The Intimate
ὁ ἄνθρωπος μικρὸς κόσμος
The first horizon for human action is so small and subtle that we often forget to notice it as we age, particularly if we age well in good company. It appears clearer to the babe, the aged, the hermit, the unrequited lover, and the invalid sick unto death. Many ancient peoples cultivate rituals and mythology whose purpose is to mark it, especially in moments of mortal peril or moral confusion.
What is this horizon? We might call it the intimate or the personal. Max Stirner would identify it as the province of the Only One (der Einzige), and insist that all our other horizons necessarily collapse into it. Gendün Chöphel, the renegade Tibetan monk, agrees with this uncompromising outlook when he denies our ability to possess valid knowledge (pramāṇa). What do we have apart from this? Contingent knowledge. Consensus. The first and closest forms of contingent knowledge are those that arise in the evolving collection of circumstances I eventually call myself. The most original consensus I know occurs when my cells, or cells that might become me, recognize one another and work together as one. As they do this more, I acquire material integrity, the ability to exist as a unit.
Of course I do not remember my original consensus, the foundation of my integrity. But life continues to offer moments where something like it recurs. Being born is a traumatic event, a radical sundering that deposits something new in the world--someone new, who must find ways to move appropriate to this novelty. Many traditional cultures recognize more than one birth over the course of a normal human life. Oedipus solves the riddle of the sphinx by dividing the life of man into stages, each one marked by different movement: the child who crawls, the adult who walks, the elder who stoops, and the corpse that sleeps. Vedic culture recognizes four paths to the gods that classical Hinduism turns into the four successive stages of a complete life: bramacharya, the celibate life of the young student devoted to learning; grihastha, the life of the mature householder, who must share himself with wife and family, doing work appropriate to his caste; vanaprastha, the life of the elder, who retires from the city to the forest; sannyasa, the renunciation of the ascetic prepared for death. Each stage opens with birth: the individual must find himself anew, doing new things, being a person unfamiliar to his former selves.
What happens in all these various births? Not a simple repetition of the original birth, as Nicodemus points out. One self goes down, and another comes up. Sometimes, the event is marked with rituals: christening or renaming, sacraments, vows, fasting, sacrifice. Sometimes not. Often, the individual being born suffers trauma: hence sacrifice. We sometimes think of trauma, and sacrifice, as abnormal, but is that right? When the Buddha says that life is suffering, it seems to me that he embraces trauma as something intimate, something as close to us as the air we breathe. Certain Buddhist rituals directed toward the intimate involve watching the breath, in fact, while we imagine the body falling apart, decomposing and going to dust, then coming back together and reintegrating to form itself anew. Christianity accomplishes something similar with the Eucharist, which dramatizes the death of Christ in the blessed host, and his resurrection in the body or host of the congregants gathered in his name. Though this Christian example is about communal integrity, which steps beyond the intimate, you will find Christians communing alone, too. Anthony fled into the desert.
The most basic way to find the intimate is to seek solitude. Around the world, people will wander off alone, sometimes with a particular destination in view--often a cave or mountain where they can seek shelter as they watch the intimate. They may fast, subsisting on little besides water for extended periods of time, and make offerings, cutting off hair or skin or even a finger. They may leave monuments in situ, like the biblical patriarch Jacob in the outdoor house of God, or carry mementos away, as native Americans do with their medicine bags. Not all departures into the wilderness of solitude are so dramatic: Socrates the Athenian was known to spend much time alone, doing nothing but muttering to himself. He claimed to consult with a little demon, which reminds me of the still, small voice that the prophet Elijah heard on Sinai, or the little voice that guided Tenzin Palmo to her cave in the Himalayas, following the trail of Milarepa. The final result of solitude, in any event, is a new appreciation for the way I exist individually--a recognition of birth or rebirth in myself that allows me to commit to some new action. I can start a new life. I can breathe new air. I can see things I did not see, or if I did see them, my outlook has changed significantly.
