The Perennial Debate

I took this picture when I was in the Appalachian mountains with my good friend, Matthew. The wind was gently waving, the trees were softly swaying, and this field was awash with red. It was a scene of beauty, a place of serenity, peace, and calm. This is the kind of place where someone would want to sit, and meditate, take stock of one's life, think about what was truly important and worth pursuing in life. One could be seated here forever and enjoy the peace of this place and breathe slowly.

I took this picture leaning across Matthew from the passenger side of the car, quickly snapping the shutter as I struggled to point the camera out of the driver side window. The car had barely stopped. More cars were coming behind; we had seconds to get the job done. I was sure it'd be a blurry shot; it was definitely going to be poorly framed. My only hope was to document some of that stunning red so as to aid memory recall later; we weren't sure what plant that was.

Stability, changelessness, calm - is this the true nature of reality? This picture fosters in my imagination and yours the sensation of a field of eternal rest; but the circumstances under which I took the picture were anything but. They were high-intensity seconds of hyper-scrambled creativity and wishful thinking. I actually snapped a ton of pictures, hoping against hope that one might turn out. This one did, as did one other. By presenting this picture to you, I can usurp the reality that it pretends to convey, and replace it with another one that we long for ... a reality dominated by peace, eternity, stability, rest. Is it wrong of me to usurp the supposed "reality" which was "taking place" when I took the picture? On the contrary, I think that is the role of the artist. The first medium of the artist is his or her own soul; in the chaotic, ever-changing flux of life, the artist creates a world of eternity and peace in his or her own soul; in a way, he usurps reality, not with a photograph, but with a self-image. That is the creative act - to create something else besides the Creation. The second medium is external; he or she captures moments, or facets, or perspectives, and explores them in a created eternity. Art captures reality and holds it for awhile. If reality is a flowing river, art is those huge, joyful rocks that make the water swirl back around.

Since the beginning of philosophy, an epic, passionate debate has raged. The history of philosophy has been one big showdown between two heavyweights of the mind: Parmenides and Heraclitus. Parmenides taught that change is an illusion, that ultimately reality is unchanging, one, eternal, stable. Heraclitus taught that the fundamental basis of reality is that it has no fundamental basis - it is always changing, coming into being, receding into darkness. There is no foundation "behind" the "veil" of our sensory perception of the world which always changes. Reality is change. Or as he said "Changing, it rests."

I left my apartment of two years, my job of three years, my friends in Chicago, my Chicago routines ... I have uprooted myself, and am living the nomadic life - now, quite literally, as I'm on a road trip, and have no address - but in a few days, I will be in Iceland, living a completely new life ... which will then be uprooted as well in three months. Uprooted? Was I ever rooted? Life is motion. Stability is an illusion. I have cast my lot with Heraclitus. The artist doesn't find eternity; he creates it.

Early Retirement

Let no one be slow to seek wisdom when he is young nor weary in the search of it when he has grown old. For no age is too early or too late for the health of the soul. And to say that the season for studying philosophy has not yet come, or that it is past and gone, is like saying that the season for happiness is not yet or that it is now no more. Therefore, both old and young alike ought to seek wisdom, the former in order that, as age comes over him, he may be young in good things because of the grace of what has been, and the latter in order that, while he is young, he may at the same time be old, because he has no fear of the things which are to come. So we must exercise ourselves in the things which bring happiness, since, if that be present, we have everything, and, if that be absent, all our actions are directed towards attaining it.

—Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus

Today is a watershed moment for me - today is my last day as a salaried employee of a corporation. Today is the day I retire at the ripe old age of twenty-six. "Retirement" in this context is a word I got from Henry. What does it mean? It means I will never "work" again ... if we take "work" to mean the thing that people begrudgingly do until they are sixty-five, and then, with relief, stop doing it. If, when I'm sixty-five, I want to stop doing what I have been doing for my entire adult life, then this means I have been directing all the time and energy of my entire adult life toward exactly the wrong thing. If one gives one's time and energy to the right thing, the one doesn't want to stop, ever. The key is to do the right thing - the thing that requires passion, energy, bravery, love, skill, creativity, mental alertness, excellence - the emotional and spiritual realities that we crave, rightly so, and the very realities that "algorithmic production" - the sort of meaningless, rote, habitual "work" we do now that we desperately want to retire from - prevents us from cultivating and enjoying. If one has to retire to begin to cultivate and expand these realities, than one should retire now, and not at the age of sixty-five. Not only is it a shame to miss out on the extreme joy of human existence, as orchestrated by these realities - it is also an irresponsibility, a shirking of one's intended purpose and potential. It is not "realistic" or "practical" to resign oneself to "algorithmic production" for several decades before retirement, and thus sacrificing passion, energy, bravery, love, skill, creativity, mental alertness, excellence, just to "pay the bills" -- because that is not reality, and that is not what it is to practice the art of being a human. The ideology that the fact that one must suffer through work until retirement is "realistic" and "practical," that "this is just the way it is," is a false ideology, propagated by a consumer culture whose soul-destroying and earth-destroying engine is run by masses of dejected, defeated, resigned wage-slaves. Today marks my first practical step in unwraveling my own habitual belief in this ideology. Today is a day of repentance, a turning away from that ideology.

What do I want to do instead? The opposite of "work" - in the sense outlined above, in the sense of the dreary thing which one must endure until being released at the age of sixty-five - is not sleep, or sloth, or laziness. I want every moment of every day of my life to require the extremes of passion, energy, bravery, love, skill, creativity, mental alertness, and excellence. What will be my work - in the redeemed sense of the word, in the old sense of the word work - the thing which made human being dignified, fulfilled, the thing which revealed the unparalleled creativity of human beings? I'm not sure. There is a sense in which I have to let myself free-fall out of the old paradigm, and fall into the new one - whatever that is. What is the gravity that thrusts me out of the grasps of the old paradigm and hurtles me toward the new? I fiind in myself the desire to write. That desire is unescapable, and to ignore it would be to ignore the voice of God. In the Land of Ice, I hope to catch a glimpse of the truth that this desire to pushing me toward.

All that being said, there is good in everything. I will miss two things very much about this job: 1) the view and 2) the people. Both have been beautiful. Check out these pictures I look from my office window.

Love,

graham

Land of Ice HQ

***UPDATE (1/23/09): Thanks to a clutch link sent by Guðríður Steindórsdóttir (with an assist by Amanda McLaughlin) and especially thanks to the deligent and persistent work of Henry in rolling properly hard by sending email inquiries á íslensku, we have secured an apartment in the Land of Ice. It´s within our price range, fully furnished, and located in the country we are flying to. The very town we travel to, in fact. Thanks all!

Introducing the team:

This is Henry. Henry studies languages. Henry desires to know foreign languages better than most people know their mother tongue.

This is me. I write prose. My writing ambition far outweighs my actual talent.

Introducing the first problem of many to come:

We need an apartment. Otherwise, our first bold move in an infinite series of bold moves may be to sleep on the streets of Iceland in the dead of winter. As Obama would say, "That's not the kind of change we're looking for" (thanks for the joke, dear friend Ted - a possible Dark Horse in the infinite series of bold moves).

** Apartment parameters **

Where: Akureyri, Iceland
When: Feb 3, 2009 – May 5, 2009 [an odd timeframe; we can be slightly flexible on the begin & end dates]
Price range: 50.000 – 80.000 ISK [assuming roughly current ex rates]
Space: 2 bedrooms is preferable
If the apartment is already furnished, so much the better - but we can figure something out, if not.

Email Henry (hooper.johnston@gmail.com) or me (grahamps@gmail.com) if you can help.

Takk fyrir and much love as well,

-GP + HJ