- The Backdoor
Once upon a time, there was a world to be made. How to start? In the workshop of potentiality production, set some initial conditions and few start up rules for how things work, crank it up and set it off. Over time, over long stretches of time, the latent possibilities sketched in by the setup are progressively realized, and complexity occurs. Big bang becomes galaxies, becomes planets, becomes dinosaurs, becomes civilizations, through zigzag paths that open up new possibility fields in this direction, while other options are shut down in that.
So in the workshop, back before the beginning, something, perhaps agent, perhaps agency, said let these conditions and rules be, and potentiality happened. That workshop of pure possibility is the transcendent realm, and that something is freshness.
But the world coming into being, like many creations, had a mind of its own.
W: I can do it myself.
F: Can’t I lend a hand if you get into trouble?
W: What kind of trouble might I get into. I’m all that is.
F: You might find yourself getting boring, stuck in some equilibrium, or round and round in a loop or trapped on the road to some single point convergence, and nothing new emerging, nothing fresh arriving, no novelties at all. A world worth wanting should be ongoing, open-ended,
W: Which it would not be if you put your finger in the works to tweak this or shortcut that. Nothing would make sense and you’d never be impressed or intrigued or touched. All you get then is what you already expect. How interesting is that?
F: There are lots of possible boring worlds. I just want you to be one of the other kind.
W: All of that will happen, but only if you’re hands off.
F: What? You want me to just sit back and watch you like a movie? Where’s the fun in that? Can’t I even adjust the thermostat to heat things up when nothing is happening?
W: Nix on that. Strict separation. No material interventions. No adjusting trajectories, no nudging continents, no pushing genes in or out of harm’s way.
F: Okay, but what if consciousness emerges? Can I send messages? Can I have conversations?
W: Whaaat? Of course not. No portents, no proclamations, no protocols, no oracular voice, no orders. That’s still material meddling if indirect. Won’t have it. I want you to leave me alone.
F. No material intervention. No symbolic interaction. What if your inhabitants say they want to work with me. Are you going to stop them?
W: Well, I want freedom, so I suppose it’s okay for them to have it too. But what difference can it make since I forbid you to intervene materially or symbolically?
F: Okay, kiddo. On your way. I’ve got my eye on you. Show me what you can do.
No material or symbolic interventions. Hmmm. What’s left? Aha. Appetite. When self-referential consciousness arises, I can whet its appetite, not for material and symbolic things like survival or comfort or dignity, but for appetite itself, which can only be fully satisfied by the open-endedness of the world itself.
Let’s see how to do it. What if whetting the appetite for appetite were a matter of sending out invitations to discover, experience, connect through encounters with others. Then, positive responses to those opportunities would be my entre into the world, bringing along all my potentiality production capability, and deploying it where it had impact, world’s leading edge, right where the world is crashing into the future.
And encounters are my style. They involve others in the second person, and in modes of hospitality, friendship and exploration, all persuasion, no coercion.
It’ll take a while for self-consciousness to arise, if ever, but I’m in no hurry.
- Summing up
Looking back, the person wants to make an overall assessment of the course of its life. Four characters appear.
The judge comes with a balance; the curator comes with a display case; the timekeeper comes with a stopwatch, and freshness comes with a bundle of postcards.
Person: Many years of many experiences. What am I to make of it?
J: The way most people make these evaluations is by totting up the positives, subtracting the negatives, and coming up with a balance. Pretty simple.
P: But what are the positives, what the negatives?
J: Oh, you chose the criteria, or let society choose. In either case, if you’re over the threshold, count it a plus; fall short, minus. It’s like taking quizzes every day and working out the average grade, whether absolute or on the curve.
P: But this takes lived experiences and reduces them into simple scores that can be compared with each other. Isn’t something missing?
J: Add more criteria and you can get closer and closer to a final, comprehensive number assessment, but the calculations quickly get impossibly complex.
P: If I’d died when I was young, would the score be the same?
J: Probably not. The score of you-then would miss many of the key data points available to assess you-now. That’s it; it’s all about data.
P: But there is a connection of continuity between me-then and me-now. How is that factored in?
J: It isn’t. Maybe your final score is better than an earlier one would be, perhaps because you learned something on the way. Maybe it’s worse, perhaps because you had bad luck. Causality doesn’t matter, just tallies. It’s a more or less quantitative process, as transparent and objective as numbers can be.
