This I Believe: An A to Z of a Life

Experience

“Non sunt multiplicanda entia praeter necessitatem” (“Entities should not be multiplied without necessity”). At the height of the Middle Ages, William of Occam (1280–1349) made this statement, known as “Occam’s razor,” possibly the most radical defense of man’s worldly experience as one that is complementary to time, space, and even the metaphysical heaven. Time and space are not independent of experience. The sky (God) supports the presence of human matter, neither condemning nor contradicting it. For this reason, Occam tends to be viewed as the distant but definitive father of scientific experience. Without Occam, neither Copernicus nor Galileo would have dared to divorce reason from faith, the experience of science from the experience of God, to the degree of his more radical descendants, the Occamists, who not only separated Church and State but regarded with suspicion — and even condemnation — a God that had deceived us.

I use this brief explanation as a way of establishing humanistic knowledge and ethics as the root of all experience (and that includes divine experience). I should mention, however, that this does not ascribe absolute or — much less — divine powers to human experience. To believe that would be to succumb to the sin of pride and expose oneself to the tragic consequences of defeat, disillusion, and deception. Experience is human, and it is necessary. But is it free or is it predetermined? How is it free and how is it predetermined? These questions reveal our existence because they pull together, in one fell swoop, all that constitutes the manner in which we live our lives.

Experience is desire, eagerness, or a project to be realized— either in and of itself, in the world, in my inner self or “I,” or in other people. It encompasses a great deal. Does it harvest too little? Who does not believe experience to be supremely valuable, almost synonymous with life itself: the experience of love, of friendship, of work, of creation, of power, of joy? But experience also means pride, shame, ambition, fear. And pleasure. And hope.

Damaging experiences force us to ask ourselves if we must get to the root of what caused the experiences in order for our wounds to heal. Positive experiences allow us to maintain the hope that good things will happen again, that there will always be something else.

Nevertheless, experience itself — good or bad — makes sure to remind us that, time and again, we will fail to rise to the opportunity of the day. We will turn our backs on those who need our attention, we will not even listen to ourselves. Time and again, what we thought to be permanent will prove to be fleeting. Time and again, what we imagined to be repeatable will never occur again.

This is because experience, like Galileo’s earth, moves; it changes from one place to another and its most profound force is desire. Borges describes the object of desire as simply another desire. The son of a dreamer does not know that he himself is being dreamed; the father’s fear is that his chimerical scion will discover that he is not really a man but rather a projection of the dream— the desire — of another man. This baffling situation is concluded when the father discovers that he too has been dreamed by someone else. That is, desired by someone else. In Balzac, as I mentioned earlier, the object of desire is a fetish — the body of a woman and the skin of a wild ass, both of which fulfill the desire of their owner.

Balzac in The Wild Ass’s Skin, Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams, Borges in The Circular Ruins. All offer resounding testimony of the relationship between experience and displacement.

To displace: to move. Displacement: abandonment of the place. Movement, relocation, change, mutation, transfer: money circulates, the hero rises to greatness, the adventurer travels, the conquistador pushes onward and his ships displace tons of water and will and passions and dreams. Displacement: the distortion of the visual image through the inversion of its normal coordinates. Left and right, above and below, occidental disorientation and Deep South and Far West and rudderless North, or rather new, Freudian, disorientation and displacement as dream-activity, the dream-work that is comparable to that of the novel: omission, modification, reorganization of material, substitution for satisfaction, change of the object of desire, the sublimation of perception, the identification and nomination of things, the disguise of the erotic dream projected as a social dream, the masquerade of condensed social reality in the abbreviation of a love-dream. Exorcism of the nightmare. Triumph of the replaced allusion. Translation from immediacy to mediacy. Forms of movement of surface but also of depth: trips around my room, trips to the center of the earth, the trips made by Ulysses and Phileas Fogg, but also the trips of Proust’s narrator and Kafka’s insect: displacements toward the lighthouse, the magic mountain, but also behind Alice’s looking glass and into the garden of forking paths.

Occam asks us to look beyond the notion of movement as the mere reappearance of something that has moved to a new place. Borges, Balzac, and Freud, on the other hand, offer us proof of experiences that require displacement, movement from one place to another (spiritual or physical), but always through a transformation, a metamorphosis. Of what? Of experience in destiny.

To say it is easy, whereas to do it is more than difficult (though it is that, certainly) but complex. Transforming experience into destiny implies, for one thing, desire. But desire, in turn, opens up like a fan of possibility. It is the desire to be happy. A desire that the Enlightenment consecrated as a right, most explicitly in the founding laws of the United States: the pursuit of happiness. And while there are philosophies that see happiness as nothing more than the sister of passivity, the Faustian culture of the Western world, imposing and imperious, suggests that we act so that we may be happy. The experience of action is the condition required for arriving at happiness. But that action is going to encounter a multitude of obstacles. Comparable to Ulysses’s voyage, the odyssey of the search for happiness will navigate perilously through Scylla and Charybdis, hear the siren song, frolic in the arms of Calypso, run the risk of transforming the thing it searches for into its opposite: the angel into the pig. We will see and be seen by the fearsome eye of the giant Cyclops. And we will return home to confront the suitors, the usurpers of all that we consider to be ours.

