My One-Note Spew - Proclamations by a Propheteer

Berlin, February 10, 2020

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I’ve long been aware but only recently have defeatedly come to accept and confess that I suck at reasoned argument. What I do is make proclamations. Proclamations do not, for me, depend for their interest on logical back-up. Nor do they seek to invite agreement or disagreement. When I look for even remote counterparts in the arena of proclamation pretty much all I can find are propheteers. I use that word because I don’t like the hubris in ‘prophet’. Propheteers trade in cadences that may carry a mystical sense of perception, but they are not chosen by a deity to be a mouthpiece. Some people turn to them as if they were that but always with ultimately silly or disastrous results. My tribe of propheteers centrally include D.H. Lawrence and Emily Dickinson and Henry James.

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In the hands of these accomplished artists proclamation becomes an ardent plea from the soul to be known and heard. My proclamations are only beginning I think to rise above one note spews. Many of which including this one have surprised even me by their pared-down-to-the-brink-of-idiocy singular message, which is that nothing ultimate can be known. I didn’t realize I had already begun hanging all my intellectual hats and coats in that closet including the ‘saving’ ones of the arts - indeed it seems clear to me that none of even the most pleasurable of creative pursuits can do anything other than distract us from the one seemingly inescapable fact of Being: it is senseless. Meaning can only be manufactured through the manipulation of symbols we ourselves have had to construct to build a system which would give us the means to communicate — a means which because of the more complex level of monkey brain we’d attained was capable of abstract ideation. This meant we could examine memory meticulously, investigate events and feelings for clues about what was likely to happen again, use it as a guide to what might be reasonable to expect in the future, strengthen our powers of anticipation. Many animals lower on the brain-size scale do this too, of course, but as far as we know they don’t manufacture from experience the same complicated illusory schemas which we call Past and Future, or create the illusion we do of time. It’s as if we can’t live without creating an encompassing scaffolding up and down which we climb to hang continually re-patched coverings of concepts we believe (decide) were cosmically preexisting. We are not wrong to do this: it’s our nature to make ‘sense’ in this way, possibly (certainly held to be) essential to our physical and emotional survival. That ‘human nature’ encourages our creativity, generating voluminous fantasies, some of which prod ‘practical’ mechanical inventions, some prodding Art, some prodding elaborate neuroses. Because all of these mental constructs originate from and make use of reactions to our physical senses and hungers, they have an incontrovertible sense to us of actuality. But none of it can transcend the confines of our essentially solipsistic minds. We cannot think except self-regardingly. 

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This closed system of perception is probably fine in many ways. It suggests how and why we create culture, whose innumerable satisfactions surely in the moment requite the desire in our lives for some sense of purpose. But that what they amount to is a great variety of powerful distractions is, I think, not lost on us on the deepest levels — even those distractions powerful enough (love, politics, religion, art, sex, vengeance, patriotism, a sense of mission in one’s work ... etc.) to convince us they offer a cosmic answer to our lives. Effectively, for some people, perhaps they do. 

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But it seems to me one hunger this perceptual system generates which cannot be satisfied may be the source of all anguish: the hunger to know why any of this is happening. We are perhaps existentially cursed with our curiosity: cursed because it seems inevitably to invoke the deepest dark wish inside every living being sentient enough to wonder who and what it is, and why.

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Even as I type these words I find myself rushing into the crowd of naysayers — who feel themselves to be yeasayers — who’ve assembled in angry response to what they take to be my bleak message that we’re all existentially afflicted In the one-note way I assert is the source of all anguish. Why can’t I espouse a deep-soul connection to any of the activities of life that for long moments have given me torrentially inarguable meaning? Drawing strange creatures, singing Cole Porter songs, playing Brahms on the violin, writing proclamations like this? What other solution could I want?

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But I squeeze back out of that crowd. The anguish of Unknowing won’t relent. I’d like to think there’s a kind of beauty to that. But I don’t know that I can. Perhaps I don’t have to find it harrowing. But how not to?

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I’m in Berlin for 12 days. There is a spirit here that answers me in kind. Though not like New York which answers me in toto. Berlin sexualizes anguish. It is extraordinary to feel ‘known’ by a place devoted to doing that. That may be a strange note to end on, but I think it may be the note in this one-note-spew.

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I am half-German after all.