — ‘meaning, freedom to choose, action, and how we should act’. Looking outside ourselves can be beneficial but it should not become a cause. I am suspicious of the altruist. To my mind, altruism is a ‘charitable’ invention by people like Plato — people with time to spare, either because they’ve got nothing better to do, or because they have misunderstood what it is to be. Living our life for ourselves is all we have, all we are, all we should be concerned about. Of course we can love, involve others, take part in the world, enjoy the world, and feel happy because of it. But primarily we are concerned only with ourselves. We are the only ones who will face our own death, and we are the only ones who can be centrally concerned with the loss of our being in this way.

And this centrality is an object for us — a meaningfulness. It’s not a direction but it is a motivation. It is not a ‘direction’ because we should not view our lives like that — running along some temporal pathway. We are unavoidably living under the impression of time, but the world is not truly temporal, it is not ‘moving’ from the present into the past, and there is no future. We simply think that’s how things are, we live sub specie temporis — that’s all. Any memories we have, any sense of pastness which ‘drives us forward’ we must accept as part of being — we cannot alter that. But it is not true, and we should not use it as anything more than a background — a sort of ‘impression’ about how our lives are led. We must, as far as possible, measure our lives by our lives themselves — by what we are doing in the act of living. We must divorce ourselves from the misleading untruth of time and bind ourselves instead to the underlying truth — an experience of perceptions which build as each one occurs.

But to return to Lowney’s day of not being a philosopher. Philosophers nurture the idea that through philosophy they can somehow either share wisdom with others or themselves become wise. Socrates should never have proclaimed he knew nothing. It started an avalanche of self-righteous wisdom disguised within logically modelled techniques of philosophical rationality. Socrates might have liked the idea of saying he knew nothing in the face of an assertive and competing sophistry, but he did not hold back on his own determined logical method any more than he ever passed up an opportunity to demonstrate withering defeat on many of his protagonists. And that is what most of philosophy is about — and it’s hard to get around.

Many practical philosophers deny getting involved in logical minutiae — and that’s fair enough. We know this is merely technical, and that it offers no real gain beyond itself — it’s just method exploring method. But where does this sort of involvement start and end? I am doing it now. My effort is less analytical perhaps than the efforts of some others, it’s certainly not formal, but I am writing (something Socrates had the sense not to do), and I am putting forward my points. And maybe I hope to convince, or at least to attract some agreement or contribution that will help me further in understanding what I am trying to say?

I think for a moment how I have tackled my own philosophising. Unlike Socrates, I like to write. I have written reflections with little or no explanation. I have written reflections with explanation. I have written explanations without reflection. Which is best, I wonder? Which serves the purpose most properly? Or is it all inappropriate?

I am pre-occupied with Lowney’s idea of not being a philosopher. I can’t get away from it. He describes a day when, for him, everything goes wrong — his two most important aims are dashed within twenty four hours. Within this he has a realisation, an intuition, a call from within which shows him something of what life is truly about. Not his directed aims, the objects of desire for his life, but for something within himself which opens up to the world and becomes part of it — a unified, loving part of something which, even as we perceive it inappropriately in time, seems to contain love and unity.

I understand that. I sympathise with it. But where does it get me? My thinking leaves me muddled.

 

An iPod

Our own life is what it is, and our acceptance of that brings us face to face with both its delights and its meaninglessness. We face up to life and take it on with excitement and creativity or, turning away in fear, we resort to beliefs and values which do nothing more than disguise the inevitable truth — we all must die.

After a long delay, yesterday I finally bought an iPod. My collection of CDs — already a reduced offering of my collection of cassettes, and that a poor and trivial substitute for my boxes full of old LPs — had been sitting as a ‘library’ in my computer for months, just waiting for that dainty piece of micro technology, the iPod, to come along and suck it all up. I plugged it in and within minutes every recorded song in my collection was safe within the tiny piece of black plastic — a gift from the heavenly combination of US entrepreneurship, Chinese cheap labour, and the West’s unstoppable, and seemingly unfulfillable, craving for objects of desire.

How our lives are caught up with the times in which they find themselves. And how we strive to try and escape their influence and find something eternal, something ‘beyond’, something that reaches across the diasporic gaps that spread out like deep chasms between one life’s time and another’s.

