A sense of permanence
by Bob on April 21, 2008
Elephants know where to go when they are about to die. They have a natural instinct if not a sixth sense. A final resting place. The proverbial "elephant's burial ground".
For us mortal humans, it's really a hard bit when we don't have a permanent anchor in life even while we are living it.
It's so great to be able to say "I'm going home to my family" or just "I'm going home". A place of comfort and confidence and love: home. It's also a safety net when the world at large falls apart around us. We can always go home.
But what if there was no anchor or safety net or place to call home to go to or a family or people who loved us ? Or a place or places we could always return to, with no questions asked ? Suppose there was no such place anymore ?
Life would be hell-ish. Our center would fall apart. Much like that brilliant poem by William Butler Yeats, "The Second Coming" wherein he writes:
"Things fall apart, the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world"
So, as was written in Candide by Voltaire, it is important to cultivate our garden. Our metaphorical garden of friends and worldly people to have as an anchor.
The trouble there is that people are fickle. Sometimes they erase all their love and memory and cut our tether of love and support and leave us drifting in outer space without any chance of getting back to the spaceship or getting anymore oxygen than the spacesuit we are drifting in contains. So we perish as their fickle behaviour waxes and wanes.
Good friends last forever, through thick and thin. For better or worse, for richer or poorer as the classical phrasings go. But many times they don't.
This might lead one to be either a Solipsist or a hermit or a solitary man, uncaring about others feelings and existence and also insensitive to their needs and wants. But such a Stoic will survive because he doesn't believe in a safety net. He also may be very practically wise because the anchor or anchors we so depend on in life may be just illusions of emotions. We would hope not but perhaps the hermit has found the secret out: one only has one's self in the end.
This is sad for the Social Contract and interpersonal relations of any type of sincerity.
In the end it seems, we are all just a mouse click away from the delete from friends button. But this time it's in real life and not on the internet.
So one is at a crossroads philosophically and sociologically: can one depend on others and their love and the warmth of a home where we always will belong and can return to as our hearth ?
I am inclined to think not, much to my great chagrin. There is no more permanence. We've scratched it out of the emotional vocabulary in favour of programs like "Survivor".
And let us copy out all of Yeats poem "The Second Coming". It's worth a good reading. And thankfully elephants never forget.
* * *
The Second Coming
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
-- William Butler Yeats, January 1919