🪟 23 - Roots of sanity
🪟 23 - Roots of sanity
Frame & Axiom #23 (Part 5): On the indispensability of love.
Table of contents
PART 1: Where All Begins
PART 2: The Moving Being
PART 3: The Court of Reality
PART 4: The Canvas of Reality
PART 5: The Realm of Others
Roots of sanity
Dear Reader,
Romantic love is but one of many loves. Nature is gracious enough to offer alternatives beyond mere consolations, thus the treasure of community is offered in a diversity of forms. Although romantic love is the most potent by far, it is exclusionary, and there remain forms inclusive of more others. The English language performs poorly in arresting this diversity, and so I will refer to the language of Greeks. Of the Greek loves, the richest are fourfold — eros, philia, storge and agape. Eros reaches into the other forms from within itself, therefore it is richest by far, but there remain three loves to be accessed in fullness.
🪟 23 - Roots of sanity
The self is the greatest of unknowns. One is predestined to ask: who am I? Well, that is the question to which everyone seeks an answer for themselves. To the inquirer, the blankness of this question is felt in progressive agitation, until in the violence of distress, she thinks to ask a reasonable one. Given she is searching, I presume she has matured beyond the free man’s routine diverting of such weighty questions. But this our youthful inquirer must come to understand, that she is a moving self, and she who moves involuntarily and unceasingly cannot hope to arrest her own motion. She asks, who am I? I answer, a moving self. Whereabouts do I move? All directions at once, and more. (She looks puzzled.) Your mind lusts to cohere, and so it searches, interrogating the map for an X that marks the spot. But dear inquirer, do you even have a clue what is it you are looking for? … Now to that question, she either cannot say, or she can only say too much, never too little. There is, however, one truth in regards to her aimlessness that she may come to see. When isolated in an infinite space, she can only flail about erratically, for infinity provides no grounding. But Nature in all graciousness has codified a boundary in order to ground her turbulence — and it is none other than the boundary of community! Inquirer, you ground yourself in relation to others at all times. To them your fluctuations are tethered. Your natural interactivity with others is an invisible process of co-location, of transference and countertransference, that renews your conception of self and confers your roots of sanity. It is an eternal process of dia-logos.
It occurs to me that the burden of the mad multiplicity was not meant to be borne alone! Is this not affirmed by the games of Nature, seeing that even the ultimate act of creation, procreation, is not solitary but mutual? On the canvas of life, the most decorated motifs are not solitary, for the court has ruled that life is to be fundamentally communal. One does not truly live until accompanied. A withdrawn and pensive one may opt to substantiate her images in seclusion, in the universe of her room, away from the noise of crowds. She ought not to remain out of touch for too long. Whatever she moves her soul to express meaningfully, relative to the radiance of those who have lived, can only be in black and white. She does not see that her impoverished soul requires the appropriation of others in order to be made rich! It is not even quite so optional as that. If a man wants his sanity tested to its extremes, one need not take the trouble of torturing him. He simply needs to be secluded indefinitely, where he will find no man and no man will find him. But this is a futile test. It is well known that he will soon enough be hanging by a thread. The declaration of God rings: “it is not good for man to be alone”. The realm of Others is no mere additive. A man is incomplete without a woman, mad without a fellow.
Do you begin to see it now? So, to flail about in isolation is to be thoroughly imprudent. Haven’t I mentioned it before? Freedom is naught. We ought to be grateful for our boundaries! Inquirer, know that your ‘self’ does not exist in a vacuum. Your anxiety makes you persist in asking, who am I? That is a vain question. What you are looking for, no one finds in themselves. Who you are is a living fragment of the mosaic which binds all fellows, encompassing all who have lived, all who are living, and all who will. Have you noticed how your blood mixes with your fellows’? It was quite right for the ancient man to deduce that a mind is borrowed from a universal mind, a consciousness borrowed from universal consciousness. You are, by Nature’s ruling, a part of its body, a wholeness in which you yourself are made whole by tethering effectively. The stages of life offer their own fair sample of the community, demarcated by practicalities of place and occupation, the passage of time or, let us say, divine synchronicity. All who are socially competent and invest enough of themselves into tethering effectively should over time be welcomed into the warm and invigorating love of friendship, love of the philia category. Alas, social competence is not a given! Therefore, social competence, of which not all are equal, is the most important of games one ought to play. Its reward so completes our being, that it makes up for other losses.
What differentiates the socially competent and incompetent? There are many places to start, but here is an axiom, a conception from which I can press no further. Man has an eternal desire to unravel the self to others as deeply and frequently as possible. Does it not feel like a peculiar and trivial indulgence? Inquirer, call to mind the never-ending coverage of how you feel about the weather, or your joy and anticipation, or your sorrow and anxiety! You love talking about yourself, but you cannot go on and on for all time. That is not how the game works. You would be an utter bore. So you heed an unspoken rule, a rule of exchange. You speak... The other speaks and you listen... You speak again. Of this rule, you needed induction from a young age, then of your proficiency, continual adjustments against framing disproportions, for here lies a cornerstone in the sphere of social competence, of which there are no exceptions. If a grown man proves inept, he embodies the misfortune of being most readily resented. And it is a terrible misfortune, for in his inability he is left most vulnerable to the poverty of his soul. The tragedy of the loner! He is active in his agony, grieving not so much for what was, but much worse, for what is not. He has everything to grieve, and no past to hold on to. His sanity is tested, despite his own pleas to be saved from it. For him, my greatest compassion is reserved.
