Knowing My Father
My father passed away last year. Let’s imagine that right after my father’s death someone approached our family and said “I really want to know who Stan Vander Klay was. Would you give me permission to examine his medical records and study the body?”
What type of knowledge would that type if investigation yield? Would that type of investigation really help this person know Stan Vander Klay?
I would have likely told this person, “save yourself the trouble and just download his memoir in Kindle from Amazon. You might learn a few things from examining the body, but you will not know Stan Vander Klay as those of us who loved him knew him.”
You are Your Psyche/Soul/Self/Story
If you want to know Stan Vander Klay, or anyone else, you need to know their story. We all know that. You walk into the doctor’s office, take off your clothes and the doctor looks and pokes and draws blood, but someone can learn more about the real you, the you you care about with a good conversation over lunch or a cup of coffee. We all know this. At a deep level you are your story.
The New Testament has a word for “you”, it is your “psyche” in Greek which most translations call a “soul” but the word same word is translated as “self” often too, it is you.
Walker Percy
Our communal story here likes to assert that we are an animal, but we are the strangest animal upon the face of the earth. The mountain gorillas aren’t anxious about their extinction, maybe their individual or family survival, but they don’t know extinction. We are worried about them.
We are also the only animal that commits suicide for purely for concerns about our story/psyche/self. What does this say about us?
I’ve recently been enjoying the work of Walker Percy. Both his father and grandfather had committed suicide and he called his mother a victim of suicide. He was raised an agnostic. He struggled with the legacy of suicide in his life and sought therapy for that. While recuperating from TB contracted while performing an autopsy (he was a medical doctor) he began to study the work of Soren Kierkegaard, the Christian Danish philosopher and the Russian novelist Dostoevsky to try to understand the basic mystery of human life.
One of his books, Lost in the Cosmos, talks about the fact that we know more and more about all sorts of things in the physical world but seem to make hardly any progress knowing who or what we are.
One of the peculiar ironies of being a human self in the Cosmos: A stranger approaching you in the street will in a second’s glance see you whole, size you up, place you in a way in which you cannot and never will, even though you have spent a lifetime with yourself, live in the Century of the Self, and therefore ought to know yourself best of all.
The question is: Why is it that in your entire lifetime you will never be able to size yourself up as you can size up somebody else— or size up Saturn— in a ten-second look? Why is it that the look of another person looking at you is different from everything else in the Cosmos? That is to say, looking at lions or tigers or Saturn or the Ring Nebula or at an owl or at another person from the side is one thing, but finding yourself looking into the eyes of another person looking at you is something else. And why is it that one can look at a lion or a planet or an owl or at someone’s finger as long as one pleases, but looking into the eyes of another person is, if prolonged past a second, a perilous affair?
Percy, Walker (2011-03-29). Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book (pp. 7-8). Open Road Media. Kindle Edition.
We imagine ourselves growing in knowledge and mastery over everything in the cosmos and we are filled with the optimism that this power will produce for ourselves a better world. Yet almost all of the future movies and stories about this better world are filled with the notion that we are and in fact will destroy our world and our selves because despite all of our master of our world we seem to have achieved almost no mastery of our selves.
The irony of our age is that while we have radically increased our capacity to maintain and preserve the life of our physical bodies and have exponentially grown in our capacity and power to arrange our stories better than any other civilization before us, increasing our amusements and reducing cultural and traditional restrictions on our freedoms our ability to combat despair seems in no way dislodged.
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