COVID–Situationism: A Thought Experiment.
OUR SELF-APPOINTED BETTERS HAVE EXTOLLED A NEW VIRTUE; branded it "social distancing," I just consider it everyday life as an introvert. Throw serious illness into the mix and one has the ultimate recipe for introspection. Just now walking the dogs, unable to reach Vera for our hours-long FaceTime sessions, I notice something unusual: People, outside, sat on their lawns talking, playing games and most shocking, they wave–At me. All at once, I appear to them for the first time; as neighbour, as peer. I am stroked. The hypervigilance and tension, so paradigmatic to my public face has no home in these passing moments. Hypervigilance born of American social substrate, a matrix of essentialism and appearances–demeaning; my frustratingly proximal resemblance to those dusky, dead-eyed faces that populate the nightly news; mugshots punctuating any sense of commonality with implicit 9mm privations; jungle rule spilled into the suburbs. That old public fear shifted in month-after-month of the chemo pump, alien tubes emerging from my houndstooth shirt as I ambled along, alone except for the dogs, tumour weeping into my diaper and rare of breath. Sickness travels on pheromonal conduits.
People have been coming to me for days, asking me for my quarantine (and quarantined) thoughts. Something about my tête-à-tête with the carcinomic reaper a threshold into knowledge (if they say so). "How to stay calm and patient?" they ask, "How to stay sane?" It all comes down to one question: how to position one's self against the unknowable?
In the Norse Hávamál, an epic poem dating to around the year 1270, the god Odin, observed the Norns–goddesses who dictated fate and shaped individual destiny with their runes, therefore exerting ultimate will over the course of the world. Jealous of their power over the runes, Odin journeyed to Yggdrasil, the sacred Ash tree of life that holds all things aloft, and sacrificed himself. Through starvation and pierced by a spear with his own dedication inscripted onto its shaft, Odin died:
Veit ek at ek hekk
vindga meiði á
nætr allar níu
geiri undaðr
ok gefinn Óðni
sjálfr sjálfum mér
á þeim meiði
er manngi veit
hvers hann af rótum renn
Við hleifi mik sældu
né við hornigi
nýsta ek niðr
nam ek upp rúnar
œpandi nam
fell ek aptr þaðan
I know that I hung
on a windy tree
nine long nights,
wounded with a spear,
dedicated to Odin,
myself to myself,
on that tree of which
no man knows from
where its roots run.
No bread did they give me
nor a drink from a horn,
downwards I peered;
I took up the runes,
screaming I took them,
then I fell back from there...
To sate his thirst for knowledge, Odin pays the ultimate price. To know anything requires sacrifice, blood, sweat and toil, sure, but also conveniance; our comforts and certainties, our ego and our assumptions. Odin also gains knowledge in solitude, fed by no one, aided by no one, rescued from his hubris by no one. Alone with only his pain and his goals in mind.
It is interesting to watch the masses, cut-off from the rat-race; left to spend time with themselves. It appears a terrifying prospect to many; the self some unkown spectre from the id, come to torment the ego. You can often learn everything you need to know about a person through careful observation of how they handle crisis. This, in turn, counts for the self. Currently, as many of us adapt and try to make sense of a bewildering situation, the opportunity to get to know the self–as those who experience Limit Situations amidst mortality often do, is available to everyone willing.
I have always been right at home with my self; immersed in a rich inner life of the mind. My mind-palace holds a multitude of rooms, some for storing minims of data, fragments of memory, while others are populated by the shades. I close my eyes, pull in a deep, greedy breath; Beethoven and Miles Davis are sat in my mind-palace living room, sipping Prince of Wales Tea and discussing the finer points of Shepherd's Tones. Krishnamurti's in the bath watching Kubrickian dances on a silver lenticular screen while James Dean whipsers lovemaking suggestions into the ear of a bored-stiff Emily Brontë. In an A-frame attic room, Nietzsche writes on whitewashed walls with the nub of what was once a pencil, one passage scored into the wall by fire:
Historia abscondita -- Every great human being exerts a retroactive force: for his sake all of history is placed in the balance again, and a thousand secrets of the past crawl out of their hiding places — into his sunshine. There is no way of telling what may yet become part of history. Perhaps the past is still essentially undiscovered! So many retroactive forces are still needed!
Historia abscondita, "concealed history." Not the same thing as occult knowledge, rather story hidden in plain sight. How have we, historically, explained phenomena in the natural world? By telling stories; by assigning character, form, function and a nature to the things we observe. We encode meaning into the names we use for experiential constructs. For instance, the word "myth." In our Postmodern lexicon we tend to think of a myth as being something fanciful or untrue. We might see it in articles, "the myth of real estate," or "10 common myths you've always believed to be facts!" The word myth comes down to us from Ancient Greek mythos, meaning "that which is spoken by mouth." Myths were, at least intitally, couched in oral tradition and grouped together by tribe or nation into a foundational account of a population's past.
Myths comprise a prevailing subsumption of the human condition semiotically ingrained as instinct; This is most clearly demonstrated by what theorists refer to as the monomyth, the universal narrative structure present in folklore, mythology, ancient religion and even Hollywood films. Uncovered through a decades-long discipline of comparative mythology poularised in the 1940s by Joseph Campbell, the monomyth is a narrative structure that transcends disparate human cultures and ecologies. It contains an archetypal blueprint of human hopes, fears, assumptions, ideals and desires. As Campbell described it:
A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man 1 If we break down the term monomyth itself:
mono- Greek, "one, singular, alone, containing one."
myth- from French, mythe Latin, mythus, oringally Greek, mythos "That which is spoken by mouth."
We might arrive at, "One thing that is spoken by mouth," or even "the word." If something is universal, trancendant of culture and ecology–such as the monomyth–can it bear out in some way? Could this in fact be a myth that is, for lack of a better term, true? Herein lies an interesting opportunity: while so many of us are now cloistered at home, bingeing Netflix (Hulu, Prime... pick your poison) this could be the largest collective monomythic immersion in human history. It's become a meme, passing the time expososed to many stories that reinforce the belief systems that we are currently forcibly separated from. What fruits might result from an application of the monomyth to our own lives? If presented with four pevailing monomythic structures, one might identify the current "beat" or moment they inhabit within a given monomythic structure, and work backwards, into adolescence, childhood, filling in the blanks. Not in the Jungian sense where we are seeking to find our selves in the archetypes, rather an attempt to place our selves into a narrative context, identifying inciting incidents, influences and motivations. To facilitate this, I have combined the four preeminent monomythic structures into one list for reference (your mileage may vary).
The autopsis within complete, I find myself thinking it's time to look outward again. Emerging into the present warm-sun on my face, dogs asleep at my feet, I leave my mind-palace with gifts, a black spot smudged onto a piece of paper, the flip-side scrawled with three words in Latin: Ordo ab Chao. "Order out of chaos." There is a Hegelian dialectic used to affect cultural changes that human beings might not accept under other circuimstances. It works like this:
Create or present a problem
Manufacture a reaction
Provide a solution
Maybe it's nothing, but regardless it is critical to keep one eye inward and the other ever outward, each engaged in autopsis–the act of seeing clearly with one’s own eyes, interpreting what is seen and weighing all possibilities with empirical data. None of us can know for certain what lies ahead, but we can know where we've come from and for a time, we have an eye of the storm buying us the time to dive inward, gain present coordinates and determine the hero we want to be going forward into the unknown.
FOOTNOTES & REFERENCES
Campbell, Joseph (1949). The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton: Princeton University Press. p. 23.