“Reality” and “Truth”

It is aggravating when a class that I am predisposed to dislike makes me think, but my Art and Science readings today have distracted me so much with my thoughts that I have to stop in the middle of them and write about it.  We’re reading about the way the art community and science community generally perceive the universe, reality, and truth.  This line caught my eye:

In the world of science the idea that there is some kind of universal jigsaw where all the bits fit together seems to prevail.

Such a view is troubling to me because it assumes two things that I’m not sure I agree with: first, that we can ever really get a grasp on any of the pieces of the “jigsaw,” and second that there is any ultimate and universal “reality” out there to discover.

My uncertainty about whether we can ever really firmly latch on to a solid manifestation of ultimate truth stems in part from the history of science, which is in essence a history of wrongness.  Thomas Kuhn’s theory of paradigm shifts explains the history of scientific belief as a series of big changes in basic ways of looking at the world.  Big changes like earth-centered universe to sun-centered solar system, physics based on Newton to physics based on Einstein, etc.  Basically, a paradigm shift entails the realization that very fundamental principles for looking at and making sense of the world are at best flawed, at worst wrong.  This has happened too regularly over the course of known history for me to really trust that the currently established way of thinking about anything is in fact the right or true way of thinking.  Wouldn’t that be arrogant?  Of course it seems like a right and true way of thinking, just like a sun-centered universe seemed the right, true, and only logical arrangement of the universe to pre-Copernican folks.  Facts and truths are set out by people, and people are very fallible creatures indeed.

However, I’m not trying to imply that I believe we can never be sure about anything.  Here’s what I can be sure of: things I touch, things I smell, things I see, things I hear, things I think, and things I feel.  Absolute truth is limited to individual sensory experience.  I can’t be sure that there is a computer in front of me (it could be a hallucination, or I could be a brain in a jar experiencing things through electrical impulses, or whatever) but I can be absolutely, positively sure of the truth of the sensation of a computer keyboard against my fingertips and the sight of the words on the screen.  If I feel happy, there is no way that I cannot in fact be happy.  If I say something is orange, and someone else says it is pink, which is it?  Does an object have inherent color without anyone/thing to perceive said color?  Luckily for us, enough of our individual sensory experience seems to line up with that of other people that we can interact with them and even make generalizations about the nature of things.  We can go on just as though there really were a single, fixed reality that we could eventually puzzle out through judicious application of science.

Thus, the only real implication of my beliefs about  reality is an open-minded and flexible attitude toward truth.  It’s not the case that I don’t appreciate or benefit from science–in their pursuit of truth in fixed reality, scientists often come up with applications that can make life easier or more enjoyable, and that’s awesome.  It’s certainly not the case that I walk around feeling like I’m inhabiting a separate reality from everyone and everything else–that would be profoundly lonely.  It simply means that I’m unconvinced and unimpressed by any assertion (by religion, science, or whomever) of unbending capital-T Truth and I am interested in subjective exploration of reality through art, poetry, literature, etc.  It means I want to be a professor of English rather than a professor of chemistry, physics, or biology, so that the kind of truth I’m chasing makes no pretensions to absoluteness.

Why I Study Old English

In my seventeen years of formal education (counting kindergarten, in which one could argue I learned more valuable information than I did senior year of high school), I have often found occasion to wonder: “why on earth am I bothering to learn this?”  “When will I ever need to know the ins and outs of a semi-permeable cell membrane?”  “Why do they call this the honors program?” and questions of a similar ilk.  But it never occurred to me (until my professor raised the question yesterday) to wonder why I should study Old English.  It seemed obvious; “Ure ealdfaederas spaecon Westseaxna theode thusend geara aer thissum” (our ancestors spoke the West Saxon language a thousand years ago.)  That is, I consider Anglo-Saxon culture and the Old English manuscripts that it produced to be my roots, and everyone should study their roots, right?

