From my last post, I've read Cormac McCarthy's No Country For Old Men and now want to watch the movie again. I didn't know that McCarthy originally wrote the story as a screenplay which likely explains why the movie is more recognizable. The novel ends with Ed Tom Bell (deuteragonist turned main protagonist) talking about waking up in the middle of the night. Unsettled, sometimes he gets up. He recollects a dream of meeting up with his deceased father who he feels he never gave enough credit to. The dream reveals his father looking out for him.
I’ve often tweeted about how remarkable it is that disorder of the night becomes order in the morning. I’ll wake in the middle of the night usually after a disruptive dream or nightmare. I’m left with an ominous feeling of dread and the wisp of memory that my foggy mind transfers to something I’m dealing with in real life that I can’t figure out. I usually get out of bed, get a drink of water then head to the sofa in our living room. After a time whatever disruptive thinking had besieged me seems to wear itself out and I fall back to sleep. When I wake up again it’s usually light and things are resolved and in order once again.
I have multiple recurring-type dreams that wake me up but two in particular: one where I’m in an office that I can’t seem to get out of and one where our family is living in a house that’s falling apart. At one time I thought these dreams were quite literal—a prediction of the future—not that we ever lived in a house that was falling apart but I did work in an office for most of my life. But I’m not writing this article to try to figure out what my dreams—nightmares—are trying to tell me but the fact that they seem to be making the effort.
As described in my last post, I notice similar things are happening on the supposed conscious level; when I’m fully awake. I don’t know whether they are or not but seem to be trying to tell me something. I described my collection of books arriving at our new place of residence and easily finding my Rush books and a Cormac McCarthy novel (see link) like they were being presented to me for a reason. (I had been thinking to read McCarthy’s novel No Country For Old Men and of Rush for a little inspiration.) Another like event just took place while writing this article. We’d been invited to a movie night at friends to watch The Power Of One, the 1992 movie adaptation of Bryce Courtney’s novel. A day later, I unexpectedly connected with a friend on LinkedIn who’s working at Yorkville University. My wife and son-in-law are enrolled in classes towards their Masters in Counseling Psychology at Yorkville. (I’d never heard of Yorkville until my wife started to talk about it.) This friend was the person who had introduced me to Bryce Courtney’s work. Again, I’m not necessarily trying to figure out what the message being relayed here is, only whether the attempt is indeed being made.
In my last two articles (blogs if you like) I wrote about Graham Hancock and his book Fingerprints Of The Gods awakening something inside me that had laid dormant for most of my life. I’d like to say unknowingly but I don’t think that is true. I’ve spent a lot of my life, subconsciously or unconsciously, trying to explain what it was and is to myself. It didn’t fit into a job description that I knew of and was very likely the reason the job world didn’t fit well with my psyche.
I was noticing these things because of where my recent writing has taken me and what I’ve been writing about over the last year. I’m also beginning to realize that the subject matter—consciousness, the unconscious, metaphysics, postmodernism—is what that “it” seems to be that I may have been pursuing all along and now becoming increasingly recognized even in my work.
What Mr. Hancock’s book initiated was the re-emergence of possibility. The ‘what if’ associated with there being more to us than is written in the text books of academia and corrections to what we know as fact. It’s helped bring us to where we are, only here is not a destination though; how we came to be here and where we’re going might be. Clues seem to lie in the infinity that exists inside us—in our brains and our unconscious—if we could just understand what is there beyond the cognitive and linguistic processes we’ve learned. When we conclude that that’s just the way it is, we tend to stop searching.
Fortunately, some are not convinced. Examples come daily. Last week a story appeared in the journal Science where human footprints in rock were found in White Sands National Park, New Mexico, that are estimated to be between 21,000 to 23,000 years old putting human life in North America 10,000 years older than previously thought with more stuff to come that looks even older. 13,000 years was the previous estimate for life in North America that’s been held for nearly a century.
Why do we get locked into our truths?
Part of what seems to happen with education, knowledge, and teaching, is that once we get to know something, that something seems to become ours. We possess it like property and, will in some cases, do anything to protect it’s truth to ourselves. Even a little piece of knowledge carries with it a strange feeling of power. In just writing this, the idea sounds odd, that we can feel so strongly about information we know, but we all do it. Just think of the last argument you were in. We’ve all argued to defend what we think and believe based on the knowledge we have and often it’s not even particularly important knowledge.
Also knowing something seems to have the effect of daring others to question what we know just because we have it. There is the insecurity argument that we’re so diffident about the knowledge we hold that we have to protect it to avoid being seen as weak and having someone else usurp the power that we feel is ours in having it. But it goes beyond that I think; it’s more complicated. Primordial even. The beast that holds the knowledge will eat the ones that don’t.
Academia, when I was there, was full of it; professors had a demigod like status over students who wanted what they had. Many were not about to give it away; “You can’t know this until you’ve suffered like I have to to get it.”
What seems to happen is that we lock into a feeling of possession and seem to forget what is really to be accomplished—learning and understanding. We stop questioning whether the culprit of that feeling, “knowledge,” is even correct. Before long the “knowledge” becomes unquestionable in the minds of the holder and their inexplicable attachment to it. Those that question that knowledge, trigger the knowledge holder’s defenses to quickly shutdown the questioner, the enemy—the monster that wants to eat them—discrediting the questioner in whatever means necessary to vanquish any possibility that what they know could be in question, erroneous or just plain wrong.
