I got into a Walker Percy kick again recently, for the first time in a while. At one point, I read him voraciously, reveling in the irony, the dissipation, the odd redemptions, at times bitter, at times flat, at times (such as Lancelot which I cannot in good conscience recommend to anyone but is an incredible feat), breathtaking.
Feeling irritated with Love in the Ruins, which is the first Percy book I got my hands on and usually delights me, I picked up Lost in the Cosmos, which I love but which, at one point, hit too close to home in its discussion of transcendence and re-entry. At a slight distance, though, I am able to appreciate it greatly, and equally greatly regret that it slipped my mind when writing my master's thesis (so passé and, it may be argued superfluous, but I so badly wanted to write). It's a superb treatment of the post-modern man--or human, if you prefer--dilemma of the abstracted self. Put simply, the modern man has no point of reference by which to define himself, so he is left floating in a constant state of impermanence, unmoored to any solid referent outside of himself . Art and science, claims Percy, are the two ways by which a person transcends the problem of reality, but then s/he is left with the problem of re-entering the word "at Wednesday afternoon at 4 o'clock": How does one who has tasted transcendence deal with the most mundane and humdrum of this often tedious reality?
One thing that slowly dawned on me is that, while spot on with the idea of transcendence and reality and the difficulties of the artist (and, to a lesser extent, the art-lover/receiver), something about the 1983 view of science wasn't quite relevant any more. There is some truth to it, that the "laity" revere science: medicinal, environmental, technological, but there is an edge, a disillusionment, that we have that was still absent to the wondering world of the '70s and '80s. We question surgeries and vaccines; our scientifically-altered food is making us an increasingly ill society; we have seen the limits of and also the fear of advanced weapons technology; we have reached the second decade of the 21st century and still drive cars, by and large, that run on four wheels and gasoline. So I pondered: What has replaced science as our panacea, our new god, our layman-available escape?
Oh friends: it is entertainment. Instead of seeking the cure for the abstracted, "flying dutchman" self, we have sought to numb it continually through means of ever-increasing, ever-more-extreme pleasures.
We are zombies.
Abstracted zombies.
The problem hasn't changed. We, as a societal whole, still are floating around, unmoored, untethered . . . except now we don't care. We numb it: lots of prescription drugs, lots of other drugs, lots of media--oh, such an incredible amount of media! (like this blog: teehee!)--fake online "communities", yogis and gurus and meditation and marriages and non-marriages and "alternative marriages" and God knows what else.
but we don't care, as long as we can numb it, even for a moment.
One slightly spooky coincidence is how well Percy's description of the modern man jives (yes, I did, and no I won't take it back) with C. S. Lewis's depiction of hell in The Great Divorce: isolated individuals, petty squabbling, incessant bickering over nothings, and, above all, the tininess. We are a nation of pusillanimity: of small-souled beings. How much you love your dog or cat or save the whales or the ozone layer doesn't matter a'tall in the end. What matters is our relationship to other human beings. We are the human race. The problem is not saving the abused animals or the abused earth or the whatever. The problem is that we are doing it instead of caring for each other. Because "caring" for each other has come to mean "let me do whatever the hell I want or I will scream intolerance at you."
We will not save ourselves or each other or the dogs (after all, it is very, very wounded people who abuse animals and children) or the earth (ditto that: if I don't care about myself, why should I care two pins about the earth?) or the whatever. And we cannot fix ourselves or help anyone else until we find moorings. And, as Walker Percy, the first in a family of generational suicides not to kill himself (it was at least his father and grandfather, if not great-grandfather, as well, and I believe an uncle or two) well knew, the only way to survive this world, to find moorings, is to find God. After that, well, as Lewis says:
"A sum can be put right: but only by going back till you find the error and working it afresh from that point, never simply by going on. Evil can be undone, but it cannot 'develop' into good. Time does not heal it. The spell must be unwound, bit by bit, 'with backward mutters of dissevering power'--or else not. It is still 'either-or'. If we insist on keeping Hell (or even Earth) we shall not see Heaven: if we accept Heaven we shall not be able to retain even the smallest and most intimate souvenirs of Hell." (The Great Divorce, "Preface")
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