Right, only I’m not really English.  Ok, I have a few droplets of English blood on my maternal grandmother’s father’s side, but officially I’m 50% Czech and the remaining percent (minus the drop of English) German.  So I’m northern European, I told myself.  Germanic.  Like the Anglo-Saxons.  Plus, there’s that drop ‘o English…

But that’s not it either.  The extent of my cultural connection to my Czech forefathers is a smattering of Czech words (mostly scatological) that I picked up from my dad and his cousins, and the opportunity to eat kolache at family gatherings.  The German connection is even fainter; we make pfeffernus at Christmas, but that’s about it.  The ties to and traditions of my pre-American ancestors have been essentially absent from my life, leaving a historical-cultural void that I filled with…literature.  I grew up with British history and culture pouring in through my eyes and ears off the pages of my favorite books.  British children’s fiction was the bread-and-butter of my youth–Roald Dahl, Brian Jaques, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and countless others with forgotten names but remembered stories.  I read truckoads of historical fiction, mostly about the middle ages or Queen Elizabeth.  I read about King Arthur and Harry Potter, and when I got a little older I read Bronte and Austen.  Thus, the strongest cultural influence I had as a child (which has continued into adulthood) was British.  Through the literature that I read, I learned and loved the history, mythology, language patterns, and historical culture of Britain far more than I ever did those lands to which I am connected by blood.

And so it seems only natural that I should study the language that is the ancestor of the tongue that connects me to the books I read, and the culture that is the ancestor of each successive period of British culture that I have grown up seeing as my own heritage.  It seems unnatural to say that the Anglo-Saxons aren’t “my people” when I feel more connected to that drop of English blood than to the pints and pints of Czech and German.

Fear of the void

Of the several complaints I have about my disability studies course, one is that it makes me feel so damn fragile.  I lay there reading about perfectly average people whose able-bodiedness was snatched away in an instant by a car accident, a sports injury, or a sudden medical condition like stroke or hemorrhage, and as I read I can feel my heartbeat in the hand against my temple.  The layers of skin and bone, the delicate connections of nervous tissue, the harmonious functioning of the complex whole–it all seems so vulnerable and breakable, like an antique china vase in a children’s playroom.

Death terrifies me.  When I was a very little girl, I used to get out of bed and sit at the top of the stairs while my parents read and talked in the living room.  When they noticed me, I would come down, climb into my mother’s lap, and tell her, in tears, that I didn’t want to die.  I remember being told that most people die when they are very old and that little girls like me had nothing to worry about.  But, you see, I remember that like it was yesterday when truly it was fifteen years ago.  In another fifteen years I’ll be in my mid thirties, and in another fifteen and another, it won’t be such a comfort that death is for the old.

Some people say it is illogical to be afraid of death.  When you die, they reason, you won’t even know you’re dead, so what is there to be frightened of?  But non-being is like a void; when I think of it, it swallows me up and paralyzes me with the claustrophobia of the immense.  I always picture being dead as floating in an outerspace devoid of stars: cold, dark, silent, alone.  The fact that I won’t be alive to experience it doesn’t make death less frightening…it is what makes it frightening in the first place.  The absence of everything is a vacuum, is space, is cold, dark, silent, and alone.

So, much as it scares me that I could slip on some ice, fall wrong, and break my spine, ending up paralyzed and unable to communicate, it scares me more that I could fall really wrong and end up nowhere at all.  While I like a class that makes me think, I don’t so much like a class that spirals me down the path of vertigo and terror that is contemplation of my own fragile mortality.  There are some things that don’t bear thinking on when you’re still too young to die.

Semper

I think people probably don’t really change that much.  I’m not talking about individuals–although changing oneself is hard enough.  I’m talking about people as a species.  While working on Latin homework I came across a sentence written by Cicero stating: Nomina stultorum in parietibus et portis semper videmus.  My best translation is, “We always see the names of stupid people on walls and gates.”  Immediately, I think of the walls of picnic shelters and caves and the supports under bridges and all of the other places where one might find “Bob was here” or “Jack and Annie 4 ever” in bold sharpie or carved with the tip of a knife.  If the impulse to write your name on public property (which seems a random sort of behavior, and far from vital to a fulfilling life) hasn’t faded over the past 2,000+ years, it seems likely to me that an awful lot of human behaviors, emotions, and reactions are probably fairly stable.  Last night reading an Icelandic saga, for instance, I was struck by how much the description of their ball games sounded like a play-by-play of a rough game of football: “Gisli brought him down and the ball went out of play.  then Gisli went for the ball, but Thorgrim held him back and stopped him from getting it.  Then Gisli tacked Thorgrim so hard that he could do nothing to stop from falling” (Gisli Surrson’s Saga).  When the Icelanders aren’t biting people’s necks out or burning people alive in their houses or projectile vomiting on them, they’re just like us.  (Actually, I just saw I Love You Man, which includes an instance of projectile vomiting, so even there we aren’t so different.)  Knowing that folk who lived thousands of years ago liked to play ball games and graffiti walls makes me feel a little closer to history, I guess.  And also, closer to people thousands of years from now who will no doubt scribble their names in glowing laser ink on solar panels and space ship walls.

