⩩ 4
I believed once in action. A skillful movement, a space mastered. A mark, aimed at and hit, and an outcome, a result.
I don’t anymore, and find the reason stuck to the inside of action when I break it open: middle and end. When we act, we use a means, a middle, and the middle is always richer than the end we use it for. A memory occurs to us and we begin telling it to our friend, — and in the telling we are surprised as forgotten details become remembered, as whole stories, offshoots, unsuspected a moment before, come into view and crowd around. Or we go for a walk for exercise with our dog, who falls in a hole, — and we discoverer a cave of prehistoric art. Or we would like to have a child, — and we get twins. Since the means is richer than the end, it often happens and is always possible that a surprise wanders out in the middle of the action. Next to the effect, our effect, stands the sideeffect, and it is often bigger and more important.
Even when we accomplish our end, we soon find that it is not the end, that it is itself a middle. In living things this seems to be built into our nature, in pleasure. We eat the meal for the pleasure of it, and it nourishes us. We couple for our own reasons, and a while later there’s a child. Nature has taken care to reward us for doing her bidding, to hide half the ends from our view.
And not just living things but every object is imbued with this middle-nature. Once it exists, once it is lying there, it can be picked up and put to new uses. What Louis Armstrong held in his hand was a weapon, a ram’s horn, before it became an instrument of music, a trumpet. The turntables existed and served one function before our DJs enlisted them for quite another. We never finish, and therefore don’t know what we are starting in the world. The inventor of electricity – could he have known what he was inventing when he invented it? The inventor of Twitter? Could any inventor? Any founder of school or religion? Misunderstandings, appropriations compound and give birth to something quite other than the original idea, often enough a grotesque distortion, a monster, no matter what one had in mind at the start. In the end we all have a Frankenstein on the table in front of us, — no, we are Frankensteins.
And this smaller sphere of power? We fly a plane, we build a house, we feed a mouth. These are a class of their own and one we live in, but I don’t call them actions. They are the precarious work of an hour or a day where we want a result with finality, once and for all, a whole. We fly the plane, fingertip dials and handheld levers, but in this larger spacecraft, lives, cities, continents, millennia, earthy ship voyaging colossal through the stars – we look out the window, we throw our hands up, we haven’t got a clue. How could we? We missed the first part, — we too showed up in the middle. And what is now vastly exceeds our outstretched arms. We do not begin wrap our minds around it.
That’s why I don’t believe in action anymore. No actions, no actors, no adults. I realized in hindsight that I believed once in acting on knowledge, acting once and for all, acting according to a plan fixed in advance, a script, — acting without learning, speaking without listening in turn. And that this way of thinking finds expression in the idea of an adult. An adult, someone categorically different from a child, someone who knows. And I realize now that this word, this concept, is a fantasy of power, a myth, the projection of the developing mind, and therefore something to be outgrown. There are no actors, no adults. There are only children and what is continuous with them.
The deeper we go in experience, as soon as we survey human life with some altitude, especially as soon as we find ourselves piloting a craft of some sort, in general the more we get our heads up, the more we see that there is no such action for human beings, and never was. When you see how concentrated is the field of our vision, how restricted the sphere of our power, how recently we have arrived here, how soon we will depart, it is impossible not to look on human beings as helpless, innocent beings, — as children. No one knows where we are, or where we are going. The simplest questions are unanswered. No one, I realize, will satisfy my curiosity, or deprive me of the mystery of this float through being. There are only different kinds of children: little kids, big kids and grownups.
But while action is impossible, inaction is also impossible, and action is therefore made new. We act, without fully knowing what we are doing. There is a dose of knowledge but also a dose of ignorance mixed in all our action, a dose of inexperience, innocence, — which makes it initial, tentative, provisional, a try, an experiment. Actions are attempts, scouts sent out to explore the land and tell us what they have seen. And the end of our action does not lie somewhere else, in a finality, but here in our activity, our action and reaction. Because we are always encountering something new that changes the shape of the whole for us, if we would let it, a further stroke that rotates the picture, turning it upside down, leading us in a new direction. The actor is one who is ready to explore it, ready to react, one who listens and speaks and listens and listens while speaking, who writes the music in playing it, who lives on the wavecrest and is always ready to make a better judgment. This is improvisation.
Thank you to Danny at breakfastswerved, who not only created the drawing above in tandem with this essay but has done the same for each previous letter in this series. If you haven’t seen them, check them out. You can find them here.
A shout out also to my book club, who I read and discussed Shelley’s Frankenstein with earlier this year.
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*A man on a walk with his dog in 1940 discovered the Lascaux cave near Montignac, France, which contains cave art around 18,000 years old.
“ I don’t believe in action anymore.” I have a problem with belief in this sense. “I feel” ditto. A dear friend once described to me the difference between “I believe,” “I feel,” and “I think.” I think I prefer the latter.