⩩ 47
There is nobility in work. So practical, so realistic, so concrete, so necessary. We have needs, our bodies have to function, so work has always been recognized as a primary dimension of human life. The hunter, the farmer, the weaver produced basic necessities of their lives, for themselves and their communities.
There is also a shallow quality to work. Work can be exploited by the social mind as a platform for achievement and distinction. We strive to gain social acceptance and approval — emotional security — by distinguishing ourselves in our careers, acquiring awards or titles or money. We want to be successes. This is a shallow form of security, and it doesn’t ultimately bring satisfaction. We have reason to abandon the track, desert the office, forgoing achievement and distinction and addressing ourselves to the deeper questions.
Work can also be medicine to the spiritual mind. In work we are grounded, tethered to the here and now. In work we humbly accept the specific circumstances which our bodies happen to have arisen in. We are not too curious or detached. We acknowledge that we are born to walk the path, not to turn over each leaf or stone along the way. There is clarity, simplicity, regularity. Work concentrates the mind.
This concentration is harmful if exclusive, healthy if it is balanced by expansiveness. It if it’s exclusive, work becomes a sedative. Deadening. If it is balanced by openness, wonder, awareness from moment to moment, if there is a rhythm of contraction and expansion, then work contributes to the development of the complete human being.
So there is also nobility in the surrender of work. Interruption, disturbance, distraction. Violation, disaster, whim. In these states of mind our awareness expands. We become open to the environment. We become alive to uncertainty, ambiguity, the provisionality of human understanding. In work we assume we know what we are doing. Now we are liberated from that presumption. The questioning of beginnings and ends opens up.
Where do I come from? Where am I going? Who am I?
When I recently described my concept of the stagestranger to a friend — you’re at the theater and in the middle of the play, a stranger wanders out onto the stage. The actors look at each other with increasing concern, and it slowly dawns on the audience… — he asked with some exasperation, “Wait, what is the context? To evaluate it, I need to know, what is the context?” That is the point precisely. We come to maturity in a world that is ongoing, and find ourselves predisposed to action, but what is the context?
When we look beyond intermediate ends to ultimate ends, we see that we cannot begin to answer. Where does our going have its gone, its satisfaction, its perfection? We straightforwardly own up to the fact that we don’t know. Ultimately we give up the concept of work, of going anywhere at all. We are not going anywhere, we are going nowhere, we are not going. We are already there. Here.
From ends we turn towards beginnings. The best things are beginnings, those nameless, uncertain, ambiguous moments, where there is just something in the air, just a sense of something about to happen, before anything has taken shape, before it has even become a thing. Long before it has won followers for itself, become established, become “successful,” codified, set into forms fixed by imitation, retained by habit, communicated by tradition.
Take jazz, for example. It is astonishing how little is known about the beginnings of jazz. Scraps and tattered edges, of a form that was born only a hundred years ago. You see how accidental, contingent, serendipitous it was. There almost was no beginning, and, had there been no beginning, no one would have been surprised. No one would have gone looking for it. How funny we might have looked, going on without a clue, not even knowing what we were missing.
As fate would have it, by two handfuls of concerted miracles, it did happen, but it could not have happened at all. The same is true for everything else, in art, in politics, in religion, no matter how well-established, no matter how hard it is for us to imagine the world without it. It could not have happened, and if it hadn’t, we wouldn’t know to miss it. That is humble beginnings.
Or look at science. Have you noticed that every field of learning is raw and simpleminded and even childlike in its early stages? Look back to its early days and you will see that, however it thought of itself at the time, it eventually becomes clear that in its first steps it was wobbly and unbalanced and stumbling. This is perfectly natural: its ambition, matched by its innate capacity, is large, but the experience that constrains it is by necessity small at the beginning. The first exercises of the capacity far outstrip the experience. By necessity there are blind spots, oversimplications, imbalances, so that from the later point of view it seems reckless. That is just the nature of growth.
I am venturing a new kind of knowledge too, knowledge of myself, and so the best I can do is to own my simplicity and lack of refinement in good humor. To overestimate my ability and think I am saying anything lasting and solid would be a mistake, and yet it would be an even greater mistake to refrain from saying anything on this matter because of my lack of refinement. That would be stagnation. So the best thing to do is to proceed, even to enjoy the awesome power of the first steps and strokes, and to be humbly ready to revise as knowledge develops.
We don't know how long we take to develop, or where we begin or end. It strikes me that you don’t even have to be alive to create something. You only have to have been alive. A man may be dead for as many as nine months before his child sees the light of day. There is a period of gestation, pregnancy, of development, and we don’t know how long it lasts. We die, and yet we live.
In our world of letters someone might have been dead not for nine months but nine or ninety or nine-hundred years and father a child? The seed falls from the tree and buries itself in the ground and you don’t know when it might stir and sprout up.
I conclude that we need not be in any hurry. As Walt Whitman says,
And whether I come to my own today or in ten thousand or ten million years,
I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness I can wait.
You are reading Footnotes, by Garrett Allen, a series of philosophical-ish short essays. You just read ⩩ 46.