Active experience will encounter evil. And the bad thing about evil is that it knows goodness. Good, because of its innate goodness, exists within the innocence of only knowing itself. Evil has a better chance of winning, then, because it knows both good and evil. The experience of good is caught by surprise by evil, just like the cowboys caught by the Indians in the canyons and gorges of the Old West. Our dilemma is that in order to conquer evil, good must know evil. Know it without exercising it. Is this a demand fit only for saints? Or do we have ways of knowing evil without exercising it?

As a Faustian, Western male, I have a difficult time understanding and practicing the Eastern philosophies that know how to conquer evil passively. The malignant history of the age I live in leads me actively to oppose any and all assaults on liberty and life. But I am not unaware of the fact that the energy expended to achieve goodness is comparable to the energy expended to achieve evil. For the disciplined creator — and that could mean artist, politician, entrepreneur, worker, professional — it takes as much energy and experience to achieve good as it does to lose it entirely. And those of us who have witnessed drug addiction at close quarters know that it is an endeavor that demands as much energy, will, and cunning as does painting a mural, administering a company, or performing a quintuple bypass.

The temple of ethics is erected so that human experience may be, though difficult, exceptionally constructive. As far as I can see, this requires a high degree of attention that surpasses our own selves, our own interests, and focuses its concerns on the needs of others, linking our internal subjectivity to the world’s objectivity through the one thing that the self and the world share: community. The nos-otros, the “we,” us with others. And if this is a variant of the Kantian imperative, so be it. Kant may very well be the last thinker able to be fully moral before history (Nietzsche) proved that history was only very rarely in harmony with either goodness or happiness.

Given that we remain decrepit, ruined prisoners of the last great cultural revolution, which was Romanticism, this kind of skepticism has led us to believe fervently in the experience of passion, to the degree that we cannot conceive of experience without passion. Corazón apasionado (impassioned heart), as the old Mexican song goes. Passion means recognizing, respecting, and emulating the greatness of human emotion, to the degree of believing that passions themselves are what constitute the human soul. The experience of passion attempts to conceive of itself as a kind of free obedience to valid existential impulses. In my novel The Years with Laura Díaz, I describe a passion that encompasses the surrender and reserve necessary for passionate ecstasy to be truly consummated.

At the entrance to the house, he was reserved, discreet. . On the second floor he was surrendered, open, as if the exclusion had been the sole thing that had placed him exposed to the elements, with no reserve whatsoever for the time of love. He couldn’t resist the idea of that combination, a complete manner of being a man, serene and passionate, open and secret, discreet when dressed, indiscreet when nude. . There he was, finally, as he always had been or invented right then, but revealing an eternal desire. .

To have desires and to know how to sustain them, correct them, abandon them. . what is the path of this experiential ideal? It is precisely that very delicate balance between the moment that is active and the moment that is patient. All we need to do is observe (not imagine, but rather observe and confirm through the images and news we see on a daily basis) the manner in which passion degenerates into violence. This is what leads us to advocate a kind of balance that does not condemn passion (which is, after all, the source of such great satisfaction) but emerges from patience — not the patience of Job but rather the patience of resistance: the moral courage of Socrates, of Bruno, of Galileo, of Akhmatova and Mandelstam, of Edith Stein and Simone Weil, of all the humiliated and vilified souls of the City of Man, of all the patient pilgrims making their way to the City of God.

The concept of waiting is inextricably linked to attention. It is not resignation. It is not the terrible impatience of the Catholic confessional, where we ruin our experiences by revealing them to a man who can be just as perverted as the instructions the Church gave its confessors in the Spanish colonies (“Little girl, have you ever looked at yourself naked in a mirror? Have you ever desired your father’s member?”); as indifferent as the sleepy parish priests who dispense Our Fathers and Hail Marys; or as solicitous — this is also true — as the exceptional priest who invokes the voice of confession to separate it from parlor fodder and make it the object of communion — of, I repeat, a shared attention.

