Reason for Being in the World: "Becoming"
Chapter 1 of An Experiment in Intellectual and Spiritual Accounting
When I began publishing Reason for Being in the World in May 2024, I imagined it only several weeks in duration. As it has turned out, for reasons of expanded ambition and the state of the nation (American Samizdat), I am now, approaching the final chapter, number 9, into the ninth month of writing and publishing this first draft. I have hundreds more subscribers than when I began, and even those here from the start may be forgiven for not recalling the foundation laid down in chapter 1. I thought, then, in preparation for the conclusion, I might serve us all by republishing the first chapter, here today, and offer this summary recap of what follows it.
Ch. 2, “Become from”: I explore the significance of my father in my life, the mysteries of his early years in pre-revolutionary Russia, and how that mystery prompted my lifelong interest in historical origins.
Ch. 3, ‘The Centuries Pass”: I learn more about my father’s life and about my great grandfather who cared for him as a child. I attempt a visit to the shtetl in Ukraine where my father was born.
Ch. 4, “Boats Against the Current”: after my father’s death, I re-visit his mother’s grave in New York and complete my journey to Orinin, where he was born.
Ch. 5, “Burn the Boats,” part 1 and part 2: I investigate the pre-revolutionary conditions in Russia and Ukraine that led my father and all my grandparents before him to emigrate to the U.S. I recreate in my imagination, from what I know, my father’s childhood and the day he left Orinin.
Ch. 6, “The Persecution of the Jews”: I confront as a thrown condition of my life a 2500-year history of murderous oppression — of the people who, upon my birth and my emergence into consciousness, it was so that I numbered.
Ch. 7, “Wavelength”: I recount dramatic youthful developments and transformations in my own sense of identity, which played out, as it happened, against a period of mirroring cultural and social transformation during the 1960s and 70s.
Ch. 8, “Thrown into Being”: Never one to resist a challenge, I contextualize my thrown condition — and yours — within the history of the universe, the planet, and human evolution.
Ch. 1, Introduction
The experiment is partly in the process: I begin publicly before I have finished privately. I know where I’m going. That’s in the title. I know the impulses in myself and the provocations in the world that prompt me to write now. I know much of what I want to say and, generally, how I want to present it. But there are many decisions, of expression and selection – inclusion and exclusion – and a final vision yet to be determined. This is all to say that while I know the town I’m traveling to, I don’t yet know what station I’m getting off at. I can’t see the platform and the faces are vague. I’ll be filling in those blanks almost in real time, week to week. There will be multiple, consecutive parts, I think, though I don’t know yet how many. More than two, fewer than six seems right.
This is very unlike me. Though I create not quite in the manner of Alfred Hitchcock, who storyboarded a shooting script shot for shot, so that he likened it to a composer’s score — the film already played in his mind — I am far from Michelangelo Antonioni, who often decided on his shots that day on the set.
It’s also an experiment in what I aim to produce by this effort, a kind of intellectual and spiritual account of identity, so in that regard a form of memoir. It is, further, for me, an urgent response to the world as I find it now: now that I have moved by an unaccountable and, surely, diabolical magic into my eighth decade.
My stating that aloud is another departure. Born as I was within the first post-World War II generation, the first generation that was permitted to claim youth as a privileged state of being, instead of a developmental stage in the process of becoming — having fathered no children and thus bypassed more than one processional passage in the aging process — it has been easy to conceive myself in the way I naturally comport myself, as “forever young” (no, not Dylan’s). The calendar and a greying head have betrayed that ruse even if the aches of aging remain private and the spirit still cavorts.
Finding myself, then, amid what I hope is a long last-stage spillage of words into the world, it offers no value to me or the world to pretend to pour the words from a younger man’s pitcher.
Write them, then. Be them. Of all the world's words, deliver this one, then that: world the word departing, and worlding word, word the world in enunciation of our parting. from "The Words," in Waiting for Word
What I hope to present in this accounting, with what success I can’t yet know, is how an intellectual and spiritual world view emerged from the concrete experience of a lived life – mine – and not detached from it in some merely abstract acquisitions of mind. It isn’t my intent to suggest that the ideas that have shaped my intellect are epiphenomenally reducible to the experiences that more emotionally and bodily battered the person into being. It isn’t my purpose to show that I lived my life according only to the beliefs that comforted and confirmed myself. I don’t believe either of those propositions to be so. But if we are whole human beings, then it is worth exploring how experience and even our most well-considered ideas form a totality, of our individual being in the world.
