In this weary and vulnerable place, poetry whispers of truths that cannot be confined to mere rationality or experience. In a seemingly wrecked world, I’m drawn to Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Autumn” and recall that “there is One who holds this falling/Infinitely softly in His hands.” When the scriptures feel stale, James Weldon Johnson preaches through “The Prodigal Son” and I hear the old parable anew. On tired Sundays, I collapse into Wendell Berry’s Sabbath poems and find rest.
Frankenstein is the saddest book ever written because it’s about a creator who abandons his creation. A parent who leaves a child. Shelley’s monster is left to wander the frozen North alone, across its icy nothingness, forever. When all it ever wanted was to feel loved.
Royce was born in Grass Valley in 1855, today better known as the birthplace of Joanna Newsom, whose broader clan includes the state’s current governor. His parents were 49ers. Muir was born in Scotland in 1836, and absorbed enough European romanticism by the time he arrived in California to allow him to experience its mountain sunsets as glimpses of the transcendent, rather than supposing, as Royce did, that something about the climate and topology and vegetation of the place precluded any such experience and limited any true Californian’s apprehension of reality to the plane of immanence.
The opposition between these two foundational articulations of what we might call “the Californian condition” explains, I believe, quite a bit about more or less everything that has happened there since.
Someone’s probably told you before that something you thought, felt or feared was ‘all in your mind’. I’m here to tell you something else: there’s no such thing as the mind and nothing is mental. I call this the ‘no mind thesis’. The no-mind thesis is entirely compatible with the idea that people are conscious, and that they think, feel, believe, desire and so on. What it’s not compatible with is the notion that being conscious, thinking, feeling, believing, desiring and so on are mental, part of the mind, or done by the mind.
The no-mind thesis doesn’t mean that people are ‘merely bodies’. Instead, it means that, when faced with a whole person, we shouldn’t think that they can be divided into a ‘mind’ and a ‘body’, or that their properties can be neatly carved up between the ‘mental’ and the ‘non-mental’. It’s notable that Homeric Greek lacks terms that can be consistently translated as ‘mind’ and ‘body’. In Homer, we find a view of people as a coherent collection of communicating parts – ‘the spirit inside my breast drives me’; ‘my legs and arms are willing’. A similar view of human beings, as a big bundle of overlapping, intelligent systems in near-constant communication, is increasingly defended in cognitive science and biology.
Here is my last good-bye,
This side the sea.
Good-bye! good-bye! good-bye!
Love me, remember me.