Beyond Meaning
(The One-Millionth Part)
ERIC BRUENNER
I.
W
hat are we then but fishermen and taxidermists? What do we not
receive that isn’t sent by fate in a bulrush basket?
It would be a mistake to consider consciousness as anything less than a
continuous, sustained artistry. Our reality is an open wound stitched closed, a
bridge built between two misty shores. The movement of the mind is just this
stitching, this bridging.
Virginia Woolf shows us how we are fishermen. “Macalister’s boy took
one of the fish and cut a square out of its side to bait his hook with. The mutilated body (it was still alive) was thrown back into the sea” (180). Macalister’s
boy is the mind. The fish could be innumerable things. The fish could be the
scent delivered on the breeze, the fish could be the sun on his face, the fish
could be the taste of salt on his skin, the fish could be a memory. When he
cuts a square from the side of the fish he literally picks and chooses. He picks
a piece of the fish and removes it from the rest. He focuses on certain aspects
of the scent, of the sun, of the salt on his tongue. The way he uses the bait is
this: to catch ever more fish. The scent on the breeze has caught him a recollection of his mother. The sun on his face reminds him of the deserts he
wishes to visit. The taste of salt on his skin brings him to last night’s beef. In
‘reality’ there is no relation between these things. A wound has been stitched
closed, shores have been joined, by the mind.
This is how we are taxidermists, also. We can only keep what has been
stuffed, frozen in time. We are taxidermists in this way too: to possess something in the mind, we must first kill it. Understanding is just another form of
violence. A firm belief then, is the cessation of motion. All our deepest convictions are just so many ridiculous beavers on a mantelpiece. They are certainly references to real beavers, somewhere, foraging and making love
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beneath the delicious light of a bone white moon—but they are decidedly not
those beavers. Thought is the taxidermy of reality in this way. Everything we
possess is only a dead reference. Even the freshest kill, the most recently formulated concept, points us to something no longer in existence. To live in the
moment means always to have the hands covered in blood.
Living then is nothing if not something endlessly dangerous. Again,
Woolf reminds us: “What was it then? What did it mean? Could things thrust
their hands up and grip one; could the blade cut; the fist grasp? Was there no
safety? No learning by heart the ways of the world? No guide, no shelter, but
all was miracle, and leaping from the pinnacle of a tower into the air? Could
it be, even for elderly people, that this was life?” (180).
Safety then would be learning by heart the ways of the world. Safety is having a guide, having a shelter. Safety would be the certainty that the images of
our minds correspond to the dancing lights before our eyes. Safety is knowing whether or not this is, or could be, the case.
In this light we must consider science (besides as a compulsion, or senseless joy) as another more clever form of vanity and insecurity. We must consider science, and most ‘progress,’ simply as an attempt to smooth over the
delightful variables of a very fickle universe. Such charming accidents as
engine failure and the blooming of tumors late in life are given an origin, a
cause and even remedies in case they cannot be avoided. Above all, science
aims to give us a world we can agree upon.
Woolf tells us though that no such world exists and that there is no common reference. “And looking up, [Mrs. Ramsay] saw above the thin trees the
first pulse of the full-throbbing star, and wanted to make her husband look at
it; for the sight gave her such keen pleasure. But she stopped herself. He
never looked at things. If he did, all he would say would be, Poor little world,
with one of his sighs” (71). She tells us that observing the same phenomenon,
“the first pulse of a full throbbing star,” two people who are ostensibly in love
and have been married for decades will not (cannot) see the same thing. To
return to a metaphor: even coming upon the same phenomenon (catching the
same fish!) Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay will be moved to different places (cutting
different chunks of the flesh!).
In this way though, life becomes only a leaping into thin air. It is a leaping into thin air because there is no longer a truth to be told. Life as it is
becomes a miracle. It is a miracle because it is unsure, because it defies constancy. There is no certainty anywhere, but there is a growing old, there is
music.
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What is the heaviest question? The heaviest question is whether our
minds make an arbitrary sense out of utter chaos or whether our minds interpret a pre-existent but endlessly complex order. The lightest question is
whether the answer means anything at all.
