The Dispossessed

Well, it has been years since I’ve written in earnest like this.  I think the last bunch of posts came out like some long held diarrhea.  Or maybe I’m more manic depressive than I realize.  Anyways, while writing about gestalt, emergence, insanity, leaps and such, I kept thinking back to a book I read years ago.  Well, I found The Dispossessed by Ursurla K. Le Guin at the library and reread it over the last week.  Figured I needed more meat to chew on before I continued spouting off thoughts.  And in the end, I’m really not original, not even all that intelligent.  I might not remember where I heard or read everything, but certain things stick and if I understand the concepts and their interconnection with other ideas that have moved me, I internalize it.  This, I believe, is because my strength is in seeing connections and patterns, even if it’s between animal rights and corporations.  I’ve always been decent at strategy games, because I can see the whole and how the parts need to fit together to achieve a goal.  This is not to say I’m all that organized or systematic in the implementing of strategy.  I really enjoy jigsaw puzzles.  Not that I get the chance all that often, but when I do pull out a 3,000 piece, or sometimes, even our 4,000 piece puzzle, I get this hungry gleam in my eye that not everybody understands.  But there’s a mental state of riding the edge that I can easily slip into while puzzling in earnest.  The most systematic I get is in deciding to put edge (ha ha) pieces together first, or focusing on a color, or a grouping of lines.  I purposely disallow myself from approaching the puzzle in a linear fashion.  In fact, once I’ve seen the top of the box with the picture, I fill it with pieces and then don’t look at the picture any more.  When I see other puzzlers picking up a piece and comparing it to the picture to figure out where it goes, I get downright annoyed.  Irrational and rude, I know, but the one-to-one correlation and linear connections is not what I’m after.  I approach puzzling laterally, in a free association of gestalts.  (I am aware this is also reflected in my free association talking that accompanies an earnest puzzling session.)  After giving myself some loose parameters such as this particular shade of green with yellow fuzzy spots, I then try to ‘unfocus’ my brain.  Sure, take in the details of shape, the details of color, the details of lines or other giveaways, but don’t focus on them.  It might be a little slow going at first, especially with the bigger puzzles, but my mind starts to get momentum and little gestalts start popping out at me faster and faster.  At the height of this mental state, I can be putting in puzzle pieces at a good clip and not even know what specifically triggered me to know what it was that signaled to me why each piece went where it was.  Certainly there is a sense of accomplishment when the puzzle is complete, but what I’m really after and enjoy is the exercising of that mental ability or mental state of the periphery.  Several years ago, I made the connection to soccer.  Before I blew out my knee, I usually played center mid.  My skills were good enough that my teammates had confidence to make me the go to player.  Having a good sense of where my teammates were, I usually could create the space, take it and dish the ball off to the player making the run to goal.  Yes, I had a good sense of the whole, but the connection with puzzling was that I realized I never really focused, in the literal sense, while playing.  While dribbling, you cannot be effective if you focus on where the ball is.  Nor can you know where the other players are.  Somewhere down the line (pun intended) I had learned to play while predominantly using my peripheral vision.  That’s why the joy of playing soccer for me was not purely physical.  Soccer was my art.  Where I could enter that state of mind of suspension, where I constantly held the whole in my mind and not focus on the specifics.  The specifics are there, but like the second dimension, they are just clues to the whole picture.  In that state of peripheral suspension, you are not aware of yourself, your problems, your pain, or your joy.  Of course, you slip in and out of the mental state, but while in it, you are accessing the creative force, that dynamic reality, and riding that edge, you feel alive.  Meditation comes in many forms.

