In literature, when a storyline entails sufferer and a persecutor, we name it a drama. In life, most acts of aggression or criticism (that are two sides of the identical coin: the emotional forex of existential malcontentment), most tantrums thrown by in any other case cheap adults, most blamethirsty fingers pointed at some neutral actuality, contain the self-victimization of drama. Individuals liable to drama haven’t solely forged themselves as victims of a perpetrator in a plot, however have tacitly conceded that there is a plot, which presupposes a playwright — some exterior entity scripting the story wherein they really feel performed unto. The individual self-cast right into a drama is resigned to being a personality, insentient to Joan Didion’s basic legislation of getting character: “Character — the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life — is the source from which self-respect springs.” Wherever there may be drama, there’s a deficiency of self-respect and too shallow a properly of self-knowledge.
The methods wherein we’re all prone to drowning ourselves into drama, and what it takes to drift free, is what Iris Murdoch (July 15, 1919–February 8, 1999) explores in her delicate, splendid 1978 novel The Sea, the Sea (public library) — the story of a proficient however complacent playwright approaching the overlook of life, who’s finally overcome by his tragic flaw: Regardless of his obsessive self-reflection (or maybe exactly due to it), his egotism finally eclipses his artistic spirit — that brightest and most beneficiant a part of us, the half rightly referred to as our present, the half that extends the outstretched hand of sympathy and surprise we name artwork and invitations, in Iris Murdoch’s pretty phrase, “an occasion for unselfing.”
Wanting again on his life, the aged playwright displays on his personal artwork and its relation to life itself:
Feelings actually exist on the backside of the persona or on the prime. Within the center they’re acted. For this reason all of the world is a stage.
Murdoch’s total physique of labor, from philosophy to fiction, could be regarded as one cohesive inquiry into the meaning of goodness and the meaning of love, lensed by means of the meaning-machinery of art. She understood uniquely that we act out the messy center of emotion as a result of it’s typically too complicated, contradictory, and category-defying for us to know what we’re actually feeling. Perennially half-opaque to ourselves, we feign surety and confidence in our causes. Unwilling to totally stay into what we’re — anxious and unsure creatures, tender and terrified all through a lot of life — we act ourselves into being, taking the stage costumed in false certitudes.
As Murdoch’s protagonist units out to put in writing his memoirs — these unhappy shallows of literature, the place artwork drifts to die as useless self-obsession — his cousin and boyhood playmate, now an outdated males himself, urges him to allot ample room for the everlasting topic of human self-importance, which renders us blinder to actuality and extra opaque to ourselves than any of our different confusions:
We’re such inward secret creatures, that inwardness essentially the most superb factor about us, much more superb than our motive. However we can not simply stroll into the cavern and go searching. Most of what we predict we learn about our minds is pseudo-knowledge. We’re all such surprising poseurs, so good at inflating the significance of what we predict we worth. The heroes at Troy fought for a phantom Helen… Useless wars for phantom items… Individuals lie so… although in a method, if there may be artwork sufficient it doesn’t matter, since there may be one other sort of reality within the artwork.
Greater than something, we deceive ourselves. Peeled again far sufficient, even essentially the most layered self-delusion springs from the identical supply — our phantasm of free will amid a world wherein, on the most elementary stage of actuality, we management not one of the basic forces and due to this fact have extraordinarily restricted company in occasions. Because the precocious teenage Sylvia Plath understood, our latitude of free motion in life is paralyzingly restricted “from birth by environment, heredity, time and event and local convention”. In such a actuality, selection is barely a story, and a retroactive one at that — it’s the story we inform ourselves, within the vanity-light of hindsight, about why our lives went a technique and never one other.
Echoing James Baldwin’s exquisite lament about the illusion of choice, Murdoch writes:
What a queer gamble our existence is. We determine to do A as an alternative of B after which the 2 roads diverge totally and will lead ultimately to heaven and to hell. Solely later one sees how a lot and the way awfully the fates differ. But what have been the explanations for the selection? They could have been forgotten. Did one know what one was selecting? Actually not.
A subset of the phantasm of selection is the phantasm of closure — the alluring however finally useless concept that, as life lives itself by means of us in methods far past our management, in a posh and by definition ever-fraying tapestry of story-lines, we will tease out anybody narrative thread neatly sufficient to tie it into a whole and completely legitimate conclusion. Murdoch dispels the self-importance:
Free ends can by no means be correctly tied, one is all the time producing new ones. Time, like the ocean, unties all knots. Judgements on individuals are by no means remaining, they emerge from summings up which without delay counsel the necessity of a reconsideration. Human preparations are nothing however free ends and hazy reckoning, no matter artwork could in any other case fake to be able to console us.
However right here is the place we do have selection: In accepting a hazy and unsure actuality past our management, we will additionally refuse to resign ourselves to being victims of it — the type of adaptation Octavia Butler held up as the highest measure of intelligence and integrity. We will acknowledge that life is way more attention-grabbing as a means of continuous presence than as an acted drama; that the world is way more attention-grabbing as a shoreline than as a stage — for it’s on the dwelling shore that we witness, as Richard Feynman did, “ages upon ages” unfolding into the wonder of life; on the shore that we’re humbled, as Rachel Carson was, by “our place in the stream of time and in the long rhythms of the sea… in which there is no finality, no ultimate and fixed reality”; on the shore that we lastly settle for essentially the most elemental reality of our lives: There is no such thing as a remaining act — solely shoreless seeds and stardust.
