Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book (2 page)

Or do you see sexuality as a unique trait of the present-day self (which is the only self we know), occupying an absolutely central locus in the consciousness particularly as it relates to other sexual beings, of an order and magnitude of power incommensurate with other “drives” and also specified by the very structure of the present-day self as its very core and as its prime avenue of intercourse with others?

If the sexual drive is but one of several biological needs, why are we living in the most eroticized society in history? Why don’t TV, films, billboards, magazines feature culinary delights, e.g., huge chocolate cakes, hams, roasts, strawberries, instead of women’s bodies?

Or are you more confused about sexuality than any other phenomenon in the Cosmos?

Do you know why it is that men and women exhibit sexual behavior undreamed of among the other several million species, with every conceivable sexual relation between persons, or with only one person, or between a male and female, or between two male persons, or two female persons, or two males and one female, or two females and one male; relationships moreover which can implicate every orifice and appendage of the human body and which bear no relation to the reproduction and survival of the species?

Is the following statement true or false:

Pornography is not an aberration of a few sexually frustrated middle-aged men in gray raincoats; it is rather a salient and prime property of modern consciousness, of three hundred years of technology and the industrial revolution, and is symptomatic of a radical disorder in the relation of the self to other selves which generally manifests itself in the abstracted state of one self (male) and the degradation of another self (female) to an abstract object of satisfaction.

(6) Consider the following short descriptions of different kinds of consciousness of self. Which of the selves, if any, do you identify with?

(a) The cosmological self.
The self is either unconscious of itself or only conscious of itself insofar as it is identified with a cosmological myth or classificatory system, e.g., totemism. Ask a Bororo tribesman: Who are you? He may reply: I am parakeet. (Ask an L.S.U. fan at a football game: Who are you? He may reply: I am a tiger.)

(b) The Brahmin-Buddhist self.
Who are you? What is your self? My self in this life is impaled on the wheel of non-being, obscured by the veil of unreality. But it can realize itself by penetrating the veil of
maya
and plumbing the depths of self until it achieves
nirvana,
nothingness, or the
Brahman,
God. The
atman
(self) is the
Brahman
(God).

(c) The Christian self (and, to a degree, the Judaic and Islamic self).
The self sees itself as a creature, created by God, estranged from God by an aboriginal catastrophe, and now reconciled with him. Before the reconciliation, the self is, as Paul told the Ephesians, a stranger to every covenant, with no promise to hope for, with the world about you and no God. But now the self becomes a son of God, a member of a family of selves, and is conscious of itself as a creature of God embarked upon a pilgrimage in this life and destined for happiness and reunion with God in a later life.

(d) The role-taking self.
One sociological view of the self is that the self achieves its identity by taking roles and modeling its own role from the roles of others, e.g., one’s mother, father, housewife, breadwinner, macho-boy-man, feminine-doll-girl, etc.—and also, as George Mead said, upon how one perceives others’ perceptions of oneself.

(e) The standard American-Jeffersonian high-school-commencement Republican-and-Democratic-platform self.
The self is an individual entity created by God and endowed with certain inalienable rights and the freedom to pursue happiness and fulfill its potential. It achieves itself through work, participation in society, family, the marketplace, the political process, cultural activities, sports, the sciences, and the arts. It follows that in a free and affluent society the self should succeed more often than not in fulfilling itself. Happiness can be pursued and to a degree caught.

(f) The diverted self.
In a free and affluent society, the self is free to divert itself endlessly from itself. It works in order to enjoy the diversions that the fruit of one’s labor can purchase. The pursuit of happiness becomes the pursuit of diversion, and in this society the possibilities of diversion are endless and as readily available as eight hours of television a day: TV, sports, travel, drugs, games, newspapers, magazines, Vegas.

(g) The lost self.
With the passing of the cosmological myths and the fading of Christianity as a guarantor of the identity of the self, the self becomes dislocated, Jefferson or no Jefferson, is both cut loose and imprisoned by its own freedom, yet imprisoned by a curious and paradoxical bondage like a Chinese handcuff, so that the very attempts to free itself, e.g., by ever more refined techniques for the pursuit of happiness, only tighten the bondage and distance the self ever farther from the very world it wishes to inhabit as its homeland. The rational Jeffersonian pursuit of happiness embarked upon in the American Revolution translates into the flaky euphoria of the late twentieth century. Every advance in an objective understanding of the Cosmos and in its technological control further distances the self from the Cosmos precisely in the degree of the advance—so that in the end the self becomes a space-bound ghost which roams the very Cosmos it understands perfectly.

(h) The scientific and artistic self.
Or that self which is so totally absorbed in the pursuit of art or science as to be selfless. The modern caricature is the “absentminded professor” or the demonic possessed artist, which is to say that as a self he is “absent” from the usual concerns of the self about itself in the world. E.g., Karl von Frisch and his bees, Schubert in a beer hall writing lieder on the tablecloth, Picasso in a restaurant modeling animals from bread.

(i) The illusory self.
Or the conviction that one’s sense of oneself is a psychological or cultural illusion and that with the advance of science, e.g., behaviorism, Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism, the self will disappear.

(j) The autonomous self.
The self sees itself as a sovereign and individual consciousness, liberated by education from the traditional bonds of religion, by democracy from the strictures of class, by technology from the drudgery of poverty, and by self-knowledge from the tyranny of the unconscious—and therefore free to pursue its own destiny without God.

(k) The totalitarian self.
The self sees itself as a creature of the state, fascist or communist, and understands its need to be specified by the needs of the state.

(
CHECK ONE
)

If you can answer Questions (1) through (5) and did not check (6g), you probably do not need to take the Twenty-Question Quiz.

