Thrown into Being
Reason for Being in the World, Chapter VIII
Dear readers, you whom I fondly call Vitruvians, in the place I jauntily refer to as Planet Vitruvius, thank you for visting again. We are nearing the close of Reason for Being in the World, with only two more new chapters to come after today, in the new year. Then I begin redrafting behind the scenes toward the finished book while I continue to publish new pieces for American Samizdat and, in February, begin serializing my play What We Were Thinking Of. (I offered a snipped of dialogue from it on Notes the other day — incentive, maybe, to get on Notes, where I am active?) From what I understand from Substack, you may be seeing a special holiday subscription offer from them, in which case, apologies for the overkill — I think my offer below is better. You know, I hope, how much I appreciate your readership, and if you’re able, your paid subscription. The next year is going to be sadly historic. Here’s a way to support me in trying to meet it. Also, if you have friends or family you think might appreciate what I offer, maybe a subscription would make a different kind of holiday gift. Thanks again.
Thrown into Being
Reason for Being in the World: Table & Chapters
Every miserable, petulant teenager who ever cried out to a parent, “I didn’t ask to be born,” was right. They didn’t. You didn’t. I didn’t. None of us did — ask to be born. We were shot out of a canon, a long timeless barrel projected from nothingness into being, dropped out of a womb — thwat, pshht, plop, plunged into the bath of the world, of light and sound: my eyes, my ears.
Terrible cries.
Holy fuck/
All this feeling.
So I found myself. Thrown. Into this world. Into being. Again.
Not myself again. Life again. A life again. So often. So many. Me.1
I was bobbing, under water in a sea of sensation and sorrow — where did it come from? — all around me. Things people said, their gestures toward and away from me, emerged bubbles of air floating out of the mouths, forming at the fingertips, drifting in every direction. I couldn’t get out of their way. They hit me. Pack. Puck. They hurt. I recoiled. Wounded, I contracted. I peered.2
each hung suspended in the dark silent current bobbing slowly in his single shaft of pain drifting up, drifting down, passing sideways like fish in the cold blue light that names us.
I floated dreamy, inward, fearful, shy.
Break out!
I try, over long years. To reach out, shed fear.
This is myself, as I come into self-consciousness, of my situation. That into which I have been thrown. I am trying to become a person without any knowledge of what it means to be a person. Learn to swim, learn to box: land a punch, take a blow.
We move for the first time, to Rockaway, a grittier, less homogenous part of New York. The kids, more varied in ethnicity and race, are tougher. I’m too dumb to hide my smartness. I’m a target, teased and picked on. I’m miserable, without resources. I cry.
It’s our fault, my mother says, standing me before the family, gathered in my parents’ bedroom. We babied you. We loved you and protected you. But now you have to learn to stand up for yourself. You have to defend yourself. You have to fight back. You're Jewish and now Jews have to fight back.
Helen was haunted by the Holocaust. She felt it was our shame. My fear was my shame. So I did. I fought back. I stopped it.
Fuck me? Fuck you!
But after that day, I recognize for the first time – a young man naked in the arms of a woman older than he, lazing reflectively in the warm pasture of her breast – she never held or kissed me again.
As I seek to become a person, that undefined being that is somehow me, but whole, I understand that people are also people in relation to others — to begin, what family you have and where it comes from and what they bring with them to where you find them. If I am melancholic, I see, so, too, is my mother. If I lack self-esteem, I come to learn, so too does Helen, who felt inadequately loved by her parents, who favored her “brilliant” brother. She married a man, worldly wise, sharpened to shrewd caution by the misfortune of his youth, but far less educated, probably less intelligent than she. Why?
He brings to her joy for living, love for family, of which he received so little from his own parents — also eruptive rage.
So Mac wars with his first, independent, female child, Sharyn. Why?
Because she will live as she will, in the one small patch of this world Mac thinks he can finally control.
There’s nothing we can do, Helen tells my sister. He doesn’t love us.
Yet when he dies forty-five years later, I will find neatly folded, once, then twice, carefully tucked into a pocket of the wallet he carried, the newspaper obituary that I wrote for his wife two years before.