But we are mistaken in doing this. There are gaps, but they are unimportant. They can help us understand that each lifetime has its span, each lifetime has its history, but they can do nothing to help us understand what being alive is for us, as individuals, as being itself. History is fascinating, if we look at it enough we will find analogies for almost everything that happens, or can possibly happen, to us. But that is nothing of true importance. Our life is once only, each moment of it simply happens. History is closed. It is, like God, dead. The diasporic gaps are abysses filled with darkness. Trying to string ropes across them will lead us only into peril. What does Zarathustra say to the tightrope walker who falls at his feet in the town square? What does he tell this poor wretch moments before he dies? After destroying the man’s lifetime belief in God and an eternal life, and making him think that he will ‘leave nothing’ when he leaves life, how does Zarathustra try to offer ‘hope’? Zarathrustra tells the dying man not to worry about ‘leaving nothing’. ‘You have made danger your calling,’ he says, ‘there is nothing in that to despise. Now you perish through your calling.’ (Nietzsche, p.48).

And so our lives are summed up. Our calling is life and through it we perish. And we must, like the tight-rope walker, make something of it. Life is itself creative, We must make it our calling, and live dangerously, because there is nothing more dangerous than life and nothing more compelling than living it. What can be more dangerous than something that kills us? What can be a more urgent experience than something which can be taken at a moment’s notice? And like the tight-rope walker, in life, we must give up the hope for anything beyond that life.

 

The Animals

Our mortal fate is inescapable and often it means suffering. But the loss of life to death is also life’s greatest bonus, for the limits of life confine the activity of being into a span which is within our grasp, critically felt and subject to our own will.

So, recovering a pair of headphones from the world’s last piece of audio technology, the CD Walkman, I listened to my first iPod ‘tune’ — simply by chance, Eric Burden and The Animals.

In this dirty old part of the city

Where the sun refused to shine

People tell me there ain't no use in tryin'

Now my girl you're so young and pretty

And one thing I know is true

You'll be dead before your time is due, I know

Watch my daddy in bed a-dyin'

Watched his hair been turnin' grey

He's been workin' and slavin' his life away

Now that’s something to think about. I have long thought most music one of mankind’s fairly low level achievements, pop music even lower than that. Indeed, most creative art as achievement in itself, I think, does little more than hoist a nose above the parapet. Plato’s cave depicts something bad — as bad as we can imagine — and yet I think, in truth, things are even worse. Unavoidably, we misperceive many things, and most of our creative achievements have only personal or relative quality. It’s hard to locate anything in art that makes itself really clear — Bach and Picasso might be exceptions. But we all reflect — it is part of the human condition — and, if we decide to be creative, we tend to be creative around what we reflect. And this song is reflective. It tells us that the world we find ourselves in can sometimes be so depressing, so tough going that it’s not worth trying to achieve anything. In such a place, we witness our own lives and the lives of those we love affected, perhaps shortened by the miserable effort of it all. We are saved from it temporarily only because that will be later, but what was before holds the same. We are trapped in the pincher grip of what surrounds our current experience — hard work, misery, suffering and death.

So there we have it in nutshell. Life throws things at us. Often they are bad things and even if not, the end is bad because we will all die. It will be the same in the future, it was the same in the past, and, as it was and will be the same, so it is the same now. We might think we want to escape but we cannot, it is our lot. Life is what it is, we have to suffer it because without it there is nothing else.

It seems a grim lot. But it gets worse. For all it is, for all the suffering, it has a sting in its tail, it also ends — we all die. The only thing we have is destined to finish. But death is not a true problem. Not at all. Indeed, it is also life’s biggest bonus for, without it, life would be limitless — and that would be more depressing than ever ‘any dirty old part of the city’ could possibly be. In life we ride the most remarkable double edged sword — life is good because we lose it, life is bad because we lose it. So is it good or bad? Well, of course, it must be good. Bad is the absence of being, so any step up from the absence of it has to be an improvement. And we can call that improvement ‘good’. As we live we are being in that ‘improved’ state. That this condition is not limitless does not make it bad.

 

The Pig Cooler

Each of our actions occurs only once — there is no way back. Pleasures must be realised, hardships undertaken. We should be wary of ‘revisiting’ past experiences. Our actions have repercussions for both ourselves and for the world, but these should never hold us back from acting freely. It may be that these repercussions go unnoticed or have great meaning — it may be that we will never know.

 

A tale is told with the enthusiasm of youth — bright eyes, windmilling animations, jutting chin. It is an account of years ago — fifty — a different time, the time before change, when the world was still sealed in its golden cage, before Pandora’s doom, before the interference of the hubristic Prometheus. It was a time that had experienced no alteration and a time when its inhabitants expected none. What a time it was. A time that would remain forever unaltered, a moment in a life, a singular experience of being — bright, sunny — when no time presses, packaged for eternity, waiting only for the end of it all. We can hardly believe there was such a time, and yet it must have been.