How can we scrutinize our particular lives to recognize the universals that might be drawn from them? How are we able to propound universal truths with care when applying them to particular lives? How do I see my own life with those thoughts in mind? How do I view the world through which I’ve made passage looking now around me?
Becoming
What first surrounded me in childhood — after myself, that is, in my self-comforting consciousness and my familiar body, and after my family — was my Americanness, which was so readily apparent because so enveloping: my Americanness within the ever expanding and enriching American culture of the 1950s and 60s boom, of which I was a baby born.
Only somewhat less pervasive – and even more notable for that reason – was that I was Jewish.
Because my non-observant parents never inculcated the Jewish faith in me, I have never been an observant Jew. I never attended synagogue but for holidays — sometimes, when young, and on occasions like Bar Mitzvahs. My parents, my mother, really, did no more than maintain social appearances. Since I never really knew any of my grandparents, I had no idea what faith any of them had possessed in their disrupted immigrant lives or how that faith, or its lack, might have influenced my parents, though I could draw conclusions. I knew that I had relatives and friends who were more observant than we were as a family, though few if any of them orthodoxly so.
I learned in my teens that my father, always very clearly a nonbeliever, had, during the Great Depression, been at the very the least a Communist sympathizer. Still new to the country at the time, working as a sewing machine operator in the New York City, garment-district fur trade, he had belonged to the International Fur & Leather Workers Union, among the most radical American labor unions during the era, and which, indeed, had been taken over by Communists. When my father earlier fled Ukraine with his sister, it hadn’t been because of any opposition to the Russian Revolution and Marxism (he was just a child) but rather to escape antisemitism and pogroms and follow his parents. So when the Depression arrived just a few years after his own arrival in the U.S. in 1927, after years of journeying, Meyer (Mac), my father, soon enough joined thousands of other Americans in an idealistic search for work in the Soviet Union, an ironic return in my father’s case. What he found there, however, failed miserably to match his naïve dreams, and after a year living in an unheated, St. Petersburg, converted-apartment barracks, he managed, with luck, to accomplish a return to the U.S., a happy outcome that evaded large numbers of those other Americans, who ended up in gulags, dead, or disappeared.
Discussion of all this even decades later still provoked anxious discomfort in my mother, Helen. Mac had long since lost any Communist sympathies – he and Helen were liberal Democrats — but nothing Mac experienced in his long, hard life ever brought him to belief in God. When my parents made a rather late, half-hearted attempt to guide me toward Jewish observance, by enrolling me in Reform Hebrew school at the age of eleven in preparation for a Bar Mitzvah, they were soon enough dissuaded from the effort when they learned I was cutting classes. They could ill afford the expense, which Mac hadn’t wanted to bear in the first place, so after some argument, their subsequent withdrawal of me from enrollment in the school stood as one of the few contentious issues between my parents in which my father’s will prevailed. I would, it was decided, receive no further, delayed and indifferent training in the Jewish faith.
Yet I lived in the city, New York, that contained, both then and now, the largest metropolitan Jewish population in the world, in or out of Israel. All of the neighborhoods we lived in as I grew, though often mixed, were significantly Jewish. I came of age surrounded by Jews, in a city filled with Jews, among a broader family of uncles, aunts, cousins, and old-world friends who were Jews, many of them immigrants who spoke Yiddish or otherwise sounded and lived like New York Jews. This is the most immediate and obvious way, like my Americanness, by which emerging selves recognize and adopt an identity. Though I had not been led to the Jewish religion, that I was, nonetheless, ethnically and culturally Jewish emerged very early and clearly in my consciousness. Mac and Helen hadn’t set out through any program to lead their children to assimilate, and we were not led to it, if by assimilation one means the abandonment of ancestral cultural identity. My parents had wished their children to enjoy the blessings of American opportunity by growing up American, and they wished us, faith or no faith, to be consciously identified as Jews. Both came to pass.