The intrusion of the intimate into literature happens most naturally as lyric poetry, that speaks of the individual as a world in itself; as autobiography, where the writer seeks to tell the tale of the self; or as novel, in passages where the author wants us to see characters interacting with themselves. Of course any communication can wax intimate, as it needs to, and a careful awareness will show the intimate peeking out of many different passages in every sort of text. Homeric heroes pause to converse with their hearts and hide thoughts and feelings in their guts; perhaps Democritus has this in mind when he remarks that the soul is a treasure-house of woe. The Vedic sage Uddalaka advises his son to make a habit of noticing the self in all things (tat tvam asi in the Chandogya Upanishad). And the famous inscription in the forecourt of the Delphic temple to Apollo never ceased to remind all comers of the command attributed to many different poets and masters: know thyself (γνῶθι σεαυτόν).
As a conclusion to this meditation on the intimate, I offer two little poems that approach it--one from Antonio Machado, the Spanish professor of literature who lived at the turn of the last century, and the other from Cold Mountain (寒山, Hánshān), the mysterious Chinese hermit whose specter has haunted Mount Tientai since the ninth century AD. First, Machado (poem xxix in Proverbios y Cantares):
Wanderer, your footprints
Mark the way: there's nothing more.
Wanderer, the way is not
You make it as you walk.
As you go you make the way
And when you glance behind
You see the path that nevermore
Your feet will strike in time.
Wanderer, the way is not
But what there is, you see
Ripples of a passing bark
Ripples in the sea.
my translation
This beautiful little poem shows you in a few lines all the essential horizon of the intimate. You are the wanderer, traveling a path that can seem utterly external to yourself, but that is an illusion. Your footprints make the path; when you move them, it moves with you. You can take them off into places nobody goes, and then your path appears clear to you, and clearly yours, as it is not swallowed up in the tracks left by others. When you look back to see whence you come, you see a way you will never walk again. Even if you do come back to it, this coming will be new: it will not be the same. I remember when this insight first occurred to me. I was a small child, staring through the links of a chain-fence in the schoolyard, and the thought came into my mind, "This moment will never happen again." I spent a long time looking through that fence, enough that it remains stuck in my head.
The last lines of the poem look at the fluidity of time and space in our world, contemplating the reality that everything here will change with time. Even the footprints I leave behind will fade and vanish, as ripples in the sea. Surfers do not surf for the future; they ride the waves now, looking for balance in the present. Watching the intimate closely teaches this discipline: to ignore the past and the future and do what is right, right here and now, with minimal regret or anxiety. Moving well through life is about carrying the self carefully, not leaving tracks. They are only incidental.
Now for Cold Mountain (poem 43 in the collection published by Red Pine, lines 76-77 in the text published online by the Chinese Text Project):
A white crane carries a bitter flower
a thousand miles without resting
he's bound for the peaks of Penglai
with this for his provision
not yet there his feathers break off
far from the flock he sighs
returning to his old nest
his wife and children don't know him
he's bound for the peaks of Penglai
with this for his provision
not yet there his feathers break off
far from the flock he sighs
returning to his old nest
his wife and children don't know him
translation by Red Pine
Red Pine follows the textual tradition that reads hua (椛 or 埖), flower, instead of táo (桃), peach. In either case, he says, the crane represents a Taoist adept, and the flower or fruit is his practice. In this poem, that practice is bitter: it never comes to maturity. Instead of escaping to the Taoist heaven of Penglai, which sounds very much like the Isles of the Blessed familiar to ancient Greeks, the would-be immortal must come home chagrined to a family that does not know him. Here we see the hard side of the intimate, manifest in the isolation of the individual not only from others, who do not recognize what is not theirs, but even from the self, when something desired is not achieved. Red Pine says that the crane sighs, but xīn cǎn cè (心慘惻) might easily be rendered his sad heart breaks.
If I dare to look deep into my heart again and again, what I see will not always be sweet, or successful, or coherent. Exploring the horizon of the intimate shows us our uniquely personal limits, which are quite real, even if I must discover them for myself. This means that Epictetus is right when he denies my ability to exert unilateral control over the inner world that is myself. The surfer seeks to move with the wave, finding and anticipating himself in the moment, but it may wreck him yet.
ante diem III Kalendas Octobres, anno Domini MMXIX --JGM.