Interrogations

By Ophelia Benson

An eclectic, literary challenge to everyday thinking.

Number Twenty: Tap Tap

We rely on a lot of illusions in order to live life as we know it - or if not illusions, states of forgetting or ignoring or believing or acting as if. Or else of postponement, setting aside, bracketing, fencing off, compartmentalization - of 'I'll think about that tomorrow,' as Scarlett O'Hara liked to say. Or really of all those combined. Of knowing and not knowing; of knowing but pretending not to know; of knowing but shelving for the time being; of knowing but blurring or concealing or prettifying; of knowing if we think about it but never thinking about it.

For instance we don't, most of us, most of the time, dwell on how short our lives are and how all our plans come to nothing in the end. We're not like the characters in The Tale of Genji who spend all their time reminding themselves and each other of the transience of everything, writing poems on the subject and soaking their kimono sleeves with tears. We don't do as many medieval and Renaissance people did, and keep skulls on hand for a memento mori. (Unless we're teenage Goths, of course.) We don't even muse about it as much as Montaigne or Shakespeare did. We instead adapt a remark of Sir Thomas Browne, 'The long habit of living indisposeth us for dying.' 'The long habit of living maketh us think we'll keep on that way forever.' (This is doubtless much less true for nurses, doctors, morgue attendants, pathologists, homicide detectives, funeral directors, grave-diggers and such.)

For most of us, most of the time, the illusion of continuity and meaning and purpose is what we live in. (The lucky among us, at least. People in Bosnia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan and myriad other agitated peppery bits of the globe probably have a hard time managing that.) We might as well, after all. What's the alternative? Not doing anything, because we have to stop eventually? That's a possible alternative, but not an attractive one for creatures like us. Naturally enough. If it were we wouldn't be here, we would have shrugged and given up long ago, and died out or perhaps evolved back into salamanders.

But at bottom we know, and remember if we think about it, that under many aspects - eternity, the cosmos, history - we are very small, very temporary, very foolish, very beside the point. We can go up or down, and the effect is the same. Look at the universe, then look at us. Pretty small potatoes. Look at (or think about, at least) atoms and quarks. Think about the self, or free will, or the mind. Slap the desk, note how solid it is, then think about how solid it isn't. Think about other minds, then think about zombies or evil demons, and wonder how we would know for sure.

Then shrug and go back to living as if everything really is the way it appears; solid bodies are solid, other minds are real, the self is continuous over time, our wills are free, and all of this that seems so important right now this minute really is that important and will still seem so in a hundred years, or a thousand.

Because it's not as if we can do anything else, is it. We can know and remember that we're molecules and atoms, meat and water, hydrogen and carbon, space and energy. We can tell other people we are, and tell them they are too. But so what? We're still in the illusion. We're still solid bodies, with thoughts and feelings, rather than lumps of meat or swirls of atoms. We're just bodies saying we're atoms, we're not visibly or otherwise sensibly atoms. The illusion is the reality and the reality is the illusion; it's a fantasy, a thought-experiment, something we can only imagine, not experience. We can only know we're atoms and sub-atomic particles, we can't feel it or see it. And there's no way we can demonstrate it, either. We can't perform it or act it or dance it. The very idea conjures up one of those old Jules Feiffer cartoons, with an etiolated ponytailed woman solemnly announcing her Dance to the Spring. 'I will now perform "I am a Collection of Atoms and So Are You."'

We can't abdicate, we can't give up the illusion. It's not optional. We can't drop the illusion of a unified self and become a discontinuous one, not unless we're mentally ill, and then it wouldn't be much use. We could pretend - but who would be fooled by that? And what would be the point? How would we even go about it? Just talk at random? Say things that make no sense? We could, but would anyone understand? No. We'd have to explain - and there we'd be, feeling like a continuous self, explaining that we're performing a discontinuous self to remind everyone that the self is an illusion. Oh it's hopeless. A hot new movie, 'My Dinner with the Churchlands.' No, it won't do. We'll just have to settle down to live in Illusionland.

Ophelia Benson is editor of Butterflies and Wheels - http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com.

She can be emailed here.

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Interrogations will next be updated mid March 2004

Previous Interrogations

1. Self and Internet
2. Perfection Isn't
3. Homo Quaerens
4. Showtime
5. Thinking Makes It So
6. Who's In There?
7. Gustave and Dawn
8. Sense and Sentimentality
9. Mind the gap
10. Weave a Net to Catch the Wind
11. Done and Not Done
12. Mere
13. Influence
14. Other Minds
15. Mystery, Drama, Surprise
16. Work
17. Mutability
18. Do I Wake or Sleep
19. The Right Tools

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