What is the nature of life?
I will have to use words to describe what an image made immediately evident. If articulating it brings something of what we saw, the mission is beyond complete.
Writing a chapter about some issues a few days ago made me realise how badly I would like to be able to write in a way that all becomes plain and clear. Of course it became plain and clear that my desire was ill-conceived: thinking that this or that is plain and clear has been precisely the source of all complex sentences, paragraphs and utterances ever written and uttered by me.
Not that we should aim at plainness and clarity all the time, although their appearance would make understanding much more easily available. This needs some explanation because it appears as if I am saying that we should aim to obfuscate and to make things unintelligible. No. I’m just pointing out that sometimes to aim at plainness and clarity can render a deafening silence and paralysing immobility. We need to start stumbling and then we might walk; by walking we might learn to walk straight; by learning how to walk straight we might find a quest; and by participating in the quest we might find that things are more plain and clear than how we started, but they happened through our participation in the quest rather than through our volitional design and production.
The question is the nature of life. What I mean is not to consider the cases in which we can identify that something is living, although this is clearly useful. This is beyond my wisdom. Nor do I want to give you the conditions of the origination of life. This is also beyond my wisdom. I just want to subject to a description the nature of this image that in my idiosyncratic view, exemplified how I think life is meant to be understood. Not how it happens, not how it starts, but how we could see it once is there and what this might mean.
I will of course show you the image, and then maybe attempt to say why this lower than average picture shows itself to me to be the image of the nature of life.
If I don’t explain you might quit reading, so I will do my best. First I ask you though, what do you see? Look carefully once or twice. What do you see?
Focus on different aspects this time, what do you see? Had you seen the tin? Look again. Did you see the other tins? And how about the plastic bottles? And the cat in the middle of the grid?
There’s no cat! Sorry. I just wanted you to look really carefully. Why is this picture ‘the grand image of life’? What came to mind originally was that I could see life there, growing, flourishing even, through the yellow bars. This has a double meaning at least. Through the bars I saw the life and the life was going through the bars.
Life happens via a limiting frame — one we did not choose
Of course the yellow bars are incidental in the image, but still, it shows us that life is happening in-between something that was not supposed to be there at all. The limiting contours of our lives are almost independent of us. We don’t choose our families, our countries, nationalities, bodies, passions, etc. With passions, we can limit them, discipline them, but somehow it is not the case that we have decided them to be our own. These are the conditions of our lives, and as we learn to live precisely in and through, maybe even because of these conditions, we begin to flourish. Our life happens in this limiting context that we did not choose, appearing to us as merely incidental. We cannot render it as a pristine, clean, plain, neat succession of predictable events. There is nothing predictable about our lives and its conditions are given, whatever they are.
This I think is a difficult pill to swallow, for it is not obvious why we have ended up with the short straw at some points in our lives. Or why it seems that some never or always end up with the short straw in their lives. I offer no comment on this, for it serves to highlight the point, each has their limiting frame, one that is their frame of action, that which constraints and permits, if they choose it, life.
Life is about the beautiful appearing in the unexpected place
Tying the idea of a limiting frame to the existence and growth of the beautiful daffodils in and through the frame, we have to say the obvious: both frame and flower are not the best match, except they become one in their togetherness. The picture shows us something that cannot exist without the flower and the frame. This is not any other group of flowers and any other frame. It is that group of flowers and this exact frame. They are unique and the life they are a part of is absolutely unexpected, but yet not only possible but beautiful in its combination and configuration. It is precisely the just alignment of material reality, time and place that treats us to a reality that we observe, also through a frame.
We see life and our own life through a frame
Lastly, it was interesting that the frame the daffodil is growing through is also similar to the frame I was looking at the daffodil and its frame through. Life happens through a limited frame and is itself perceptible through a limited frame.
It is worth pondering about this ‘limiting frame’, for it does reveal something very true: it is profoundly good in its ambiguity and true in its imposition. It gives us life, it shapes our reality, it is a givenness that we cannot avoid. It is at the same time, good because it gives us life, it shapes a gift that we have to have. One of the characteristics of life is that it is a gift we did not ask for, a gift we have to have. We have to see it through this frame of its givenness to us, for it is how it is, and also we strangely find that it is a demanding gift. It demands to be lived in a particular way. What? Yes. Have you tried it? Hopefully after ten years of ‘doing it my way,’ we have learnt that this beast demands of me something I am utterly incapable of delivering.
The eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing,
said a teacher.
Strive to withdraw your heart from the love of visible things, and direct your affections to things invisible. For those who follow only their natural inclinations defile their conscience, and lose the grace of God.
In other words, of course I cannot meet its demands! Life is not satisfied with living! The frame that permits life, the frame through which life is seen, good and true though it may be, brings substance to something that now seems to be implacable, nothing is able to quench its thirst.
This ‘striving’ that Kempis refers to here should not be read as the anxious, manic, ‘be the best’, ‘make yourself better’, ‘better and better’, etc. It is to do with the ‘withdrawing’ he follows it with. With ‘withdrawing’ our hearts from that which is insatiable.
How is this possible? He says, directing our affections to things invisible. Turning our natural inclinations towards the givenness of it all, so as not to defile our conscience, losing God’s grace — the perspective of the givenness of it all, the gift of life.
I did not say I had a solution to the problem, but at least a question arose and something important came through the unexpected beauty through the limitations of the frame: what in the realm of being is able to turn my affections towards it? It has to be something other than me, other than life — not less but more, more true, more beautiful, more alive. Something to which our lives compared they are mere bleakness and obscurity, something that allows our eyes to truly see, our ears to truly hear and our hearts to truly live.
What a terrible mystery, but what a shattering hope.