So far, I’ve offered a mostly passive version of my cultural identification and spiritual development, of my emerging sense of place in the world. By my later teens, I began my own active search for philosophical and spiritual understanding.
Along with ultimately ill-fated LSD trips that befitted the era, and that were, for me, very much journeys into altered perception, a self breaking out of its confines briefly flirted with the Vedanta tradition of Hinduism. But Hindu worship and ritual I found, oddly and less familiarly, too Catholic, offering too much divinity and too elaborate an edifice of iconography. I sought essential truths, not the worship of grand symbolic overlays upon them.
At the same time, starting college, I began to study philosophy. What already seemed a predisposition to learn and understand things historically directed my studies. After the pre-Socratics, Plato and Aristotle laid a foundation in rationalism. The full course of the Western tradition, however, up through the ambitions of Kant and Hegel and then to the later nineteenth century attacks on such systematic rationalist projects, had begun to shape a critical perception: that efforts at totalizing accounts of reality through the sheer container of porous language were folly. Yet far from concluding in sympathy with the Analytic school that the traditional questions of philosophy those accounts had attempted to address were thus rendered meaningless, I determined only that other approaches to them might be necessary. In the meantime, deeply troubled spirit that I was, I needed, urgently, to find a way to live in the world.
The way I found — the philosophy — was Existentialism. Though as philosophy it could still produce huge investigatory and contemplative tomes in time-honored style \— Sartre’s Being and Nothingness — the common stances among a range of Existential philosophers provided me, as well, with something vital, immediate, and necessary: implications for how to live in an uncertain world: if I felt at sea in that uncertainty, amid waves of indeterminacy that battered my self and spirit, I needed to look nowhere greater than my own self for direction, strength, and determination in living. With no easy encouragements and no bromides to render more palatable the stark realities I thought I saw, Existentialism provided an account of my condition that enabled rather than disabled me. It emphasized responsibility for oneself, in solitariness, yet also to others in engagement with them, and in that engagement, as an implication of one’s condition, to be, in fact, engaged in the world and with others.
“I do not want to found anything on the incomprehensible,” wrote Albert Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus. “I want to know whether I can live with what I know and with that alone.”
Like Camus, I determined that I could. I survived psychologically into stable adulthood because of existential philosophy.
That wasn’t the end of my philosophical development, however, or of my efforts to understand spirit. Though I had rejected any form of theism as merely anthropomorphic projection, a strict atheism, to my mind, had also always provided a wholly inadequate, even evasive response to the wonder of existence. (“Not how the world is, is the mystical,” Wittgenstein says in the Tractatus, “but that it is.”) By the time I finally concluded my much-interrupted undergraduate education thirteen years after I began it — and aided by the intervening worldly experience of an international business career — I had experienced two further developments.
It was during my final undergraduate years, that I studied Martin Heidegger under Hunter College’s Joan Stambaugh, a student herself under Heidegger while she attended the University of Frieberg in Germany. A frequent translator of Heidegger’s work into English, Stambaugh was even then, in the early 1980s, working on a new translation of Being and Time. It would appear in 1996 and still serves as the most recent English version. I had by that time recognized my particular interest in literary Modernism, and I found Heidegger’s radical re-conception of being — dismissing and seeking to overcome the Cartesian subject-object split — to complement my own thinking about Modernist aesthetics and the “unified sensibility.” Personally, it revolutionized my sense of how to conceive my individual, finite presence in the world.
What repelled so many critics — Heidegger’s difficult style — I found, on the contrary, compelling. It might be called a naïve demand of philosophy, different from that usually placed on either the sciences, with their higher-level mathematics, or theology, with its scriptural exegeses, that it communicate profound and challenging ideas simply and clearly, readily to all. (Parables for preachers, that is, but no neologisms for a new philosophy.) I recognized, too, in Heidegger’s phenomenology and hermeneutics, complementary concerns to my study of Modernist aesthetics and close reading.
In both Heidegger’s theoretical embrace by some and his critical rejection by others, he came to serve as the exemplar par excellence of the vatic and obscure Continental philosophical style, with its oracular pronouncements aided in their projection by their obscurity, the obscurity partly protected by the oracular soundings. Regardless, profound insights abounded, and as it happens, the vatic and the poetic can often be seen on the verge of meeting somewhere just out of sight.
