Free Fall by William Golding
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Reaching Out With Tongs

Forget about theological mysteries; the anthropological ones are at least as mysterious, and a lot closer to home. Most theology is just folk trying to explain themselves to themselves. What is this amorphous thing we call consciousness that inhabits (or infects or is generated by) a human body? Is it real or is it a delusion? Does it have authority and freedom or is it merely a part of some long chain of cause and effect, a mere response to pain and pleasure? Is it intelligible even to itself?

All of our lives demand holding the issues of personal metaphysics in suspension. In order to function we need to pretend that there is no mystery, that thought aware of itself is not just natural, but also uninteresting. To let down our guard by investigating ourselves too carefully would be wasteful and needlessly risky. People might snigger. And there are deeper problems, as Golding’s protagonist discovers: “... when the eyes of Sammy were turned in on myself.. what they saw was not beautiful but fearsome... to live with such a thing was unendurable.” So he prays; he doesn’t know to whom 0r what, but he prays: “If I could only take this world for granted!” He prays to himself, of course. And there is no reply.

But insistent thoughts appear unbidden and unwanted: “They are important simply because they emerge. I am the sum of them. I carry around with me this load of memories. Man is not an instantaneous creature, nothing but a physical body and the reaction of the moment. He is an incredible bundle of miscellaneous memories and feelings, of fossils and coral growths. I am not a man who was a boy looking at a tree. I am a man who remembers being a boy looking at a tree.”

Experience itself. Reflection upon experience. The experience of reflection. Simultaneous experience and reflection. These sum the unavoidable facts of human existence. But how accurate are any of these facts? Are they contradicted by someone else’s facts? To attend to them generates uncertainty and confusion but to ignore them is solipsism. Both are potential conditions of dark madness. Besides “What we know is not what we see or learn but what we realize.” And realising takes time, perhaps more time than we realise.

But there must be a beginning, that point when the light bulb got turned on, a Big Bang of the Self. What happened there in the slight lack of uniformity of primordial psychic energy to produce this particular consciousness and set its course of evolution? “... what am I looking for? I am looking for the beginning of responsibility, the beginning of darkness, the point where I began.” Or is this fuss just a matter of not knowing who my father is?

No, that’s not it. And neither is the explanation involving Ma, childhood friends and enemies; nor the youthful crimes, not the ones discovered, not the ones got away with. Not the sorrows or the tragedies that are there but have no force. Even the betrayals, given and received, are sterile. There simply was no choice. Like human language, or the human species itself, “I” doesn’t seem to have a definite beginning. And like the fossil of the ‘missing link’ between monkeys and men, I couldn’t know it if I held it in my hands.

Eternity is out of the question. Yet here “I” am. Why does it, this “I”, do what it does, want what it wants, think what it thinks? Who’s pulling the strings here? God? The past? A clever torturer who wants me to confess what I don’t know? Some deeper (collective) consciousness? “I cannot find the root. However I try I can bring up nothing which is part of me.” The line of bricks of memory builds something but not the bodily edifice I see now.

Was there ever freedom? If so, what happened to it? “Somewhere, some time, I made a choice in freedom and lost my freedom.” But nothing ever felt like a choice. It always felt like the next thing to do, the next part of a life of distinct parts, separate epochs. But now they all seem to be connected. Connected by what if not this “I”?

The answer and the point of it all seems to be this, this right here, right now. Literally this, what’s happening to me and then happening to you. “My darkness reaches out and fumbles at a typewriter with its tongs. Your darkness reaches out with your tongs and grasps a book.” The story is the answer. The story is where we originate. The story is mother, father, those we love, those we hate and fear, those we care nothing about. Others “had and have a finger in my pie. I cannot understand myself without understanding them.” Their story is my story. The story, therefore, is a simultaneous gain and loss of freedom. It’s what “I” is, which is always “we.”

Metaphysics is not for sissies.

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