Conjecture and dream
Writing in isolation and imagination
Anyone who follows my work knows how obsessed I am with the gap between what we see and feel and what we can know. Not only is this a recurring theme in my poetry, but it’s been the driving force behind my fiction; my first novel, Beautiful Soul: An American Elegy is a kind of neonoir metanarrative about the difficulty of knowing another person, in this case a mysterious and tormented American woman living in Paris during the 1968 student uprisings; her character, or more precisely the mystery of her character, was based on my own mother. My second novel, due out in January, returns to the prehistory of the family romance: as the narrator wanders around Europe and Morocco in the wake of a near-fatal accident suffered by his father, he imagines the courtship of his parents in 1960s New York City. Both novels were born out of an irresistible impulse to try and imagine the circumstances that shaped my own life, on a personal and historical level. I didn’t experience the 1960s, and yet they remain somehow present to my being and in the prehistory of my body. These books explore the epigenetics of “the greatest decade in the history of mankind,” and behind that, the dual trauma of the Holocaust and immigration.
From earliest childhood I’ve found deeply mysterious things that others seemed to take for granted or somehow already knew how to categorize and handle. This was as true of other people—I was slow to acquire a feeling for nonverbal social cues—as it was of the larger social and historical reality for a kid growing up in the 1970s. What was an “energy crisis” and why were we in one? OPEC was opaque, a series of gnomic letters that had something to do with sitting with my mom in her Datsun baking in the sun waiting for our turn at the gas pump. How was it possible for two Boeing 747s, the epitome of technological progress and mastery, to collide with each other on a runway on an island whose name I couldn’t pronounce, leaving 583 people dead? Why did the Iranians hate us? Why couldn’t I see gravity? How was it possible for me, a bookish and uncoordinated kid, to be so smart about so many things, and so completely dumb about so many others?
Bookishness, for me, is where the experiential and the theoretical most often collided. I read novels—mostly fantasy and science fiction but a lot of classic literature too (Mark Twain was a favorite)—with a feverish thirst for greater understanding of the world, as though novels provided scale models of histories and behavior that I could revolve in my mind and analyze without being blinded and tongue-tied as I was in moments of personal interaction. Then I would go around the house prattling about the things I’d read, often repeating them word for word, to the amusement and irritation of my parents. I mispronounced words, a lot—I still do this sometimes—because I’d read them but had never heard anyone speak them. I was a Huck Finn of the library: absorbed and scrupulous, but naive to the point of obtuseness. It took a very long time for me to realize that a writer’s insight into life could be derived from life, as well as from books.
Then there was D&D, which promised to quantify and make comprehensible the laws of the universe and of personality—it was a great relief to imagine that a person could be comprehensively laid out and explained on a single sheet of paper, reduced to a race (I favored half-elves), class, level, and a series of attributes physical and mental: STR DEX CON INT WIS CHA! Even their morality could be clearly laid out and explained in the form of an alignment that left no ambiguity as to who was good or evil, order-loving or a creature of chaos. (I was lawful good trying to be chaotic good—that probably explains as much of my personality as anything can.) Wargames, of course, are highly rationalized simulations of something that everyone knows cannot really be predicted or controlled—the fog of war always descends. I wonder how many of the people who believed we could somehow game out a happy ending in Afghanistan were wargamers in their youth. I suspect quite a few of them.
All this autobiography by way of explaining how my fascination with the gap between what we can perceive and what we can rationalize goes beyond intellectual interest into something existential. What fills the gap between what we can see and what we can know?
Think of all the wretched stories we keep hearing about anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers—some of them with massive media platforms—dying of COVID. Think about the climate-change denial that not only grips the conservative base but which has had enough of a ripple effect into the general population to make the drastic actions we must take if our civilization is to survive that much more difficult, if not impossible. Both might read as a case of misplaced faith in an authority that demands as in the old joke, Who are you going to believe—me or your lying eyes?
We want to believe in authority—we want to believe, in spite of all the evidence, that those in power have our best interests at heart, or at least that their interests will somewhat coincide with ours. Surely, we reason, the oil executives and the COVID-deniers want a good life not just for themselves but for their children and grandchildren. It can’t possibly be in anyone’s interest to render the planet uninhabitable. Can it?
For too many people, conspiracy theories flood in to fill the epistemological gap, to process or ward off the intolerable knowledge of our abandonment, without as yet a plausible political project to fill the void.
The rest of us are similarly confronted by this failure of imagination. Not theirs, but ours.