The pig cooler was a large bath-shaped receptacle used for scolding a slaughtered pig and, after the victim’s demise and dismemberment, as a receptacle for salting its body so that it would last, hung in dark pantries, through the dim winter months of austerity and cold. The pig — the saviour of every family. The cooler — a treasured communal object the origin of which had been forgotten, the importance of which could never be underestimated.

And so the tale started.

‘It was me and Jimmy. A fantastic summer’s day — warm, butterflies, insects buzzing. We were so hot, just wearing old shorts and vests, nothing on our feet, chewing grass, whistling, holding our arms wide and soaring through the long grassed meadows, scattering the butterflies like flickering chaff.

In the stackyard of the farm, we found it — the pig cooler. It was years old. All the houses around used it in October, when the old pig killer came round and saw off all the porkers who had been living so well in their comfortable brick sties. Jimmy and me jumped into the cooler. We could lie down full length in it and not be seen.

They were cutting hay around the farm. Nobody was thinking of winter. The farmer himself came into the yard. We asked him outright if we could take the pig cooler down to the river. What a wonderful boat it would make, we said. He nodded. He didn’t care.

We pulled it across the long-grassed field. The butterflies opened up a path for us. We dropped it into the river. It splashed onto the water and we jumped aboard as it slipped out of its harbour and into the open sea beyond.

We pirated the day away, using long poles to propel ourselves down amongst the reeds. Jimmy ducked as a kingfisher flew like an iridescent rocket over our heads. We saw an otter and we were still there as the sun set.

We pulled the pig cooler back and left it where it had been found. We stroked it as we walked off into the night, unfed, exhausted, dirty and wet. It had been the best day of our lives. I can see it all now. I can smell it — every drop of it, every speck of it, every sound. I can see it all — breathe it all.

The autumn came — we did other things, we felt the chill of the morning dew, the pigs got fatter. We heard the old pig killer mentioned, not by name, only by title — like the Grim Reaper, his function was more important. He was named for his broad shoulders and taste for death. He was the ‘Pig Killer’ — a savage devil who came with the dying light of the shortening days and brought screams, smells, blood and entrails, to the keenly expectant villagers. And when he left — wandering to his winter lair — the villagers feasted on what he had left behind, thankful they would not witness his merciless killing spree again until the fading autumn light of the following year.

So we went again to the stackyard. We pleaded with the busy farmer as he fought to orchestrate the fearful webbing bands that spun on the whirring pulleys of a frantic threshing machine. The air was full of choking dust from the battered ears of corn. “Yes! Yes!” he shouted above the din. His flustered, red-faced nod was enough.

We dragged the pig cooler again to the river. It had dried since our last adventure. There were no butterflies now and the grass was tacky and moist. The river was higher than before. We slipped in the mud as we slid down the greasy bank which before had provided such a safe launching place. Beneath the angry cawing of circling crows, we jumped into the pig cooler as it slipped quickly out into the muddy river.

Straightaway we knew everything was wrong. The dried out timber had shrunk and loosened against the steel banding that held it in place. Its earlier journey across the meadow, its previous day long soaking, and the subsequent summer-long heat of the stackyard had all taken their toll. Its parched ribs opened. Water flowed into its hull. We grabbed its sides and within seconds it fell apart. It did not even have a carcass. Its bones went in all directions, floating away or sticking in the muddy sides of the treacherous bank.

The water was cold. We shivered as we struggled to recover the dismembered ribs. Jimmy reached to the bottom to grab the steel banding. My heart pounded as we gathered the staves together. It was a world of destruction — the broken body of our craft, the runes which foretold the repercussions of our actions.

Somehow, we got all the parts of the pig cooler back to the stackyard. We struggled to put it back together but nothing would stay in place. In the end, we rested the ribs of the one side against a dusty timber partition and wedged the steel retaining band between a milking pail and a heavy horse harness.

We ran from the stackyard, our minds filled, not with the glorious day that was now behind us, but with the darkness of the future and what it might hold.’

And so the tale ended and time began to press again. And the sentiment was drawn back with the melancholy sigh which accompanied the departure of the story teller.

‘If our lives could only be like that.’

But our lives are like that — exactly like that. The moment of being is the place of joyfulness, and because of that we can hardly resist pursuing it again, as if it will open itself up to us just like before. But we should not think we can pursue things passed. Everything we do has repercussions, exertion of our freedom to act means the lives of others are affected — and sometimes darkly. But we should not withdraw from this potential shadow. The tight-rope walker does not hold back from his calling to danger for fear of falling. We should not hold back from acting freely for fear of censure. The world is ours each day, it is perfect, it is unreclaimable, it affects the world and those affects are, as far as we know, eternal.

