Water All The Way Up

Here's how I reason about pain in moments of disappointment.

I was meant to go to Australia. I'd been looking forward to this trip for months. But now it looks like I won't get to go there after all. Due to a combination of personal incompetence, bad luck, and the Australian government's blatant operation of a visa system, in spite of their claims to the contrary. (The Romanian Government complained to the EU about this but no cigar.)

It was bad. Is bad. I woke up, saw their email, sent the documents, called my friend, and as soon as the administrative distraction was no longer present, I sat there, as the saying goes. thunderstruck. I sat there, feeling like a heavy rusty work wrench had just been casually pushed through my forehead and wedged inside my chest like a tombstone. I sat there, at the end of a week in which the visa thing had been the least of my troubles, feeling like I'd just received a cancer diagnosis. Disoriented, angry, vexed, and sad beyond comprehension. A huddle of negative emotion, as if my brain couldn't quite decide which pain receptors to reach out to first.

I got up, took a few steps around my room and sat back down. Got up, sat down. Got up, sat down. Then lay down, wrapping myself in my duvet, waiting for some sort of letup I suppose. Then got up again. Confusion. I took another few steps and my eyes rested on my shower towel. Still, no coherent thought agreed to present itself to me. So I walked to the hallway. And then stopped again. Walked to the shower, stopped. Opened the door to the shower cabin and stood starring. Pain in varied forms was the only discernible emotion. I felt ill. Get in the shower, said a voice, you're cold. My own rational thinking, coming to me as if from above. Pain pain pain, I thought vaguely, pain pain pain. I turned the water on. Pain pain intolerable pain pain. Pain pain pain. Pain like a kick in a slowly healing gunshot wound. Pain like a bad movie. Pain recalling every hardship, every disappointment, every fear and moment of horror, every sadness and vexation, every ego damage I'd ever experienced and could still recall.

Then, out of habit, I thought this: mustn't narrow frame. That's my preferred method for handling seriously bad news. Don't narrow frame. Not everything outside this context is damaged. There's stuff outside this one trip to Australia. Things are bad here, but they are not bad everywhere. A neat mental habit, if you can teach yourself it. Perspective. A drab cliche if you cannot conjure the associated emotion, or a life-affirming soul gift from the fucking gods.

Don't narrow frame. I thought of Time longitudinally. One of the small benefits of age is that you can imagine Time in long- as well as cross- section. I thought of elsewhere and elsewhen. Will this matter in 6 months? a year? 5 years?

But then something happened. Pain.

The pain was physically in my body, here and now. The pain was permeating and very real. And none of my elsewhere/elsewhen thoughts were helping very much. The body independent from the mind. I felt the disconnection distinctly: like trying to push a balloon upwards by a long limp ineffective thread. My wide framing wasn't working.

And that's when the penny rolled of the margin. Something I knew, of course, but never knew feelingly. It's stupid but kind of important to get this. You can't leave your body. You can't crawl outside your skin, is the real prick of the problem. No matter how bad the game is going, you can't just switch it off and go have tea. Any which way I moved, I continued to be inside Living. No out. That was it. No out. I could walk from one room to another, from one country to another, from one job to another, from one aspiration to the next. But no matter how far, how different, I'd always be inside. Living. Nowhere to come up for air, you see. Because there's no above water. It's water all the way up.

Really. Water all the way up.

I see.

So that was it, all those years. That sadness. That forever sadness. That sadness I was heaving around with me like a heavy suitcase wherever I went. That rootless, disembodied sadness, sadness eating, sadness speaking, sadness lodged behind my sternum like a knot. That sadness. That's what that was all about. It wasn't about whatever happened. Failed attempts, disappointments, heartaches, no no. I was narrow framing all along. That sadness was really about this. Water all the way up.

Water all the way up. The supreme mother of all problems.

The thought rather cheered me up. Blessed intellectualization. I'd pulled it off after all, the perspective trick. Big Problem had put Little Problem in its proper place.

I came out of the shower, got dressed, and walked to a coffee shop.

The pain was still kicking, but now I had a better avenue for thought. Without being too reductive, making your body stop hurting is not that different from fixing a motorcycle. Or indeed a bug in a computer app. The thing that gets you stuck is always not enough information. The thing that gets you unstuck is thinking things through. And coffee. And food.