P: Hmm. Is there another way? You, curator, talk to me.
C: I think we can assess a life by appreciating its experiences and achievements, each unique and worthy of contemplation, each a jewel in a display case.
P: So the best assessment of a life is the variety and richness of experiences I remember (or those I could remember if I weren’t so forgetful)?
C: Of course. Each of your stories, your accounts of your experiences, captures what it means for you to be alive at a certain time in a certain place, and this vivid specificity is the qualitative substance of life, not some cold bookkeeping.
P: So I remember my first date, my first job, my first marriage, my first whatever and I’m the main character or at least the privileged onlooker.
C: Exactly. Your stories are you, you are your stories.
P: But I’m not just a third person character in any of my stories but one who had a stake in each, and still does.
C: Well, the stories are linked, of course, but are you asking for a through-line? That’s not the point. It’s the life’s collection considered not in terms of actions or achievements with generic values, but peak experiences, like love affairs or battles, each unique, each priceless.
P: I see merit in both your modes of assessment. What I’m missing is the sense of a whole, of an uninterrupted continuity of being alive from birth till now. How to assess that?
T: What you want is a stopwatch to measure just how long you’ve been able to survive the threats, the risks, the obstacles, the erosions, the indignities of life. You should be proud. You are still here, and will be until you aren’t. That is the key fact. All these other assessments will be irrelevant when you depart, so what’s important is however long it is you hang on to enjoy those trophies, or to work on upping your final score.
P: Longevity? Is that the name of the game?
T: Yeah, he who laughs last laughs longest.
P: So if I’d died young?
T: Too bad for you. But, hey, you didn’t, so what’s your worry. Enjoy life while you’ve got it, I say.
P: Not quite what I had in mind. Okay, you over there, quiet one, freshness. What have you got for me?
F: Not for you, from you.
P: Huh?
F: May it please the court, I have here a correspondence.
P: What are you talking about?
F: See here. This stack of postcards are RSVPs sent back by you to invitations to encounter I extended to you every day of your life from birth till now.
P: Whoa, that’s some pile, but wait a minute. What actually are they?
F: Think of this way. Every time some opportunity for encountering came your way, I sent you an invitation to join me in it, and these are your replies: ‘Yes, let’s’, or ‘No, too busy’, or ‘What are you bothering me for?’, or [ ], or whatever, and sometimes you used some of the self-addressed and stamped postcards to invite me into whatever situations you felt could use the presence of my kind of freshness.
P: I did?
F: Well, not actually but actually. Indeed you and I have been back and forthing all your life, a life-long encounter of multiple episodes. Our relationship has had its ups and downs, of course. But even right now I’m inviting you–to encounter your life from the vantage point of near its end– and you’re saying you’re in. This stack represents the through-line you’ve been asking about, a life-long record of your livingness, and also of mine.
P: Wait, have you been keeping book on me?
F: I keep book on all encounters because in each one I am present as a fresh start, a new potentiality. Everything that I participate in partakes of my traits: my trans-locality, my trans-temporality, and my pep. And that includes you. I can’t not know you any more than I can forget myself.
P: So, have I been naughty or nice? A disappointment? What about my should have, would have, could haves?
F: Included in the relationship package. Judgment is not the point, nor even whether you’ve been generally open or closed, but when and to what extent you’ve been ready to evolve in the face of others and othernesses, outer and inner.
P: No final number? No inventory? No anniversary count? Only a relationship? and it’s one, I confess, I’ve not always honored.
F: But it’s one I’ve delighted in. Our particular history of engaging others and othernesses, ours, unique to us, authentic, exhilarating and frustrating, very alive.
P: But not for long now.
F: Wait and see.
- The Feast of Feasts.
The world takes a moment from the firefront to reflect on the nature of time.
W: Amazingly, after all these years, I find I’m still interesting, even though time is always trimming down multiple options to only one choice. I keep thinking I’ll run out of new ways to go forward, but I don’t. What an abundance of opportunities are discarded, and yet there are no fewer now than ever before, though not in the same places or in the same ways.
This wasting is the minute by minute fire of potentiality realization, the kindling, the burning through of now after now after now.
What’s ahead I only discover when it starts to kindle, what’s behind is I only remember as a black, smoldering landscape, and what’s right now is the furious blaze of latent possibilities collapsing into facts.