I now see this everywhere or at least get a sense of it. I see it in religion. I saw it in the workplace. I see it in the news. It’s rampant in social media. Everyone gravitating onto what they know and holding onto it like a possession they want no one to question or take away. It seems like survival—survival of the fittest (I’ve heard that somewhere before.) Who knows the most will win?
Hold on. Another thought about that knowledge.
A while back I was listening to two men in line at Tim Horton’s talk about Justin Trudeau (the Prime Minister of Canada). I’m quite sure neither knew Trudeau, had worked with Trudeau or had ever met the man, but they each spoke as if they had intimate knowledge not only into the man himself but what Trudeau was doing and thinking. All their information was gleaned from TV, radio, newspaper, the Internet, word of mouth or possibly just made up.
The experience caused me to remember working in the corporate world. I’ve worked on a number of management teams. But in my roles, even being next to president of the company, I didn’t know what he’d do next. I was right there, involved, and I didn’t know what the next decision or action might be until we were acting on it. I was that close and didn’t know.
Listening to the two men who spoke convincingly about what they knew was almost shocking to me in what was revealed. Outside of two humans in a verbal exchange, they were talking fiction, but convinced their points were fact. I was reminded of the U2 lyric: “When fact is fiction and TV reality” from their song “Sunday Bloody Sunday” off the Waralbum. Each man saw their fiction as fact and right and despite just how erroneous what they saw as fact could be, it was their truth.
Time to change gears: how do we know why we know?
Jordan Peterson, author of Maps Of Meaning has said that our brains react to information the same way they react to food. We must be fed. Is there any help for us when we have that degree of need for it, correct or not?
Going back to my previous article’s discussion on McCarthy’s essay “The Kekule Problem,” he wrote about the arrival of both our unconscious and language. There was a lot in his relatively short essay but I come back to our unconscious that “has been organizing and directing our lives” and “has been getting along quite well without it (language) for a couple of million years.” I’ll leave language for a future post.
The Bible, from my last article, starts with Genesis, “In the beginning, God created the world.” I looked at this a little differently after digesting the McCarthy essay. As I wrote previously, I believe there’s much more to this ancient text than what I grew up thinking. Like Kekule’s dream in McCarthy’s essay; is the ancient text of The Bible speaking from our unconscious? Our unconscious seems to want to tell us things; is The Bible trying to do that through the written word—language? The Genesis description of the creation of the world is quite short (one chapter) and all that happened took place before we had language and likely before our unconscious existed. By comparision, the description of how God’s tabernacle was constructed that held the Ark of the Covenant is much longer and more detailed (Exodus 25-31 and 35-40).
Everything started in Genesis like the Big Bang of science. But this ancient text seems to be giving us a clue into how existence was created from nothing. God created everything and then thought of man; Genesis 1:27, “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” Did he create man physically then? Doesn’t look like it because in Genesis 2:7 is written “then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.” It’s like a clue, God first envisioned man in “the unconscious” (Genesis 1:27). Then he made man from the dust and the earth, Genesis 2:7. What are we made up of? The stuff of what’s found all around us “dust and the earth.” God then makes woman from man Genesis 2:22; “And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into woman and brought her to the man.” But God then does something extraordinary with his new creations of man and woman in the garden of Eden. They’re touched by consciousness or the unconscious where the serpent says to Eve, “You will not surely die” (Genesis 3:4) in eating the fruit from the forbidden tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Eve then eats from the forbidden tree and offers Adam the fruit which he eats. In eating the forbidden fruit, “the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked” (Genesis 3:7). Both Eve and Adam became aware. They were granted awareness. Were they connected to consciousness? All of this takes place before language is upon us as there are only two people and there’s been no mention of language; only communication between the serpent and Eve and Eve and Adam. Is this our unconscious already at work or the early formation of it?
What if the timeline for these events is closer to what science has estimated that McCarthy uses in the Kekule essay and is in millions of years rather than the apparent short time as it appears to take place in Genesis. Is a timeline even important then? There really is no specific timeline in Genesis 1:1, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth”; or Genesis 1:2, “The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep”; and Genesis 1:5, “And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.” Would the concept of day come without language? If we were to use the approximate sixty thousand years that language has worked its way into us, there wouldn’t be words for days never mind their duration when Eve and Adam were created. Science has the appearance of modern humans at about two hundred thousand years ago.
There’s a lot here. Are the answers here? I don’t know. Are there answers? I think so but then that’s part of the journey; today’s answers are tomorrow’s questions. The pursuit seems to be important but I can’t explain why, only that it excites me.
There is and has been enormous room for error, misinterpretation and misunderstanding but then isn’t that part of learning while using hard science to measure accuracy. The Great One, Wayne Gretzky once said, “You miss 100 percent of the shots you never take.” We’re going to miss a few shots along the way but we have to keep shooting.
We don’t own the facts; they’re not our’s to own. We need to take care not to cherish the information like it’s a loved one. History has proven we’ve made mistakes on what we know and what we thought was right has turned out to be wrong.
We once thought the sun orbited the earth.
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More about this and other things will be coming in my next post.
I thank you in advance for reading The Actor, The Drive In and The Musician.
You can follow me on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook or LinkedIn or visit my website at www.douglasgardham.com.
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