WHAT TO DO WHILE WAITING FOR …
Samuel Beckett's absurdist play, Waiting for Godot, was voted the most significant play of the twentieth century. Over the years, I have read the play several times, but I had never seen a production. With my mind full of reflections, considerations and dreams relating to the Sixth Extinction, my Ragnarök poem, as well as the contemporary geo-political climate, I decided to watch the play.
I do not wish to add to the endless commentary and critique of this work,[1] but I do recommend that you watch this play. A good version of it is available at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wifcyo64n-w
Try to forget analyzing, interpreting, or even understanding the play. None of that is the point of absurdist art in any event. Instead, attend to what rises up spontaneously in you: thoughts, feelings, memories, images, emotions, impulses, dreams. The play is psychoactive, and that is the point.[2]
I must admit that my favorite genre of art and literature is absurdist in nature, as well as its many related and ancillary forms.
By what I have said already, you can presume that I do not favor traditional analysis (of any sort), but I do favor focusing on what is engendered spontaneously on an individual basis. Like a dream, such responses may appear “absurd.” This, of course, is why they take a back seat to more “rational” approaches. What faces us in the coming “collapse of everything” (the fact of collapse) is not absurd.[3] But I must admit to my haunting sense that the conscious collective responses to the collapse can be considered absurd at almost all levels and in all directions.
Rather than falling into nihilism, or paralyses of one sort or another, I experience the abundance of absurdity at the present time as an opportunity to develop a more radical individual effort in response. So what does one do from this perspective?
Waiting for Godot is, without doubt, expressing a demand for what Keats called “negative capability.”[4] Instead, almost all contemporary commentary and critique expresses that “irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Underlying this irritability is fear, and most especially the fear of the “unknown.” Most people have the same response to a dream—preferring to embrace the known (interpretations, analyses, understandings) rather than stay with the tensions of uncertainties, mysteries, and doubts until these tensions give birth spontaneously and autonomously to something hitherto unknown—most particularly, the future.[5]
Thus, one thing “to do” while waiting, is to perfect the art of negative capability, to learn to dwell there, whether one is confronting a dream, political turmoil, or ecological disaster.[6] Heidegger, more than anyone, has given us a veritable instruction manual in achieving dwelling amid the din of conflicting “choruses of certainty”[7] ripping at the very fabric of culture and civilization.[8]
The first necessity in developing the art of negative capability is to “take time.” One must go slowly, withdraw from the frenzy, and tend to what is “presented” from the interior. Immersion in the fast and frenzied distractions of collectivity destroys the possibility of dwelling.
Another help in achieving dwelling is to simplify. We are all doing too much, have too many things to deal with, our plates are too full, our information diet too seductive, our feelings of responsibility too heavy. In my lectures in 1982, which became the book Psyche Speaks in 1987, I wrote the following:
The phrase “I have no time” in its various forms has become so common, such a carrier in all aspects of our life, it is perhaps time that we began to listen to what we are literally saying: we have no time. We live under the triple burden of speed, surface, and survival. We are so busy surviving the pressures of modern life that we haven’t the time to go beneath the surface, and we speed from one thing or person to another. Recall again what Wordsworth said when he saw this coming: “The world is too much with us.” [9]
I wrote that paragraph thirty-four years ago! Before the Internet, before smart phones, before everything and everyone was “connected.” All this connectedness has not increased the reality of eros in our time. Even more so now, it is the absence and poverty of eros that is so striking in almost all departments of the human enterprise. It is well to remember the mythological stories (as stories): Chaos is mother of Eros in one version, Poverty is mother of Eros in another. As I said in those lectures, the ubiquity of chaos and poverty gives us some basis for expectation of seeing the birth of Eros in our time, as Æ called for in his Pilgrim of Eternity, as Merezhovsky called for in his Third Testament of the Holy Ghost, as Freud called for Eros to come battle with Thanatos, as Jung called for in the Coming Guest.
As one simplifies, one also turns more local. Less dependence on the far-away leads as well to more human-to-human contact as distinct from virtual contact. This is turn leads to small as distinct from the many and big. Facebook is not a substitute for face-to-face, nor book-in-hand. As dwelling with negative capability increases with taking time, being-with locally, simplifying, manifesting what comes from such dwelling becomes ever more possible. What is born from negative capability is creative in ways not imagined before. This is partly true because deep dwelling in the spirit of negative capability gives one access to the deeper portals of imagination. This becomes the true immunization against viral mimetics which are serving the robotization of humans and maximizing malignant narcissism. These powerful factors increase inequality and must eventually lead to an inevitable conflict with those more immersed in “realities” of poverty, exclusion and devaluation.
The monetization of robotizing humans, the malignant narcissism that increasingly underlies celebrity and advertising, and the centrifugal pull on everyone to participate, sets the stage for its own collapse, its own demise. To substitute these things for a meaningful life is absurd.
[1] There is a veritable industry of commentary and critique in relation to this play: hundreds of books, thousands of articles, and untold numbers of performances.
[2] Having psychoactive experience is crucial but not complete in itself. One must also act in relation to such experience, no matter how absurd such experiences may seem. I’ll go into this further in a subsequent post.