I never tire of quoting this passage from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “A Defence of Poetry”:
We have more moral, political, and historical wisdom than we know how to reduce into practice; we have more scientific and economical knowledge than can be accommodated to the just distribution of the produce which it multiplies. The poetry in these systems of thought is concealed by the accumulation of facts and calculating processes. There is no want of knowledge respecting what is wisest and best in morals, government, and political economy, or at least, what is wiser and better than what men now practise and endure. But we let I dare not wait upon I would, like the poor cat in the adage. We want the creative faculty to imagine that which we know; we want the generous impulse to act that which we imagine; we want the poetry of life; our calculations have outrun conception; we have eaten more than we can digest. The cultivation of those sciences which have enlarged the limits of the empire of man over the external world, has, for want of the poetical faculty, proportionally circumscribed those of the internal world; and man, having enslaved the elements, remains himself a slave.
And next to that I’ll place another well-known passage, this one from Alfred North Whitehead’s The Concept of Nature:
What I am essentially protesting against is the bifurcation of nature into two systems of reality, which, in so far as they are real, are real in different senses. One reality would be the entities such as electrons which are the study of speculative physics. This would be the reality which is there for knowledge; although on this theory it is never known. For what is known is the other sort of reality, which is the byplay of the mind. Thus there would be two natures, one is the conjecture and the other is the dream.
Another way of phrasing this theory which I am arguing against is to bifurcate nature into two divisions, namely into the nature apprehended in awareness and the nature which is the cause of awareness. The nature which is the fact apprehended in awareness holds within it the greenness of the trees, the song of the birds, the warmth of the sun, the hardness of the chairs, and the feel of the velvet. The nature which is the cause of awareness is the conjectured system of molecules and electrons which so affects the mind as to produce the awareness of apparent nature. The meeting point of these two natures is the mind, the causal nature being influent and the apparent nature being effluent.
When Shelley was writing, the Industrial Revolution was already three generations old; almost exactly one hundred years later Whitehead restated the problem of modernity as “the bifurcation of nature” into two irreconcilable “systems of reality.” We remain in dire need of the creative faculty that translates quantified knowledge into something lived, that translates causal nature into apparent nature, that revives the meeting point that Whitehead calls simply “the mind.” Modernity created this epistemological gap. Modernity is this epistemological gap.
The pessimism of Whitehead’s language is remarkable—all the more so for his being one of the sunniest of philosophers. Reality breaks down into conjecture on the one hand, and dream on the other. Neither of these cognitive models promises to bring us into contact with the bedrock of things as they are. Yet Whitehead’s whole philosophical project was to devise a metaphysics that could be plausible for both systems: perception-dream and calculation-conjecture are both modes of what he calls “prehension,” the contact between things (or “societies”) that doesn’t require consciousness but doesn’t negate it, either. I kick a football: the ball, a society comprised largely of leather and air under pressure, prehends the impact of my foot and responds by flying through the goalposts. I listen to Bach: my ears prehend a set of soundwaves the pattern of which arouses emotions in my body that mix with the memories in my mind to become feeling. I read the IPCC report—or, if I’m honest, I skim news articles about it—and I prehend information about the state of our climate that fills me with an unstable mixture of alarm, anger, and despair.
What’s missing? An act of the imagination that would lift my apprehension of other people into reality.
Since our office is with moments, let us husband them. Five minutes of today are worth as much to me, as five minutes in the next millennium. Let us be poised, and wise, and our own, today. Let us treat the men and women well: treat them as if they were real: perhaps they are. Men live in their fancy, like drunkards whose hands are too soft and tremulous for successful labor. It is a tempest of fancies, and the only ballast I know, is a respect to the present hour.
This passage from Emerson’s "Experience”—an essay I think about almost daily—appeals to something like mindfulness—the husbanding of moments—as the only cure for the solipsistic separation from reality that afflicted Emerson and afflicts me and afflicts the thousands of people who have invested themselves in apocalyptic narratives that end with the defeat of evil and the restoration of their lost world. In the moment—now—we can try to imagine alternatives to the dismal disconnection that’s left so many of us adrift and atomized in the face of vast forces that have been organized against our benefit. Political imagination begins with how we organize our intimate lives, if only to redraw a line between public and private that’s been blurred and erased by the capitalist algorithms of social media. Am I present to my spouse, my kid, my friends, my students and colleagues? Do I treat them well, as though they are real, in spite of the epistemological gap, in spite—or because of—the fact that the other is other? Am I called to the palpable present-intimate of my time? Our time?
My next fiction project is a novel about my distant cousin Barney Ross, a boxer and Marine and drug addict, and his lifelong entanglement with one Jack Ruby. It’s another dive into the history that shaped our country, and my family and my life. It’s about loneliness, and the violent drive to “strike through the mask” and make contact with reality, and our mediated culture’s corrosive effect on the sense of a shared American project. What’s the alternative to atavism, to conspiracizing, to the terrifying emptiness of figures like Lee Harvey Oswald or Jack Ruby? I am hoping that by coming to grips with these well-known yet mysterious historical figures that I might be able to say something durable and persuasive.
