Specter V

I am Defeated all the time; yet to Victory I am born

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson (Journal K, 1842, # 283)

There are many who labor under the delusion that life is simple, that all one must do is be honest, work hard, take care of family, and cause no harm to others. Yet life is more complex than we would wish. Regrets are buried, only to rise at the darkest hours of our life to overtake us ... Guilt for wrongs done to others (intentional or not) invade our psyches like potent vampires, reducing our well-filled intellect to a husk, a dessicated rind of nous left to rot unused and unremembered.

How can one forget one's mind? It happens all the time.

A man hardly knows how much he is a machine, until he begins to make telegraph, loom, press, and locomotive, in his own image. (Emerson, Conduct of Life, Part 2)

This act of making, which reduces the role of the human to a mere function, causes the mind to forget itself. How often have we heard someone say "I get lost in my work"? Rarely do we hear anyone say "I have discovered something new about myself!" This discovery of self (which IS possible!) is difficult; and there are those who seek shortcuts. I am such a one. My shortcut has been alcochol which, to quote Bob Dylan, "levels my head and eases my mind." Yet it nearly killed me. Defeat was closer than I ever thought possible. Victory is a promise -- but like all promises, there is always the possibility that it may prove empty.

Service to others is the popular mode of exorcising the demon; yet there are those who dwell alone in this world, for whom the other is, as Sartre put it, hell. Loneliness demands that the mind turn in on itself, in what sometimes amounts to a morbid preoccupation with one's own thoughts. Yet this preoccupation, or (as I prefer to put it) self-reflection or theoria ("contemplation"), is necessary if one wishes to preserve what is essentially human in us: the life of the mind, the creative impulse, the Byronesque self on the mountaintop, defying the world with one's own glorious defeat.

That being said, I disagree with Emerson that the Crucifixion was a defeat, however glorious. It was indeed a victory of the highest order. For this world is chaotic, purposeless and poisonous to the sensitive, self-reflective person. Christ with His defiant love is a model for those who know that defeat is inevitable, and that victory is nothing more than a noble defeat, a conquest of this world by a rejection of its mindless machinery.