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.””
There is a deep and devastating truth to the seemingly cliche phrase “my world is crumbling” or “my world is falling apart.” World in this sense takes on the form of an existential home, a holistic ecosystem of all the meaningful ways one’s identity is bound to and housed within reality around us.
This sense of world (what Heidegger called worldhood, a human capacity) is the necessary context of my own self-understanding. My identity takes shape in the space between my ‘I’ and the ‘other’ of the rest of the world.
When the meaning of my connections to that world fails me, or when things seem to fall apart, the grasp I had upon my very self seems to be an illusion. There is an existential and not uncommon kind of sorrow that I want to describe by way of an image: a slumped and isolated body, the detached strings of this relational existence (the ones which bind us to the land of the living) whipping in abyssal winds.
In the book of Job, the devil suggests a wager for the Maker: “Job is only righteous and just 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. 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 that title is not an attempt to circumvent sorrow. I want to develop a way to be sad about that which is sad, but remain in the world. 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.
Next week, 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.