Superimposed order is a human delusion. The only natural order is Nature’s, which is inexorable and inevitable. Engineering, architecture, manners, language, logic, maps, any artificial system, is an order superimposed. Whether mathematics is a natural or superimposed order is an ancient debate – do we discover or decree that one plus two equals three? My brain veers from that quandary as from an open manhole. Any resolution of that head-scratcher, if available, doesn’t affect my point here, which is that humans spend much of our lives insisting something that isn’t is. “That makes sense,” “Whatever is is right,” “Everything’s under control,” “God knows,” we nod, fanatically asserting a fantastic absurdity. God doesn’t know, nothing’s under control, nothing’s right (or wrong), nothing “makes sense,” unless and until humans imagine it. As Hamlet and dog-pal Henry put it, “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”
This matters – not as an academic wrangle but as an existential premise – matters enough to have woken me just now as a subject worth our attention. If I’m feeling bewildered, angry, misprized and misplaced, as I have for the last few days, if my private journals bristle with rants and groans, it’s my imagination that’s acting up not my facts. My facts – age, gender, health, etc. – neither good nor bad, just are. My imagination is comparing actualities to dreams and declaring those actualities deficient, poor me. The way to change my mood, then, is to change my mind, to talk some sense into myself and maybe entertain you in the process. This is why I write.
Writing is not something I do like swimming or backgammon, it’s a means of survival like eating or sweating, I’d expire if I didn’t. Twice in my adult days I couldn’t write – for weeks! – and suicide seemed the only solution on offer. Doctors, loved ones, and drugs winched me from the depths, but for a few days, it was hit-or-miss, I was that confused. For others, writing may be pastime, option, recreation, but for me it’s do or die, my way of superimposing order on the chaos of meaninglessness. That my life or yours or anybody’s, even Shakespeare’s, has no meaning is plain as the noses on our faces; we all go down to the dust – species, planet, even our solar system for all I know. Yet we can imagine we matter, each in our way, and that delusion is delicious. I write – to you – therefore there’s a reason for me to be: Happy days!
The syllabus of my adult years has been mind-mending, language my professor. With words I can “turn that frown upside down;” a pleasing paragraph can make my day. Watch me squeeze the lemons of self-pity into the lemonade of a balanced phrase. With a tweak of vowel, batter and bitter can be transformed to better and butter – Alakazam! – how’s that for magic! That’s why I reiterate to myself – tirelessly, tiresomely, for I am a slow learner – sadness is not your fate, fella, but your fault. The beauty of the world is up to you, Carll, so get cracking!
Nihilism and idealism, as I see it, are obverse and reverse of the same psyche. Nothing matters so we make something up, plug our facts into an energizing dream and our world glows. The Nameless One can only ruin my day if I fail to inflate him into an hilarious (albeit hideous) balloon. In time, any superimposed order topples like a house of cards, but so what, we’ve got now, we’ve got each other, we’ve got syllables, let’s boogie!