Pride

A sentence in the first chapter of Joseph Shapiro’s No Pity, an assigned text for my class on disability, made me stop and think today.  Discussing the disability rights movement in America, Shapiro writes, “The 35 million to 43 million diabled Americans have come to take a growing pride in being identified as disabled” (13-14).  My mind balked at the notion of taking pride in the lable of disability.  Pride.  It is a word with many, many meanings (I looked them up).  Besides being a type of freshwater lamprey and a regional term for male genitalia (yes really), pride has 11 definitions in the Oxford English Dictionary, most with numerous sub-definitions.  Two main senses come out of this slew of specific definitions–first, pride in the deadly-sin sense of over-confidence and arrogance, and second, pride as “the feeling of satisfaction, pleasure, or elation derived from some action, ability, possession, etc. which one believes does one credit” (def. 5).  This second definition is the one that most commonly comes to my mind when I think of and use the word pride in daily life.

Notably absent, however, is a definition of pride as “the opposite of shame”.  Yet this is the sense in which the term has come to be used quite frequently.  Phrases like “Black pride” or “Gay pride” are examples of this apparently unofficial sense of the word.  You can force this use of pride to conform to the old definition–say, for example, that people are proud of struggling through and overcoming the challenges of being a minority in contemporary society, and that their doing so is an action that does them credit–but I really don’t think that is necessarily always what is meant by pride in this sense.  I think, often, it is intended to mean “without shame,” as in the expression, “I’m X, and proud of it!”.  Why are you proud of it?  Proud of the struggling/overcoming, yes of course, but of it?  It, be it disability, race, or sexual orientation, is just a part of who you are, and really is nothing to be proud of.  Can I say, “brown hair pride” or “straight pride”?  No, I cannot (the second example would probably be taken as offensive, in fact*).  It doesn’t make sense to say that I’m proud of my brown hair (even if I think it’s the prettiest kind of hair out there) because it is not something that “does me credit”.  I could be proud of the healthy shininess of my hair, because that stems from actions that I have taken to achieve that desired effect, but it doesn’t make sense to say that I’m proud of the color when I never had any agency in the matter.

My conclusion is that this is all very confusing, and either the OED had better update its entry for pride posthaste, or a different word should be used in phrases like “gay pride” or “pride in being identified as disabled”.  For now, politically incorrect and probably rude as it is, my first response to someone who said to me, “I’m proud to be a person with blindness” (or epilepsy, or schizophrenia, or even cancer) would have to be, “Why?”

*I don’t actually think “straight pride” should be offensive (or “white pride” or “male pride”) for that matter.  In my opinion, celebrations of gay pride, black pride, whatever pride are simply celebrations of a facet of people’s personhoods (a facet that happens to be misunderstood or maligned, and thus requires public acknowledgment and celebration).  If we’re going to define pride as “not ashamed of, and in fact quite happy and content with ____” then I think everyone has a right to be proud.  I am not ashamed of (and in fact quite happy and content with) my gender, my race, my sexuality, my socioeconomic class, my nationality, my region, and most of my physical attributes.  So I think if offense is taken, it is because the meaning of pride is so terribly muddy and confusing.

Signet Classics

It has been known to happen that Rhetoric and Narration seminar gets off track, and so it was that while we were supposed to be discussing What Maisie Knew by Henry James, we got to talking about Signet Classics. I’m not alone in that class in appreciating a book for its book-ness–that is, the way it falls open in your hands, the texture of the paper, the delicate scent of the pages. Signet Classics, according to a professor who knows, are perhaps the most disgusting available classics in terms of book-ness. I’m familiar with Signet Classics, and hate the way the ink smears and the paper sucks the natural oils out of your fingers like a leech. Their website, however, is worth sharing. “Welcome to the Signet Classics website,” it reads. “If you’re looking for a good time, you’ve come to the right place!” I can only imagine the impoverished literary geeks who would flock to the Signet Classics website, looking for a “good time.” While I love literature, as I do most of my passions, immoderately, I can think of places more conducive to a “good time” than the website of a publisher of cheap paperbacks. I applaud Signet for their attempt to bring sexy back to the classics. Or, at the very least, I applaud them for giving me a good belly-laugh in the middle of a rather stilted couple of hours of Henry James discussion.