Most of what I post amounts to a nervous tick. It is fidgeting that I do in lieu of some other needed task. I long ago decided most of my fidgeting was likely on balance more useful than harmful, so I indulge myself in posting it. But it does not necessarily come from a healthy place, even if it may seem–and indeed be–intelligent or even at times brilliant.
This post feels a bit different. It is a resolution of sorts, which may last in me. It promises to.
I was watching the movie Troy last night, and despite my intellectual and emotional preference for Hector, the character of Achilles–the arrogant but highly capable man who just wants to fight, fight, fight–kept coming through in my dreams last night.
I woke up, and was wondering what it is with human beings and conflict, and it hit me: we are BORN craving conflict. We are born that way. We are born to seek out struggle the way that tigers are born to hunt, and cows to eat grass.
And it hit me that if this planet, at this time, with this way of living, had a name in the cosmos it would be the “World of churning oceans”, not in reference to physical events but of emotional ones.
And I do believe there are many other worlds, both in other dimensions we don’t really understand yet, as well as on other alien planets. Many people have spoken on this, and even if they are all full of shit, nothing in the nature of things precludes it, and it would seem that in an infinite universe, the infinitely unlikely will happen often.
This inverts things, though. The question becomes not “why is there war”, but “why is there ever peace?” Is it that we just wear one another out? War is the answer to depression, lack of focus, sense of loneliness, sense of meaninglessness. It solves, particularly for men, nearly all our problems.
And I will remind you that when World War 1 broke out, there was celebration in nearly all the combatant nations. The national dullness and ennui promised to be dissolved in feat of heroism.
And, again: Nazism appealed first and foremost to the youth of that era since it too promised war, which was the logical evolution from the mountain climbers of the Bergfilme, to the next step. They were going to go out and do great things, commit acts of valor, and above all break up their tedium, monotony, and listlessness.
And I think most women, at heart, want to be with men who are at least capable of craving war. And to be clear, this need not be literal war. Most of the “wars” being fought in America right now are not (yet, at least, and in the main) physically violent. They are wars of words. They are wars of personal attack and rhetorical submission. They are wars of expulsion, of banishment. They are wars of control: of media, of academia, of the government, of the military.
Even the Femboys often are militant vegans. This is of a cloth with the whole. They were passionate Bernie Boys. The men women can’t stand, over the long haul–since many for a period of time want without realizing it to mother grown ass men, until they weary of it (unless they are severely codependent)–are the ones laying around with no driving passions.
What does it mean to be “bourgeois”? Is it not precisely the rejection of political war in favor of personal comfort? Is this not why the Communists–who have long waged wars of aggressive conquest in all sorts of ways, in as many places as they could–have long hated those they could not count on being foot soldiers, really, on EITHER side, and thus in their way?
No, I think the moment we hit Earth we are wired for conflict. If we can’t find literal conflict, we crave and find other forms of difficulties: in work, in sports, in religious enthusiasms and the like.
We crave difficulty. We can’t help it. If we stop seeking it, we feel less alive.
So why have we not achieved a stable world peace in conditions of prosperity and freedom? Well, we have not tamed human nature, have we, not least because some of us fight hard to prevent anyone from talking about such a thing, precisely because there IS such a thing. They fight because they were born to fight, and they fight in the name of a peace they don’t really understand.
So everywhere there are people who are troubled. Everywhere people in conflict, with themselves, and with others. This is the BASE STATE of Humanity. I think there are many advantages to looking at it like this, not least that we cease judging people for being born as people.
So what is the solution? First off, we accept there may not BE a good solution, that all proposed solutions, if they themselves come from a place of violence–as they tend to do–are cures worse than the disease.
But it does seem to me that each of us can and should begin to establish beachheads of peace on the shores of War. In your normal, average day, find twenty minutes of true peace, if you can. It’s not easy, and will not happen quickly. But it conditions everything before and after, your memory and your expectations, in subtle and vitally important ways.
As mentioned, I recently read Camus’ The Plague. It was a worthy book, one worth contemplating for a moment. With regard to this specific thought, I would offer up the evening when Rieux and Tarrou went swimming in the ocean. In the midst of the plague of being human, they found peace for a moment, which Camus argued through Tarrou may be the best we can hope for.
And in a moment of perhaps unintentional comedy (comedy being in large measure an unexpected mismatch between our expectations and the event), Camus ranked being human over being a saint.
I have contemplated this, and here is what I will propose: aspiring to sainthood is still a battle, a battle between our mortal bodies and our spirits, but such battles are still something we crave and which come naturally to us. What does not come naturally is being at peace, of not seeking out the Grand Conflict, and of simply seeking to offer small things out of genuine sympathy and kindness.
Indeed, as I have said, we might speak of a Battle of Kindness, in which one group of people who rally around the Kindness flag execrate and attack those they believe don’t.. And their chief “evidence” of course is that since they believe themselves the unique possessors of the Kindness flag, all who do not rally around it must oppose it.
This of course is the Plague, as Camus used it, in at least one sense. I think he used the metaphor in several ways, but clearly one was Ideology writ large, which justified murder. Camus declares himself a de facto pacifist and Conscientious Objector to ANYONE who might believe him or herself worthy of determining who should live and who should die.
And again Rieux rejects sainthood. He is not trying to stamp out the Plague once and for all. If he tried to do that, he would BECOME the plague, would he not? No, his aim is much more modest and much more realistic: to do what little he can, where he can, knowing that it will always return, but not for a while; and in the meantime, he can do his best to be neither carrier nor recipient of it. You will note the three main characters who came out unscathed are Rieux himself, Grand–who he asserted was the hero of the story–and the asthmatic old Spaniard who spent all day shuffling peas from one pot to the other. Presumably Camus was saying of the last that this was indeed vastly preferable to any Grand Passion which induced someone to the Plague.
