For Whom the Bell Tolls. Are we all Losing It?

 

Some are born to move the world—
To live their fantasies
But most of us just dream about
The things they’d like to be

(Losing it from the 1982 Signals LP) 

There are comparatively very few who these first two lines describe. Out of the billions of people throughout human history, those who both “move the world” and “live their fantasies” are a small community indeed. Not that the rest of us aren’t happy and contented with our lives or that you can’t be happy unless you move the world. But content though we may be, it doesn’t mean we haven’t dreamt of other things we would have liked to have been—a famous writer, an actor, a sports icon. Not all of us got there. 

The next set of lyrics cut to the heart of the matter: 

Sadder still to watch it die

Than never to have known it
For you—the blind who once could see—
The bell tolls for thee…

You can’t lose what you do not have. But you certainly can lose what you do have. Of course, the final line refers to the Ernest Hemingway novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls (which in turn came from the writings of John Donne), and the second verse of the full song is about Hemingway. The writer who stares with glassy eyes, who once wrote with “passion and precision” loses it and can no longer find inspiration. He just stares out his kitchen door “where the sun will rise no more” (another Hemingway reference from the novel The Sun Also Rises).

The opening verse of the song tells of a dancer who perhaps because of the wear of time can no longer dance to sound of applause from an adoring audience. She is left to limp across the floor and to close her bedroom door behind her. Both the writer and the dancer fulfilled their dreams and became great. The lived their fantasies. Such things are hard enough to let go if you have to, but even worse still to have them taken from you by the march of time. 

What would you have? Would it be better to avoid the pain of loss by not doing something you love, knowing that it will inevitably decay and one day be lost? Or would you rather seek for the glory and joy to do what you love in spite of its inevitable death? Would you have joy, say for example the joy of love, knowing that there is pain that comes as part of having it? It is true that it is “sadder still to watch it die than never to have known it.” But who wants to never to have known it if you could? 

Paul Ricoeur (to whom I will likely refer to often in this blog given its hermeneutic slant) as he grew old and experienced loss himself, began a book called Living Up to Death that addressed the idea of mortality. He set it aside and never completed it. It was published in mostly fragments after his death in 2005 at the age of 92. In the preface, Olivier Abel writes that Ricoeur understood that “[m]elancholy is not something what we must avoid at all costs, for it is part of our condition, such that our reality, to be alive, must also include the absence of what no longer is but once was.” 

A theme throughout the work of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger is that our “being” is being-toward-death. From the moment we come into being, we grow closer to death with every passing moment. Yet Ricoeur, in his monumental work Memory, History, Forgetting, cites Hannah Arendt, joining her sentiment that despite the fact that we must die, we “are not born in order to die but in order to begin.” Begin what? Doing something! It is the moments between birth and death that we have, so we must do something with them.

 The price is sadness and a kind of death. Another gem in Living Up to Death is when Ricoeur joins Jacques Derrida in saying, “To ask me to give up what has formed me, what I have so loved, is to ask me to die.” Nonetheless, Ricoeur observes, learning how to live, finally, is to learn how to die, to accept “absolute mortality.” “What remains” he asks? To “continue living up to death.” For Ricoeur cheerfulness and mourning are bound together. 

I’m reminded by this of two other lyrics Neil Peart gave to us. From the song Secret Touch on the Vapor Trails album, Neil wrote that “there is never love without pain,” yet “love is a power that remains.” Likewise, in BU2B2 from Clockwork Angels, although all has turned to bad, the hero (a young fellow named Owen Hardy) proclaims “I still choose to live/And give, even while I grieve.” 

Although few of us move the world or go on to live our fantasies, the truth of the matter is that each of us in our own lives are the blind who once could see and for whom the bell tolls.

 As John Donne wrote, “Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

Spinning the Big Wheel—Taking a Chance at Life

 

When listening to Rush albums (which I frequently do), one can often detect a general theme loosely connecting all or many of the songs. On Roll the Bones, the theme one finds throughout is the idea of the randomness of life. This is obviously present in the title track: “why does it happen? Because it happens. Roll the bones.” Some things are what certain philosophers refer to as “without why.” In other words, you just can’t explain everything all the time. As humans, we have a deep need to have explanations. The world is less scary when we think we understand it. It tends to be those things that we can’t understand or explain that bother us most. Accepting that some things don’t have reasons—it is not the universe or the grand plan of some higher being—is a big deal for many of us.

 One aspect of this randomness is that sometimes in life, you just have to roll the dice (or roll the bones, as it were) and go for it. Sometimes things work and sometimes they don’t. But doing nothing is simply not an option. You and I just have to spin that Big Wheel called life. This is the message of the song The Big Wheel from side two of Roll the Bones. You can read the full lyrics here. 

“Well I was only a kid—didn’t know enough to be afraid.” Ah, that youthful naivete, optimism, and drive! “Nothing to lose—maybe I have something to trade.” You get out there in life with all the wonder and excitement, and you just know that the big wheel is going to spin in your favor. You aren’t going to wait for anyone or anything, you have to make your own way: 

“Well, I was only a kid, on a holy crusade
I put no trust in a faith that was ready-made
Take no chances on paradise delayed
So I do a slow fade” 

No, paradise is not for some other future time, it is to be had and enjoyed now. And life is not “ready-made,” you have to make it yourself. For those who knew Neil Peart’s attitude toward life and his own experience as a young lad going for broke, this was him. As the song goes on, he didn’t want to wait for heaven or an angel to forgive his sins. However, he was “playing with fire.” Sometimes you get burned:
 
“Well, I was only a kid, cruising around in a trance,
Prisoner of fate, victim of circumstance
I was lined up for glory, but the tickets sold out in advance
The way the big wheel spins”

That youthful optimism finally gives way to harsh realities. This verse, hailing back to the song Circumstances from the 1978 Hemispheres album, rehearses the fact that once you go for it, you find that you get punched in the gut. Things don’t always go as planned. So rather than being wide-eyed and ready for glory, you cruise around in a trance as that prisoner of fate and a victim of circumstance. Despite your “can-do” attitude, you wind up prisoner and victim to forces beyond your control—the forces of fate and circumstance. That is just the way the big wheel spins. So what do you do? You get up and do it again. No looking back!

