🪟 34 - Testimony for the existential
Frame & Axiom #34 (Part 4): A window into the development of my inner life.
Table of contents
PART 1: NATURE » on the relation between man and nature: man as feeble and the consequence of forces.
PART 2: COURT OF JUSTICE: » on the relation between man and justness: reality as court and canvas.
PART 3: HOUSE OF MIRRORS » on the relation between man and others: the necessity of love and compassion toward the ill, that is, us all.
PART 4: EXISTENTIAL LETTERS
Testimony for the existential
🪟 34 - Testimony for the existential
Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.
—Jung
We are asleep. Our Life is a dream. But we wake up sometimes, just enough to know that we are dreaming.
—Wittgenstein
Dear Inquirer,
Twenty-five years ago, I entered the world. I entered it with a cry. For a newborn who had been conceived in a womb, the outside world was an alien world.
Everything required getting accustomed to. By the good grace of Nature, a newborn acclimatises quickly—here is the first expression of that great human power! And no sooner after, the unease of the alien world gave way to amusement. I started becoming amused by just about anything I could touch. I have been delivered into a world of objects! Everything that was not the womb was new and interesting—from my own limbs to the cloth I was wrapped in, to that peculiarly comforting woman cradling me—every object was its own expansive universe.1
But—oh, how fleeting this state of glorious eternal novelty turned out to be! Passively, without so much as noticing anything, a new phenomenon surfaced in how I experienced this alien world. Look at the pristinely white wall two times, touch the same cloth two times, fiddle with the same toy five times, and it begins to lose my attention. And here another core aspect of my humanness expressed itself for the very first time; for my amusement gave way to its antagonist: un-amusement. This phenomenon has a proper name: disinterest or boredom.
Slowly but surely came the disruption of life as a novelty. As it wore out, I came to be disinterested, unamused, by the vast majority of objects. I realised certain objects to be merely everyday, and my attention ceased to belong to them. As I grew older and progressively restless, I began to be more conscious about a certain appeasing category. It was not ‘food’, not ‘Mother’, not ‘love’2. It was a category for everything naturally or artificially inflated for my amusement. They were given the explicit name of ‘toys’ or ‘games’, but could be anything ranging from video games to social activities, learned or improvised, explicit or implicit (say, between playing football and plotting a rebellion). Thus, amusement became detached from the everyday to the optimised. Boy—how my ears would perk up, and how my heart would leap at the mere sound of the right word, not unlike a pet dog wagging its tail at the sound of the word ‘fetch’! By then, it was no longer amusement that was eternal, it was boredom that was eternal. Amusement served as its only alleviation. ‘Fun and games’ were my spiritual refuge. If someone had posed the ultimate question to me back then, I would have said enthusiastically that they were the only things that truly justified living. Of course, I would say so with full innocence, for I would not grasp the gravity of such a statement, and I would not draw any further conclusions from it. (Camus’s chief concern of suicide was certainly not on the cards.)
Ah—I myself have fond memories of my amusements through the years. In primary school, I recall passing the hours in the classroom with a classmate, swiping pencils on an exercise book with a hand-drawn football field, with each swipe of the pencil demarcating passes or shots at goal; or, other times we would be flipping erasers, and I would try to flip mine on top of my opponents’. Even when the teacher commanded our attention, I would maintain my own personal amusement out of being the class clown, at most times being on guard to quip with a perfectly-timed remark. Then, there was this girl who sat behind me in fourth or fifth grade, with whom I fondly remember bonding over crossword puzzles. I chuckle at this now, but I remember her excitedly guessing the answer to a set of empty blocks—I believe she said ‘Carrie Underwood’, the American Idol of 2005. She had a smile that seemed to light up the whole world. As we grew in closeness, so did the magnetic pull that emanated from her, which mysteriously pulled all of my attention to her. (It was only too many years after that she first admitted the sentiments were mutual, and we shared a nice laugh about it.)
Now, two decades after, this same impulse for amusement still remains. It has taken on all sorts of different forms, but its vital essence remains the same. Where I once would have frothed at the prospect of playing the strategy game Age of Empires 2 or badminton with my brother at the front gate of our home for a full day, I would now baulk at the thought of doing the same for more than a few hours. Why is this? It is certainly not because of those white lies that adults love to mindlessly repeat with each other3—the reason being that we (unfortunately) have to work, or that we (unfortunately) have “adulting” to attend to. That is hardly true. You see, we have not stopped playing games at all—in the same way we have not quite outgrown our cartoon-watching selves! Our horizon of play has only widened in accordance to the dance of life’s stages and the imperative (tyranny) of the crowd. Hence, as one matures, there arises a constantly-evolving ecology of amusements, with certain games proving over time to be richer and more rewarding, and others proving poorer and more punishing, all while the allowance of time remains just as finite.4
Indeed, it is not that a noble action is a necessary evil, a total sacrifice of gratification for the sake of some ungratifiable thing, woefully for the soul damned to desire such things in the first place! It is rather that there is a higher kind of gratification at stake—a kind more elusive, and much less obvious to the young mind. Inquirer, see how you are gripped to play all these grown-up games, these complex and demanding, but equally all the more stimulating and rich games—be it the contest of greatness, the games of nobility, of human relations (friendship, love, sex, family), and so on. This is why it is acceptable to call these preoccupations ‘grown-up games’ (unironically) even if they genuinely take on the appearance of sacrifice and labour. They are still very much games, because they maintain the same functional relation to the self, to the adult as to the child: an antidote to boredom.
