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On Absurdity

9/30/2015

7 Comments

 
Allen Ginsberg and The Oneness: Everybody Knows Everything


There’s this story about Allen Ginsberg. It happened during his time as an undergraduate. The young neurotic poet, future co-father of those wild compassionate bards the Beats, was standing in the University Bookstore watching all the bustling impatient students and professors and passersby as they shopped and waited in line to buy their books, and all of a sudden he had a moment of deep epiphany. He saw the harried looks in their eyes, the deep desires and fears hidden within them. He realized: Everybody knows everything all the time. 

I don’t remember where or when I heard this story. It’s possible that it’s not even true, though the sentiment is evident in Ginsberg’s poetry. Consider the lines in Howl: “Everything is holy! everybody's holy! everywhere is holy! everyday is in eternity! Everyman's an angel!” In the language of the two previous posts on this blog, I’d say that Ginsberg was presenting his notions of  “the Oneness.” His vision: If only we could forget our fears, our self-consciousness, our pettinesses, our prejudices and insecurities, we would see the ways in which we are all connected, the ways in which we are all holy angels, pieces in the substance of eternity, spots poking out of the blanket. Somewhere within ourselves we all know.

It’s a beautiful concept. One that echoes from teachings at the heart of many mystical and religious traditions, which I’ll be going into in some detail as I travel over the next few months. And in many ways, I believe Ginsberg’s epiphany to be profoundly true. 


 Now, hold that thought. 



A Quick Word on Irony vs. Absurdity, (in Order to better Understand Absurdity) 


Lots of essays and books can, have been, and no doubt will be written on these concepts. This will not be a particularly long or detailed analysis. Here I’m going to make only a fine distinction for the purposes of moving forward in this blog. 

Okay, so a little example. 

Here’s the situation, a pretty familiar one from television and movies and especially real life: A senator or member of congress known for some type of crusading do-gooder work (trust-busting, ending corruption, fighting prostitution, ridding the streets of mangy rabies-infected cats, etc.) is discovered to have participated in the very activity he or she has built a reputation fighting against. So, after the video of this person dressed in drag and secretively releasing those mangy cats onto the city streets is released, and the public outcry is understandably shrill, we go on youtube and find an old speech made by this same person in which he or she states emphatically, “those who release mangy cats onto the streets of the cities in our great state ought to be punished to the fullest extent of the law!” What do we do? First we snort, and then we scoff in front of our computer screens, and say, “that’s hilarious. How ironic.” We take another minute to roll our eyes and nudge each other in the ribs. This is irony: the juxtaposed and opposing images of this old speech next to this new video of the transgression are so incongruous as to make us wryly take notice. 


Now, absurdity. This is when this congressperson goes on television and explains, “I was not in fact releasing those mangy cats like the cameras caught. In fact, I was given those cages by a reputable coyote-dealing company who told me they were filled with human-friendly coyotes. I was in fact releasing the predators that would eat those mangy rabid cats infecting our city streets. But they lied to me! I was set up!” The premise of this explanation is so ridiculous, so unbelievably unreasonable that we would not be out of line to call it “absurd.” 

So this is the distinction: Irony is a fleeting observationally-induced sensation that we get from an incongruous image. Absurdity is a fundamental premise that no reasonable person could believe is truthful. I bring it up because in the realm of thinking about questions of the universe, of God and spirituality, seeing irony all around can lead quickly to presuming a fundamentally absurdist premise to our world, and the jump from seeing absurdity at the root of all things to believing in nihilism, to ultimate meaninglessness, is pretty miniscule. 


Okay, two more points on this little meditation: 

1. In my previous post, I profiled a couple who used an absurdist religious premise to convince themselves of an actual belief in God.  To respond to the unanswerable “whys” of existence, they invented a fake deity. I say they invented an absurdist religious premise, but really, Kent Candlewood began with the view of the world as fundamentally absurd. Without God, Kent says, “the world just fucking sucks.” 

So Kent defiantly responded with his own absurdity. Why are we put through all this pain and nonsense of existence? Because Almig, the fake god of the world, works in mysterious ways. Eventually for the Candlewoods this became real faith. Absurdity crashed into absurdity and the result was a raised earth, a transcendence of the daily injustices of life: meaning. “Remember, there is meaning beyond absurdity,” said Abraham Joshua Heschel, and this is where God operates. This is not to say that humanity is absolved of responsibility for those daily injustices. In fact, it’s the opposite. Having meaning beyond absurdity means there is compelling reason to fight those injustices. Otherwise, there’s really no point. 