I do not believe in opposites. For instance, what is the opposite of a small
mole just beneath the collarbone of a beautiful woman? Also—what is the
opposite of ice cubes clinking pleasantly in a gin and tonic, or the majestic
grazing of a very large triceratops? There are answers—it is an unfortunate
condition of the human experience that there are always answers—but they
are yours and not mine. This is because being conscious is not just the act of
wending one’s way between poles, but creating poles by this wending. We
may consider writing—an exaggerated and public form of consciousness—as
the energy that results from this sort of juxtaposition of two disparate objects,
and the route created from one to the other.
Many times we call this sort of product a story, and mistake it for an
answer. A story, even a very bad one, can never be an answer. Here are three
such non-answers of my own.
One: It’s very possible I survived a cunning attempt on my life when I was
four years old. It was sheer luck, not least because at that age one rarely suspects assassination in the sublime light of a California early morning—especially not from one’s own eight-year-old brother.
The way it happened was fairly simple. I had never swum without the
crutches of adult supervision and over-inflated water wings that left red marks
on my fat arms. By all accounts, I could not swim without these aids. Deep
ends, at this time, were as foreign and treacherous to me as the dark streets of
Manhattan.
After we had gazed some time at the distant mountains, and then thwarted the grand projects of angry red ants, my brother suggested a swim. The
plan would have made me nervous but for a warm breeze that seemed to blow
from nowhere in particular. I am tempted to say ‘from the west,’ but this is
preposterous. I had no knowledge of the cardinal points at such a tender age.
I did not protest when he led me over to the edge of my grandfather’s
pool, nor when he bade me imitate him testing the water with one dangling
foot. I did not protest either when he pushed me in with both hands from
behind. It is very difficult to protest gravity—she is both an insistent and persuasive mistress. Even at that age, with my many dreams of flight still jealously guarded, I did not resist. Mostly I just fell.
Surfacing, I found my natural buoyancy to be a joy. I also found the look
of amazement, the first seeds of admiration I would ever plant in my older
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brother, to be a joy. He jumped in also. We played until the sun rose significantly and my parents emerged onto the patio, shocked. They had been
asleep—too far removed to have heard any distressed thrashing, or the
screams of my brother.
“I just taught him how to swim,” he told them.
This is absolutely correct. To this day, I let everyone know: my older
brother taught me how to swim.
Two: “I am not just for fucking.”
She was informing me, as well as the rest of Union Square. People began
to turn their heads as she screamed it again. Diligent, aggressive males began
to roll up their sleeves, ready to pummel the awful brute I was. I put up my
hands to suggest a vague surrender and communicate my confusion. I wasn’t
sure who had suggested such a vulgar theory to her, but I meant this gesture
to imply that we could go find this person together, perhaps chain him to a
radiator somewhere and beat remorse and chivalry out of him with hoses,
wrenches even!
I began to rethink this proposition as it became clear: she was talking
about me. We had been to countless dinners and kissed often in the rain. We
had regressed wonderfully and played videogames, watched cartoons. She
even taught me how to rollerblade. We smoked cigarettes together sometimes, just before dawn.
Not this evening though. This evening I was subject and had made her
object, and then she wanted to be held and taken through the deep night, and
we stopped at a deli and I ate a little though she had nothing and cried very
much.
Shortly afterwards I sent her a letter in the most legalistic language I
could muster. I stressed that, because of my deep respect for her—no, for us—
I thought it advisable that we maintain minimal contact. I may have specified
minute intervals and an open-door policy. Frankly it’s hazy. I divided up our
life. She could keep our friends and also our favorite bars and even my love.
I only kept myself, which was a point of contention.
I have not spoken to her since, though sometimes I see her in parks, and
her dark skin is the most beautiful thing there ever was.
Three: I believe in small messages but that sometimes the universe doesn’t care to be subtle and sends big ones. On the evening I found out my
grandfather had died, I broke out of my prep school dorm room and took to
wandering about the night, looking for answers beneath lights that scientists
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insist have mostly burned out long ago. Over the course of my walk I began
to realize that I was not alone. To my right and left were several deer, moving
silently beside me.
Frankly I was a little bit disappointed. I could have dealt with a shooting
star, or even a lone crow flying across the full moon. The deer seemed to be
a little much.
