Coming near the end of Labor's biography of Jack London, everyone should marvel at the sheer zest for life of London, even as he did have frequent and grave problems. In his early thirties, he set sail for the South Seas on his own sailboat with wife and a small crew. Nearly sinking many times, with storms and problems with the boat, he also explored such areas as the Solomon Islands, which at that time (early 1900's) were wild and disease-ridden, the natives still practicing outright cannibalism and the whites a slightly doctored form of slavery (called "black birding"). Deaths from violence and disease and volcanoes were imminent. And then after a few years, having to return because of health problems, London began a large farm in California, throwing himself whole-hog into it with money and research and effort. And such was his whole short (died at 40) life. He lived it to the fullest that he knew how.
His life is a good lesson in how to rise above socially-induced torpor, but also a lesson in socially constricting visions. With all his bravery and hard work, we can also see how he was still constrained by his era. He did have the guts to not let the prospect of death keep him from doing worthwhile things (I underscore worthwhile), as it is inevitable anyway (as one friend of mine put it after seeing the slow death of his ancient parents, "I no longer want to live to be 90." Yes, I would say, and add "or any other age where fear or laziness or ennui has kept us locked in an unfulfilled purgatory.") But we can also see that he required the overall approval of his society, a society that we now see through the distance of time as one of greed, corrupt bigotry and environmental travesty. He spent too much; he could never bear to "move down" after economic setbacks; and he suffered for weeks from adverse criticism of his works. He needed approval of certain segments of society even as he sloughed off others.
He longed for freedom yet knew that he was not free. It is in the "wild," in the wilderness that he sought freedom, in mind or body, and obviously found it as we can see from his writings, but this freedom was ephemeral. Most of us cannot live in the wild without other humans - whose presence makes it less than wild. He had to return to the social world, only to look over his shoulder at the wordless wonders of the untamed wilderness. And yet, without words, even that freedom remained elusive. I know what stymied him: seeing Truth in nature requires our human analysis, and once that is turned on, the Truth, shimmering behind a thin curtain, disappears altogether.
Don Juan, the wise sorcerer in Carlos Castaneda's works, made an example for us as he and Carlos ate in a small Mexican cafe. He told Carlos that all he (Carlos) could think of was "on the table" of his social conditioning. As Carlos named certain things, Don Juan pointed to the salt shaker, the plates, and the cups: there is love, there is science, there is, that coffee cup over there, god. All on the table. How do we get off? How do we find true freedom?
As I began to write this piece yesterday I had not quite finished the biography on London, but last night I did, and I found something surprising. In his last year of life, London read the newly published work of Carl Jung, in which Jung describes "archetypes," redirecting psychology towards the metaphysical (whether he wished to do so or not. He remained publicly ambivalent about this to the end). Here, London exclaimed, was what he had been searching for - the words that pointed to the greater truths, if not THE Truth, of human lives. From Jung he learned that our perceptions were metaphor, and that only the language of metaphor and myth could capture the larger truths. In examining nature, he found that it did indeed bring us back to our truth, the truth about who we were as a certain breed of people, and by extension, of who all people were. But these truths could not be expressed in direct dialogue, but rather in "feeling" words, words that made pictures and feelings that explained our truths in the only way this is possible - through far-reaching (archetypal) symbols. The Cross, the mandala, the yin-yang sign, all were symbols of an indwelling truth, just as were the religious epics - and just as was Nature, the sun and moon and stars and silence and wind all curling us back to a primordial time at the font of meaning.