I bring up the Candlewoods and Almig also to say this: I come at this project with deep respect for the people I’ll be interviewing and the places I’ll be visiting. I’m not doing this to expose the ironies of fringe spiritual life in order to contribute any more to a belief in the absurdity premise of existence. I suppose going forward in this adventure, my point is this: there is no religion or spiritual practice that I won’t take seriously, even the ones that don’t take themselves seriously.


All that said… 2. Let’s get back to Ginsberg’s epiphany. 



The Incongruity at the Root of This Journey: Nobody Knows a Damn Thing


Sometimes when I think of Ginsberg’s epiphany I grow angry. We all know everything?  Look around with open eyes and you’ll see the multitudes of things that Ginsberg believed inhibited the understanding of our deep connectedness. Government surveillance and drone strikes and chemical weapons used on civilians and the murders of young black men by the police. I believe in the meaning beyond absurdity, but I’m not so sure that Ginsberg’s premise isn’t itself absurd. To a person who knows within him or herself the simple desires to be happy and free and fed and safe, and can presume that this simple wish is shared by most if not all people, the broken state of the world now and as far back into history as we have text to recall, is simply ridiculous. Why the hell do we do this shit to ourselves? Or, more succinctly, why does this world exist if this is what we end up doing with it?

To that end, my epiphany is precisely the opposite of Ginsberg’s:  

Absolutely nobody knows anything, and anybody who says they do is lying. 

So way down there in the trenches of my belief is this incongruity, this inescapably absurd formulation of believing at once that, yes we are all holy, knowing, godly beings…but that we are also Hobbesian animals, too often fighting and killing each other like mindless unknowing brutes. 

I’m not really sure what to do about it. I’m not quite sure that there is anything to do. But it seemed pertinent to share in this setting the internal conflict that’s pushing me into this journey. It is what I’d call the basic conflict between my rational mind and my spiritual belief. I’m pretty sure that A is A and Not A, whatever that means. Maybe some of the people and places I visit will have some insight. 

Anyway. 

7 Comments
Saul J. Weiner link
10/3/2015 11:47:25 am

Good luck on your journey. I hope, as you write, you help us with definitions of words. For instance, when Ginsberg said "Everybody knows everything all the time" he must have had a fairly specific meaning for the term "know." Taken, literally, it would seem untrue. For instance, I don't know Japanese. When I look up the definition of "know" in the dictionary there are various options such as this one "to have established or fixed in the mind or memory." Clearly that's not what Ginsburg had in mind. I wonder what did he mean by the word "know" if he thought all of us "know everything" all the time?

Reply
Daniel Spiro
10/4/2015 07:20:57 am

Thank you for the comment! It's a great point you bring up, and I will certainly do my best to offer some insight into the definitions of words I use.

Of course, I can't say for certain what was in Ginbserg's mind when he had this epiphany. But I actually think that Ginsberg's usage of "to know" is in line with the dictionary definition you found, "to have established or fixed in the mind or memory." When he said "everybody knows," he was indeed saying "everybody has this innate fixed ability in their minds and/or memories." The question is then: what does he mean by "everything?" Because you're right, it's pretty unlikely that he was saying that we all quietly have the wealth of the world's information in our minds. We aren't walking around with perfect encyclopedias lost somewhere deep in our memories (although, sometimes it does seem like that's what we're aiming for with smartphones in our pockets).

My take is that when he says "everything," he's talking about a kind of secret, unspoken knowledge we all share about this life. Specifically, that life is hard, or to quote Plato, "everyone is fighting a hard battle." I know Ginsberg, along with the other Beats, dabbled in Buddhism, in which the first Noble Truth is the truth of Dukkha, that all conditional experiences are suffering (or, as a friend of mine says is a better translation: dissatisfying) (Just a quick aside: The other Noble Truths offer a blueprint for helping free an individual from this dissatisfaction). From that, and from a lot of the messages I read in his poetry, I understand Ginsberg's epiphany to be a call to a kind of radical and brave compassion. Not just a call though, an insight into the fact that this compassion is not unnatural, it is in fact something that we all have access to! The tragedy is that, for a variety of reasons (fears, prejudices, etc.), we don't cultivate this innate "known" quality in ourselves.