I have observed this dynamic at play in my own life. In comparing extended periods of being alone to periods of being well-accompanied, it is no question that in the latter I find myself in a better state of control. The roots of my sanity are tightened and reinforced in the blessedness of accompaniment, in which my light moods (including an idiotic sense of humour) are pulled into my grasp. But when I am in solitude, my heavy moods and soulful sorrows are most open to advancing their statement. The immediacy always prices the affirming at a lower value than the angsty, for joy is final, whereas anxiety may precede destruction. Therefore, there is a problem not so much in solitude per se, as there is in too much solitude. Perhaps the existentialists needed reframing — they who are most unmarried, glum and incomplete! Perhaps they were so given over to despair not in the contemplation of solitariness, but in the solitariness of contemplation. Perhaps the prognosis of all-consuming existential despair was not so much the realisation of true humanity as they preached, but the effect of imprudence with their sanity. You have to wonder why there is not so much of a gap between the philosopher and the insane. They perform inward-looking heroics but meddle with their own sanity in the process! I think their fault is that they romanticise their solitude, and serve a swallowing imbalance. He who moves in all directions at once cannot simultaneously ground his own movement in himself. Perhaps those called to biblical exposition need to be reminded over and over again of those words, “it is not good for man to be alone”, and those called to classical philosophy, the Aristotlean principle of moderation.
Nature is peculiar, for heaving up the community on such a high pedestal. A know-all might point me to evolutionary arguments, but to me that is unsatisfactory. That there is a reason for a process to exist does not resolve its peculiarity. I may equally say we needed to evolve bottoms in order to defecate, but why should we even need to defecate? Why do our ingestions not break down into tinier particles that we can empty by exhalation instead? Why is there an unfathomable variation in size at all, that a spoonful of a thing must break down into tiny, invisible, particles instead of just evaporating into nothing? And why must our bodies be forced to interact with those particles? This is all absurd. You may think I am being imaginative. I say it is you who is not being imaginative enough, if you do not see absurdities everywhere. But I am starting to be unproductive in my thought! I shall pin all this to an infinite wisdom that I cannot comprehend, and return my attention to the matter at hand.
What was peculiar, again? Ah, yes. The brutal necessity of social competence. I am certain that the order of Nature demands social competence. But the sheer weight of this burden is seen, and mercy shown! It is ruled that assistance is to be offered from the very beginning, in the form of a mother present at every newborn’s first sight of the world. Dear inquirer, you have true fortune if you have the privilege of absolute dependence on the mutuality through which you were created. Despite their sometimes-veiled humanness, they are your true first loves, and you have bonded in a Nature-arranged marriage. They are the reason for your competence in the foundations of the great game, so critically in your infantile years. Yet the bond does not end there. How unceasing their concern! How long-suffering their love! It is true fortune to delight in the sturdiness of family, love of the storge category. But here we speak of an endangered institution, for it is one that repulses the free man. The concern of family is denigrated to an image of regression, at the hands of our free man in contempt over its intrusion over his boundaries. The blood bond is made trivial, the family unit weakened. Of course, every generation has an archetypal rebel, but the modern West seems especially insistent on trivialising the sacredness of family. How alarming! Have they paused for twenty minutes to think about the ramifications? Have they been made aware that we have relied on it since time immemorial?
There is a fellow archetype that universally tends to earn the most credit. Picture this for a second. Here is a fellow who stays put with you in an hour of pain or grief, or in moments of unstableness or idleness. A fellow who tolerates the reality of your feebleness, who is consistent in affirming your presence. A fellow who loves purely, who is devoid of scheming. You relish in a mutual co-affirming between this fellow and yourself, and through it partake in a mutual extraction or drawing out. And here the long-suffering storge love shows its true worth, for it is born not of perfection, nor sameness, nor cunning, nor trivialities of any sort, but of rootedness. I recall what C. S. Lewis wrote of family, as branches on a tree growing in all directions, yet remaining rooted as one. Inquirer, if you are fortunate, where else are you to find so sturdy an accompaniment in matrimony, birth and burial, if not your roots? If you count yourself a child among the fortunate, you veer away from such blessed assistance at your own peril. I do not know you or your origins, but I implore you to reflect on what your vision of Judgement Day has to say of the matter. Do you find it within you to love your roots, if not now, in their final moments, and if not still, in your own final moments? Let it not be your own hastiness that leads you to disregard such riches.
You had asked, who am I? I shall point a finger to your roots. The apple does not fall far from the tree, they say. I concur. Now I shall point a finger to your companions. Can you sense their blood flowing in your veins? Now, I wave my open palms to try to encompass everything I am speaking of. Yes! Yes! Here lies the gold, frankincense and myrrh offered in community — your band of fellows as the ensemble of your opera! You are an utter fool for grounding yourself in others, yet you are given no alternative, and so it is the wise thing to do. The music of your soul is substantiated, drawn out, and enriched in it, while most vehemently in the passion of eros love, reliably also in the philia and storge loves. You would be less without them, in a sense. It is an irony, that effectiveness demands you, a being of self-interest, to indulge in your desperate need for others! So, let us all feel the heavy weight of our soulful hunger, and pre-occupy ourselves with the motif of love. Let us keep up our tempo and build up, in co-affirmation with our fellow musicians, to the most epic of crescendos. To love and be loved — that is to play melodies that reverberate in harmony. It is to fortify the ground on which we tread the infinite.
Till next time,
Euwyn
“The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.” — James Baldwin