Suddenly I’m alone. Menna and the girls have gone to a church camp. The flat is eerily silent. I haven’t been alone like this in a long time, and it’s disorienting.
I miss them. I pause to think about what they would be doing at each moment. When I should be catching up on my own work, I stop to clean up, picking up the girls’ things, which lie scattered around the flat as though there were an explosion.
One thing I find is their jar of snails. Last week, they became unaccountably fascinated by snails and slugs. I suppose it was because of the advent of spring, and the work their mother had initiated on the potted plants outside. Among the leaves, in the soil, and underneath the pots were all kinds of fun little creatures. Baby Jos fancies herself a scientist and has no fear of slimy things. Little Ren loves whatever her sister loves. They have decided that snails are cute. They have decided that slugs are cute. In fact, they are desperate for pets; they have been for a while. Unfortunately, their papa is allergic to half the animal kingdom and is too grouchy to deal with the rituals that would no doubt devolve upon him.
Concurrent with their snails-for-pets moment came their lemonade-stand moment. It made for a strange alignment. They set up a table outside our door last weekend, but not for lemonade. It was for a view of their snails, set out for public inspection on a pair of plastic beach shovels, filled with mud and their creeping pets. They made a cute sign asking for two euros. But then when neighbours did stop to look, they were too shy to ask for their fee.
I’m laughing at the memory, sitting alone at my computer. The solitude doesn’t weigh on me yet, but it is insistent. It is an insistent fact of life, isn’t it? From the moment one becomes aware of one’s essential solitude, one is never allowed to forget it. It’s as concrete an aspect of life as there is. An argument could be made that solitude is the central problem we seek to solve with religion.
Religion tells us that we are never actually alone, and not just sentimentally but metaphysically: there are invisible beings around us all the time. It makes a certain intuitive sense, doesn’t it? As singular as we are in our heads, in our bodies, we never quite achieve absolute solitude. Even an atheist would concede that life is a continual negotiation with others.
And if one were to concede the rather elementary metaphysical point implied by an all-powerful God that exists untouched by time, that all things exist at once, then the space we inhabit becomes very crowded. Perhaps it’s religion’s most salient point: we are not alone. One might expect that an afterlife would offer a lifting of the veils, the veil that separates us from one another, and the veil that separates us in time.
This idea of timelessness does complicate the idea of reincarnation a bit. In actuality, Scaliger and I exist simultaneously. So his scepticism that I represent “progress” is justified. And it essentially posits that one soul is a community, and a fairly large one at that, according to most accounts of reincarnation that I’m familiar with. It not only puts into question the idea of progress, in time without time, but the idea of an atomized soul that requires hard boundaries with other atomized souls.
What the reincarnationist theory still represents to me is the drive to domesticate the other by calling it all “me”. It’s the cannibal’s solution to solitude.
Sunday, May 28, 2023
Saturday, May 20, 2023
When Scaliger died in Leiden, it was in January. Such a grey and desolate time in Holland: I’m not sure that it was the winter that killed him, but it was certainly a sad backdrop for what looks to have been a lonely death. Apparently, the great man was a bit of a curmudgeon. (The evidence is mounting!) He had resisted the idea of moving to Leiden, but the university raised such a sweet and enticing siren song. He would take over the chair formerly belonging to the great Lipsius. He would be the only professor allowed to wear the red gown. He would be exempted from lecturing. He would be allowed to hand-select his students (among whom would be Hugo Grotius, the great Dutch humanist). He was finally lured, but one senses that he never quite settled in or felt at home. He complained bitterly about the Dutch (the resemblance is uncanny!), describing Leiden as “one crowded pub” and complaining about the noise. “On days of fasting” he wrote, “they start drinking very early in the morning.” He had the university move him from house to house, because he longed for more space and peace of mind. His last house he described as a hovel. It was cold, and it leaked, which is no small matter in the Netherlands. This is where he died in mid-winter. It sounds miserable.
Can two bios be the same soul, I have asked? The question is condensed, and yet it contains within its several words so many big assumptions. Belief is a complicated machine, hiding many working gears inside. It reminds me of the twentieth-century shell game of finding the smallest particle, leading us from molecules to atoms, to protons, to quarks until suddenly we were saddled with an uncanny new world view, or set of world views, thrust upon us by quantum mechanics. It’s exhausting. We might have been happier with molecules.
Scaliger looks down the centuries at me, and he asks, “Is that me?” Between us is an unfathomable gap, and the concept of “me” is instantly swallowed up in it. Whatever we may decide the soul is, we don’t get to say it’s Scaliger. Scaliger died when the animal body died. The man was the man, and whatever escaped at death was not the man. When we mourn, we mourn truly: the human life has ended. What’s more, if we find ourselves alienated – even unconsciously – by the “other” in human form, then any meditation on the concept of a soul ought to be a very sober one. It’s a ‘thing’ as alien as possible, and probably itself gave rise as much to our terrors of ghosts and demons as to visions of celestial angels gaining their wings.