Helen had too often commanded their lives by the force of her mind over his will. She had achieved professional stature in the world beyond his lowly position. She had also become marked over time by increasing, neurotic eccentricity, hobbled in more time by osteoarthritis, then diminished by Alzheimer’s. Still, Mac had wanted to keep close to him, through each of the days after she left him, the words by which, as if by magic, I evoked for him her being now gone. The day Helen died, under hospice care at home, she called to her husband with sudden clarity, from out of the fog of her unconsciousness: Mac, hold me. I’m going.
But forty-five years earlier, Sharyn had rashly married at the age of nineteen just to get away from home. The marriage soon failing, she returned to us with a four-year-old son.
Did I, the youngest of the five, to offer myself as example, choose any of this — the raucous dinner table, the family outings and vacations, the blind woundedness in which we all stumbled? I landed there on my descent, as from the sky into a field of corn. Yet I loved my father, who doted on me, and my mother, devoted to her children and her husband, too.
And their three children, along their different trajectories, but alike in so many ways, bonded unknowingly to each other in utter, unbreakable love and loyalty. Why? How? Our parents had instructed us in nothing. They did not teach; they did not wax wise. They delivered their first child into the world notably ill-equipped to raise her. They could not articulate a philosophy of life to any of their children. They simply fallibly, faultily, loved us.
I search my memory for any life lesson from my mother after the directive at the age of ten to fight back. I recall only one, maybe as many years after, at an extended-family wedding, delivered to me like a strict Zen master’s koan. Picking up some worried, secret grumbling at our table over the groom’s handing the cash-envelope gifts to his brother to hold, I naively challenge my mother. “But it’s his brother,” I whisper incredulously.
Helen fixes me that stare – the beady eyes, we called it, the eyes that penetrate to catch hold and pin you to the board. Do you think all brothers are like your brother? comes her stern corrective.
This stops me.
All brothers were not like my brother, I was now on notice. And Helen was right. The world into which I had been thrown, of family, intersected with another larger world, both better and worse than the fractious land of love in which I floundered. How to make sense of that wider world and of connection between the two?
By midway between those two outstanding, not fully outlined or curricularly approved maternal lesson plans, not having been instructed in Torah or wholly absorbed into the greater Jewish mishpocha, I began to concern myself not only with forming myself into a person but also how to be a person among other persons. Who was I — seeking love, longing to be loved — to be? Why be that way rather than another? To what end in this world?
For a third of my life, awash in melancholy and reflexive introversion, nagged by a debilitating sense of inadequacy, I was adrift mostly in myself. It mattered little what purpose I might have in the universe if I couldn’t function as a person within it.
So still in my teens, I began to drop LSD and investigate Hinduism. I became absorbed in astronomy and physics and philosophy, seeking as broad and penetrating a vision of the whole universe of matter and spirit and thought as I could. Monotheism made no sense to me. Faith, for all the elaborate edifices of spiritual and theological imagination raised to support it, remained no more than a rationalization for believing what one wished to believe, what one felt one needed to believe in order to survive — an early, awed explanation for our thrown condition that could, if one adequately persuaded oneself, maybe even enable one to feel better about the life, the self, into which one found oneself.
But I would not barter my despair for a self-deception. From somewhere, a substratum had formed in me, a ground more than a principle, an almost masochistic bedrock, made a bed of nails, that I would not accept a lie: I would face any truth, no matter how painful.
When I sat, at 22, sunk like a load into a single corner seat of a Manhattan downtown number 1-Train running under Broadway, with all the people standing in a crush and hovering over me, adult people, fully formed people, people with meaning in their lives and of purpose, people I would never be, who knew what I didn’t know – when I saw no reason – the train screeching and slowing at my station, jerking, suddenly, to a stop – ever to rise . . .
I rose.
“There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.”