I tried though, to accept the gift of the deer with grace. They stayed with
me as I made my way down to the lake. It was getting colder and colder, especially with the wind coming off the water, which stung my wet cheeks. I
reached the small road that separated our campus from the shore and the
water. The deer crossed it, leaving me. I deliberated there for a long time.
Afraid of the security guards who patrolled along the path, I watched my
breath.
I was deeply ashamed to discover that respect for rules could restrain me
even then, in the depths of a very serious grief. I thought of my grandfather,
how little I had really known him. He was often just a voice from upstairs, or
the smell of scotch and salt, also summer time and very large tomatoes.
I tensed, and tried to conceal myself when I thought I heard footsteps. It
was only water lapping against sand. I stole across the road quickly then. I
grabbed a handful of earth from the other side before running back to my
room.
II.
It is never a good idea to let all of one’s cats out of the bag. Their endless
squirming beneath the fabric, their frantic clawing, is what we call the essay.
In the spirit of Milan Kundera, I will let all my cats free. Not because it is
unbearable to be a prisoner, but because it is unbearable to be a warden. The
duty of guarding, of having a mission, seems simply too heavy.
Here is my first cat: Kundera posits that we are all ultimately alone, surrounded by an impenetrable gap. We may also define this gap (the one-millionth part Tomas seeks in his conquests) as personality, individuality, possibly even as perspective. This is the unbearable lightness then: not just a lack
of repetition anywhere, but such infinite variations that we are powerless to
communicate any of our experiences, or to understand those of another—
even the ‘closest’ other. This is also the unbearable lightness: there is no
closeness anywhere, except in the mutual recognition of this fate.
Here is my second cat: The last bit of dialogue in the novel, Tomas’s last
words (“I have no mission. No one has. And it’s a terrific relief to realize
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you’re free, free of all missions”) are not just a submission to this fate—they
are a release through this fate (313). The distinction is a matter of life or
death. To submit to an idea, to a cruel mother, to anything is to give up one’s
own world before the terrible potency of another. It is a change without
movement. Suffice it to say, Tomas does not submit. When Tomas speaks of
freedom, he is acknowledging the impossibility of direction, of ranking, in a
universe that never spits out the same reality twice—not even for an instant.
Here is yet another cat: Kundera’s sadness as form implies a top-down
view. Happiness as content implies a bottom-up view. Life, as a top-down
affair, is not complicated. People pursue pleasure and avoid pain and attempt
to consume enough calories to live so that they can procreate before death.
An undeniably sensible top-down view also precludes the meaning or pleasures of a bottom-up perspective. For example, the deep contentment of seeing very old friends again or emerging into the sun from cold water.
Not even the final cat: knowing all of this, we know nothing. We must be
open to the idea that answers are the ultimate form of indignity to our questions and that the truth has never yet stood still.
When I speak of interminable gaps and ultimate solitude, I refer only to
Kundera’s one-millionth part, which he discusses in terms of Tomas’s fascination with it: “Tomas was obsessed by the desire to discover and appropriate
that one-millionth part; he saw it as the core of his obsession. He was not
obsessed with women; he was obsessed with what in each of them is unimaginable, obsessed, in other words, with the one-millionth part that makes a
woman dissimilar to others of her sex” (200).
The interminable gap that cannot be bridged, the one-millionth part that
surrounds and isolates us is the thin membrane through which we view the
world. It is the membrane through which you see a lamp as a symbol of sorrow because it reminds you of a lost relative, and through which I see a symbol of indigestion because I once ate old cold-cuts beneath a similar glow.
To “appropriate that one-millionth part” would be to come to safety, to
arrive at a common reference point where our words could refer to mutually
shared objects: not just the physical objects of sight but the immensely more
significant emotional objects of the mind. To “appropriate that one-millionth
part” of another would be to learn their deepest language, to speak to them
in unspeakable tongues, to actually know what one truly meant when she
spoke of love.
Like Woolf, Kundera concludes that there is no safety anywhere. All we
have is a desperate leaping into thin air. “But deep down [Sabina] said to herself, Franz may be strong, but his strength is directed outward; when it comes
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to the people he lives with, the people he loves, he’s weak. Franz’s weakness is
called goodness. . . . There are things that can be accomplished only by violence. Physical love is unthinkable without violence” (111). The unbearable
lightness is this also: we are alone and unknowable, even to ourselves.