It’s just that this problem of finite life is too often approached from the perspective of death. When our purpose is to defang death, our dreams about the afterlife are two-dimensional and cartoonish. We approach the light, essentially still human. But death is not the "other"; life is. Life is the uncanny. Death is a placeholder like zero. Life is strange and prolific. It surges and resurges in weird shapes, hungry and irresistible.
Saturday, May 13, 2023
What would Scaliger have to say, if I laid claim to his life? He expected to find himself in Christian heaven, but here I am telling him he’s evolved into … me. “This is evolution?” he will ask. And how shall I answer?
I had no idea what a fun pastime looking for past lives was! But do I believe in reincarnation? Do I believe that two bios could be the same soul? Well … there are some fundamental problems with the questions, and they begin, like most problems, with the assumptions behind the terms.
People are surprisingly promiscuous with their ‘beliefs’. I am more conservative. Maybe I’m the one taking the term too seriously. What is a belief? It’s so insubstantial, I wonder the purpose. I have no reason to doubt someone who says they ‘believe’ in reincarnation. Not only am I unable to disprove what they believe; I am unable to disprove that they believe. So what role does the confession “I believe” take? I suppose it sets up a contrast. “I believe” suggests “unlike others” or “unlike you”. The confessional purpose then becomes either persuasion or defence. Saying it internally, it may be an avowal or a vow, again separating one from others.
Removing belief from the thing believed, what is it? Is it a kind of warm feeling of confidence or security? If I say, “I think”, it affirms an opinion and admits its basis in logical thought; it admits a vulnerability to persuasion. If I say, “I wish”, it allows for absence of validity. If I say, “I know”, it claims verifiability. Many mystics will use that tactically: “I know, and you could know, too.” Verifiability lies in the mystic experience, spoken of on this plane, proven on another. Two people who have met on another plane can wink about it here, but that’s about the sum value of it on this plane.
Language gives us away. While a conspiracy theorist can claim any wild source and any level of cognitive relationship with the information, a rational person can only claim knowledge with a plural subject.
“I know the election was fair,” or “I know climate change is real” sounds a bit overwrought. Instead, you hear, “We know that climate change is real”. Why? Because most knowledge is communal. The principle that knowledge is verifiable makes it communal. It’s one of the beauties of knowledge.
For me, the phrase “I believe” ends up being little more than a rhetorical device. Like, I have come to this conclusion instinctively.
Monday, May 01, 2023
Travelogue 1088 – 1 May
The sixteenth century was a time of tumult. It was also a time of significant scholarship, the time of Galileo and of Erasmus. Humanism and classical studies were the pursuit of many scholars, and there were so many of them working on classical languages and philosophy that it’s easy to stumble upon whole sets of them that you had never heard of before.
Not all the French humanists were in Paris. One cantankerous old writer was based in Agen, near Valence, in southwestern France. Born in 1484, he had been named Giulio Cesare, a typical Renaissance name, harking back to Roman history. He was Italian, but became physician to the bishop of Agen, and devoted his life to scholarship, accruing enough reputation to take on the mighty Erasmus and be taken seriously. He is remembered primarily for his defence of Aristotelianism aesthetics and science. His opinion on Seneca apparently had some effect on the young Shakespeare.
In good Renaissance form, he raised his son, Joseph Justus, on a steady diet of Latin and poetry. He made him write 80 lines of Latin every day until the Lord took him away, and his son was abandoned to his fate as overeducated youth in an age glutted with overeducated youths.
The boy distinguished himself. He studied in Paris; he studied in Valence. He travelled through Europe. Along the way, he became a Protestant. He taught in Geneva; he taught in Leiden. Between the two latter posts, he hid away on the manor of a friend, and he wrote. He studied Latin authors. He compiled histories of texts, histories of knowledge.
His contributions were in the field of textual criticism, a science dear to the hearts of Renaissance scholars. And he is credited with being the first to see the ancient world as a collection of contemporaneous civilizations, beyond the cultural borders of Greece and Rome. It included Babylonians, Jews, Persians and Egyptians, all of them sharing knowledge and culture. It’s a thought I feel some kinship with. I may love everything Greco-Roman now, but as a child I was much more interested in Egypt, Sumer, and Persia.
Scaliger, as he was called, left for Leiden in 1593, and it was to be his last academic post. He never saw France again.
He was called ‘Scaliger’ because his father maintained he was descended from the La Scala family that had ruled Verona in the Middle Ages. Enemies of Scaliger went to great lengths to prove that was not true. He fought them bitterly, maybe out of loyalty to his dear old dad, maybe threatened in his sense of self. But it’s quite likely his dad was inventing.
That's a cool bio. I felt instant affinity with it. And he was a handsome devil, too. I wish I could say I had found him by chance. The truth is, one day I woke with the name on my lips, ‘Scaliger’. I don’t know why. I had never heard of Joseph Justus or his father. Months earlier, investigating a spring trip to Italy, I had investigated Verona, and had read about the La Scala family. The name had probably remained with me. The mind is such an odd machine, so cluttered with data, barely coherent. The most one can do is marvel at the things that pop out of it.