Clue One. This thought made me feel better: Oh well, I thought. Such is life. I'll go to Singapore. Or Mexico. Or even the US. There's other places with desert. I'll go to Flagstaff. I'll buy a bike.

Clue Two. This thought made me feel worse: But I won't see Alex. I won't see Darwin. I won't drive to Uluru for days and days through the baking desert and I won't meet Pat.

Oh I know what this is.

One: disappointment. Well OK, disappointment hurts. But it also comes and goes.

Two: this interim and unmitigated horror of water all the way up. This desert between two pursuits of desire, when you have nothing to chase and therefore no chase to distract you from the thought of your unpausable existence. This waterless desert between losing one chase and starting another; between failing to secure one wish and that moment of hope when your imagination conjures for you a new desire. In this desert, you think: I don't want another cookie, I wanted that cookie; I'll never want another cookie again. It's this that makes the body hurting unbearable. Q.v. DFW: "No one single instant of it was unendurable. Here was a second right here: he endured it. What was undealable-with was the thought of all the instants all lined up and stretching ahead, glittering". I'll never want another cookie again. No distant goal will ever again distract me from It. And, horror of all horrors, there's water all the way up.

Well well.

How long now? Another 60 years?

I suddenly imagined waiting for a train in a rural train station in Siberia. Waiting for weeks on end. In the intolerable cold. No one else there. And no books.

This you see is the very heart of the problem. 60 years and water all the way up. You know those days when you feel lousy for no particular reason no matter what you do? Well, this is the reason. Call it the Tragedy of Existence.

I finished my second cup of coffee and thought about my day. An errand or two. Friends, alcohol. Books. Waiting to be told I can't fly to Sydney. The heartlessness of bureaucracies. The heartlessness of bad luck. Was I missing anything?

Well, you know, yes. Freedom, friendship, and thought.

The day is overcast but clear. No rain. I can walk. Happy thought from Clue One kicking around somewhere. Plenty of other places. Longitudinal Time. And a new desire with the associated plan and hope will eventually occur to me. There's no out, sure, but inside of here there's any number of ways of being. And I'll imagine one, eventually, I'm sure. Once I've been bored enough.

It's just the way of empty train stations underwater.

Quo Vadis

In Two Concepts of Liberty (1958), Isaiah Berlin makes a helpful distinction between technical and political matters. "Where ends are agreed", he says, "the only questions left are those of means, and these are not political but technical, that is to say, capable of being settled by experts or machines, like arguments between engineers or doctors". Technical problems, he appears to be saying, are to be settled through objectivity and rational debate. Political problems, however, are creatures of the far murkier land of Value, Ethics, Aesthetics and Subjectivity.

This I thought about while reading Radical Focus, a 2016 book by Christina Wodtke, in which she advertises the many benefits of running your business by using Objectives and Key Results. Give your team inspiring Objectives, say the proponents of OKRs, and quantify progress using meaningful metrics and that will put you on the clear blue flightpath to entrepreneurial success.

"Inspiring" is about the only insight given here into exactly what makes something a good Objective. "Qualitative". Something that will "make people excited about getting out of bed", she further adds, just in case by this point you had any lingering uncertainty. And achievable in 3 to 6 months.

Some further clues emerge when she mentions that Objectives should align with your overall Mission, where Mission is a sort of philosophical lattice for your more pedestrian Objectives to hang off of. She recommends the formula: "We [reduce pain] in [market] by [value proposition]". Now this seemed a bit more promising. Reduced pain does sound, if not exactly inspiring, at least marginally preferable, most of the time.

And finally we get some hints as to what makes Objectives bad. Unexciting. Uninspiring. Drab. "Hit revenue target of $10m", to approximate one of her examples. Who cares? Normal people don't get excited about making (usually someone else) big piles of cash.

At this point, Ms Wodtke posits that this is a bad Objective because it fails to be an Objective at all, being instead just a lowly metric with zero to none inspirational umph. But I think there is a deeper reason why a revenue target doesn't quite work. Making money is a boring goal not just because it's quantitative, but also because it's selfish. It's all about you. "Be a writer". Same problem. Being a writer is an exciting vision for the starry-eyed aspiring writer and literally nobody else.