…
At this point, I can return to where I last left off my deliberation. For it is around this stage of life that my sporadic and progressively-evolving flow of amusements (and the eternal boredom it sought to alleviate) was disrupted by another event. Amidst my spontaneous travelling from one amusement to another, from activity to activity, project to project, city to city, friend to friend, I became conscious of a certain, droning constant to it all. But this constant did not awaken to itself. No—I was always living in line with my moods that pervaded the immediate—whether I was preoccupied with the joy of listening to a Bill Evans record or air-drumming to a Relient K album, or with the burden of working at an accounting internship I needed but dreaded (and later on with the shock of being fired unsuspectingly from it). I was unwittingly awakened to the constant, not by my various, changing moods—they were all cruising along their usual course—but in a rather non-unique way, gradually (and cataclysmically) as it dawned upon me that the ‘usual course’ was all in vain, that it was all pointless and meaningless, that everything was inexplicable and unjustified.
It is that dissonant sound that sprouts out from the background of the unconscious and expresses itself in a constant, unintelligible droning. It is that sound that was expressed most poignantly by the writer of Ecclesiastes: “Vanity of vanities; all is vanity!” I was delivered into the perplexing, as my life was transfigured into the horror of an unanswerable question. What is the meaning of all this? What am I for? Why am I? What and who am I? It was at this point that I began to inquire out of ghastly anxiety, not about whether this or that made me amused in the moment, as a child. No!—my youthful bliss had long taken leave of me by then. Rather, it was as if I was born again, for the world had become alien again, and I returned to the same terror by which my outwardness began.
Yet in spite of all this, nothing had really changed. My room was still there, along with the desk and art pieces I was fond of. My housemates would still greet me with the same jovial attitude, as would I with them. My family was still a call or message away. But on random occasions, I would sink into my desk chair, retract it backwards, and find myself sunken into a contemplative state of mind, where I would stare at my hands for a good minute or two, wondering why and how the multiplicities had come about, until I was too put off by the weight of my own questioning. I was twenty or twenty-one years of age at this point. The events I experienced reflect that of a certain excerpt from Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus—which I believe was in reference to Shakespeare‘s 'all the world’s a stage’:
It happens that the stage sets collapse. Rising, streetcar, four hours in the office or the factory, meal, streetcar, four hours of work, meal, sleep, and Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday and Saturday according to the same rhythm—this path is easily followed most of the time. But one day the "why" arises and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement. "Begins"—this is important. Weariness comes at the end of the acts of a mechanical life, but at the same time it inaugurates the impulse of consciousness. It awakens consciousness and provokes what follows. What follows is the gradual return into the chain or it is the definitive awakening.
Correspondingly, this event was how and when I first became preoccupied—obsessed—with existential concern, as even the colours around me seemed to take on a more muted and weighted appearance, and my taste in music became more melodramatic. I remained in the world, and it was unequivocally the same world, yet the buzzing, signature sound of angest (angst) reflected the frustration of my own increasing alienation from it. What I called ‘I’, ‘Me’, ‘Myself’ began to be posited in more and more discordance with the world. I was in the world, but I was estranged from the world. I felt abnormal, otherworldly, like I was despairingly apart from reality. Though I had a roof above my head, a country to call home, I felt homeless, for I belonged nowhere. Though I had everything I needed, there was a piercing lack. Though I was living comfortably, I was consumed with uneasiness. Silence and solitude only served to provoke my distress. There was this strong sense of being incomplete, of being fragmented on the most fundamental levels. I felt like something of a cosmic vagabond presiding in a strange, absurd world5.