What’s this all got to do with books?   I think what I’m getting at is what I might bring to the table.  When I read good books, I feel very unoriginal.  In writing this blog, or in general, a large part of me questions why I would bother.  It’s all there in Robert Pirsig’s writings.  Certainly all there in Frank Herbert’s and much more that I can’t grasp.  It’s also there in Chesterton, Kierkegaard, Poincare, and certainly Le Guin.  Then, I think, there may be those who don’t see that they are all talking about the same thing, or at least related facets of a larger whole.  Yes, I enjoy the free associating, peripheral mental state that allows me to connect what I see at the heart of other people’s writing, but if I’m blogging, this personal pleasure must not be enough.  I guess I must want to know if others see the connections or if they enjoy having someone point them out.  I guess I’m not all hermit.  So, in light of all that, here are some choice morsels from Le Guin.

Le Guin wrote The Dispossessed in the 70’s.  She may not be the genius that Frank Herbert was, but she is much more personal and she moves me.  In any case, her protagonist is a physicists who is trying to bridge not only becoming and being, dynamic and static, but a culture of community (I’m avoiding the word Communism because of its connotations) and one of capitalism.  

                “Within the strict terms of Simultaneity Theory, succession is not considered as a physically objective phenomenon, but as a subjective one…we think that time ‘passes,’ flows past us, but what if it is we who move forward, from past to future, always discovering the new?  It would be a little like reading a book, you see.  The book is all there, all at once, between its covers.  But if you want to read the story and understand it, you must begin with the first page, and go forward, always in order.  So the universe would be a very great book, and we would be very small readers…”

                “But we don’t experience the universe only successively,” Shevek said.  “Do you never dream, Mr. Dearri?”

                “What’s that got to do with it?”

                “It is only in consciousness, it seems, that we experience time at all.  A little baby has no time; he can’t distance himself from the past and understand how it relates to his present, or plan how his present might relate to his future.  He does not know time passes; he does not understand death.  The unconscious mind of the adult is like that still.  In a dream there is no time, and succession is all changed about, and cause and effect are all mixed together.  In myth and legend there is no time.  What past is it the tale means when it says ‘Once upon a time’?  And so, when the mystic makes the reconnection of his reason and his unconscious, he sees all becoming as one being, and understands the eternal return…”

                “But we’re not babies,” Dearri cut in, “we’re rational men.  Is your Simultaneity some kind of mystical regressivism?”…

                “Maybe you could see it,” he said, “as an effort to strike a balance.  You see, Sequency explains beautifully our sense of linear time, and the evidence of evolution.  It includes creation, and mortality.  But there it stops.  It deals with all that changes, but it cannot explain why things also endure.  It speaks only of the arrow of time—never of the circle of time…”

                “Time goes in cycles, as well as in a line.  A planet revolving; you see?  One cycle, one orbit around the sun, is a year, isn’t it?  And two orbits, two years, and so on.  One can count the orbits endlessly—an observer can.  Indeed such a system is how we count time.  It constitutes the timeteller, the clock.  But within the system, the cycle, where is time?  Where is the beginning or end?  Infinite repetition is an atemporal process.  It must be compared, referred to some other cyclic or noncyclic process, to be seen as temporal.  Well, this if very queer and interesting, you see.  The atoms, you know, have a cyclic motion.  The stable compounds are made of constituents that have a regular, periodic motion relative to one another.  In fact, it is the tiny time-reversible cycles of the atom that give matter enough permanence that evolution is possible.  The little timelessnesses added together make up time.  And then on the big scale, the cosmos: well, you know we think that the whole universe is a cyclic process, an oscillation of expansion and contraction, without any before or after.  Only within each of the great cycles, where we live, only there is there linear time, evolution, change.  So then time has two aspects.  There is the arrow, the running river, without which there is no change, no progress, or direction, or creation.  And there is the circle or the cycle, without which there is chaos, meaningless succession of instants, a world without clocks or seasons or promises.”

                “You can’t assert two contradictory statements about the same thing,” said Dearri, with the calmness of superior knowledge.  “In other words, one of these ‘aspects’ is real, the other’s simply an illusion.”