I would not lie to myself. If the universe persisted empty of purpose, if my life had arrived where it landed inescapably meaningless, I would stare into that vacancy without retreat into any notional comfort. Ever since I had first come to recognize myself, childlike, in self-reflection, no conception of God had once filled my thoughts to help me face my sadness. I had lived within myself, woven of the feelings, desires, and dreams that constructed my melancholic imagination. When the nightmarish terror of an acid trip — the worst freak-out anyone I knew, even the hospital staff, said they ever saw during the 60s — threw me tumbling madly into a hell of universal extinction, there was no universal spirit, by any name, I applied as balm to my soul. I engaged no internal interlocutor to heal and guide me. I suffered and survived curled within myself. I stared into mirrors, alone in cheap studio apartments in the middle of the night, the rescue of my ego and mind at issue, and told myself, the man in the mirror, over and over again, to make it real, to ward off the mental demon besetting me, that I was. I was.
I am.
Stil, I continued to struggle. Love continued to go wrong. I was invited for my non-performance to leave college one last time. But I had spied in the dark corners of apartment and self, rising out of the shadows in lonely midnight light, a person, a being with resource in himself. I set my shoulder to its task.
As always, I needed work. I had just been one of two finalists for a position as photographer’s assistant to an artist with a studio in Manhattan’s Flat Iron District. The creativity and prospective vitality of it excited me. I didn’t get the job. I responded to an ad for customer service representatives with an international air courier company, a kind of business I’d never heard of, but it paid well, for me: $150 a week.
It was fast paced and exciting work. Early on, happy to have a little money in my wallet, I met Michael, my sensitive, lonely, alienated gay mirror, for dinner. I didn’t know it would be the last time I ever saw him. But I was moving, for love to a different state and another company, in work, up in the company ranks. The love didn’t work out. It never worked out. But the company did. It turned out to be the case, to no one’s greater surprise than mine, that I was quick-witted in a fast-paced business, decisive, even commanding. People looked to me for direction. I innovated and expanded, traveled, moved back to New York to work near JFK airport. Three years later, in 1981, as a final promotion short of ownership, I was offered on Friday the position of chief operations officer of a $40 million company. On Monday, I resigned.
That shrewd, energetic, strong-willed leader who had slipped into my suit and donned my fedora and lit my cigar when I had always been looking but never really seeing — it turned out — was me.
I lived, after, in a house by the beach with some friends. I wrote. I went back to college, still thinking philosophy but opting finally for English literature in graduate school.
So there I was, then, a person. I arrived as a person, out of all places, the business world, but by business, really, I mean exercise of a function, fulfillment of a role, pursuit of a mission, achievement of an end. Money need be only incidental. I had turned away from money.
As a person, it came to pass, I was liked and admired. I was regarded and respected. I was, in my actions, estimable. Both to my favor and not. So I was, by some, also disliked, questioned, and challenged. Thus I learned: to intend is to contend. To stand is to stand opposed, to be contested. To stand is to be able to withstand, and I learned that I could. Not without pain. There was plenty more of that to come. But I withstood it knowing who I was.
Who was I, in that case, more than an assertion of being and an uprising of ego? What was my role, in what mission, to what end? Whatever they were, I had long since decided that they came assigned to me not from outside but instead out of my own nature, perceived as I saw it within the nature of things (De Rerum Natura).
Fourteen years earlier, in the middle of my seventeenth year, on the evening of the day I took my Standardized Academic Test for college, in order to aid my shining, hopeful future (just two months earlier, I had stared up joyously into its open light spread wide across the sky over San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park) I slipped into a night of hallucinatory madness from LSD 25 that proceeded to strip me of every appurtenance of ego and self.
(Your ego is disassociating from itself, the kind psychologist explained as I described to him in his hospital office, my mother at my side, the repeated phenomenon, which began to occur even then in the describing – it’s happening now! – of how my field of vision would quickly retreat backwards in my brain, like a camera’s rapid dolly back, with what I looked at and all around it zooming far out and away from me.)
(Are you ever afraid he’ll hurt you, my mother later told me the psychologist had asked. He would never harm me, she told him.)
(She would have died for me.)
But that wasn’t exactly what occurred that night.