As a newborn finds itself delivered into the alien world of objects, so I found myself delivered into the alien world of my subjectivity, for though every object around me remained firm in its place, it was my experience of it that became imbued with the haunting air of absurdity; for I saw that at the deepest level, everything was a concrete effect somehow presupposed with my consciousness, which was itself a concrete effect without a concrete cause. The once-familiar world had become alien, it became ghost-like, for it was disconcerting to me and me only. (This is what I now recall as my first encounter with Mystery, the great unknown, to which I had not yet learnt to be receptive. Indeed—for her early intimations were deceptive to the five senses I had learned to rely absolutely on. This sense of alienation was my eternal predicament; it was my lot, my burden to carry, and yet it was also the very essence of the cosmic part of my being—but I had not known that yet.)6
In response, like so many others, I sought recourse in reason. I would wage an intellectual war on my alienation with newfound tools of philosophy and theology, and find some comfort in it (or I would presume so). But the problem did not resolve, for there was always more recourse to be found. There was always more to understand. The (rather over-used) ancient Greek quote rings true: “The more you don’t know, the more you realise you don’t know.” The mysteries, the contradictions, were never resolved. They always outwitted me. In my despair, having been raised a Christian, I would utter a Psalmic prayer of doubt and sorrow—the sort I had repeated over and over again, from day to day—and I would hear nothing back. I would be close to tears each time, as I pleaded and lamented with my whole soul to God, the one I saw to be responsible, being (as I understood) the origin of the mysteries. “Would you reveal yourself to me?” And then I knew there was a more repressed part of me that would shake my fist against God, “Why would you not reveal yourself to me like you do to the others?” (Ah, the age-old grapple with God over what one thinks is just and what is not!) And the final act proved to be when I was visiting a new church, and the preacher recounted his personal experience of “experiencing God”. I went up to him after his sermon, and, choking back tears, I posed my predicament to him. I keep questioning, I lamented, I keep praying, I keep asking, in full humility and in full desperation. But my divine requests are never entertained.
And why would I not be overcome with despair? These were the mysteries I as a devout Christian fundamentalist had professed to understand. But I obviously did not. How could I say I had faith when, deep down, I had faith in nothing? By ‘nothing’, I am not even referring to the doubt over the ‘nothingness’ of God, I am referring to my doubt over the ‘nothingness’ of everything. The more I questioned, the more my professed understanding was uprooted, and the more my bedrock of everything was uprooted. By my doubt, everything had dissolved in smoke. So did everything I knew, and everything I was. One could say, I found myself in the pit of an all-consuming scepticism, the kind Descartes was all too familiar with. Doubt was the unstoppable force, and I was the immovable object. Their meeting point was the beginning of my angst. Even though I had ample things to do, with the abundance of friendships I had and all the passion projects I could build, I was confronted over and over again with the frustration, and humiliation, of the perplexing. Studying alone in Melbourne, away from my family and friends, did not help my case. In any case, it was only an accelerant for my angst, for I had to face the trials and tribulations of silence and solitude much more often.
As to that preacher I had approached in full humility and desperation, the only answer I got was precisely what any person would expect. That it was ‘all part of the journey’, he said. That my imperative was to ‘keep praying and to keep knocking’, he said. I left wanting, without so much as a tinge of comfort or reassurance. Rather uninsightful, I thought. But that was the beginning of a turn in my arc, for it was the beginning of my slow, gradual process of resigning to my predicament. And it was a resignation not unlike that of Jonah, who resigned to his own predicament while he was out at sea: resigning against the confronting of his inner separation with fists and knives, and against the overzealous confronting of my soul’s being apart from the cosmic unity it so desires in all ineffability (or as it manifested rather simplistically back then, in my neediness for a marvellous experience of God). For I discovered that in my alienation, there was another dimension. It was not only a scream of terror at the irrationality of the universe, for it also contained within it a certain calling or a prompt. My approach had been logical, considering my circumstances—but misguided. Being is perplexing, because it is a concrete effect without a concrete cause, yet resolution was not to be found in radically unearthing its cause. Religious apologetics, science—reasoning—were not the right recourse. That was merely my overcorrection from under-narration to over-narration, perhaps also a figment of the masculine neediness to understand and to explain (mansplain) everything. But Kierkegaard offers an answer, as per his often-quoted phrase: “Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.”
Life will never be understood, and perhaps it was never meant to be understood in the first place; no—in that sense, Camus was right in saying “This world in itself is not reasonable, that is all that can be said”. Inquirer, you would have noticed this negation to be the beating heart of my existential letters by now. For life, despite its severe inexplicabilities, is not for its cause to be reasoned, but an effect to be justified. There is another often-quoted phrase by Kierkegaard that pertains to this: “Life can only be understood by looking backward; but it must be lived looking forward”. My angst was founded in the initial breakaway of my narration from my action, out of which my inwardness sprung forth, but it is to be resolved in a just re-mediation of narration and action. I have only to embrace the reality of my existence as axiomatic to myself, as being eternally valid in its own right. That is, I have life, I have been geworfen (thrown) into my life, and that is all that can be said. I am my life. Even if I somehow took on the ‘definitive’ attributes of another, my ‘self’ is in my experience that remains absolute to me. My self-conception is of my ‘pure particularity’. This gradually cured me of my all-consuming doubt, my bout with the sickness known as ‘Cartesian scepticism’, for then the absurd thought experiments and ‘what if’s ceased to bear any cause for concern7. Once again, “this world in itself is not reasonable, that is all that can be said”.
