Finding a Form

by William H. Gass

  Descartes (we discover) has his own state of nature, only the nature he is interested in is that of the mind. Once upon a time, there was a thought so clear and pure and undirected, it could be taken as indubitably true. It was not—this thought—a “Let there be light” but a “Let there be me.” Descartes’s paradise was also threatened by an evil demon; however, unlike frail Eve, who ate an apple from the tree of knowledge, Descartes became the apple of his own “I.” He imagined away his body, so as to be free of the distractions of perception. Repeating Plato, he released himself from the diseases of desire and the irrational tyranny of passion so he might move only as the mind moves, step by step down no doubt golden stairs from the highest heaven of axiomatic truth to the most distant and particular conclusions that mark the proper extent and boundaries of its realm.

  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.

  NATURE, CULTURE, AND COSMOS

  Let 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 stri
ke 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.

  And for that part of Religion, which consisteth in opinions concerning the nature of Powers Invisible, there is almost nothing that has a name, that has not been esteemed amongst the Gentiles, in one place or another, a God, or Divell; or by their Poets feigned to be inanimated, inhabited, or possessed by some Spirit or other.

  The unformed matter of the World, was a God, by the name of Chaos.

  The Heaven, the Ocean, the Planets, the Fire, the Earth, the Winds, were so many Gods.

  Men, Women, a Bird, a Crocodile, a Calf, a Dogge, a Snake, an Onion, a Leeke, Deified. Besides, that they filled almost all places, with spirits called Daemons: the plains, with Pan, and Panises, or Satyres; the Woods, with Fawnes, and Nymphs; the Sea, with Tritons, and other Nymphs; every River and Fountayn, with a Ghost of his name, and with Nymphs; every house with its Lares, or Familiars; every man, with his Genius; Hell, with Ghosts, and spirituall Officers, as Charon, Cerberus, and the Furies; and in the night time, all places with Larvae, Lemures, Ghosts of men deceased, and a whole kingdome of Fayries, and Bugbears. They have also ascribed Divinity, and built Temples to meer Accidents, and Qualities; such as are Time, Night, Day, Peace, Concord, Love, Contention, Vertue, Honour, Health, Rust, Fever, and the like; which when they prayed for, or against, they prayed to, as if there were Ghosts of these names hanging over their heads, and letting fall, or withholding that Good, or Evill, for, or against which they prayed. They invoked also their own Wit, by the name of Muses; their own Ignorance, by the name of Fortune; their own Lust, by the name of Cupid; their own Rage, by the name Furies; their own privy members by the name of Priapus; and attributed their pollutions, to Incubi, and Succubae: insomuch as there was nothing, which a Poet could introduce as a person in his Poem, which they did not make either a God, or a Divel. [Leviathan, Pt. I, Ch. 12.]

  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.

  We frequently apologize for mankind’s infatuation with the opera of ideas by pointing out how desperately we all require illusions: firstly of our lovers about ourselves, and for ourselves concerning them, while privately we trouble or amuse our inner eye by assuming the roles of phantoms. Without our myths, we say, we could not create or preserve the social order; we could not enable others, of course weaker than we, to establish an identity and choose wise goals. We need belief to bind us together a little better than baseball, and form a community of expectation that exceeds the lottery. How else could we persuade people to make the necessary sacrifices on occasion or daily to endure the unendurable. So we shall surround perhaps a poisoned well with legends of eternal youth, and lend to otherwise futile lives both hope and meaning. Before us all, there is the same great black hole in the ground, a yawning hollow, the boredom of the earth for our Being. We simply must erect a protective fence in front of this abyss.

  The earth reflects this abyss in the night sky, so there we shall imagine heaven peeking warmly through the stars; there we shall construct our most glamorous confusions, cosmologies which defy the world’s demise, and put Nature in a cage of words.

  One virtue of Giambattista Vico’s theory of history, at any rate according to the reading of his compatriot Benedetto Croce, is that it carefully separates material history, with its simple chronology, its routine of wars, plagues, earthquakes, pogroms, tyrannies, and famines, from that which represents the innermost movement of the human mind, and every invention of the human spirit. That is, over against a human history written as if it consisted of physical events in that realm I’ve called Nature, Vico places a history of culture. Language, of course, is the principal shaper of this cultural history. It is a history which advances as language advance
s, especially as it passes from that period when men gestured their desires and danced their desperations, through a time when they blazoned them on walls and shields and standards, wore totems like skins and skins like totems, and invented a language of tribal logos very much as our designers do now for Ford and General Motors (that far has the word logos fallen since God first said: “Licht und macht schnell!”), to the day they howled a vowel and growled a consonant and exchanged real caves for Plato’s.

  I sometimes think that Hobbes, Spinoza, and Freud were right. Inertia is the one real law. Sometimes called preservation, sometimes called equilibrium, sometimes called do-nothing. We’d stay in bed if someone would feed us. And we leave home looking back. Behind us are the soon-to-be-consummated tragedies of domesticity, and their queens and consorts: Medea, Electra, Clytemnestra, Antigone, and the rest; before us are the epics of the Iliad and the Aeneid; action and interrogation alternate; but while we swing between these poles of departure and return, reluctant change and unchanging reluctance, the rope tightens around our neck.

  How beautifully Joyce pictures it in his brief tale of the prankquean, a tale that capsulates Vico’s eternal returns and the cycles of Joyce’s own book, the cycles that turn round like Beckett’s heroes will on their broken wheels, for we can wait for the end of our world anywhere now, any nearby bench will atomize as well as any wall, meadow, or church. We can begin to bleed from our nose and eyes while in or out of bed. We can be raped and riddled in a foreign country or on our own front porch. This borrowed cosmology, which no longer, in the Christian manner, imagines History as the shortest distance between our first Fall and our final Redemption; that is, as the marked accretions of Time, the crowding together of events that then darken it and make it palpable the way points may be imagined queuing in front of the Future, as if it were selling tickets, to compose a sentence of some length, if doubtful significance. The Christian line of Time resembles the line of Life, for both begin with a birth, descend unevenly toward death, and end, for the true believer, again, in a move which takes them out of the play, saves them from oblivion, and saves History from overcrowding.