Think of it this way. Reality is a multiverse. You and I are here, in boring Universe A, and over there is better and much more exciting glorious Universe B: all we need to do is put the effort in to travel over. Our objective is a feature of the Target Universe, a sort of North Pole to help orient our journey. But there's a catch: we can't go there alone. A Target Universe doesn't become a Real Universe until we manage to convince enough people to travel there with us. Like Moses. So now you can see why "hit revenue target of £10m" or "be a writer" are bad objectives. Nobody wants to go there other than ourselves, who covet something in that universe. And why would they?

This is where the Promised Land idea comes in. A good objective is transcendental. Unselfish. Grand. It belongs to a Target Universe in which everyone's life is better. That's what it means to be inspiring. "Solve problem X" rather than "hit target revenue of £10m". People will travel to a world in which problem X is no longer a problem. The money will follow. Don't just be a writer, be someone who can analyse a phenomenon, articulate a vision, entertain, explain, reassure. Make the Target Universe better in some way and people will follow. Is the theory.

But it's hard gig being Moses. The distance between Universes A and B is a wide and perilous desert. The empty space of mutinies, nostalgia, confusion. People lose faith in this desert. They riot and jump ship.

Besides which, who knows what constitutes a Promised Land, exactly? What do people want. Besides bread and circus, that is, and triumphs and romance; and handy tech for continually proving to themselves their own lack of significance and personal glamour. Hard to tell. More money, less hassle, dignity, respect. Most of the stuff in the lower half of Maslow's pyramid and one or two things from the summit.

And in the light of this it doesn't surprise me at all that the tech world has a hard time telling you exactly what makes a good Objective. That is, beyond the hand-wavy notions that they should be "qualitative", "inspiring" and able to wake people out of their AM slumber like a large dose of pharma-grade class A amphetamines. The tech world is exactly that: technical. And I'd posit a little more philosophy amid its people wouldn't entirely go amiss.

The Culture of You

A few months ago a friend was breaking up with his girlfriend. The saddest thing about breaking up, he said, is having to take apart this world that you've built together. The private language you've invented based on shared experiences. She's gone and you're now the sole witness that this thing ever even existed. It's like being the last surviving native of some dying culture.

This came to mind yesterday. These private languages.

I was cycling into the city centre after the rain had stopped, cycling westbound, towards and into the afternoon sun. On the glittering tarmac. They've laid down this tarmac on Leadenhall Street, between the junctions with Fenchurch Street at one end and Bishopsgate, that glitters after a rain like water. It was like gliding into the death scene from a movie, when the screen goes all bright and the hero wakes up in heaven. It reminded me of a frame from The Story of Film by Mark Cousins, when he talks about innovative use of light in the Scandinavian cinema of 1910. Benjamin Christensen and Victor Sjöström. The frame looked like this:

I really enjoyed the connection. I'd misremembered that the frame had come from a film by Benjamin Christensen and further confabulated that it was a recurring motif throughout film history. (It isn't.) I thought it would be cool to recreate that image, but using instead the glittering tarmac and the canyon of buildings as stand-ins for trees. I rather liked that idea and dwelt on it. It would go into my Love of London exhibition: the artist's comment on natural beauty in the man-made world. Tarmac for lake, the canyon of buildings for forest. I was pleased too with the philosophy of it, I saw it as a visual expression of the ideas of Robert Pirsig in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which I was reading. The Buddha is everywhere etc.

So my pleasure was manyfold. It was the physical pleasure of cycling into the afternoon light, the memory of that documentary, the idea of Buddha is everywhere and so on. Which further reminded me of Howard Woodhouse and his introduction to Bertrand Russell's collection of essays In Praise of Idleness. Woodhouse comments on the essay called Useless Knowledge (1935) in which Bertrand Russell enthuses on how knowledge of the etymology of the word 'apricot' made eating the fruit more enjoyable:

Curious learning, says Russell, not only makes unpleasant things less unpleasant, but also makes pleasant things more pleasant. I have enjoyed peaches and apricots more since I have known that they were first cultivated in China in the early days of the Han dynasty; that Chinese hostages held by the great King Kanisha introduced them into India, whence they spread to Persia, reaching the Roman Empire in the first century of our era; that the word 'apricot' is derived from the same Latin source as the word 'precocious', because the apricot ripens early; and that the A at the beginning was added by mistake, owing to a false etymology. All this makes the fruit taste much sweeter.

