Table of contents
The Actor
Dear Reader,
Nature demands hardship. To be content with hardship is to build our houses on solid ground. To effectively navigate it is to master it. But it cannot be sufficient to only narrate everything. It is one thing to be artistically steadfast against all of life’s vicissitudes, but it is another to cause or play party to them. We possess a paintbrush to be enacted upon the canvas of reality, that is to say, we are beings who do not only narrate but also act. If a man woke up one day to find he was the only person left on this planet, I cannot imagine even he would spend his life relishing in idleness! To be human is to act, for freedom demands proof. It is from this notion that sayings such as this are born: “A ship in harbour is safe, but that is not what ships are built for”. Nature orients us beyond our locality, but now how ought we chart our courses?
🪟 16 - The Actor
The Narrator works in us, carrying out its tasks mostly independently of our will. Through the providence of maps, treasures to struggle toward are illuminated and paths to emulate recorded. But it stops short at interpretation and cartography, for Nature has determined that the responsibility of movement must fall to another. But actually, no, it was decided, to pass it on to another like it is not enough. She has granted that the game humanity itself is to play (be subjected to) is one centrally of movement, and that any movement in relation to a charted course shall be delegated to a capacity enactable directly of its own volition! To act is the very essence of what it means to exist. To be at all is to be “at work”. Movement is being. Movement is consciousness. The human ship exists to be steered for as long as it persists, and as its machinery begins to chart a multiplicity of treasure maps, it demands simply to be directed.
Nature has provided the toolkit and a canvas, but we ourselves are to voyage the seas. One may now question the arrangement, and ask: why are things the way they are? I think such a question is meaningless, futile, and not worthy of ultimate concern, for to question the way things are is to question the arrangement which presupposes a question-asker. Were even God Himself to descend from heaven, how should one engage a supreme Capacity that endows capacities upon capacities? Surely a feeble mind like ours will not comprehend the answer, and at most we will be as ants trying to comprehend philosophy. No, the question of why we have (seemingly) been assigned our lot arbitrarily will only lead us through speculative circles and drown us needlessly in despair. We exist to deal with our lot, and play our alloted game of movement. The better question to ask is how one ought to deal with this lot, existential anguish included. Because, whether by the interests of Nature or the merciful hand of God, in the just governance of our inner Actor a great reward is offered: a ‘meaning of life’ that provides us grounds to persist not only bearably, but pleasurably also.
Now what counts as just governance? To be hopelessly preoccupied with this inner Actor is to be passionate. To be passionate is to wholly accept the given lot of humanity to act, and harness it. One who harnesses it justly, towards treasures that are profound, lives effectively. To act on what is just — justness as illuminated by the ultimate test of time — is to pierce into the depths. The test favours those who act well, after all, and not those who avoid it. Is it not the case that the greatest regrets at the end of a lifetime generally are the important things left undone, rather than things done?
One may answer the call to voyage great seas. Another may embody selflessness; to love and be loved. Yet another may create something from the recesses of the soul, or to deny the self and take up the cross, or to ask the deepest conceivable questions of reality. And among all these, there is one constant. Such pursuits are not happy. Yes, they may lead to happiness, but it is surely not to the end of happiness that the motive for such acts is derived, for they cannot possibly be so shallow as that! Shallowness breeds comfort, complacency and trivial (unjust) concerns, which in excess is to be irreverent of our endowed capacity to act, as for a ship to remain docked is to be irreverent of its capacity to voyage. The human ship thrives not at the shore, but on great waves, hovering over infinity. There the tastebuds of the mind shall be rewarded in accordance to the depths they have arisen from. There one will find oneself pursued by happiness.
But how shall one first relinquish her ropes, that she might begin the voyage? It is to attend to the treasure map that the inner Narrator has already illuminated, and to act on it as a ship released from a harbour. Another question follows: by what measure will one be judged to have acted well, in a manner reverent to one’s given capacity? The measure is surely not success (in the modern sense), for such things are trivial. The thrills of spectacle and wealth belong to shallow grounds. An artist radically preoccupied with her art may find success, whereafter a young spectator would come to be bedazzled by those (trivial) rewards that follow it. But to the radically preoccupied artist herself, such rewards merely encounter a tone of indifference. Her voyage is her art — her greatest struggle, and her greatest source of contentment. While even for her the initial pursuit may have been sparked by envy akin to the young spectator, to the long-suffering one it morphs gradually into something more. It becomes a just engagement of her inner Actor, that is, the very essence of what it means to live effectively. Nietzche writes, “man ... does not deny suffering as such: he wills it, he even seeks it out, provided he is shown a meaning for it, a purpose of suffering.”
It is only radicals such as that who embody human ideals. Of those who have come before, it is those who have painted their own strokes the most intensely, the passionate, who represent humanity, illuminating us to unchartered treasures and expanding the reach of the collective will. How far will we ourselves strive towards the treasure we seek? Will we become radicals? Will our movement and charted course have any cause for emulation? The greatest force lies not without, but within. One who conquers her own cowardice and justly harnesses her Actor will stamp a mark on the canvas of reality and encounter the all-consuming hands of destiny.
In a hardship like this, the full depth and richness offered by the human experience may be uncovered. There the highest functions of our humanity are activated, and we are presented the opportunity to appropriate our given lot. After all, as a species that acts, we do not mind hardship, only to exist for nothing. A hardship is a conduit for a thing. To be most human is not to avoid our condition, but to make an art of it. We are little Sisyphuses, charged with a (seemingly) arbitrary lot, but one that offers the opportunity of a lifetime: the struggle towards the greatest heights. Perhaps Zeus was merciful, for had he wanted to allocate Sisyphus the worst possible punishment, he might have punished him to do absolutely nothing for eternity, for that would deny him the rewards of struggle. But no, as per Camus, “one must imagine Sisyphus happy”.
To harness the Actor justly is to make art out of the suffering that life necessitates. That is also the most gripping of stories that can be told, for we remind ourselves of our feeble humanity when we frame our struggle in this manner. The bells of the marketplace may tempt us elsewhere, to trivialities that masquerade as treasure-chests, but we ought to not fall for grand illusions and return our concern to the First Treasure we have already been endowed: our inner Actor. In it, we shall find everything we need and nothing to lack! So, let us seek to struggle artistically and not as cowards. Let us all become heroes and artists. To pursue our greatest ideals is to answer the call of existence itself. What is the alternative? Idleness? Self-pity? What will we, at the end of our lives, have to say of that?
Rosseau writes, “life is not breath, but action ... Life consists less in length of days than in the keen sense of living. A man maybe buried at a hundred and may never have lived at all.” To live effectively is to live in a manner reverent to the inner Actor. It is to lust accordingly for life, and to live not as perfectly as possible but as much as possible. I recall a tweet by Visakan Veerasamy that I came across recently:
“Life is either devastatingly meaningless or excruciatingly meaningful.”
Till next time,
Euwyn
Side note: I must say that the very act of writing these is a meaningful hardship of mine! It pains me to organise what I think, and articulate it using the best conceivable words. But there are very few things I would trade this pain for.