A Meandering History of Time: Untethering the Arc
2. Untethering the Arc
The bad news is we really are just falling through space with nothing to hold onto or break our fall…
The good news is there’s no ground.
– Buddhist joke
Where’s my arc, Ton?
– Christopher Moltisanti, The Sopranos
Everyone wants a good life – but more importantly, everyone wants a conceptual framework to help them understand what a good life is supposed to even look like. Everyone wants, more than anything, a template for a good life that they can aspirationally model their lives – but really, and ultimately far more importantly, their retrospective interpretations/s of their lives – upon.
In Western culture, the dominant model that has molded our dreams, visions, and unfolding self-images is the arc – specifically (as all aspiring screenwriters know) the arc of the hero's journey. Variations on the thematic spinal cord of (I’m spitballing)
leaving one’s family/community of origin to embark on an individual quest with a clear objective;
battling external enemies and internal demons in pursuit of said directive;
suffering setbacks that require learning, introspection, and
tapping into undiscovered reservoirs of talent, skill, and personal fortitude, which
transform the aspiring hero into the mature, empowered, fully realized – heroic – version of oneself, with
deepened insight into human nature, more vivid and urgent clarity of purpose –
ultimately bringing all accrued knowledge, wisdom, technologies, and other treasures back home to enrich their community or nation or family or tribe.
Even if you’ve never thought about this arc, believe me, you know it in your bones. And you know it in your bones not because it is encoded into the human genome, but because every aspiring screenwriter is taught that it’s what success is made of. It’s not that it has all the elements of a good story; for Western audiences, it defines the elements that constitute a good story
The older I get, the more experience I manage to metabolize into wisdom, the clearer it becomes that life can far more aptly – and far more usefully – be described not as a heroic arc but as as a process of non-linear wandering: the way we make as we gropingly make our way through this odd interregnum with no obvious origin or destination or purpose or plan; no clear heroes or demons, mission or quest; no handbook; nothing.
Nothing perfectly captures what we know about the nature of this place: it’s guesses all the way down, my dudes. The only way to move is to wander. By definition. So that’s what we do. All of us. (Justsayin’.)
How we wander can be as aimless or intentional as we decide to make it. But the sooner we embrace wandering as the native rhythm of human experience – easier said than done, but nevertheless – as soon as we let go of the need for our lives to hew to a particular arc based on some desired “identity” animated by the shadow-projections of culture and ego – the more liberated, empowered, and generally stoked we will become.
I’m not saying it’s easy. I know it’s an untethering. I know it feels like leaving home.
Say what you want about Heaven and Hell, reward and punishment – they are incredibly good at their job of grounding believers in two clear narrative poles. Offering everyone on earth two galvanizing, pulsating points from which to build a life-arc charged with meaning. In other words, they offer elements that make for a compelling, high-stakes – if ultimately childishly thin and melodramatic – story.
Be honest, though, back to the wall: do you know the source of your consciousness; do you know what your purpose is for being incarnated on this earth in this place at this time? We don’t know the animating origin of what we think of as our “selves,” and we certainly don’t know where or what this existence is leading towards – if anything – to say nothing of what it means or why.
And the corollary of this ultimate impossibility to know either origin or end-point?
That all beginnings are arbitrary and all closure is false closure. That all arcs are imaginary.
That our “identities” are nothing less and nothing more than the best stories about ourselves our egos can imagine into being in a particular moment or period of our lives. As all good stories, they recruit the most useful origin-point to whatever the envisioned purpose, and begin the story there. And as all good stories, they don’t exist outside of our minds – our mostly subconscious minds, our feverishly fictionalizing Default Mode Networks designing the interwoven projections of individual persona and collective culture we invest emotions in and mold into the dough we call “self.”
Unlike the ultimate unknowing that defines our actual inner experience of being, our “identities” helpfully construct neat linear arcs of meaning and purpose. This is my dream job. This is my ideal partner. My values and preferences and interests and affinities – these are who I am.
These are all things we make up along the way as thumbnail-motivations to make life feel more manageable and meaningful. They’re not bad, can be meaningful areas of exploration and growth, but too often become crutches – shorthand outlines we mistake for the whole book.