This is how we are alone and unknowable: both lovers witness Franz’s
strength. For Franz his strength is pride, the ability to protect, something for
which to be loved. For Sabina this strength is weakness, the reason why she
knows she cannot love him.
Submission to this fated ignorance, versus its acceptance, is the difference
between losing an argument and having an epiphany. Of course, one comes
from ‘outside’—it is forced upon us—and the other results from the ‘natural’
progression of our own mind. These are immature distinctions, however.
Draw the line where the world ends and your mind begins. If this membrane
isn’t porous, and the contents of your brain arise simply of their own accord—
without influence—this is no different from sheer randomness. We can call it
fortuity as well. This is a digression, unfortunately. The main thing is submission: ultimately it is the acceptance of a false proposition. It is the belief (and
yes, it often must be forced) in a theory that does not match the results of our
own experiments.
Acceptance is not only to feel in one’s intestines that something is so, but
to understand that it could be no other way and rejoice in this fact.
“The sadness meant: we are at the last station. The happiness meant: we
are together. The sadness was form, the happiness content. Happiness filled
the space of sadness” (Kundera 314). Form is our biology, our psychology.
Form is our average life-span, our unrelenting drives—it is the raw ingredients (the rocks and banks and the water). Content is laughter and lungs that
burn from running in autumn; content is sitting on a dock in the late afternoon—content is the whole as more than the sum of the parts; it is the parts
in motion (the ripple in the stream). A top-down view considers only form:
the city as a hive, man as an intersection of atoms. A bottom-up view considers only content: the plaintive notes of a homeless saxophonist, children sledding. Neither view is wrong—in fact each is only made possible by the other.
Paradoxically each also precludes the other. It is impossible to hold both
views at the same time.
We are all then situated like Conrad’s Heyst. “An island is but the top of
a mountain. Axel Heyst, perched on it immovably, was surrounded, instead of
by the imponderable stormy and transparent ocean of air merging into infinity, by a tepid, shallow sea; a passionless offshoot of the great waters which
embrace the continents of this globe” (57). This is how we are alone also, not
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just because we cannot truly know another, but because we are trapped within ourselves. We are all perched at the tops of our own islands. We are alone
in this way too—we are each our own highest point, ends in ourselves.
This gap is ultimately the product of a top-down view, of life as form: “If
Czech history could be repeated, we should of course find it desirable to test
the other possibility each time and compare the results. Without such an
experiment, all considerations of this kind remain a game of hypotheses.
Einmal ist keinmal. What happens but once might as well not have happened
at all” (Kundera 223). Life, existence, can perhaps be best defined negatively—as the absence of repetition, even for a moment. Or conversely we may
define life, existence, as only movement without cessation.
We may draw several grim conclusions from this fact. The top-down
view is the only accurate one. We are, as a result, eternally alone. All our communication, all our unions are mere coincidence—on a cosmic scale no different from a car wreck or the bonding of hydrogen atoms. Even to speak of
accidents becomes nonsensical, for this would imply that somewhere there
were things that happen on purpose.
All values and all aims then must be abandoned. Or zealously adhered to,
it doesn’t matter. It is ‘a game of hypotheses.’ There can be no ‘correct’ path
without experiments and tests to verify one. In a life built without a rewind
button, these experiments can never exist (even if there were a rewind button,
how could we rank our various results?). This is what it means to give up
directions: to accept the fact that form precludes destinations even while it
produces motion. There is an imagination, though it only exists because of
and within the biological framework of neurons and synapses.
This situation seems to make ‘meaning’ impossible. This impossibility is
inconsequential, as the search for a ‘meaning’ to existence is an absurdity
leading to a false proposition. What meaning could possibly satisfy us? The
significance of this search is that it is really a search for happiness.
Specifically, the search for a universal meaning is the search for a direction
that can satisfy, a place that can be reached, above all a path that can be repeated without end. “That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing
for repetition” (Kundera 298).
