I feel I am awakening from a dream, one which tells me that one must always be doing, doing, doing. Laziness, so called, is vastly undervalued in our culture. It would be possible on a large scale, now that we have made technology–robots–our slaves, if we had had sound money.
But our would-be, and perhaps largely actual, masters, are driven by the same manias–more so. They, too, must be doing, doing, doing. So all of us fall apart, and few remain to help us remember how to fall together.
I look at my books, my intellect, and I feel that “living” a “life of the mind” is really a continual process of treading water. We have all seen those balloons and balls kept in the air in large crowds. For an intellectual, if that ball every hits the ground, it is instant death. Or so it feels.
A vast library is a large host of life rafts, of flotation devices, to keep one above the flood of emotion, of feeling.
And I wonder if perhaps the first and most important use of abstraction was not figuring out better ways to kill Woolly Mammoths, but negotiating the more intricate social landscapes that emerged as our brains developed. The frontal cortex is, after all, the “social brain”.
And I wonder if, at a primitive biological level, the need to live in an abstract realm is an effort to recreate, or perhaps forge ex nihilo, in lieu of a time and sense of place that never existed for some of us, a sense of belonging. One engages, evolutionarily, the capacity for abstraction when one is ensconced in a complex social, ritual, order.
But in our modern world, our alienated world, our modes of production have taken abstraction to an absurd level, to a level at which we cannot possibly hope to relate to the whole. So we relate to abstraction itself, knowing that what we really want is impossible. We can never land in socially complete place, of the sort the past several hundred thousand years conditioned us for.
I would say of both Marx and Freud that even though they were wrong about virtually everything, even when they were wrong, they were right. Marx was not wrong to see “Entfremdung” as an aspect of industrialization, time clocks, “rational” modes of production, the buying and selling of time and thus human beings. Note the “alien” in alienation, and the “fremd” in the German.
I feel myself floating. I have always been floating. So many of us are floating. We struggle furiously to paddle this way or that, but mainly we have a relationship with paddling. With one another, much less.
Hope begins with truth. Thus, I see this post as quite hopeful.