And so London began an inward search for what he had intuited in raw nature. He did not have much time left for this endeavor, but his last essays and short stories began to speak of this search and what he was finding. So it was that the robust, fearless man of action found at last what he is looking for in the inward adventure, where the mental dissolves into the mythic and the mythic merges with the "real," the outside, nature, and then doubles back again inward, where it is discovered that both converge, and in this convergence comes something, something beyond even myth and metaphor. Would London have had the courage to go that far? I think he would, for he longed for freedom, and this journey, of expanding beyond our limited dialectical knowledge, is the only way to find freedom, to find things that are "off the table." Paradoxically, this journey usually begins within the limits of culturally - controlled spirit - that is, religion - whose intent, often lost on its priests, is precisely to lead beyond the words and rules to true freedom, the only kind that really is, that lies beyond form. FK
His life is a good lesson in how to rise above socially-induced torpor, but also a lesson in socially constricting visions. With all his bravery and hard work, we can also see how he was still constrained by his era. He did have the guts to not let the prospect of death keep him from doing worthwhile things (I underscore worthwhile), as it is inevitable anyway (as one friend of mine put it after seeing the slow death of his ancient parents, "I no longer want to live to be 90." Yes, I would say, and add "or any other age where fear or laziness or ennui has kept us locked in an unfulfilled purgatory.") But we can also see that he required the overall approval of his society, a society that we now see through the distance of time as one of greed, corrupt bigotry and environmental travesty. He spent too much; he could never bear to "move down" after economic setbacks; and he suffered for weeks from adverse criticism of his works. He needed approval of certain segments of society even as he sloughed off others.
He longed for freedom yet knew that he was not free. It is in the "wild," in the wilderness that he sought freedom, in mind or body, and obviously found it as we can see from his writings, but this freedom was ephemeral. Most of us cannot live in the wild without other humans - whose presence makes it less than wild. He had to return to the social world, only to look over his shoulder at the wordless wonders of the untamed wilderness. And yet, without words, even that freedom remained elusive. I know what stymied him: seeing Truth in nature requires our human analysis, and once that is turned on, the Truth, shimmering behind a thin curtain, disappears altogether.
Don Juan, the wise sorcerer in Carlos Castaneda's works, made an example for us as he and Carlos ate in a small Mexican cafe. He told Carlos that all he (Carlos) could think of was "on the table" of his social conditioning. As Carlos named certain things, Don Juan pointed to the salt shaker, the plates, and the cups: there is love, there is science, there is, that coffee cup over there, god. All on the table. How do we get off? How do we find true freedom?
As I began to write this piece yesterday I had not quite finished the biography on London, but last night I did, and I found something surprising. In his last year of life, London read the newly published work of Carl Jung, in which Jung describes "archetypes," redirecting psychology towards the metaphysical (whether he wished to do so or not. He remained publicly ambivalent about this to the end). Here, London exclaimed, was what he had been searching for - the words that pointed to the greater truths, if not THE Truth, of human lives. From Jung he learned that our perceptions were metaphor, and that only the language of metaphor and myth could capture the larger truths. In examining nature, he found that it did indeed bring us back to our truth, the truth about who we were as a certain breed of people, and by extension, of who all people were. But these truths could not be expressed in direct dialogue, but rather in "feeling" words, words that made pictures and feelings that explained our truths in the only way this is possible - through far-reaching (archetypal) symbols. The Cross, the mandala, the yin-yang sign, all were symbols of an indwelling truth, just as were the religious epics - and just as was Nature, the sun and moon and stars and silence and wind all curling us back to a primordial time at the font of meaning.
And so London began an inward search for what he had intuited in raw nature. He did not have much time left for this endeavor, but his last essays and short stories began to speak of this search and what he was finding. So it was that the robust, fearless man of action found at last what he is looking for in the inward adventure, where the mental dissolves into the mythic and the mythic merges with the "real," the outside, nature, and then doubles back again inward, where it is discovered that both converge, and in this convergence comes something, something beyond even myth and metaphor. Would London have had the courage to go that far? I think he would, for he longed for freedom, and this journey, of expanding beyond our limited dialectical knowledge, is the only way to find freedom, to find things that are "off the table." Paradoxically, this journey usually begins within the limits of culturally - controlled spirit - that is, religion - whose intent, often lost on its priests, is precisely to lead beyond the words and rules to true freedom, the only kind that really is, that lies beyond form. FK
RSS Feed