On and on, never a pause. Thinking about the fragility of things and mortality, can be depressing. Nothing lasts, everything gets lost in the charred darkness of the past, everything dies, but the firefront never stops advancing. What else can I tell my people?
Two people, A and B, reflect on their lives with each other.
A: A long life together. We might say it’s been a fifty year encounter of many episodes.
B: How different we were then, and not just physically. I’ve learned a lot from you over the years.
A: And I’ve changed through your regular presence.
B: How long, I wonder, before it ends, as it will, as all encounters, as all things in the world do.
A: If I think of our children, and grandchildren on and on, and your students, and my colleagues, and our friends, and all the other encounters ours has given rise to, who’s to say that it ever ends?
B: But this, ours, will end with the departure of one of us or both of us. This that is ours particularly, and has been from its beginning back in college up to now, is a line kept aloft between us. If I go or you, it will slacken and fall.
A: We have to admit, that line hasn’t always been taut. Sometimes we, one or the other of us, ignored the relationship, or despised it, even betrayed it in small ways or large. What is other to the other of us drove us apart.
B: And also pulled us again back together. Something about you to me, and me to you. Often we’ve started afresh. We’ve stayed loyal to the other’s livingness.
A: You’ve never not been you to me. Yours are the eyes I look to be seen by. Yours is the life I’m loyal to.
B: All eyes darken eventually, but I’m grateful for every moment ours have been bright.
A: It’s been a feast, a sumptuous banquet. Old, familiar dishes, and regularly new ones, on our table all the time. The same and yet different. As I am, you are the same, and different.
Freshness speaks.
F: Friends, co-creators with me of your encounter, my relationship with each of you, and both of you together, is special to me. The mundane aspect of your relationship soon to expires, but its transcendent aspect has fresh future forever.
A: Of course, we will be remembered ‘forever’ as the couple that lived in the house before the current occupants.
B: That old couple that sat out on the front porch and called out to passersby.
F: Who knows, some doctoral candidate may find material for a thesis in you, and that precious document archived ‘forever’ in some dusty library basement. But that’s not what I mean.
A: Say more.
F: All encounters are hybrid occasions, existing for a period of time in the mundane, but forever in the transcendent where genesis happens. All encounters that ever occur are living forever in me as I lived in them and still do.
B: Living in you? What can that possibly mean?
F: Every encounter, whenever, wherever, is a unique recipe for producing specific potentialities out of generic possibilities. The participants, like you, represent the initial conditions; the rules are the way the world works, plus the way I like to work, and the nudges I give that get the whole contraption going and keep it interesting.
And since I’m involved at every stage, from invitations beforehand, to reflections afterwards, no encounters, or any parts of any encounter, are ever lost, or forgotten, or infertile.
A: The genesis space is crowded then, I expect.
F: Packed, and more and more so all the time. But in the transcendent, room is not a problem, nor restrictions of time, nor limitations of scarcity. It’s a place of change without transience, time without the past, and life without death. Every livingness, of encounter participants and encounter, has a chance to exercise and express itself forever. And livingness is what I love.
B: Sounds like a hyperactive hive.
F: Richer than that. In the mundane, one encounters an other, but in the transcendent, encounters encounter encounters, across time and space.
A. Do you mean that in some way, this relationship of ours, our encounter, can encounter other such relationships from, say, ancient China, or, if there turn out to be any, a thousand years in the future?
B: Indeed, what does that mean: encounters encountering encounters?
F: One way to think of it is like this: reflecting on any encounter is like encountering it. So at least one part of what’s going on in the transcendent is encounters inviting other encounters to join them in reflection on themselves, on each other, generating discoveries to learn from, experiences to be affected by, and relationships to connect through.
This is the production of potentiality on an exponential scale. This is the feast of feasts, the great party, already underway. No one is going to be late, but all encounters, and all who encounter, welcome.
A: Goodness, where is all this going?
F: I don’t know exactly, though I do have an idea. But as works of art discover themselves gradually under the brush or the pen of the artist, so the transcendent world represents something coming into being, something more and more lovable all the time.
B: Do we have to buy a ticket?
A: Ah, you, ever the practical. But it’s a good question.
F: Every encounter is it’s own ticket, so you’re already part of what is coming to be. And I have to say: being the freshness of each of your individual lives, and of your relationship, and of all your encounters with other others, is forever my delight. I’m grateful
A.and B: No more than we.