Chapter 5: The Problem of Obscurity

INTRO

To read the biographies of the great poets and writers of the past is to read a litany of frustrated expectations, unrecognized genius, and bitter, bitter obscurity. From Shakespeare to William Blake to Emily Dickinson to Philip K. Dick, it seems almost a given that to make Great Art, one must forego any chance of seeing it become Great. Does this then, from the artist in question's perspective, render life meaningless, absurd, and a waste? Isn't one better off finding a decent job, going to a nice restaurant once a week, and having enough money saved to put a few tadpoles through college and grad school? (As one can see, this question applies not only to artists but to all humans).

Perhaps not. Perhaps these conditions of obscurity are only half the story. Perhaps the artist who becomes great never truly dies in the first place, in face, it is only in death that the truly great actually begin to live.


THE TWO WINGS

This is not to ignore the wild unpredictability and heartbreaking disaster of life. Not at all. We may all be forgiven for wishing conditions were other than the ones we find here. But again, this is only half the story.

Consider that human life is a two-winged beast bisected by the juncture of death. Death is the thorax which holds the two beating fans together, and, unlike in biology, one of these wings might grow far larger than the other. What we call "normal" existence is the first wing, phase A. Phase A is what we might call the "consumption" or "intake" phase, wherein one is learning skills, mastering emotions, observing patterns, and reveling in the aesthetic splendor of the Created. One's sense of self is as a Witness perceiving a territory of artifacts, some animated and some not. Sensation flows inward, objects arise, feelings are felt, experiences passed through. Accumulation here is the rule, or better yet, Inhalation: one is a nostril, smelling the world on the in-breathe for the duration of one's life.

Phase B, the second wing, is the "production" or "outflow" phase. It is the nostril breathing outward, smelling nothing but returning carbon dioxide to the living beings who need it. While it does not include Awareness per say, it is a mistake to consider Phase B a Death, a Nothing, a black pit of Not-Doing. Nor is it intelligent to say that Phase B's lack of corporeal existence (read: biological body-mind) is to render it incapable of agency or communion or Presence. Phase B is where the lasting effects of Phase A carry forth, where the deceased's memory is multiplied in minds around the world, artistic productions duplicated and distributed, rumors spread, stories told, landmarks excavated, footprints casted, thoughts and insights echoed and borne on the robes of Rilke's Angel(s). Phase A is the seed-with-eyes, seeing only the wonderful world it is immersed in and biding its time, while Phase B is the blind plant, billowing and expanding far overhead, and bearing fruit for everyone's delight but its own.


LOOKING TO PHASE B

The problem is, the size, structure, and length of wing B is never spoken of, much less believed in. Those who do believe use antiquated conceptions such as "posterity", or "living on through the pages of history", "being reincarnated", or even "going to Heaven", while atheists go so far as to confuse wing A with the whole of life, which is sheer perversion if we use the analogy of the breathe: they confuse life with the inhale only. Both get it wrong.

Phase B is not the "next phase of life" nor "eternal life" nor "life after death" nor an "urban legend", it is a structural inevitability and necessity. When one is seeing a "life form" one is only seeing Phase A, one half of something more magnificent. One is only seeing the in-breathe, and for this reason does conventional "life" look like so many stuffy fearful people holding their breathes. What they are forgetting, of course, is Phase B.

All things consumed and all actions occurring in Phase A resonate on/with Phase B. Each wing is balanced by its opposite, every vein, claw, scale, ridge, bone, knuckle, and expanse of webbing finds its reflection on the antithesis. It is not the case that one causes the other, they simply appear, together. Both are living in a sense that transcends and includes the atheist-materialist notion of Phase A and the religious and/or historical notions of Phase B.



WHAT THIS MEANS FOR THE WRITER

In writing one is engaging in a task which has classically acted to mutate the size, structure, and length of Phase B. Given that writing beats in the very blood of Civilization, and given that Civilization is one of the primary means and modes by which Phase B acts upon the world (erroneously dubbed "the Dead's curse upon the living"), writers are both sustaining and transubstantiating the very infrastructure which allows for wing B to exist in the first place. Before Phase B, before Men would exhale into "death" all that they've built up and realized in "life", we were like so many one-winged ants, shifting uncomfortably in the dirt, ignorant of the Skies we would one day sail beyond.

Every writer, in his/her very existence, holds this System in place, allowing flight to find so many other mortals. In turn, s/he extends its reach, lenghtens its grasp, ignites new possibilities: dragonflies, hummingbirds, vampire bats. Stealth fighters and VTOLs. Flying submarines and solar sails. As the reach and extent of Phase B exceeds that of Phase A, as the blind by-products of so many human "deaths" exceed the the magnificence and glory of so many conscious human "lives", the Great Winged Beast that is the Entire Earth begins to spin in circles. With one wing longer than the other, with arrow-flight destabilized by this eternal, ever-increasing return, centripetal force is only inevitable. Phase A humans are born and die, born and die, in ever-increasing blinks of the eye. So efficient is this Phase B Machine and so great is their Enthusiasm to get on with the "outflow" phase, with "production", with resonance across fields, that will willingly sacrifice Consumption, Experience, Feeling, and Aesthetics to be a part of this Great Gothic Pageant spiraling its way through time.

And writers did it all.