[3] I will be using “absurd” in varying senses. To value the absurd, in art, literature, and dreams, for example, does not commit one to absurdist, existentialist or nihilistic philosophies of existence. Facts as such cannot be ignored, although how they are related to and used can be misguided, limited, or even absurd. Even though facts cannot be ignored, they often are, and this too leads to phenomena that are absurd. To judge relation to fact as absurd in the pejorative sense, does not contradict finding value in something absurd when that absurdity opens the way to deeper and especially psychic depth. Even things judged absurd in the pejorative sense may be setting the conditions for the emergence of something of far greater value.
[4] Keats, in a letter to his brother, had written: “At once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties. Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”
[5] One of the best treatments of Waiting for Godot in relation to negative capability, is to be found in Chapter 21, “The Implied Critic’s Decision Style,” in Reuven Tsur’s Toward a Theory of Cognitive Poetics. Sussex Academic Press, 2008. This chapter is a republication of his earlier article, “Two Critical Attitudes: Quest for Certitude and Negative Capability.” He proposes an “axis” with negative capability as one pole and factualism as the other.
[6] Even when critics allow for negative capability, they tend to ignore the birth potential of this state of tension and its implied individual birth in the reader or member of the audience. There remains a striving for collective factualism which undermines the value of “the absurd.”
[7] I use this phrase to highlight a feature of the present day, where it seems doubt has been banished and one must express only certainty. This feature is always at the forefront in times of religious war, threat to government hegemony, and threat to economic privilege.
[8] Martin Heidegger. “Building Dwelling Thinking.” In Poetry, Language, Thought. New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1971. Also available on the net at http://mysite.pratt.edu/~arch543p/readings/Heidegger.html
[9] Russell Arthur Lockhart. Psyche Speaks: A Jungian Approach to Self and World. Wilmette: Chiron Publications, 987. (Reprinted Everett: The Lockhart Press, 2014)
Speaking of the absurd …
I recently watched a production of Philip K. Dick’s, The Man in the High Castle. You had to wait until the end to meet the absurdity, and it is shocking! Thankfully the scriptwriter did not satisfy our need for certainty with a ready explanation. We had to, along with the characters, stay in the uncertainty of “what the hell just happened?” There is no scripted explanation and so, the imagination begins to move. For example, can there be such a thing as real “alternate futures”?
Movies such as “Terminator” and “Minority Report” also pursue Dick’s exploration of rubbery futures. Take Terminator for example: The heroine (Sarah) and her rescuer are being chased by the Terminator and are resting in a tunnel where she seeks to understand the logic of what is happening. The machines had sent a Terminator back through time to kill her so that she cannot give birth to the hero and then train him in warfare to save future humanity from the machines. The mere presence of this future machine forces this simple waitress to gain the very skills that the machines fear, and to become pregnant with the future hero. Her rescuer had been arrested and a forensic psychologist listened to his story of travel from the future. He declared the prisoner completely delusional. The heroine, however, is willing to listen, as he talked, not of futures, but possible futures. From their point of view, now in the Present, they were confronted with possible futures that were penetrating into the Present. Their actions (and they had to act!) mattered, although they could not predict the outcome (e.g. whether Sarah would be killed or not). It seems from this and other like examples (“Minority Report” etc.) that the idea of possible futures intersecting with the Present and demanding action, without knowing the outcome, becomes important only when the usual categories that support present-day stability break down in a catastrophe.
But Dick is not done with us yet, just in case you haven’t suffered a meltdown already. In his book, Valis, his fictional self, “Fat”, contemplates the rational-irrational polarity.
“The single most striking realization that Fat had come to was his concept of the universe as irrational and governed by an irrational mind, the creator deity. If the universe were taken to be rational, not irrational, then something breaking into it might seem irrational, since it would not belong. But Fat, having reversed everything, saw the rational breaking into the irrational. The immortal plasmate had invaded our world and the plasmate was totally rational, whereas our world is not.”
Yes, all this almost did Dick in. Some, like his colleague Ursula Le Guin, thought he had cracked up. That’s the thing. When you get close to the edge, when you peer into the abyss and begin to speak ITS thinking, you’ll sound mad, like a mad poet. But if you can learn to think (not think about, but THINK) the unknown future’s thoughts or images, no matter how absurd (as judged by the old paradigm), you will likely come around to Dick’s point of view.
Many thanks John for your bringing Philip Dick’s work into this conversation. Although not formally absurdist, his work is absurdist to the core with the objective psyche assuming primacy at all levels. In this sense it is not surprising how important Jung and Jung’s work were to him–but it is surprising how ignored his work is by the Jungian world–particularly Dick’s monumental diary, Exegesis. Well, perhaps not surprising so much as sad.
Dick was brilliant as well as a man hooked on amphetamines. Thus the paranoid aspect to much of his writing. It’s that altered state reality that yields dimensional multiplicity to his works. One can hallucinate on speed. Of course he was brilliant in that he could turn these events into critiques of consensual views on the nature of reality. I like that he thought God was pink.