The Hole In Our Soul

I have just started reading Charles Eisenstein’s The Ascent of Humanity. It is always dangerous to draw conclusions from a 512 page book when you are just 40 pages in, but the opening chunk of Eisenstein’s Ascent is more than meaty enough to chew on, especially when amplified by some serious synchronicity (more about which in a moment). Eisenstein is right up front with his central thesis that the current global crisis, a crisis best exemplified by the existential threat of climate change yet somehow even broader and deeper, is a blending of “the story of humanity’s separation from nature with the story of our individual alienation from life, nature, spirit and self.” And, just as importantly, out of this state of alienation we have launched our twin would-be therapies, which Eisenstein describes as “the Scientific Program of complete understanding and the Technological Program of complete control.” But these therapies, far from guiding us from a state of illness back to health, are revealed as a toxic form of self-medication. Eisenstein diagnoses us, bluntly, as addicts:

“The future of the Technological Program is one where all the problems are solved once and for all. Here and now, though, we are waking up to another kind of future, and with a hangover to boot: vomit on the floor, apartment trashed, the world a mess.”

Admiring the problem, getting off on the mess, these can be just as addictive as the technology with which we’ve made the mess. It is something I guard against in writing this blog, with, I fear, mixed results. I am convinced that pessimism is addictive in large part because of how much less effort it takes. Meaningful optimism requires an increasingly steep degree of intellectual rigor, making it at the same time increasingly rare. Which makes it so thrilling that Eisenstein’s project is unreservedly optimistic, whilst, in the author’s own words, “assiduously avoiding New Age clichés.” (I have a heart full of my own favorite New Age clichés, e.g. the bumper-sticker slogan “God bless the whole world, no exceptions,” but keep them there a) because they fuel the heart-work of loving my neighbor, and b) because they are safe there from my mind, which thinks itself fully rational, making it (my mind) the ultimate emperor with no clothes. This heart-mind split sounds exactly like Eisenstein’s “individual alienation from… spirit and self.”) Eisenstein’s optimism is certified the moment he proposes an actual solution: “to abandon the program of insulation and control, and the conception of the separate self on which it rests.”

In contrasting this solution with what he terms our current “off-separation from the universe,” Eisenstein asserts that “rejuvenation and wholeness have been, and will be, the consequence of a different worldview, one that has roots in primitive culture and religion, and that is the inescapable yet heretofore generally unrealized implication of twentieth-century science.” (emphasis added) Everything Eisenstein says, or at least everything I can imagine him saying 40 pages in, hinges on that one little word: “wholeness.” Because as I read this passage the typically inaudible unfurling of my memories sounded instead like a whole tray of plates smashing to the floor in the kitchen. The noise redoubled when I got to page 19 and Eisenstein’s description of “our lost wholeness”: “It is a feeling that something is missing. Some people call it a hole in the soul.” The noise was Slovenian philosopher Slvaoj Zizek’s dramatic take on Shel Silverstein’s The Missing Piece.

Shel Siverstein is most famous in my household for penning The Giving Tree, a book which my wife, Jen, loathes. (Jen sees in The Giving Tree an endorsement of naked self-interest and exploitation. I must admit that I was less than impressed by the boy-who-grows-into-a-man character in The Giving Tree, especially in his bald middle age. And the tree itself seems to me sad and undignified in its giving, needy rather than gracious.) But, having never read The Missing Piece, Jen has no opinion about it, while I only became acquainted with it via Zizek’s interpretation in the introduction to his Enjoy Your Symptom! Here is the plot summary, as quoted from Wikipedia:

“The story centers on a circular animal-like creature that is missing a wedge-shaped piece of itself. It doesn’t like this, and sets out to find its missing piece, singing:

Oh, I'm lookin' for my missin' piece
I'm lookin' for my missin' piece
Hi-dee-ho, here I go
lookin' for my missin' piece

It starts out on a grand adventure searching for the perfect piece to complete itself, while singing and enjoying the scenery. But after the circle finally finds the exact-sized wedge that fits it, it begins to realize that it can no longer do the things it used to enjoy doing, like singing or rolling slowly enough to enjoy the company of a worm or butterfly. It decides that it was happier when searching for the missing piece than actually having it. So it gently puts the piece down, and continues searching happily.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Missing_Piece_(book))

The key moment comes when “It decides that it was happier when searching for the missing piece than actually having it.” For Zizek, this is precisely when “the it… constitutes itself as desiring subject through a lack.” If you have been reading this blog you know I have a penchant for reformulating Descartes’ cogito. So, at the risk of going to the well once too often, here goes. Zizek is essentially saying “I desire, therefore I am.” Or, since we only desire because of our constitutive lack, “I lack, therefore I am.” Eisenstein’s “feeling that something is missing,” his “hole in the soul,” is, then, simply the emotional tone and spiritual condition peculiar to a human consciousness.

Seen from this angle, The Missing Piece is the tale of Eisenstein’s longed for “wholeness” found and rejected; it is a reversal of Amazing Grace into “I once was found, but now am lost” that is, shockingly, as overflowing with gratitude as the original. Eisenstein’s pursuit of wholeness suddenly seems reminiscent of the scene in The Matrix: Reloaded when Neo learns from The Architect that the original Matrix was both a) a virtual utopia free of all suffering, and b) rejected by its human inhabitants for that very reason. The history of The Architect’s first Matrix is, at bottom, a retelling of The Missing Piece.

