⩩ 9
If I have learned anything, it is that I do not quite have my head about me when I am going somewhere, doing something, saying something, that I am wiser not-going and not-doing, saying and doing nothing. The truest answer to things is stillness, speechlessness, at bottom, desirelessness. The “cessation from all hankerings.” Hankerings, need, want: the root of suffering and of ignorance.
Now if I am to get going again, where to? And how? Here is how.
We all know the difference between what we ourselves know and what someone else says. As a society, as a people we have even written and passed on a poem on exactly this point, created and preserved through the ages, in the words firsthand and its counterpart, hearsay: not what we ourselves see but what we hear about, not what we ourselves have witnessed and could assert but what someone else saw and we have heard said. The one is fully funded fact, the other an idea, a hypothesis, talk, possibly true but for now just talk, a rumor.
There’s the divide; now memorialize it. Let it come home to you. Better, make your home around it. Draw a line between what you yourself have seen and what you have heard said by another, by many others, even by “everyone.” Give the first a sharp priority. Stand, plant yourself on that plot of ground. Live from within that circle, with excursions hence, and you will enjoy an original relation to the universe. You will listen to all sides, you will look around with your own eyes and speak with your own voice.
Wise men and women have always done so. Their character, their lives and ministry whisper and shout as much. Hear, for instance, Walt Whitman. Listen to him standing at the door of his house, inviting you into his poem, setting goals, stating conclusions, making promises:
Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems,
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun . . . . there are millions of suns left,
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand . . . . nor look through the eyes of the dead . . . . nor feed on the spectres in books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself.
Your eyes need washed clean, he says, so that you can see what is for yourself. But Socrates says this just as much as Whitman, and Jesus, and George Fox, and Emerson, and Mary Oliver: they are all in accord on this point. Say goodbye to the crowd. Let them go. You must learn to trust yourself. You must learn to hear that still small voice, to be warmed by the inward light, loyal to your best and wildest inclinations. You must receive, you must learn to receive your perception: that will be your revelation, nature revealed through you. On this float through being, in the wide desert to see something of the holy and know it opens into a flower and blooms for you: that is religion.
So they tell us to lean on this wedge, to plant it like a flag in the ground we stand on. What I know and what I have heard. The firsthand. They would teach us to keep an eye on it, watch over it, watch out for it, if we are to let it out of our sight, to know where it is behind our backs as a mother knows her child. Here she is with her child toddling behind her back. She talks to the friend in front of her, and even listens, yet she turns around every half minute like clockwork to check on him, her carething. She doesn’t have to look for him, to search for him, to find him. She knows where to look. So they would teach us to guard what we care about, to defend it, when need be to be mistrustful, jealous and possessive of it.
Or rather think of it as the home you leave from and wind your way back to. And beware, it is a dark labyrinth. To ensure your return, take care to tie one end of your yarn to it and carry the rest of the ball with you, so that you don’t go beyond your length and so that, no matter how turned around you get, you can find your way back to this whole. Retreat. Come home and do the waiting, the sifting. Filter things from yourself. See what you have seen and heard with your own eyes and ears.
Nothing is more important, more worthy of keeping an eye on. Or let us compare results. The one is a life that loses sight of this divide, a life that therefore takes his or her or their word for it, a life on hearsay, at secondhand, led astray by numbers, by badges, by titles and dogma. Here one lives among rumors, fossils, dead and dcaying structures, ruins. The result is so much loss of character, so much imitation: a handmedown life. The other keeps this divide in view. It has a personal relation to the universe. It assents to the living, breathing role it plays in creation. It is the only life worthy of the name: a life at firsthand.
This has an effect on our words and beliefs, since then we are ready to throw away titles just like shells. We check, we examine. We set the names aside and see what the thing itself is, and whether it be a teacher, or education, or wealth, or health, or worship. We cannot be satisfied with beliefs, habits and institutions we don’t understand and that means we cannot be satisfied with beliefs, habits and institutions we don’t have a hand in making. And so it has no less an effect on our participation in social life, the scale and nature of it. A vast, intricate, built-out theology, the aloof, sprawling gothic structure of a modern university discipline: these are not for us. Our participation will be in organizations of human scale, where members are peers and stand to each other within one or two arms’ reach, and where each plays a creative, founding role: because institutions are good for those who found them, and we must become founders. This is the active life, the life that creates the beliefs, habits and institutions in which it has its being.
So let this will be the law, the direction we give ourselves. Go as far abroad as you like and bring back what you find to the nearest. Test it against yourself, what you know and have seen with your own eyes. Try it by what you can do with your own hands and feet, what you can bring about with your friends.
Did a part of this essay resonate with you? Make you think of something you have seen, heard or read? Have another angle on the topic? Please leave a comment.
You are reading Footnotes, by Garrett Allen, a philosophical novel in serial form. You just read ⩩ 9, which is part of a series on the “Firsthand.” Here are some highlights from the first chapter (on the Stagestranger).
⩩ 1 Headsup
⩩ 3 Speechless
⩩ 6 Whim
⩩ 7 Mistake
If you enjoyed one of them or the series as a whole, please consider passing it along to a friend. And if a friend passed it along to you, welcome. By subscribing you can have these notes delivered to your inbox, too. If you would like, stay abreast.
A big shoutout as usual to Danny at breakfastswerved for his ink. See his drawings for the series here.
The hankerings in the first paragraph is from J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey
The Walt Whitman is from “Song of Myself,” in Leaves of Grass (the 1855 edition)
Mary Oliver refers to Whitman when she says, describing her youth in Upstream, that she “had a few friends who kept me sane, alert, and loyal to my own best and wildest inclinations.”
If you’ve come this far: thank you for reading my work and spending time with me. I would love to hear from you. A quick note or an association and link or a whole thought. And, if you like what I am doing, hit the heart ↓
I must object to the inclusion of Jesus in this chapter. As far as I can tell, Jesus doesn't tell you to see the world for yourself - he tells you to see the world as he sees it and teaches it. Listening to him takes priority over seeing for yourself.
The idea of the divide interests me. The divide may be kept between our truth and everything else, but what happens as we grow? Someone who ventures out amongst the heresy will gain new perspectives, which will likely change their truth or at least how they perceive it. The idea of keeping the divide may not be synonymous with keeping an unchanged divide. To keep the divide we must evolve it separate new heresy and our growing selves.