This further amused me, because it's at once pretentious and unavoidably funny. And I do enjoy apricots more since knowing that. The way I also enjoy more the word "enthusiasm", since I learned, from Pirsig, that it literally means ‘possessed by a god, inspired’ (from theos - ‘god’), from the Greek enthousiasmos. Which enjoyment is further increased because Pirsig's idea that when you feel enthusiasm for your work you are experiencing something close to a religious experience, is the same as what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called "flow". Two independent minds reaching the same conclusion. A nice idea made more real by its being accounted for by two uncorrelated sources. This makes me happy. And from there I remembered, from Daniel Kahneman, that Csikszentmihalyi used to explain that his name was pronounced Chicks-sent-me-high. Which is funnier still, you see?

The point being that these private languages don't just develop between lovers. They develop also in your own head. The little private jokes you have with yourself that make you smile but you'd be at a loss to explain to anyone Other. That is, you are the last surviving native of a dying culture. The culture of You.

Ego Goals

Having the right sort of motivation is like the feather that broke the camel's back: the weightless difference between two very different outcomes, between broke and unbroke, between achieving your goal and not achieving it.

So here is an observation. It's from Robert M. Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Narrator and ten year old son are hiking up a mountain.

Up ahead all of Chris's movements seem tired and angry. He stumbles on things, lets branches tear at him, instead of pulling them to one side.

I'm sorry to see this. Some blame can be put on the YMCA camp he attended for two weeks just before we started. From what he's told me, they made a big ego thing out of the whole outdoor experience. A proof-of-manhood thing. He began in a lowly class they were careful to point out was rather disgraceful to be in...original sin. Then he was allowed to prove himself with a long series of accomplishments - swimming, rope tying... he mentioned a dozen of them, but I've forgotten them.

It made the kids at camp much more enthusiastic and cooperative when they had ego goals to fulfill, I'm sure, but ultimately that kind of motivation is destructive. Any effort that has self-glorification as its final endpoint is bound to end in disaster. Now we're paying the price. When you try to climb a mountain to prove how big you are, you almost never make it. And even if you do it's a hollow victory. In order to sustain the victory you have to prove yourself again and again in some other way, and again and again and again, driven forever to fill a false image, haunted by the fear that the image is not true and someone will find out. That's never the way.

At this point you might imagine this all sounds moralistic. Preachy. A sermon about good and bad behaviour. But I must ask you to put aside that mode of looking at things for just a moment, because this isn't about what is Good and what is Bad. It's about what Works. Think of it as a technical problem. When your mentor says that being systematic is going to make you a more effective debugger, she isn't preaching a Moral Dogma. She's merely pointing out a fact borne out by experience.

And the fact here is that ego goals are hard to attain. I'll let Pirsig explain:

Phaedrus wrote a letter from India about a pilgrimage to holy Mount Kailas, the source of the Ganges and the abode of Shiva, high in the Himalayas, in the company of a holy man and his adherents.

He never reached the mountain. After the third day he gave up, exhausted, and the pilgrimage when on without him. He said he had the physical strength but that physical strength wasn't enough. He had the intellectual motivation but that wasn't enough either. He didn't think he had been arrogant but thought that he was undertaking the pilgrimage to broaden his experience, to gain understanding for himself. He was trying to use the mountain for his own purposes and the pilgrimage too. He regarded himself as the fixed entity, not the pilgrimage or the mountain, and thus wasn't ready for it. He speculated that the other pilgrims, the ones who reached the mountain, probably sensed the holiness of the mountain so intensely that each footstep was an act of devotion, an act of submission to this holiness. The holiness of the mountain infused into their own spirits enabled them to endure far more than anything he, with his greater physical strength, could take.

To the untrained eye ego-climbing and selfless climbing may appear identical. Both kinds of climbers place one foot in front of the other. Both breathe in and out at the same rate. Both stop when tired. Both go forward when rested. But what a difference! The ego climber is like an instrument that's out of adjustment. He puts his foot down an instant too soon or too late. He's likely to miss a beautiful passage of sunlight through the trees. He goes on when the sloppiness of his step shows he's tired. He rests at odd times. He looks up the trail trying to see what's ahead even when he knows what's ahead because he just looked a second before. He goes too fast or too slow for the conditions and when he talks his talk if forever about somewhere else, something else. He's here but he's not here. He rejects the here, is unhappy with it, wants to be further up the trail but when he gets there will be just as unhappy because then it will be "here".... Every step's an effort, both physically and spiritually, because he imagines his goal to be external and distant.