So, in the course of our lives moments of peace may happen. We may fall in love and have truly happy, peaceful moments. We may go on a walk or bike ride or horse ride on a moon-lit night, and find ourselves feeling GOOD, for reasons we don’t understand. I have had moments like that. Small ones. Not long ones. But such things make us better humans.
But such things can be cultivated, too. This is the point of the habits of yoga and meditation, and perhaps slow walks in parks and the forests. And it is funny: so often with people we find ourselves attuned only on superficial levels. But even there, moments can be created in which some genuine fellow feeling and kindness and flow back and forth. I have experienced this doing breathwork. As I have said, in my view the actually most useful part is how much that work opens people up to one another, for small moments, before they remember their homes, their misery, the pain of the world, and close up like flowers that blossomed briefly in the morning.
Love, I think, is best thought of as a small, occasional flower. Don’t seek the Grand Passion, not even in a lover. What the best lovers do is have, for some period of time, small moments that are better than most. For some period of time they look in each others eyes, for a moment, and see recognition, and in this recognition they find peace, and this peace is the meaning of it all.
And in relationships that last happily–many relationships last unhappily, or mostly, or often unhappily, since time changes everything continually–couples find ways to recreate moments of recognition. They don’t close up.
And the enemy of this–remember we live for conflict, so there is always a bear waiting outside the cave–is our pain. When we open and are seen, we heal and we feel good. But as long as there is unresolved pain, we will sooner or later close up and protect it. And so we go, back and forth, in cycles.
And what kills love, I think, is mismatched cycles. All it takes is for one lover to look in the others eyes when their pain predominates, and see nothing, and they will be hurt, and lose trust. And trust betrayed is of course worse than never trusting at all. And so lovers quarrel.
So I think, in any event. I have not had a lover like that. No one ever sees me. I am a deep, deep mist on a cool Autumnal day. I cannot blame anyone for not seeing me. It is not easy. I am faint, and far in the distance.
But returning to Camus, a point my eldest made–we have formed a sort of book club, which is fun–was that the author himself was Rieux, and he himself noted that he was just “reporting the facts”. He was as objective as possible, and as “abstract”.
But Camus may well have quoted Lao Tze, who said “renounce sainthood; it will be a thousand times better for everyone”. Rieux himself made Grand the “hero”, but of course Camus intended Rieux to be the hero, in a nice irony I nearly missed. And he intended Rieux to be the ACTUAL saint, the one who neither sought nor would have accepted the term “saint”. He was just a man doing his job.
And here is the thing: Camus more or less says that most morality comes from a very simple instinct, to do your job, even in difficult circumstances. No one is praised for seeking food when they are hungry.
And as he says, most people are basically decent, most of the time. Most are willing to roll up their sleeves and help, if the situation calls for it. Indeed, as I have said, most are primed from birth for difficulty, hardship, and conflict–in this case with death itself, more or less.
I had a specific personal reason for watching Troy I won’t go into, but I would suggest that everything is medicine, if you pay attention.
But if we equate deep, true relaxation with peace, and peace, along with sympathy, as the highest you can aspire to in this conflicted world, I would suggest you learn to seek both, in your own way.
And actually, I would say this too: Tarrou–who by the way may have been EITHER a Communist or a Nazi or something else (although Communist is most likely, since he opposed the French regime)–claimed that the world was divided into the plague stricken and the victims, by and large (other than the healers, who were his saints).
What is missing in this commentary, that no doubt was latent, was that while the relative roles may vary from time to time and place to place, that most people can be BOTH plague stricken AND victim. The victim is simply someone who had the plague and died from it.
We all have the plague sleeping in us. It is a task of continual awareness not to allow it to awaken and infect others, or to kill our own sense of decency.
You have to stay awake. There is no other remedy. How you do this is up to you, but I would suggest we all need periods of silence and solitude. We need beauty of all sorts. We need the company of profound minds and spirits, which are best found in works of great philosophy and literature. I read a couple pages of Marcus Aurelius most mornings, and when I finish Meditations will read Epictetus. We need nature. And yes, we all need love, but no one can, in the end, give you what you lack. You are no longer a child and you cannot ask the world to be a mother to you.
No: allowing your shame to abate–from time to time, and perhaps for not very long–is a skill we all need to learn, and like all skills, it must be practiced, perhaps for a very long time. After shame comes self acceptance, and with self acceptance comes the peace that I think is indistinguishable from self love. That is how it works, or so I hypothesize.
I am just speaking as objectively as I can.
And yes, of course, I aspire to being a healer. It is just a word, but it’s a good word. We all need a point and direction to our struggle, and this one seems the best to me.
I honestly think I have been a soldier in many lives, and probably at times a very good one. And think for a moment about how easily we value and admire the talent for killing. That stink is in all of us, or at least most of us. I have no memories at all, but it has long seemed interesting to me that my favorite book when I was three years old was an encyclopedia of weapons used in World War 2. Maybe I fought in that war somewhere. Maybe some part of me just wanted to get up to date.
But I have bad eyes. Even though I tried several times to become a soldier, the path was barred for me, which I think was the plan. My energy had to go elsewhere, as indeed it has. I fight my own wars, in my own way. My war is the war of peace. “Conquest” is calmness. “Aggression” is sympathy and empathy. Territory held is what is stable and good within me, which becomes daily reliable over time.