Our actual nature – who we are beyond our identities – is to wander through different experiences, with greater or lesser focus, clarity, and zeal, that help to fill in the bigger picture of what constitutes a greater Truth, or truths, and our particular purpose and role within the process of Its/their unfolding.
But it’s too hard to get up in the morning and go to work every day not knowing where we’re from, who we are, or why we’re doing anything.
So we tend to resist seeing things this way – preferring to superimpose over the gaping openness of life as a string of indeterminate wanderings, a more manageable story with more transparent goods and bads and rewards and punishments. And of course, it goes without saying – a clear beginning, middle, and end! How’s anyone supposed to generate any meaning around here without a beginning, middle, and end?
So we hold the truth of our own wandering lives – and thus the depth of what is truly possible to experience and know in our lifetimes – at a distance. And we settle on more contrived and coherent, less complicated or challenging stories that translate into more easily digestible interpretations of our lives. Stories we don’t need our molars for; stories as slurpable as shakes. We do this because we think it’s what we need to do to continue going through the motions of daily life, effectuating our roles as responsible…roles. We do it because we think it’s what we’re supposed to do to preserve some inscrutable but totally necessary order handed down from above. We do it because we’re afraid, because we sense the alternative as unpredictable and unruly and who even knows what will happen?
So we stop considering the alternative – that life is a process of wandering into increasingly evolved and enlightened versions of ourselves via open-ended curiosity, experience, introspection. And then we stop remembering there ever was an alternative. And then we stop knowing what the word “alternative” even means.
And life itself becomes an alienated labor of quiet maintenance: too distractingly monotonous and insufficiently robust to allow for more than the most threadbare defense against existence’s insistent tide of corrosive dying.
What’s the way out of alienated stagnation – the exit onto the path of non-linear wandering into the present moment?
How to begin? Where to begin?
And if all beginnings are arbitrary – when to begin?
From the beginning of recorded history and no doubt entwined with the emergence of human consciousness and society, wanderers and seekers – often motivated by a dissatisfaction with official received accounts of their ‘natural’ origins and ends; at times catalyzing, as in Abraham’s case, revolutionary paradigms and communities with world-changing worldviews – have begun at the beginning of all beginnings: contemplating the ultimate origins of our world and life itself.
According to student of Jung and founder of Depth Psychology Erich Neumann, it is a primary drive of the psyche, immune to the dismissive realism of the reasoned, conscious mind:
If our consciousness, with epistemological resignation, is constrained to regard the question of the beginning as unanswerable and therefore unscientific, it may be right; but the psyche, which can neither be taught nor led astray by the self-criticism of the conscious mind always poses this question afresh as something essential to it. (The Origins and History of Consciousness, Erich Neumann, 7)
The reason being, according to Neumann, the question of where we’re from is the beginning of the question of who we are.
The question of the beginning is also the question “Whence?”....This original question about the origin of the world is at the same time the question about the origin of man, the origin of consciousness and of the ego; it is the fateful question “Where did I come from” that faces every human being as soon as he arrives upon the threshold of self-consciousness. (ibid)
Vladimir Nabokov (who no doubt would’ve despised being mentioned in the same breath with a despised and depraved huckster of psychological quackery, but nevertheless) was one who publicly “rebelled” (on page one of his majestic memoir Speak, Memory, no less) against the legitimization and enforcement of approved accounts of “first and last things” by official bodies, e.g. the way dissenters who would dare to activate their imaginative faculties to explore them independently are marginalized as “adolescent”:
…first and last things often tend to have an adolescent note--unless, possibly, they are directed by some venerable and rigid religion. Nature expects a full-grown man to accept the two black voids, fore and aft, as stolidly as he accepts the extraordinary visions in between. Imagination, the supreme delight of the immortal and the immature, should be limited. In order to enjoy life, we should not enjoy it too much.
I rebel against this state of affairs. (Speak, Memory, Nabokov, 1)
In retrospect, this is probably why I was so triggered freshman year by the cultural hullabaloo around Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. I was rebelling, too, though in the moment I had no idea exactly why or what against. On my own for the first time, in the midst of a low-key identity crisis, uncertain who I was or where I came from…out of nowhere, I suddenly seemed to know one thing very clearly: that Steven Hawking wasn’t going to be the one to explain it to me.