Finding a Form (36 page)

Descartes believed that we think the way we make, and that we understand something (like life in a plant or animal, for instance) when we can in fact construct it: gathering all the proper parts
together, directing our actions according to a plan, then putting pieces in place, section by section, until the machine is finished—for, of course, if we can make any “it” this way (as Hobbes also maintained), “it” must be a machine.

Hobbes began with atoms, and by combining these and their motions into a kind of peaceable kingdom, he created what might be deemed molecules. Then, by grouping these, he manufactured cells; the cells united first to form plants, and later, with fancier and finer levels of organization, came animals of lower, then yet higher, constitutions, until finally man was achieved. Men became matter in motion, too, and joined in families, just like atoms clump into molecules; families led to clans and tribes; finally man evolved complex societies grand enough to claim statehood—states which were themselves solarlike systems, great masses in military motion.

Descartes’s discovery of analytic geometry united the narrative world of matter and mechanics with the expository world of thought and theory, but in doing so it revealed the mind’s bias: its need to represent every one of its operations in terms of a spatial model. Of course, this had always been the case, but the dominance of linear inference concealed it. Although the forms of the syllogism may have seemed to resemble temporal progressions, these proofs were accomplished by conceiving each term as a box—or pen—or class—or set—or place—into which particulars were put like silverware in its cloth-lined chest. The pens weren’t used simply to keep cows. Other pens could be nested inside them. Our Venn diagrams demonstrate the spatial configuration of the syllogism, and we diagram sentences in terms of trees, boxes, ladders, rings. We map not only Ohio and circuits and the gross national product; we map the mind.

When geometry disappeared into algebra, algebra’s Euclidean interior was disclosed. Our board games work within a field, and even the path which winds its narrative way gently o’er the lea is a line. The fact is “grasped.” The mind is incapable of an entirely immaterial understanding (although a machine may be). It invariably and necessarily spatializes its “perception” of things.

If we enlarge our conception of connection, not only in terms of the incredibly complex collisions we may imagine might follow the Big Bang, but also in terms of a system of inference in which interrelated “wholes” comprise the premises; and therefore a system in which a multiplicity of factors may weigh in at once, not just in a line and one at a time like drops from a spigot, but in a downpour like rain from a cloud; consequently a system in which our feeling, for example, that “Robert is prompt” will proceed from our understanding of the totality of his nature, rather than from a coded set of properties pried from his personality; then we shall be “thinking” the way we should, all along, have been reading: carrying every concept forward as though it were a great wave hanging over our surfing attention and modifying every moment’s meaning. And then returning the whole load to the beginning again. Though the novel may still be, as Stendhal said, a mirror dawdling down a road, we will no longer narrow the road to represent the speedy passage of time, but remember that what the mirror sees, it sees in terms of its own illusory but deep surround, and that there are two roads, really: the one we travel down as though life were like that, the dust behind us disappearing along with the barns, the farms, the trees; and that same road’s image in the novel’s wayward mirror—convoluted, multiple, inverted, simultaneous, continuous, pointless, cracked—that is to say, the way life is.

L
et us imagine a world without language; and since I am going to insist that what we sometimes call the soul is simply the immediate source of any speech—the larynx of the
logos
—a world without words will be a soulless one as well. If there are rude hulks moving about such a virginal land who resemble man, they will be mulk mountynotty types indeed: Vico’s gesturers, all hands and feet and face. To this world I want to give the ancient name of Nature—all too plurally significant to be anything but honorific. For its polar opposite, a world made wholly of words, of “words, words, words,” in Hamlet’s weary invocation of it, the title
Finnegans Wake
has already been nominated by its ambitious author, if it has not yet been conferred.

We tend to stand uneasily between unadulterated Nature on the one hand and total Culture on the other, as though on a teeter. We may not know much about this mute, rough thing which language has had no hand in smoothing out, since there has never been a moment, to our knowledge, when we have been without ourselves in this place, so that we are forced to infer it, to reach past our presence, as ubiquitous as it is, in order to figure out just what our absence might mean, what our silence might signify, what a world without figments might look like, for to imagine a world without language is also to imagine a world undisturbed by anybody’s elaborated longings, a world untroubled by beliefs, concerns, conjectures, dreams—a cosmos without a cosmology.

Of course, it could also simply be the image of our innermost, uncivilized selves, if there’s a patch domestication hasn’t reached—a Calibaning consciousness: eye and ear and nose and tongue and teeth—naught else. Here is one cause of our uneasiness as we balance on the teeter: fear of the region of ourselves that lies even beyond our cultured cruelty and embraced deceits, an area so stony it cannot be spoken to, and which might break open one day to disclose what character of elemental heat?