Twenty-Question Multiple-Choice Self-Help Quiz

to test your knowledge of the peculiar status of the self, your self and other selves, in the Cosmos, and your knowledge of what to do with your self in these, the last years of the twentieth century

(1) The Amnesic Self:

Why the Self Wants to Get Rid of Itself

IN ALL SOAP OPERAS
and in many films and novels, a leading character will sooner or later develop amnesia. He will not necessarily develop pneumonia or cancer or schizophrenia, but inevitably he will be overtaken by amnesia. He (or she) finds himself in a strange place, having forgotten his old place, his family, friends, business. He begins a new life in a new place with a new girlfriend, new job. After a while in his new life he begins to receive clues about his old life. A stranger stops him in the street and calls him by a strange name. The best exploitation of the pleasures of amnesia occurred in Hitchcock’s
Spellbound
where Gregory Peck had amnesia and Ingrid Bergman was his psychiatrist. For the moviegoer there occurred first the pleasure of the prospect of a new life and the infinite possibilities of the self as represented by Gregory Peck. The second pleasure is the accidental meeting with Ingrid Bergman, who is sensitive to the clues that Gregory misses, and who is a reliable guide, his Beatrice, who can help him recover his old life—for even amnesia, if prolonged, can become as dreary as one’s old life.

Here is a nice example of Ingrid picking up clues to his past identity, a search which will allow them to have the best of both worlds, a discovery of oneself and one’s past without the encumbrances of the past, and a joining of hands with Ingrid for a new life in the future:

I
NGRID
(psychoanalyzing him in a hotel room)
:
I would like to ask you a medical question.

G
REGORY:
All right.

I
NGRID: H
ow
would you diagnose a pain in the right upper quadrant?

G
REGORY:
Gall bladder—pneumonia—

I
NGRID:
It is obvious you are a doctor.

Here is an extra dividend for the moviegoer who is identifying with Peck or Bergman. Ingrid is on the track of who he is (who you are). You are a doctor, an identity which seems to interest women more than, say, a banker or an auto dealer.

Question:
Is amnesia a favorite device in fiction and especially soap operas because

(a)
The character in the soap opera is sick and tired of himself and his life and wants a change.

(b)
The writer is sick and tired of his character and wants a change.

(c)
The writer is sick and tired of himself and his life and wants a change.

(d)
The reader or moviegoer or TV-viewer is sick and tired of himself and his life and wants a change—and the housewife is the sickest and tiredest of all.

(e)
The times are such that everyday life for everybody is more or less intolerable and one is better off wiping out the past and starting anew.

(
CHECK ONE
)

A variant of the amnesic-plot device is the inadvertent return of the amnesiac to home territory, where he is welcomed by a lovely woman, unknown to him, who is evidently his wife. The crucial scene is his being led off to bed.

A non-amnesic equivalent is a twin or look-alike who is mistaken for someone else—by a beautiful woman. Invariably she finds him not merely oddly different but somehow better, more attractive, than the original. After a love scene, she looks at him wide-eyed and smiling (you were never like this before!).

This version demonstrates that the source of pleasure for the moviegoer is not the amnesia but the certified and risk-free license to leave the old self behind and enter upon a new life, whether by amnesia or mistaken identity.

Thought Experiment:
Test your response to vicarious loss of self by imagining amnesia raised to the highest power. Imagine a soap opera in which a character awakens every morning with amnesia, in a strange house with a strange attractive man (or woman), welcomed by the stranger, looking out a strange window with a strange view, having forgotten the past each morning and starting life afresh, seeing the window, the view, himself, herself, in the mirror afresh and for the first time. Does this prospect intrigue you? If it does, what does this say about your non-amnesic self?
^*

^*
Some TV series do in fact operate at this level of amnesia, the doctor or cop or private eye falling in love every week, the lover totally forgotten the following week. This quasi-amnesic device is clearly a variant of the earlier Lone Ranger or non-amnesic Western, with the difference that in the latter the lone cowboy moves on after his adventure, whereas in the former it is the lover who moves on.

(2) The Self as Nought:

How the Self Tries to Inform Itself by Possessing Things which do not Look like the Things They’re Used as

IN A RECENT ISSUE
of a home-and-garden magazine, an article listed fifty ways to make a coffee table.

One table was made of an old transom of stained glass supported by an antique brass chandelier cut ingeniously to make the legs.

Another was a cypress stump, waxed and highly polished.

Another was a big spool used for telephone cable set on end.

Another was a lobster trap.

Another was a Coca-Cola sign propped on Coke crates.

Another was a stone slab from an old morgue, the blood runnel used as an ash tray.

Another was a hayloft door set on cut-down sawhorses.

Another was the hatch of a sailboat mounted on halves of ships’ wheels.

Another was a cobbler’s bench.
^*

Not a single one was a table designed as such, that is, a horizontal member with four legs.

Question:
Why was not a single table designed as such rather than being a non-table doing duty as a table?

(a)
Because people have gotten tired of ordinary tables.

(b)
Because the fifty non-tables converted to use as tables make good conversation pieces.

(c)
Because it is a chance to make use of valuable odds and ends which otherwise would gather dust in the attic.

(d)
Because the self in the twentieth century is a voracious nought which expands like the feeding vacuole of an amoeba seeking to nourish and inform its own nothingness by ingesting new objects in the world but, like a vacuole, only succeeds in emptying them out.

(
CHECK ONE
)

Thus, ordinary four-legged tables have long since been emptied out and rendered invisible.

Even the cobbler’s bench, which, for a while, resisted the ravenous self and for some years remained a cobbler’s bench upon which one could set drinks and art books, has now disappeared into the vacuole and become as invisible as a Danish modern. The cobbler’s bench has become in fact a table. Tables are now being manufactured which look like cobblers’ benches but are not.