“Language,” wrote Heidegger, “is the house of being. In its home human beings dwell. Those who think and those who create with words are the guardians of this home.”
Phenomena, Heidegger declared, working from the ancient Greek, show forth, they shine — they give off light: licht in German, but more in the sense of lichtung, which means “clearing.” Being properly understood, human being properly understood (Da-sein Heidegger named it, “there-being” — the final poem in my poetry collection Waiting for Word is “There Being”) stand in relation to being as the clearing of being, the opening up space for its disclosure, the revelation of its truth: aletheia in ancient Greek, which Heidegger thought better understood as an opening to intelligibility, to unconcealment.
All this sat right with me as writer, as a reader of texts and the text of the world: a close reader, seeking in my reading and writing, my work with language, to shine light, clear the way to understanding, find truth through its disclosure to the world, its unconcealment from the darkness of not being seen, not being revealed to the world and, so, unknown. Like Heidegger, I wanted to understand the history of being, of human being — in the roots of language, the origins of how humans first responded to phenomena — which is concealed from us by time, both in itself and in the accreted layers over millennia of inessential ideas, of misconception, metaphor, and symbol. And though the revelations of scripture I rejected accordingly offered no revelations into the nature of reality, they do reveal to us what humans early on thought about reality.
What, for instance, had been declared in writing as early as Genesis?
And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.”
As the early Hebrews conceived it, God creates the universe in substantial degree by speaking it into existence: “And God said” and “God called.” God creates the universe through language, the container of reason and the intelligible.
In John, in the Christian Bible, we are told,
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
The Christian New Testament was written in ancient Greek, however, where the “word” is logos: “In the beginning was the logos,” with logos, as the word, also meaning reason, account, explanation of all things – God. So, then, ultimate knowledge and reality — God — was identified with language and the discursive principle of language. Heidegger had arrived at the beginning again, where he found not God but Being. (In Buddhism, the ultimate ground of existence, the inexpressible essence of reality that precedes the kind of subject-object split Heidegger sought to overcome is called Tathātā, often translated as suchness or thusness.)
To arise
out of such that is
a darkness thus unknowable
from “There Being,” in Waiting for WordWhen I did my studies in Heidegger in the early 1980s, neither I nor anyone I studied with knew of the philosopher’s Nazi past. That history, though well known to many in Germany, had not yet entered the general scholarly conversation about him, as it increasingly would through the 1980s and beyond, culminating, in a more conclusive evidentiary record of Heidegger’s antisemitism with the 2014 publication of his Black Notebooks. I thus never had cause to discuss it with Stambaugh, with whom I then pursued other studies. While previously I had studied Hegel under her, I went on to study Buddhism with her as well.
It was Stambaugh who introduced me to Zen Buddhism. It seemed to me a natural evolution from Heidegger, as it had been for her. Over the remainder of her career, in addition to completing the translation of Being and Time and writing about Nietzsche, she devoted herself to writing about Buddhism, and in The Real Is Not the Rational, she draws the connections from Heidegger to Zen. Unlike her mentor, Stambaugh was a plain-spoken philosophical writer. In “The Buddhist Way,” the concluding chapter of The Real Is Not the Rational, she links the German’s da-sein (there-being), from Being and Time, to the Thirteenth Century Zen master Dōgen's Uji (being time), from his Shōbōgenzō.
Everything is concentrated and condensed into the present, a present that is not static, but occurs constantly. This, and nothing else, is Dōgen's eternal now. Unlike the nunc stans of the Western medieval tradition, the eternal present is not lifted out of time. There is, so to speak, no time from which it could be lifted out. Each instant, as it is, is an (the) eternal present.
Now upon now upon now
the water flows
the stone stays still
and you offer your attention
knowing this moment, too
will last forever.
from “A Stone in Water,” in Waiting for WordAJA
Next: Part II, “Become from”
Writers can get down in the face of their challenges. Your support lifts me up. Your readership and your likes, your comments, shares, and recommendations, and your free and paid subscriptions enable me in the project of my writing life. Thank you again.
Poet. Storyteller. Dramatist. Essayist. Artificer.