Although there are those who believe that the natural world can’t get along without them, that it depends from their attention like a tear from an eye; I think it is safer to assume that sometime before the blessed event of our arrival, and rather more than several days, the creation on which we are now perched like a bird on a branch would have taken place. What cosmologists today, with unintentional vulgarity, call the Big Bang would have scattered the seeds of itself long since into the space of Space. Perhaps after our own Big Bang has snuffed us out, trees will again refuse to fall in the forests; or perhaps everywhere, on the contrary, there will be the renewed bleeps of an unheard cacophany, the sound of the sea as solid as stones strewn along the beach. But at least it will be a world without theories, thoughts, beliefs, symbolic behavior. It will be a world without nonsense.

More than a numerical match for anything man manufactures, more than those native beads that precede his corruptions, more than coffin nails rolled from the finest leaf, more than the number of paper napkins that blot his slobber, more than the bricks of his buildings or the bolts of his machines, man makes mistakes, man falls into errors (the only real sin, according to the only real philosophers), man keeps and feeds and cossets his opinions even better than he does his pets—do they not purr at his approach, and snarl at the smell of others?—and like his pets they mostly sleep and eat, bark and shit.

Even after our arrival, an arrival possibly prefigured by the constitution, even destiny, of matter, there will be parts of the planet—dense and steamy jungles so full of life creation will seem no big
bang but the simplest snap, or glacial desolations swept by bitter winds where lifelessness is epidemic—and each of these will strike us, perhaps, as bits of the original Nature peeking out through tears in the cultural fabric: the world as it was before we were shaped, what we like to call “the wilderness.” In any case, the solar system, and the limitless immensities of outer space, those interstellar absences where so little is going on it has to be elemental, will look like Nature to our lengthened, rounded, and signal-gleaning instruments. Or maybe it will be when our submarines have hit deep seas that we shall feel we’ve reached the aboriginal.

Pretty clearly, though, Nature will be hard to find. Nature may really be extinct. In its place, not only for us but for every species who must suffer us, there is Culture to be found instead—Culture, with its classes and customs; Culture, with its conventions and its canons. One function of Culture, whatever else it comes to, is to obscure or replace Nature with itself, to surround man with man, because it does not seem that we can survive in a state of Nature as if we were a stone in a pudding. No, we land in that pudding like a blob of ink. We intermingle as we fear the races will. The horror Hobbes describes, that state of war which is his state of Nature, where life is “solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short,” compels us, in order to escape it, to invent society, the state, the family, the kingdom, the cosmos. Of course, we neglect to notice that Hobbes’s nature is another invention, its attributes obtained as much by rhythm and other elements of his rhetoric as by argument, his covenants are fictions, his leviathan an apocalyptic beast, while we complain of our present life that we find it lonely, mean, peopled by brutes, impoverished, miserable, yet bitterly brief, without apparently realizing we are simply repeating his famous lines, although they are now about an allegedly civilized society. The fact is that in a state of Nature, men might squabble over the last bite of meat, but wars would be unlikely; wars require societies, clans at the very least, disciplined killing; wars involve conflicts between organizations, and are fought with words, whatever other weapons are waved. Without words we cannot formulate the necessary
lies. Without the necessary lies, there may be nothing we are willing to die for. If there is nothing we are willing to die for … then … by default … peace.

Eden was such a state of peace, a private neighborhood with walls and gates and its own police. Here, it was the snake who uttered the first words, and it was not to ask for a light. Eve was quite unclothed and noninviting, you remember, before words were found to dress her in nakedness and whistle to the phallus as if its name were Fido: “Up, boy!” When Adam and Eve ate of the apple, they became opinionated. Paradise was destroyed by doctrine. Soon speculators developed it, creating subdivisions, tracts, plots.

It is of no importance what the guilty doctrine was. Any doctrine will do. Thomas Hobbes, our momentary mentor in such matters, in a passage that deserves extended quotation, simply makes a little list.

This list, which could be extended to include every subject that drew the interest of Bouvard and Pécuchet, might be made as lengthy as an encyclopedia, and as detailed as a dictionary.

Things happen their way. Let them. We shall explain things otherwise, to suit our fancy, maintain ourselves in power and privilege, conceal our fears and our ambitions, focus hate and keep resentments warm, gain some sexual, some social, some legal, some economic, advantage; meanwhile supplying ourselves (no matter how things, still going their way, turn out) with an ample stock of justifications, prognostications, and excuses, ad hoc hypothecations, ambiguously stated advice and other misdirections, canards of every color, beliefs so absurd that if we can induce them in our fellows, we can then be assured that they will swallow anything: Diet Coke and decaffeinated coffee, resurrection and the parting of the Red Sea. We shall systematically constrain the minds of our children to ensure that, though tight and small, they will have the right shape. External enemies will drive us together, internal
enemies will explain our failures on every front, while our successes will spring from the well-deserved support of superior powers.

I frankly do not see how we can make an honest survey of our acts, our thoughts, our theories, over almost any slice of time without a rising sense of intellectual disgust. In every way equal to our history of rape, pillage, murder, and political oppression will be a history of ideas so craftily untestable, and so persistently unclear, and so tenaciously gripped, as to provoke the profoundest dismay. Admiration too, of course, and astonishment. At what? at how well men can live, living within illusion.