I think there might be a way to reconcile a piece of the conflict I've presented between Ginsberg's "Everyone knows everything" and my "nobody knows a damn thing" (or Socrates' "I know only that I know nothing"). The knowledge Ginsberg is talking about might be knowledge of HOW things are: that that we are all struggling with the difficulty of our own existences, while Socrates' insight is that we have no idea WHY things are this way. I think in that space, between HOW and WHY, belief or unbelief takes hold. For me, saying "there is no why, that's just the way it is," which is to say, not being allowed to ask the question, "why?" or, maybe more accurately, being told that it's not a useful or meaningful question, is a path to a baseline of absurdity, which I understand as code for ultimate meaninglessness.

Also I think that not asking "why" bothers me personally because it goes against what my parents taught me while sitting around the Seder table :-).

Thanks again for the comment! Hope you keep reading!

Reply
Alan
10/4/2015 07:21:20 am

The nature and definition of "know" is important here but the question is whether a dictionary definition or a more religious, philosophical or even literary definition is in order. I guess I can be fairly certain that the Torah use of the word "to know" which is often about a person rather than a set of facts or concepts is NOT what we are talking about. Instead, we seem to be talking about the nature of wisdom. I love the concept put forth by Dara Horn in "The World to Come" in which she speaks of the yet unborn babies being guided and taught by those who have already died, "eating art and drinking literature." In her image at the point of birth all of that knowledge is forgotten but presumably still present, to be brought up and reminded of as we grow. Then there is Samuel Johnson who, in concert with that approach wrote that most men need to be reminded rather than educated. So perhaps "knowing" is really just about being reminded of what you already know. However for this purpose the Socratean notion that the only true wisdom is knowing that you know nothing is the one that hits home for me. That allows you to face life with constant questions and with wonder and fascination, which according to Abraham Joshua Heschel is a core facet of religion and spirituality.

Reply
Saul Weiner
10/4/2015 09:43:26 am

Thank you both....

My point of departure in a discussion such as this one, is that all of our thoughts are a product of the interactions of neurons and neurotransmitters in our brain, literally. The way those neurons are organized is, in turn, a product of just two variables: (a) Our inherited DNA and (b) the way the environment impacts the organization of those neurons. By "environment" I mean everything that gets to those neurons, including the sounds from a conversation, and the visual stimuli of your reading from this screen. I mean all this in the most literal sense.

Starting from this premise, we are born knowing nothing, but with the capacity to learn a lot and in a variety of ways. As Daniel notes, we figure out a lot about how things happen ('he died because he was hit by a drunk driver while walking to school") but not why things happen, and as Daniel notes this gap can be filled with belief or non-belief, probably depending on our tolerance for uncertainty and the role of chance. If we need answers, then religion provides answers. If we can accept the role of chance in life, then we chalk it up to bad luck (being hit by a drunk driver) and social ills (the fact that there are drunk drivers) and perhaps bad social policy (that they are still on the road).
You can appreciate from this perspective why both Ginsberg ("we all know everything") and Socrates ("we all know nothing") are tough to interpret unless one presumes the word "know" is being used in some metaphorical sense.
That said, I can also appreciate Alan's perspective that Socrates assertion introduces a dose of humility that in turn leaves us open to asking questions rather than assuming we already have the answers.

Reply
Marc
10/4/2015 03:31:17 pm

"Chance", "bad luck", "social ills", "bad social policy"... aren't these also attempts at answering "why?"

For me at least, religion (or more accurately, belief in God) is not about coping with an intolerance of uncertainty. Certainty is in the realm of knowledge, not belief. I believe in God, but am in way way certain of whether or what God is. My belief in God gives me a glimpse of the "because" at the end of reductionism; it (occasionally) allows me to tap tap into those ultimate Truths which we have "known" all along.

Reply
Saul Weiner
10/4/2015 04:47:12 pm

Reasonable question. Again, definitions become important here. What is the difference between a "how" and a "why" in the setting of this discussion? When I said that religion answers the "why" question, as in "Why did John get run over by a drunk driver"" I meant it that only if one believes in god can one say there is an answer (and only if one believes in a God who can decide whether a car hits someone). Any more proximate response (e.g. "inadequate drunk driving laws" is a "how" answer, not a "why" answer). Finally, to say it was "bad luck" (ie chance) is neither a how nor a why answer.

Reply
Alex Mosley link
4/30/2021 03:55:18 am

Godd bless

Reply



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