The heart of all experience, more than anything, is the simple awareness that all experience is limited. And not only because we, like Pascal, are gripped by the vertigo of infinite spaces, but because death (if not life) and the gaze of the night (if not the blindness of the day) tell us that experience is limited and the universe, infinite. This is proven to us by the fact that no experience, no matter how good or valuable it may be, is ever completely fulfilled. The artist, who need not possess the chisel of Michelangelo to ensure the imperfection of his work, knows this. If the work of art were perfect, it would be divine, impenetrable, holy. Death will tell us the same thing about experience. Socrates and Greta Garbo are dead. The philosopher will never dialogue again, nor will any more of his thoughts emerge beyond the ones established by Plato. All the rest (which does not mean the “lesser”) — memory, humor, prudence, hope, physical and psychical reality — have left us forever. Greta Garbo has always looked at us and will always gaze upon us as Queen Christina, from the prow of the ship that delivers her far from love and toward impassioned memory. But Greta Gustafsson will never make another movie. Yes, a passionate heart, but one that conceals a sadness within. And he who is born into misfortune embarks upon a life of pain and suffering, right from the cradle, the Mexican song continues.

Reckless courage is what a person needs to be able to endure a limitless experience, one that is exposed to all kinds of risk. Goethe, typically, asked us to search for the infinite within our own selves: “And if you do not find it in yourself and in your thoughts, there will be no mercy for you.” But there is an awareness of the limits, one that the young, romantic author of The Sorrows of Young Werther skillfully balanced with the morality and aesthetics of Wilhelm Meister. Everything has a limit and the real challenge to our liberty lies in the question: do we dare to exceed those limits or do we not? The answer is yet another challenge. If we wish to broaden the area of our experience, we must understand the limitations of that experience. Not the political, psychological, or ethical limitations, but rather the limitations inherent to all experiences simply because of their nature as experiences. Each person possesses his own personal device for gauging those limitations. Einstein did not exceed his own limitations. Hitler did.

A character from the novel The Years with Laura Díaz expresses a desire to be in a place where he feels exposed to danger and at the same time protected, not because he wants to banish the feeling of being in danger but because he does not want to let himself be fooled by the illusion of his own power. How many people do we know who take extraordinary pains to appear strong for those around them precisely because they are all too aware of their interior weaknesses? Who will win that duel with weakness by making themselves strong on the inside, so that the world does not deceive them with false strength, crumbs of power, or insulting pity? Stoic resistance should be taken seriously because, as Marcus Aurelius tells us, we are never given more than we can endure. And he adds: “Time is a sort of river of passing events, and strong is its current; no sooner is a thing brought to sight than it is swept by and another takes its place, and this too will be swept away. . ”

To understand this quotation you do not need great moral courage, but to experience it you most certainly do. “Was it for this. .?” asks Wordsworth at the beginning of The Prelude, one of the greatest poems of all time. And he answers with yet another question: “For this. .?” Behind both questions, the fabric of our experience is being woven like a second skin, made up of the abilities that we gradually acquire as humans. The ability to be with others, and the experience of solitude as well. Forms that detach from our personal experiences and take on lives of their own, leaving testimony behind, perhaps fleeting, perhaps permanent, of our passage. And of our passion. Lights that progressively illuminate our path. And the nagging question: what are the names of those beacons that light the way for us? The skin of experience. With scars that sometimes heal and sometimes do not. The voice of experience. Sometimes we listen to it, sometimes we do not. Experience: danger and yearning. Experience and desire: an ardent or serene anticipation of something that has yet to happen, without losing sight of those things that already have happened.

We are on earth because this is where we were born and this is where we will die. But we are also in the world, which is not quite the same thing. In El naranja (The Orange Tree), the women to whom I give voices in my description of the walls of Numantia are besieged by death and famine, and they watch as the overwhelmed world — though not the earth — disappears. The earth remains while the world disappears. It makes no difference. The world (construction) dies, but the earth (instruction) is transformed. Why? Because the word says so. Because we do not lose sight of the experience of the word. The world shows us that we are human beings, subject to its experience. The Earth hides us for a brief moment, only to give us back the power to recreate the world. “We disappear from the world. We return to Earth. From there we will emerge to frighten everyone.” In other words, we will speak.

Calderón de la Barca poses the defining question of experience in La vida es sueño (Life Is a Dream), the greatest work of Spanish drama: “The greatest crime of man is that of having been born.” Segismundo, the protagonist of the play, compares himself to Nature who, having less soul than he, has more freedom. Segismundo feels this absence of freedom as a deficiency, as if he hasn’t fully been born: “Before being born, you died.” But isn’t it a greater crime not to have been born at all? Calderón liberates us to the intimate beat of dreams. Dreaming as compensation for all that experience has denied us. We dream in both forward-time and backward-time. We desire in both directions. No, it is better to have been born. And each of us must examine the reasons why it was worth coming into the world at all, and ask ourselves tirelessly and without hope of an answer the great questions of experience:

How are freedom and destiny related?

To what extent can each one of us personally shape our own experience?

What part of our experience is change and what part permanence?

To what degree does experience depend upon necessity, coincidence, liberty?

And why do we identify with the ignorance of what we are: the union of body and soul? And still continue to be precisely the thing we do not understand?