Being sad in the world, pt. 1
Existential worlds; sorrow and worldlessness in Job; aiming for a poetic therapy
“8 Then the Lord said to Satan, “Have you considered my servant Job? There is no one on earth like him; he is blameless and upright, a man who fears God and shuns evil.”
9 “Does Job fear God for nothing?” Satan replied. 10 “Have you not put a hedge around him and his household and everything he has? You have blessed the work of his hands, so that his flocks and herds are spread throughout the land. 11 But now stretch out your hand and strike everything he has, and he will surely curse you to your face.”
12 The Lord said to Satan, “Very well, then, everything he has is in your power, but on the man himself do not lay a finger.””
It seems to me the phrase “my world is falling apart” harbors a penetrating intuition, perhaps beyond what it typically communicates. There is, for starters, the existential meaning of ‘world.’ Such a one, for sure, can crumble or be lost. (One’s ‘existential world’ being something like the whole meaning and interconnectedness of the networks of people, artifacts, communities, memories, places, hopes, etc., which houses my self-understanding.) To lose this would be something like a soul-level free-fall; to be a worldless, isolated creature, and in the most meaningful ways, exiled from the creation. Alone. Then there is that ‘crumbling’ aspect of sorrow which, in my experience, does indeed dim the world’s natural ‘thereness’ or ‘aliveness’ and traps me inside the makeshift world of my mind’s despaired and tiny construction of reality.
For my world to fall apart is to find that the strings which bind me to reality—to the land of the living—snapped and hanging into oblivion. If your like me, this sensation can happen without warning or occasion. When it does, I tend to root my spirit in a world of my own making, rather than sorting out some way to re-attach myself to the real world, the one outside my own mind. But in the world of my own mind, everything is neatly arranged to confirm my anxieties about the outer world.
And of course all this is hard to talk about. My great terror is to be either entirely naive, reductive, and preachy about this stuff, or, on the other hand—in absolute resistance to naivete—resort to confronting the darkness with a practiced pseudo-valor: that refined, poetic, depressive-philosophical pessimism that seeks to appear so ultra-realized about the reality of sorrow that approaching it becomes intentionally anti-therapeutic and sorrow-indulgent. But as anyone with half a grip on their brain knows (that’s not always me, by the way), hopeless spelunking into the mystery of suffering is not the answer to hopelessness.
In the book of Job, the devil suggests a wager for the Maker: “Job is only righteous because you are one small part of a big, happy delusion which he calls Job. But make him face the darkness of his creatureliness. Make him face the flimsy reality of the human frame. Cut loose those strings of attachment that give him the illusion that he is doing such a grand job being Job, and he will fall away with all the rest of it.”
God takes the bet. And Job falls into the wordless abyss.
Without a world in which to find ourselves, we cannot truly possess ourselves.
We know this worldlessness in our bones, and we see it depicted in movies and stories everywhere. It is the midlife crisis, the dark night of the soul, disillusionment with one’s faith community or nation, the loss of a loved one, a soured friendship. Worldlessness happens on a scale, but the existential free-fall is the same experience nonetheless. How many of anxiety’s bitter forms are just the terrified mind trying to put the ground beneath one’s feet again—the frantic effort or paralyzing wish to gain a hold of something that will steady one’s existence for a minute?
I find in Job a story of worldlessness whose mythic proportions are meant to unveil a richer meaning that sits at the center of so many human sorrows, big and small. I also find here a therapy for the worldless soul, and analogies to that therapy in poets and thinkers of other kinds. Every Monday for the next six to eight weeks, I’m going to post a new piece on how this worldlessness seems to manifest, and what I think it means about being human. But, true to the purpose of this whole project that is Inhabited Thinking, I’ll be using other spiritual and poetic texts as a launching-off point for the discovery of a kind of poetic therapy. Right now I’m content to call that therapy, being-sad-in-the-world. But… let’s hope we can find something better by the series’ end.
What I mean, briefly, by being-sad-in-the-world is to develop a therapy that does not attempt to circumvent sorrow. I want to develop a way to be sad about that which is sad, but remain in the world of my actual abiding. I want to maintain an imagination rich enough and a personality (spirituality?) alive enough to see some of those central attachments snap off and yet recognize that I am thoroughly world-ed, not free-falling, but always existing and persisting within a rich ecosystem of generative relationality. My existence persists and takes shape in a dynamic relationship to a million-odd things. I want to be sad, but remain in all the explosive power and joy of that world.
In the next post, I’ll try to look at God’s approach to Job’s worldlessness through the lens of someone who knew how to be sad in the world, one of my favorite poets, Mary Oliver.