But if, per The Missing Piece and The Matrix: Reloaded, we homo sapiens have rejected wholeness, our preferred modus operandi is leading to another rejection, only this time it is Mother Earth herself rejecting the artificial heart transplanted smack in Her chest in the form of us “desiring subjects.” The choice between Eisenstein’s wholeness and Zizek’s lack begins to feel like choosing your last meal before execution.

It was with just such pleasant thoughts that I went to bed after reading the first bit of The Ascent of Humanity. The very next morning my work took me to a meeting held in an elementary school library, during which meeting I glanced at the bookshelf abutting our little round table. There, at eye level directly in front of me, were three copies of Silverstein’s The Missing Piece. “Aha,” I thought, “the universe is clearly endorsing Zizek, we aren’t meant for wholeness, and if we’re going to save ourselves and our planet we had better rescue desire from capitalism, perhaps beginning by collectively desiring a twenty-hour work week.” (I didn’t actually think all of this on the spot given that I was attending to the specifics of the meeting, but I could feel the thought’s “bow wave,” one of my new favorite terms and one which describes the experience of knowing what’s coming before it happens, i.e. like the wave pushed out in front of the bow of a boat. I played baseball for years and came up to bat hundreds of times, but only once did I ever have precognition of getting hit by the pitcher. Standing in the on-deck circle, I felt the wild pitch’s bow wave. Neither before nor since have I ever been struck with such vivid foreknowledge. We all know what we’re going to think next, e.g. I know that I will never vote Republican, so maybe my use of “bow wave” in reference to my thoughts is a bit of a misnomer. In any case, my wife, who knows me better than I do since her view of me isn’t clouded by my garden variety projections and denial, i.e. she sees through my bullshit, can also tell you what I’m going to think next. And she still loves me! “A man’s greatest treasure is his wife,” indeed.)

But there, just a few books down on the very same shelf, was P.D. Eastman’s Are You My Mother?, which was something of a miracle given that a book by Eastman has no business on the same shelf as one by Silverstein. Unless the books were shelved by genre instead of by alphabet, which changes the particulars but not the fact of the miracle; either way I was staring at two famous illustrated children's books that essentially tell the same story, but with much different endings. Here is the plot summary of Are You My Mother?, again quoted from Wikipedia:

“Are You My Mother? is the story about a hatchling bird. His mother, thinking her egg will stay in her nest where she left it, leaves her egg alone and flies off to find food. The baby bird hatches. He does not understand where his mother is so he goes to look for her. In his search, he asks a kitten, a hen, a dog, and a cow if they are his mother. They each say, ‘No.’

Then he sees an old car, which cannot be his mother for sure. In desperation, the hatchling calls out to a boat and a plane, and at last, convinced he has found his mother, he climbs onto the teeth of an enormous earth mover. A loud ‘SNORT’ belches from its exhaust stack, prompting the bird to utter the immortal line, ‘You are not my mother! You are a SNORT!’ But as it shudders and grinds into motion he cannot escape. ‘I want my mother!’ he shouts.

But at this climactic moment, his fate is suddenly reversed. The earth mover drops him back in his nest just as his mother is returning home. The two are united, much to their delight, and the baby bird tells his mother about the adventure he had looking for her.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Are_You_My_Mother%3F)

The search for a missing piece is mirrored by a search for a missing mother, and both searches endure several false starts. But where Silverstein’s “It” finds the missing piece, only to throw it back and continue looking for satisfaction it doesn’t really want (thereby achieving satisfaction by never finding it, making life either a mystical paradox or absurd, which seem to be the only available choices for us desiring subjects), Eastman’s baby bird is delivered to its missing mother by its last, seemingly terrifying mistaken maternal object. As Snort, the embodiment of the industrial revolution, unexpectedly delivers the baby bird to its lost mother, one can hear Eisenstein in the background, riffing on the possibility that it is technology itself that will bring about the end of “The Age of Separation,” and deliver us unto “The Age of Reunion,” a “potential reunion that lies in the fulfillment, and not the abandonment, of the gifts that make us human.” The particular tale of separation and reunion told in Are You My Mother? is the children’s illustrated version of The Ascent of Humanity every bit as much as The Missing Piece is the children’s illustrated version of Zizek’s Enjoy Your Symptom! I would note that in both cases the children’s illustrated version came first.

So what was the universe telling me by putting both of these books on the same shelf right in front of my nose? Presumably, if the universe endorsed either wholeness or lack I would have encountered the corresponding children’s book, but not both. And it doesn’t seem possible that the universe was endorsing wholeness and lack; we don’t live in a universe of squared circles, after all. I am, it seems, left with the work of interpretation. So… if wholeness and lack are mutually exclusive, then perhaps a semantic shift is required. A shift from wholeness contra lack to a desire born from wholeness. The latter may be just as illogical as the former, if we grant that desire is just a byproduct of lack. But perhaps it isn’t always. And what would a desiring subject constituted from wholeness even want? She would want to give and, quite possibly, create.

Some would say that God, who by Her very definition is whole, constituted us with a lack, gave us our hole in the soul, so that there would be someone to receive Her gift. For us, achieving wholeness, then, would be to join in the Divine game of creation in order that we might give. (Our giving will be nothing like the Giving Tree's; if nothing else, we won't end up a stump.) What might we make, and to whom might we give? I seem to recall something about a “five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before.”

Here’s hoping we find wholeness before we take to the stars.