 

Onceness

Stepping into the river is all we do — all we can do — and each step contains all our life, all our potential for living. And we must fulfill that potential by taking the risk of being — being free to act and take action — because, when we are dead, there is no further opportunity to act.

In being we never do step into the same river again. Each moment is a new one. We must face each of these moments as both a novelty and our only opportunity. Any fearfulness which comes with it is an inherent part of it, and we must deal with it as we deal with every moment of being. It’s not so much a question of being Stoic, more a matter of being available.

Heraclitus asks us a question to confuse us. But the question shows us what is right — the river is what flows and what flows is never there again. There is no point in entering into philosophical illusions over this. Time appears to ‘flow’, but it does not. But what appears to flow in some way ‘passes’ and we pass within it — no one second is the same as another, they may not even be properly joined. We only step into that particular second once and that’s the only secret of it. We only step into the river once — no matter how many times we think we step into it. No matter whether it is, to us, the same river or not, we only step into it once, and we only step once. Every moment of our life is once. It is not a question of ‘living in the present’, it is a question of coming to terms with living once.

 

What do I mean by step only once? I mean that our attachment to the idea that our experience of being is part of a bigger picture is mistaken. It is not another step, or a step preceding a future step, or a step similar to a previous step. It is quite simply the only step. In the way that, say, you had lived all your life without any memory, took the step, then moved on into your world without memory. That is what life as a whole is like — no knowledge of being before being, no knowledge of being after being. The false belief that memory somehow recalls part of a continuous effect, plus our constant misunderstanding of temporality, lead us to believe that the step we take is part of something it is not. Each action is our only action, in the same way that our life is our only life. We only use memory and time as authority in the same way that we call up authority for what we say or believe. This authority can be at different positions on a broad spectrum — epistemological, metaphysical or ethical; we can believe in the world of God, or the pronouncements of the broad shouldered one, or a simple analogy. Doing this gives us a sense that there is some firmer ground, something more than our constant suspicion that all we are doing is all we are doing and that is all there is.

Philosophers invoke authority all the time, and Practical Philosophers cannot resist its siren song. It is as though without it no one will believe they are philosophers, or that they will be suspected of never having read a book, or it will be thought that they cannot do philosophy if they only say what they themselves think. I have already involved Zarathustra, Socrates, Plato and Eric Burden in this way. And, of course, Heraclitus lies behind much of what I am saying. I hope, though, that most of what I am saying comes from ‘me’.

Our world is not so black and white that one thing automatically precludes another. The world is much more messy — different shades of grey. Our central purpose is our own, though, and that is where our value truly lies. We do not so much need the support of greater authority, especially we do not need to attach ourselves to authority in such a way that authority forms the structure which supports us. And so I avoid this as much as possible and, as a by-product, it shows me in part that ‘philosophically’ I detach myself from any mainstream academic thrust, and that causes me some satisfaction.

‘Onceness’, let me call it, is the time of our being, the experience of being which we ‘find we are involved in’ more or less now. I say ‘find’ because we have no choice about being. I say ‘more or less’ because I do not mean ‘this instant’, ‘this moment’. When people suggest we should ‘live in the present’, which is certainly sensible advice, they sometimes understandably misconstrue this as somehow grasping, or trying to grasp, the singular instant of experience. But we do not experience being like that. We are not truly in time in such a way that the instant could possibly mean anything to us. What we experience ‘now’ is a grey area which surrounds our momentary experience. It includes some anticipation of the future, some memory or experience of the past, and some control over how we shape our actions. It is a ‘specious present’, the present of experience. It is not the ‘instant present’, the misunderstood moment of ‘time’ which occupies the interface between what we think of as future and what we think of as past. These so-called temporal qualities are not real and so cannot form a foundation for our being. Past, present, and future form a descriptive bridge between us and our concept of chronology. But the world is not truly like this. Our only experience is in a ‘B-world’ of before and after.[1] It is in this world that we find our ‘onceness’ — the singular and unrepeatable event of experience which lies between what has irretrievably gone and what may possibly follow. It is the moment of change, for our world of experience is, in truth, a world of change. When change does not occur, we no longer exist — our time has gone, our onceness is no more.

How do we use onceness? There is only one way of using onceness and that is by living it. Moreover, the sole motivation for living is onceness, so the question of how we use it should more properly ask how we should live it. And so we find ourselves back with an ancient authority, the one with the great sense of humour and fun, the great arguer, the one who realised that our cause was to investigate how we live. But he had it a different way to the way I see it. I do not think it is important to ‘live well’ in the Greek sense — justice, value, the good, are essentially social mechanisms. If they fit in some way with internal states of experience of onceness they may have a place, but they will never be part of any absolute aim.