                “Many physicists have said that,” Shevek assented… “Can one dismiss either being, or becoming, as an illusion?  Becoming without being is meaningless.  Being without becoming is a big bore….If the mind is able to perceive time in both these ways, then a true chronosophy should provide a field in which the relation of the; two aspects or processes of time could be understood.” …

                “But look here,” said Dearri, with ineffable satisfaction in his own keenness, “you just said that in your Simultaneity system there is no past and future, only a sort of eternal present.  So how can you be responsible for the book that’s already written?  All you can do is read it.  There’s no choice, no freedom of action left.”

                “That is the dilemma of determinism.  You are quite right, it is implicit in Simultanist thinking.  But Sequency thinking also has its dilemma.  It is like this, to make a foolish little picture—you are throwing a rock at a tree, and if you are a Simultanist the rock has already hit the tree, and if you are a Sequentist it never can.  So which do you choose?  Maybe you prefer to throw rocks without thinking about it, no choice.  I prefer to make things difficult, and choose both.”

[Being/Becoming.  Static/Dynamic.  Zeno’s paradox.  This shouts out Pirsig and Kierkegaard to me.  The next morsel is one of the best descriptions of the mind acting like a supersaturated solution crystalizing or taking that leap form a smaller rational circle to a larger one.]

                …[Einstein’s] unified field existed, in Cetian physics, but it existed on terms which he might not have been willing to accept; for the velocity of light as a limiting factor had been essential to his great theories.  Both his Theories of Relativity were as beautiful, as valid, and as useful as ever after these centuries, and yet both depended upon a hypothesis that could not be proved true and that could be and had been proved in certain circumstances, false.

                But was not a theory of which all the elements were provably true a simple tautology?  In the region of the unprovable, or even the disprovable, lay the only chance for breaking out of the circle and going ahead.

                In which case, did the unprovability of the hypothesis of real coexistence—the problem which Shevek had been pounding his head against desperately for these last three days, and indeed these last ten years—really matter?

                He had been groping and grabbing after certainty, as if it were something he could possess.  He had been demanding a security, a guarantee, which is not granted, and which, if granted, would become a prison.  By simply assuming the validity of real coexistence he was left free to use the lovely geometries of relativity; and then it would be possible to go ahead.  The next step was perfectly clear.  The coexistence of succession could be handled by a Saeban transformation series; thus approached, successsivity and presence offered no antithesis at all.  The fundamental unity of the Sequency and Simultaneity points of view became plain; the concept of interval served to connect the static and the dynamic aspect of the universe.  How could he have stared at reality for ten years and not seen it?  There would be no trouble at all in going on.  Indeed he had already gone on.  He was there.  He saw all that was to come in this first, seemingly casual glimpse of the method, given him by his understanding of a failure in the distant past.  The wall was down.  The vision was both clear and whole.  What he saw was simple, simpler than anything else.  It was simplicity: and contained in it all complexity, all promise.  It was revelation.  It was the way clear, the way home, the light…

                The moment was gone; he saw it going.  He did not try to hold on to it.  He knew he was part of it, not it of him.  He was in its keeping.

[This last bit moves me.]

                Fulfillment, Shevek thought, is a function of time.  The search for pleasure is circular, repetitive, atemporal.  The variety seeking of the spectator, the thrill hunter, the sexually promiscuous, always ends in the same place.  It has an end.  It comes to the end and has to start over.  It is not a journey and return, but a closed cycle, a locked room, a cell.

                Outside the locked room is the landscape of time, in which the spirit may, with luck and courage, construct the fragile, makeshift, improbable roads and cities of fidelity: a landscape inhabitable by human beings.

                It is not until an act occurs within the landscape of the past and the future that it is a human act.  Loyalty, which asserts the continuity of past and future, binding time into a whole, is the root of human strength; there is no good to be done without it.

                So, looking back on the last four years, Shevek saw them not as wasted, but as part of the edifice that he and Takver were building with their lives.  The thing about working with time, instead of against it, he thought, is that it is not wasted.  Even pain counts.