This seems to be Chris's problem now.

For an atheist who spent over two decades convinced that religious feeling was just self-satisfying delusion by another name, this is a troubling passage. But then being who I am today, I am willing to read it. Because these days I am open to the possibility that religious feeling may in fact have actual scientific, as well as subjective, reality. I know that academic research into how this feeling can be reliably induced using psychedelics is restarting, after half a century of censorship. I know that bans on research with drugs such as LSD are being lifted, that we may be only a few short decades away from serious breakthroughs into our understanding of consciousness. I have The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test sitting up on my shelf. So I am open to the possibility that rational materialism might not be the sole and whole explanation of reality.

I became open to this possibility out of simple necessity. I needed more drive. I felt I wasn't living and working and pursuing my goals with enough gusto. Something lacked. I did not experience every waking minute of existence as being aflame with the same fire that lit the sacred stars. My work didn't feel meaningful.

So now is the point where I have to confess to a long running habit of setting ego-goals. My goals have far too much been about me, my success, my self-improvement. Me me me me. I was so tired of me. Then one day I discovered, almost by accident, how it felt to serve a higher purpose.

It happened like this.

I had spent years struggling with let's for lack of a better word call it depression. Existential melancholia. Low mood. Lack of vitality. Anger, frustration, resentment, hopelessness, the whole 12 course with 6 types of wines and interim palate-cleansing pickled ginger Michelin-star feast. Not fun stuff. And I wanted to "feel better". And you'd think that "feeling better" would be a self-evidently worthwhile goal to pursue. I mean, what's more autotelic that "feeling better", surely? Or so my consciousness thought. But my unconscious adamantly refused to pursue this agenda and remained as stubbornly miserable as before.

Until, that is, on day in June. I've tried to write about this before, badly, as I'm sure I'll continue to try. It was an odd enough gestalt.

Best I can describe it is that during one moment of particularly low mood and morbid existential despair, all that I'd spent the previous 9 months studying suddenly came together in a splendid, clear, unavoidable, transcendental, revelatory realisation. The Project of Being. It was something like this. Human beings are a social species. As such, we are a node in a Network. We are connected to other living humans whether we like and approve of it or not. We are by necessity someone's child, sibling, lover, friend, employee, tenant, audience. It's inevitable. OK, so now something bad happens. Maybe to us, maybe near us. It doesn't matter. We suffer. And when we suffer, two knee-jerk reactions appear possible: anger and depression: the world is awful or we are awful: hatred or self-loathing. OK, now here's the problem: both reactions damage the Network. If we hate, all we do is take the pain we experience and push it back out into the Network, usually many times multiplied. If we self-hate, we damage ourselves and by unavoidable extension the nodes in the Network we are immediately connected to. In both scenarios the Network suffers. The Project of Being suffers. And in my 9 months study I'd come to rather like the Project of Being, in complex and awe-inspiring totto. Because, let's face it, the Project of Being is kind of cool. Whatever this thing called Being is (from inorganic molecules to your very own Homo Sometimes if Proded by Necessity Sapiens), it's a whole lot more interesting than Not Being. Or so I decided to feel. And here is the gestalt. The minute I decided I loved The Project of Being, feeling better stopped being an Ego Goal. It was no longer something I needed to do for myself. It wasn't For My Own Pleasure. It was for a greater good and a good that I felt was worth it. You must keep the love of living alive, in spite of the Tragedy of Existence, because the alternative is damaging the Network and thereby the Project of Being. Well yes. This is the point at which many religious people would go: d'uh.

But the point is that all of a sudden, what felt impossible before, felt now not only possible, but easy. I became a pilgrim. "We must imagine Sisyphus to be happy", said Nietzsche. Of course!

So at some very high abstract level, I'd solved it. But the trouble with something as immense and undefined as The Project of Being is that it doesn't tell you very much about what exactly to pursue in your far more pedestrian daily existence. The quest is by no means over.

But that's not the point. The point is that now I know to stay away from Ego Goals. I know that whatever I'm searching for is something transcendental. Value. Quality, to use Pirsig's term. The Buddha. Whatever. But the knowledge I'm after is no long likely to lie in the epistemology section. What comes next is about Aesthetics. What is Valuable? What is worth giving my time to, worth loving? Worth climbing a Mountain for?