Living well in onceness is more simply knowing it — being aware of what is going on as it is experienced. Onceness is, in this way, an experience of existence, and yet it is still different than simply an experience of existence. Yes, it faces death — annihilation — it realises absurdity and pointlessness, it recognises the creativity of personal destruction, but onceness is more than that. Onceness is the time of all experience, it is the specious moment of being which has in its grasp the whole world. Living well in onceness is living in a state of recognition — knowing the state of affairs, sensing the abundant wisdom of being, the sparkling crystal of knowing. Realising that without being there is nothing and so, with being. there must be everything which is not nothing and everything is all we know. We step only once into the river, and once again, and again, and then we don’t, and when we don’t there is no river, and no step to be taken. Each of us lives in onceness and decides on how we should live well, to what we should attach our values, how we should create, how we should be free, act, love, how we should measure ourselves. If we do not do that, then we do next to nothing — we are grey, we have not taken the risk of life — and our being has little value.

 

A hard death

Death comes to us all. It is the point at which the river dries up. It is the point at which we leave the world of sensation for nothingness. And the act of dying can be hard to anticipate and sometimes hard to experience. But, in being, we should know that the only relief from life’s pain is its abysmal and fathomless absence.

And so the circle closes, sometimes it is tight and convoluted, sometimes it is wide and distended, but it closes nevertheless. Death arrives, unheralded, sudden, protracted, or with too much notice, but still it arrives, still it is death, still it is the end of being.

And no one death is different than another. One person loses their existence, and others do not — they wait their turn. One person loses being, consciousness, perception, sensing of the world, a future, a past, a moment, and others do not — they wait until their own death. That is the loneliness of it, the isolation of being the only one who dies. Even in company, when death arrives it takes only one and the others stay — there is simply one fewer than before.

And this death was a bad one. Young, too young, a common cancer seen too late and another one, entirely different. Two cancers acting independently to kill an individual life. What a cruel conspiracy — two when only one is needed. And it came fast, the penetration of it, the unaccountabilty of it, the precision of it. And science? Running for cover, struggling to offer medicine’s meaningless answers, cowing in the face of their patient’s pain. And it was the pain that dominated everything— the sensation that these days we all believe we are immune from, the sensation that surely does not present a problem. But that was the problem. Not only must the patient wait for his own death, he must wait for it in agonising pain. He must tighten himself against the sensation of pain he had never even dreamed of and, at the same time, through his squeezed up eyelids, he must watch the shaking heads of the doctors who inspect him, prod him, test him. No hope. Only one destiny, and to leave life this way.

Where is onceness now? Where is the distracting abstract thinking of the philosopher? Where is the wisdom? I wonder where it is. The world is failing like a breaking machine. It is falling apart before the patient’s eyes. He is watching it disintegrate. He is watching the skin fall from the faces of the peering students that stalk his bed as they wonder if they will have a turn at cutting up his body when he has finally abandoned it. Where is the onceness now?

It is still there, still happening. Yes, for the patient is still being, still stepping in the river only once. But his onceness is besieged with difficulties. Nothing is clear for him. This is no Socratic death. There is nothing calm and considered as this patient prepares to leave being in a mist of anxiety and fear. This is not a show-death, an inspiration for the ones who must follow. Wisdom has not extended itself this far, there are too many other things to think about and they have squeezed out wise thoughts. But still thinking is happening, being is happening, onceness is definitely there. Even though the patient is consumed with fear, wracked with pain, filled with hatred for his watching doctors, still the onceness is there for, when finally the patient is relieved of his pain, there is no further opportunity to be.

 

References

Burden, Eric and The Animals, We Gotta get out of this Place, written by Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, produced by Mickie Most, Columbia (UK), MGM (US), July 1965.

Lowney, Charles ‘What I learned the day I was not a philosopher’, Practical Philosophy, 8:2

McTaggart, J.McT.E., The Nature of Existence. Cambridge University Press, 2 vols, vol. 1 1921, vol. 2 1927.

Mandell, Mindy ‘Seeing the world through philosophical glasses’, Practical Philosophy, 8:2

Nietzsche, Friedrich (1969) Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans by R.J. Hollingdale. Harmondsworth: Penguin, p. 48.

Rochelle, Gerald, ‘Killing Time Without Injuring Eternity — McTaggart’s C Series’, Idealistic Studies, 28, 1998, 159-69.