Notions of the eternal return, the eternal recurrence, have been around from about the beginning. The idea was there with the first of the Greeks, the original Hindis, others as well, and most philosophers ever since have weighed in. The champ, of course, is Nietzsche, who thought it the greatest burden, the heaviest weight, das schwerste Gewicht. Milan Kundera agreed with Fred, pretty much, though MK was more concerned with the unreality, the imaginative untruth of the eternal return, that it is no more than a philosophic fancy. This is the premise of his most famous book The Unbearable Lightness of Being. In it he argued that life one-time lived and gone had no weight, no significance. Italo Calvino, while disagreeing with neither, thought that the lightness could be an affirming philosophy; also one of pure kitsch. A fine line separated the two. One could argue that the notion of the eternal return is the God particle, the Higgs Boson, of philosophy, that which gives weight, mass to human ideas and morals and examined existence. I bring this up because the novel Im writing, Again, has as its premise a life lived over and in the writing Im finding that memory, conscious memory, has a central role -- and that in the face of the eternal recurrence, conscious memory is absolutely superfluous. (Im finding that conscious memory, when honestly examined, is fairly superfluous in about all cases -- an indirect proof of the eternal return.) Im finding that in the writing, in my characters, scenes, expositions, that the greatest burden is in knowingly living ones life over and deciding to change ones action, to do something different -- which makes it other than eternal, makes it a one-time thing. I write because I find it stunning that none of the great philosophers put memory into their equations of the eternal return. Doing so is central to my book and it turns what the greats said on the matter on its head. This somewhat worries me, gives me pause that I might be straying down Crackpot Road. But it also does the opposite, excites me. And then theres the case of the Russian mystic P. D. Ouspensky, who believed that all men were living their exact same lives over and over and that with his special aid, people would be able to remember and improve their lives and eventually, when they had perfected their turn, would become immortal and free of what Kerouac described as the quivering meat wheel of conception, ... After the Bolshevik revolution, Ouspensjy moved to London and paled around with Wells and Huxley, and as an old man watched from his roof the Blitz in 1940. He stared and stared at London burning and his disciples thought he was having a mystic revelation. Finally, he solemnly turned to them and said, deeply troubled, This I do not remember.
Posted on: Sun, 16 Mar 2014 16:55:56 +0000
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