With this, I realised my infinite freedom to narrate and act. Everything was up to me, for ‘I’ was now axiomatic, beyond argumentation, and so was the universe along with it (if you recall my earlier argument in favour of interpreting reality solipsistically, though not without caveats). Yet ironically, it was also this infinite freedom that lay at the origins of my angst. What in the heavens was I to do? How am I to narrate, and how am I to act, and how am I to do justice to both? Kierkegaard, again, was supreme in his lucidity and understanding of the psychical realities; as he incisively deemed this phenomenon, the ‘dizziness of freedom’—and I can also interpret this to be the (unconscious) grounds of the breakaway of my narration from my action, for I was so destabilised by the dizzying multiplicity before me that my capacity to narrate and act was paralysed.
And so I gradually emerged from the pit of despair, from being trapped underwater, beneath the constant, violent crashing of waves. The whale spat me out onto dry land. My ultimate concerns had evolved. Life was no longer an impossible question, for I had resolved it by the revelation that it was beyond question, that it was beyond the shadow of a doubt, effectively the point of departure. My concerns evolved into the justification of life—concerning the justness of my action and narration. Am I doing justice to my life? What is life demanding of me? What does the cosmic demand of me; where is my Nineveh? Otherwise, what was the point of living? I found myself down a line of inquiry not dissimilar to Camus’:
There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest—whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories—comes afterwards. These are games; one must first answer.
No one is born into this alien world of subjectivity fully acquainted. But once one has gone through the trials, one realises as I and many others have: that there are no amusements more rewarding and rich than the very justification of life itself. At this point, my life ceased to be the sum of amusements as it was in my childhood and youth, for life itself had been transfigured into a great Project—a cosmic project, a project of projects. It was an exercise of my freedom to narrate and act, and my imperative was ultimately to do justice to that freedom, to be in a state of synchronicity with the demands of reality’s mysterious courts. And this is most certainly not a phenomenon unique to me alone—for it is a freedom born of the dialectic between nature and the cosmic that constitutes each one of our souls. This phenomenon is, as Kierkegaard describes, “the most abstract thing of all which yet, at the same time, is the most concrete thing of all”.
Inquirer, it is precisely out of the infinite wellspring of my existential concern—that I feel the necessity of writing all of this. For as much as I write this for you, inquirer, I write this also for my own sake, to do justice to what life has demanded of me, which is to write about how I have come to see the world, to write about how I have been and where I have come, to present an eternal tribute unto life itself. Yes—everything you are reading here is the labour of my own, personal existential Project.
Till next time,
Euwyn
Needless to say, memory does not carry me this far back. But it squares up with everything I know.
By the grace of God, all my basic needs were met by my most wonderful parents, for whom I am eternally grateful. My deliberation here ignores attraction and repulsion, traumatic experiences, and the love, security, and basic care (or lack thereof) necessary for development.
When those excuses of “having to work” or “having to attend to something” are not merely cover-ups for passing up on uninteresting invitations, they are well-meaning white lies, usually accompanied by language such as ‘delayed gratification’, a technique I know parents are fond of employing with their kids in order to promote in them the virtues of nobility and sacrifice. I would understand if such language is the result of simplifying timeless concepts for the young, but I have found that we ourselves, all too often, do not know the differences between the common language we espouse and what is true.
Of course, not everyone grows up, a phenomenon perhaps most common in the male sex. Hence, the category of the ‘man-child’.
Having been brought up fundamentally religious, as the son of a Pastor and church founder, I was under the impression that I was well-acquainted with such matters.
I suspect I will be criticised by some lovers of the present, so to speak, for paying too much heed to the mystical. But I doubt this is a false sense or an illusion as they would say. I believe wholeheartedly that, at core, we are otherworldly beings. It is by this otherworldliness that I can declare with confidence, as C.S. Lewis did, that the only logical explanation for our cosmic longings was that ‘I was made for another world’. But now, perhaps it is not the smartest thing for me to appeal to a radically Christian writer. Now then, even the atheist-absurdist Camus, the man who famously wished to ‘live without appeal to the incomprehensible’, acknowledged this same predisposition in The Myth of Sisyphus: “If I were a tree among trees, a cat among animals, this life would have a meaning, or rather this problem would not arise, for I should belong to this world”. It is precisely by our innate comprehension of this break between the natural and the cosmic—by our default being in nature against eventually awakening into the cosmic (and all the emptiness and nostalgia that comes with it)—that I am allowed to pose what I am positing here with utter seriousness, without being posted immediately into a psychiatric ward.
Now, I acknowledge this is not so simple as a ‘matter of choice’. I will expound on the framing that led me to this in a later chapter.