What occurred that night was that as I felt myself receding in my mind into some deep and fearful recess, I lost all conscious awareness and control of myself. Regressing to a little boy again, I asked the friends privately trying to calm me for my mother and my father, my sister and my brother. Over the course of hours, held down on the living room sofa — before the local police, alerted to my screams, raided the house party — the contents of the current culture and of my recent studies spilled out over my mind and from my mouth. I spoke of the Beatles and Einstein. Time, space, infinity. I saw the universe reveal its Pythagorean metaphysic, as its atomic structure dissolved into numbers floating and drifting off in space. I experienced, on its vast and incomprehensible scale, the reversal of the universe’s Big Bang, contracting back upon itself until it surrounded my biologically devolving body, diminishing into fetus, embryo, and cellular cluster, crushed within the infinite mass at the nothing-node eventually reached of universal extinction.
I called out in anguish the name of the first girl I’d loved and lost. (Was later mocked for it, too.)
I knew the pain I’d caused my family (the only time I ever saw my father cry). I sank into depression worse than anything before, fearing for my sanity, languished, at the bottom of some bodily encasement of being, seemingly without resource. I had seen into the cold, impersonal mechanics of the universe, a horrific vision never to leave my mind. For years after, alert to any unusual mental sensation or the slightest shift in my perceptions, whether alone in my apartment or, hidden from any around me, among friends, or strangers in a subway car, I would struggle against rising internal panic, that I was about to lose control of my mind.
Fourteen years after, I had emerged from these travails more whole than I had ever been.
I was a writer. That I had known all along, but what I had not known was the man who would write.
I hadn’t known any purpose other, finally, than to try to create myself, whatever it was I created, to seek my own pleasure – which indeed I liked, sensuous and sensual and vital – and to write out of my pain, which had all along been so debilitating that I created little that was finished or worthy of the ambition that conceived it.
(One day in a Hunter College classroom, Professor Alan Brick sat at his desk reading through the short in-class writing he’d assigned as a first response to Thackery’s Vanity Fair. I watched him from my seat while I worked on another assignment. Then he looked up, quickly, directly at me before I quickly looked back down, and I knew he had just read my sentences, filled, as I said was the novel, with the folly, the futility of all hope and ambition. I had achieved success in the world, success of a kind I never wished for, and I had understood the folly in it.)
But now I was not a helpless child thrown into the world and “bobbing slowly in his single shaft of pain.” I was a man with skill and confidence, assertive, armored.
(Have I changed, I asked the nurturing, elusive love I’d left before my success, returned to after. You’re tougher, she said. Hard? I worried. We’d always been so tender with each other. She touched my face. Tougher.)
But for what engagement in the world had I toughened myself? To conquer what adversary, save what that needed rescue? Myself, still?
I returned to my studies of philosophy, history, literature.
If we are thrown into our existence, shocked, then gathered up to look around us and take stock of our situation, a natural step should be to assess our surroundings and our condition on landing. It is a first step people take at widely varying points in life, many not at all.
Almost any pre-teen and teenager of the modern, industrial world, raised in working or middle-class environs and beyond, will make their way toward adulthood immersed in a sea of cultural practices, values, and expectations that govern their lives and identities as invisibly and unquestioned as the ocean’s water to a fish. There are the exceptions, of course. We can all think of them. In a politicized world, especially, they often frequent unhappily the news of the day.
But even many of those excepted from all the common rungs by their exceptional being don’t see all and the deepest fissures in normalcy. It’s a normalcy that presides perhaps less stably for the young of the less developed world. Yet we know that wherever people live in community, there are the daily habits, the values imposed from above, the mores culturally embedded, the directives of parents and the mutually recognized eyes of peers that project for all a vision of what the world is and is important. We can try to conceive, with some historical and imaginative knowledge, what constructed such normalcy, so apparently solid and unchanging, in much earlier human times. In the Middle Ages in Europe, for centuries presided the Christian Church and its whole elaborate theological edifice of meaning, to shape habit, practice, and belief, even for a child consumed with chores and responsibilities and a little play. What an earthquake of being should someone in those times cease to see the edifice as anything other than a construct and unreal? Of times closer to what we might think primitive, who can say now what might have been thought natural – normal – and not?
