For FEAR OF KNOWING DAY (FOKD) this year I’ve composed a contemplative, meandering, essay obliquely on the subject of art, illness, impotence and blogging, to accompany the release of “get well soon”.
You might consider the following a meditation on the image of the serpent and the apple, depicted below. Adam and Eve do not become fully human until they eat of the apple. Likewise, the young prince who travels westward to Egypt does not fall asleep to his mission until he has eaten the food of the locals. The apple, then, is a narcotic which causes us to forget who we are. In knowing each other, Eve and Adam discover the difference between Good and Evil and lose the perfect innocence of their former life - a loss which brings them all manner of suffering and death. Accordingly, the fear of knowing is uniquely great, to those having been so conditioned.
The most salient point of the Fear of Knowing is its ubiquity, at least as far as I am concerned. It’s not, that is, merely a cultural defect that I mean to point to, but a personal defect that I mean to bring to light. It is the illness of our times and of myself.
As previously described, the Fear of Knowing is expressed in the image of Hamlet’s Dilemma… such is a personal expression. More generally, Hamlet’s Dilemma can be seen in Jeffserson’s Sense of Duty: the Duty, that is, to make revolution in the face of tyranny. This duty, when experienced by some significant - which is to say, effective - group within a population has been termed The Spirit of ‘76. Fear of Knowing is a fear of that Spirit, for the Spirit of Liberation promises to destroy the world. Use only in cases of emergency… which Jefferson rather idealistically imagined occurring once every couple generations.
This is the Change we can believe in, and it is striking to reckon how cosmetic such change has become. One of the great flaws in the original essence of America seems poised on the verge of symbolic repair: a Black man might be president. Yet the legal fabric of the Republic is threadbare where it is not in tatters. Likewise, we are as a culture able to access information and interrelate on a scale that seems virtually unlimited, yet our discussions achieve remarkably less than they promise. It’s a pattern that seems endemic to an imperial democracy: universal suffrage requires universal mental control, assisted by technological manipulation of the vote. Where there is not Force, there is Fallacy and Fraud.
All of this conspires in creating a sense of profound dysfunction, of permanent frustration that is too frightening to recognize. We become ghost dancers at best, responding to the march of historical inevitability with a warrior’s sense of style. We take to moral high ground: not as an improved vantage point for attack, but as a refuge. A shelter from the storm.
It is a phantom immortality, but what is the proper response to knowing that your goodness is insubstantial? Despair, certainly. But then what?
Blogdrama, for so many of us. Athenians all, Socrates and his jury. Worry not, for you send me to a far better place. Be cheerful with your executioner, but do not throw yourself upon his blade.
TMS 09-11-2008
