Piggyback Worlds

Sometimes the life we live is not completely our own. My life, for example, is simply too full of moments when my own personal experience, in addition to being my own, is so representative of just about everyone’s experience of the Human Condition, that I become, even if merely for the blink of an eye, Everyman.

Dream a Little Dream of Me. The other morning my wife informed me that I, yet again, woke her up in the middle of the night with another of my dream-world lectures. Now I am obviously dead asleep at the time and have to trust my wife that she is in fact telling me the truth, but apparently I hold forth as only a sleeping philosopher can—on the damnedest subjects. So my wife, with a giggle, was telling me that on this particular middle-of-the-night my theme was “Wielding his sword,” in which I was discoursing on some Epic Hero, as is my wont, but then the point of my oration (so I am assured, anyway) was that this hero’s “sword” was not really his sword, but rather a metaphor for the hero “wielding” some other, more untoward, object of incision.

            Even afterwards, as I read this paragraph aloud to her, she reminded me in a very sniggering and distinctly ungracious tone, that she had told me the story truly, and that the sword was not a sword at all, but some interestingly comparable human body-part apparently gone berserk.

            So this is a reflection about piggyback worlds; worlds that contain a surplus of realities none of which are ever exactly what they seem; worlds within worlds, or more precisely, worlds in which every other world carries along with it, inseparably and almost indistinguishably, still more other worlds – piggyback worlds. Like the Story told by his wife to the dreamer, who dreamed unawares the Story of an Epic Hero holding a sword which may also have been a sword, but which was certainly perceived by the Dreamer (and giggling wife) to be something rather more. Intruding realities from piggyback worlds are always somewhat vague, their boundaries fluid and unclear; and sometimes these essences of a piggyback sort will be less, but most of the time they will be more than they seem. The piggyback nature of our Worlds is nicely reflected in the classic onion metaphor where, peeling back layer after interminable thin layer of enfolding skins of meaning, we discover a rather small and not terribly tasty “tendril-like” root hiding at the core.

“Being” Invisible. There are many things that I do in the world. I do the things that a teacher does, a husband, a dog-owner, a philosophical blogger, a hardy olive-tree planter, an untalented house painter, a laborer, a traveler—all of which are noun descriptors of a verbalizing sort being used appositionally, which is to say that they point back to the subject/individual in the midst of some function. The verbalizing nouns may then also be strengthened afterwards by adding any number of adjectives, depending on how much obfuscation is desired.

            These verbalizing nouns describe, in fact and in deed, how I am performing my life; but they also collectively beg the question as to whether there is any “tendril-like” “being” invisibly stashed underneath all these actions… some true and authentic “I” that has integrity and inherent worth apart from these myriad life-actions. How are we to interpret or understand the individual body-being who is acting out the functions of living? Some philosophers, like Heraclitus, clearly think that the individual, as such, is not a “thing” separable from its acting; indeed, the individual self has no distinct or unique being apart from its performance of it-self. Therefore, Heraclitus famously writes, “What we do habitually is who we are or who we become.” What- or who-ever I think I am is inseparable from what I do, an observation that has, in Heraclitus’ eyes, almost as much importance metaphysically as ethically. This observation about individual authenticity, of course, will resurge many centuries later to become the “tendril-like” root out of which the tree of modern existential thought will spring.

            As I think of all the things I “am,” what I come up with are the typical interpretive anthropological categories of sex, gender, race, religion, color, etc., etc., etc. (remember to pronounce this like Yule Brenner in the King and I just for the fun of it!), which are really not “me,” but rather piggyback groups that normalize qualities of all who are such-as-me. On this view I “am” by analogy.

            Alternatively, as I think of all the things I “am,” I peel back an almost infinite number of layers of all the things I can be or become as a result of my actions. Through my actions I can position my-doing-“self” in a variety of narrative categories or Archetypes, as Hero, Anti-hero, Villain, Rascal, or Savior. In this case I “am” allegorically.

            “Me” by analogy or “me” by allegory – in either case Heraclitus called it correctly: “me” equals the sum of all the piggyback versions of me-interpreted and me-doing or me-having-done.

The Acts of Living. What a philosopher Shakespeare was… and a phenomenologist of Heraclitean persuasion to boot! Remember Jaques in As You Like It, (Act 2, Scene 7) who translates Heraclitus’ vision of man into theatrical terms: 

“All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages.”

Theater (or film or literature) is a wonderful analogy for the piggyback nature both of Human Understanding and of the Human Condition. In the best of cases, the analogy is informative precisely because theatrical re-presentation tends to blur the lines between the layers of our onion-worlds as easily as it blurs the lines between genres, and it seldom makes any pretense of finding some “tendril-like” essence at the center.

            The winner of the Golden Bear at this year’s Berlin International Film Festival was the Italian film, Cesar Must Die (Cesare deve morire). What makes this film so challenging, which is also precisely what makes it so very interesting, is that it seems deliberately to confuse the “edges” between metaphor, allegory, social philosophy, cinema, and straightforward theatre. This film, which used real (and some formerly real dangerous) prison convicts as the actors, can be construed to be a meta-type applied-reworking of Shakespeare’s Julius Cesar; or to be a docu-drama, although in a radio interview aired on France Inter’s Cosmopolitaine (Sunday, 21 October 2012) the director brothers denied this interpretation. Likewise, Cesar Must Die can also be considered an updating of Shakespeare’s piece, i.e., a recasting of the Julius Cesar narrative in the modern arena for modern viewers; or, again, as a statement about social politics and the penal system. So what are we members of the audience actually supposed to do with this narrative? How are we intended by the directors to interpret this Story, and is there only one interpretation, or even a best interpretation? Are we supposed to seek some kind of meaningful application to our lives through this narrative, or to become informed on issues of social justice and redemption? Or are we simply to let the visual event wash over us as “entertainment,” with no more thought or value than we might attribute to a Mozart divertimento?

            This brings us to one of the very interesting problems associated with theatrical devices, like metaphor, in marketing and advertising, where the goal is to get the dollars out of our pockets and into someone else’s bank accounts. Oh, the dangers of irony on this stage of our world, which becomes even more pocked should advertisers become “playful” with the already blurry lines between motivated information, i.e., information with an agenda, and deliberate dis- or misinformation.

Sometimes the life we are living is not fully our own. The edges of all of our lives, and the identity of the various personae we play in the course of those lives, are not clear and distinct essences, as a Descartes might have said, but rather are full of blurred lines and abandoned layers of onion peels. Heraclitus gives the preferential reading on the question of our human authenticity: ours is more of a fire-sort of reality. It is inevitable, then, that the roles we play will cross over the boundaries of tragedy and comedy, farce and drama, and that all of our lives will be plagued by interpretations and misinterpretations, hearings and mis-hearings, takings and mis-takings, errors and corrections.