The only meaning then is artifice, is the one we create. We have come
back to the mind. Meaning is the bridging, the stitching. This is not to say
that the meaning of life is to bridge, to stitch. This is the second subtle distinction that is a matter of life or death. The second sentence states that there
is a meaning to the heartbeats we have been given and that meaning is the
movement of our mind—that the movement of our mind is the purpose of
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our life. The first sentence says that what we call meaning is the movement of
the mind from one point to another. It is the joining of these two points by
the mind. To say life has meaning is to say that these two points were joined
before the mind got there, that it just followed a path. To say this movement
is the meaning is to say that each path is created as we travel it. To go beyond
meaning is to recognize that these ‘alternatives’ are one and the same.
Letting go of some supreme agency that administers absolutes and lightning bolts—a supreme agency that has laid down a path—we may find curiously enough, that happiness still exists. In other words, the top-down view
has not destroyed the bottom-up view. Even though we are alone, with no
common language, conversations do still occur, whiskey warms the belly, and
we may still ride bikes down steep hills in the summer time. These things do
not ‘matter,’ cannot be weighed, but even if they could what would this mean?
Experientially, it would alter nothing.
As a result, we must ‘give up directions.’ We must also give up missions.
There can be no missions in a world that is shifting constantly, in a life that
will not be remembered past a few generations: “If rejection and privilege are
one and the same, if there is no difference between the sublime and the paltry, if the Son of God can undergo judgment for shit, then human existence
loses its dimensions and becomes unbearably light. When Stalin’s son ran up
to the electrified wire and hurled his body at it, the fence was like the pan of
a scales sticking pitifully up in the air, lifted by the infinite lightness of a world
that has lost its dimensions” (Kundera 244).
This is far from a nihilistic view: our moments matter but only in the most
personal context. Moreover, the most personal context is all we ever possess.
Measuring ourselves against expectation, against duty, is futile. Failure, after
all, is only possible within a context. It is possible to fail at a specific task (to
lose a ball game, to make love poorly), or even to ‘fail ourselves.’ Failure then,
is really an inability to conform to a certain definition, to certain standards—
it is to mean something different than expected. Kundera gives us a world without destinations, definitions, or expectations (a world where “there is no difference between the sublime and the paltry”) against which to fail (244).
Kundera takes away the context, and with it failure. He asks us: ‘what could
be left?’ He answers for us: ‘everything.’
Freeing all our cats, we have become free ourselves. Freedom though, is
a form of nothingness. Conrad knows this in Victory, lays it down as the last
words of his novel: “Davidson took out his handkerchief to wipe the perspiration off his forehead. ‘And then, your Excellency, I went away. There was
nothing to be done there.’ ‘Clearly,’ assented the Excellency. Davidson,
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thoughtful, seemed to weigh the matter in his mind, and then murmured with
placid sadness: ‘Nothing!’” (385)
We find Davidson at the end of the tale, absolved from all duties:
Heyst—his great friend—and all the villains on the island dead or gone. The
Nothing! that Conrad lets end the book is our Nothing! as well. We are left
with nothing to be done, nothing to be gained. We are left with a life free
from heroes or villains, a life without fixed poles. If life can no longer be
measured, or even directed—if it is beyond weight and rank—what is it?
Above all it is instinct—it is the instinct of motion. It is the instinct of meaning becoming: of creating the path as we tread it.
This Nothing! is the form, our moments the content. This Nothing! is
the great yawning chasm, the blank canvas, the space into which we pour ourselves. This Nothing! demands only that we live our lives as works of art, that
we live our lives beyond the poles of success and failure. How does a valueless state demand anything? It is form; it presents us with a certain set of conditions such as mortality, or the inherent unknowability of another. All pessimists, aware of these conditions, believe life to be unbearable. They forget
that life is only unbearable in the abstract. To escape the abstract we must
realize that our lives are not our own—that we are an intersection, a one-millionth part in every moment, a song on the breeze. This is how Nothing! can
make a demand of us. In other words, it is unbearably light, and this unbearable nature becomes an imperative. Nothing! is a command; it is the origin of
all our motion.
It is the call urging us beyond meaning.
WORKS CITED
Conrad, Joseph. Victory. London: Penguin, 1963.
Kundera, Milan. The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Trans. Michael H. Heim.
New York: Harper & Row, 1984.
Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. New York: Harcourt, 1955.
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