Albert Camus’s Meursault, in The Stranger, Jean-Paul Sartre’s Roquentin, in Nausea, experience the indifference of the universe to any human concerns or interest in meaning; for Roquentin, particularly, the strangeness of objects, of the physical world, perceived with such intensity, like repeating a word so many times it become a meaningless sound, signifies the alienation of the object of sensation from the comforting perceptions of humans.
(How do we know that what the eyes communicate to the brain as square conforms to what is actually out there in the world independent of our perceiving minds? Why should they be congruent? Had Pythagoras not proposed that the metaphysical substrata of being was numbers? Had I not seen them in what only seemed my drug induced madness? Do we not now know that subatomic neutrinos pass through the human body at the rate of about 100 trillion times per day.)
Now the world is no longer homely, as Heidegger put it (das heimische), a place in which we feel at home, with all about us, enveloping and embracing us as natural and normal. The world becomes, instead, estranged from us, uncanny, and we feel anxiety. Certainly, I felt all of that. People medicate with alcohol and drugs, pharmacological and figurative, to quell that anxiety. They meditate casually in order to calm themselves in their daily lives, more profoundly to feel connected again to some ground of being, as they try to understand it.
In the years before then, I made a Sisyphean boulder of my own will to make meaning for myself. In time, that meaning, I have said, became pursuit of my arete, my excellence, in fulfilling my nature as a writer. I can rationalize, a posteriori, the significance of writing as a human endeavor, but it is, a prioi, in the act itself, without rationale, by which I feel whole. I can say that I write as my free choice, but is it free choice for a hammer to hammer, a dog to hunt? Writing is as natural to me as a dog’s bark.
Thrown into the circumstances of my being, including my natural inclination to write, if I am conscious of all the conditions of my circumstance, without merely accepting and adopting them as part of myself, I can seek freedom to make myself beyond what was given outside my control. Even what was given as the ground of my worldly being on being born I am free to accept or reject, accommodate or dismiss. That I was born American and Jewish, for instance, cannot be changed. Whether I remain so and live my life American and Jewish is for me to choose, and how so if I choose so. This is true for anyone.
In the face of what is given, however, I find limitation on my freedom. It isn’t unbounded. I cannot not be Jewish in the way someone not born Jewish can be. I would have to reject my Jewish birth, as, somewhat differently, someone who leaves the Catholic Church must reject the cultural and faith inheritance of family and ancestors. We are free to do it. But it is not the untutored freedom of the puerile cry, “It’s a free country. I’m a free person. I can do whatever I want.” Yes, one can. But it means something to do it. Actions communicate, and every action, by its communique, contributes to shaping the world. Every choice for is also a choice against, if only as a choice not to rather than to. But rejections of the givens of our thrown condition carry still greater import.
What this means is that only the God of our imaginations, who has no prior, given condition, experiences boundless freedom. Humans live within the boundaries not just of physical restriction, in whatever form, but also of consequence, the implication of our choices, to live within or without our given condition and of how we do either.
Implication entails responsibility so freedom entails responsibility. It entails responsibility not only as moral compunction but also as a logical and natural consequence of the bounded nature of our thrown being. We can deny it. We can consciously ignore it. We can maintain a state of ignorance towards it. But we cannot make it disappear. Our histories, from family, and even to the species, are legacies and entailments.
We come up out of the darkness into that shadowed light.
AJA
Poet. Storyteller. Dramatist. Essayist. Artificer.
Poem “The World Again,” by A. Jay Adler, from Waiting for Word, 2021.
Excerpt from “Gravity,” by A. Jay Adler, from Waiting for Word, 2021.
What a wild ride! I had a few let-me-out-of-here moments but am grateful for the trip. It’s exhilarating to see a writer grapple with the biggest and most confounding questions.
I feel so connected to you by reading this: the process of growing and connecting --and having a mother like yours and mine, but also how we've shared a literary history of reading and having that count for something in our live. I love this.