 

“Well, I was only a kid, gone without a backward glance
Going for broke, going for another chance
Hoping for heaven—hoping for a fine romance
If I do the right dance” 

Life is a dance. The idea for some that life is random and a game of chance is paralyzing. If there is no guarantee of victory (no heaven to place your bets on), then there is nothing to believe in. (And, frankly, whether you believe in a future or heaven or not, you have to live life as if there isn’t one). To the contrary, existentialist philosophers would say that this absurdity we call existence is not cause for despair, but great hope. I know most folk think existentialists were all about despair and angst, but that is not the end of the story. The lack of ready-made meaning in life might provoke the initial reactions of despair and hopelessness, but that isn’t where you want to stay. Life may be random chance the way the big wheel spins, but that means the world is a place of seemingly endless possibilities. You just have to go for another chance, that is just the way the big wheel spins! 

My Rush interpretation for today is that life is a constant, unending process of interpretation. Whatever “it all means,” you have to get out there every single day and find out. You start out naively joyful. You will inevitably get knocked down at some point. That’s just the way the big wheel spins. But don’t stay down! Go for broke. Go for another chance. You might even be a little wiser for the wear. So don’t lose that youthful optimism, even it is tempered somewhat from fate and circumstance. This is what philosophy professor, Brian Treanor, means by a “second naivete” in his book Melancholic Joy: On Life Worth Living. 

Keep the youthful drive “as if” the world was all sunshine and glory, even if you know it isn’t always that way. 

So get out there and see how that big wheel spins!

 “Wheel goes round, landing on a twist of faith

Taking your chances you’ll have the right answers
When the final judgment begins
 
“Wheel goes round, landing on a leap of fate
Life redirected in ways unexpected
Sometimes the odd number wins
The way the big wheel spins” 

Notice the play on words. No leap of faith, or twist of fate. Sometimes its a leap of fate that becomes a twist of faith. 

(Today’s post for my friend, George)

Obscured Perspectives: Looking through the Eyeglass in Reverse

 

One of the principles of philosophical hermeneutics is that human understanding is perspectival. That simply means that we experience the world from where we are. After all, you cannot be anywhere other than where you are, right? Perspectival understanding does not mean that knowledge is merely subjective while objective truth, if it exists, eludes us. It just means that every new thing you learn is learned through things that you know up to that point. As a child, I understood things a certain way, but as I gained more experience and knowledge, I learned to see things differently. And that does not mean that my perspective as a child was wrong necessarily, it can simply mean that my perspective became broader. What is important is that we remain open to other perspectives and gain new ones for ourselves (always learning). By doing so, we can experience the world from multiple perspectives, which leads to greater knowledge, understanding, and wisdom.

Perspective is inescapable and not, in itself, a bad thing. But one of the reasons we must remain open and willing to change is because there are times when our perspectives are flawed and obscure our understanding of new knowledge or experiences. It is true that things can have multiple levels and possibilities of meaning, but that doesn’t mean something can mean anything. In interpreting Rush in this post, I will explore this idea of obscured perspectives by turning to the 1985 Power Windows album and look at a few lines from the song Territories.

“The whole wide world
An endless universe
Yet we keep looking through
The eyeglass in reverse
Don’t feed the people
But we feed the machines
Can’t really feel
What international means”

I love the metaphor of looking through the eyeglass backwards. We have such a big world. You could spend lifetimes learning and experiencing it and still never exhaust all the possibilities. I think here of the sentiment expressed by Neil Peart in his book Traveling Music: “How could anyone ever be bored in this world, when there was so much to be interested in, to learn, to contemplate?”

Indeed, the whole wide world is an endless universe. But what do we so often do? We look through the eyeglass in reverse. We take something that is big and full of wonder and reduce it down to something small and familiar. We obscure it. We obscure the full potential and possibilities of meaning. We take the “so much” and turn it in to “so little.” I expect that is because we are comfortable with the so little and the so much is too much of a challenge and makes us uncomfortable.

One result is that we value the wrong things and set poor priorities. We could feed the people, but we are too busy feeding machines. I would propose here, as well, that the lie continues to be repeated that feeding the machines is the best possible way of feeding the people, even if we can’t feed them all. We can live with people not being fed because, after all, we have done the best we can. Nope. We need more imagination. We can do better.

What does it mean to say we “can’t really feel what international means”? One reason is that we are very territorial. National pride and love of country, for example, are good things. But when that pride and love are so parochial that we must look at others that are not us as people who should be put down or just go away (for no real reason besides they are “other” than us), that is a cancerous form of national pride and love of country. Yes, I am a citizen of a particular country and I love the good in my country and the good things that make it unique. But besides being an American I am also, more generally, a human. I share humanity with all the other humans! I am a citizen of earth as well as a citizen of the United States. These do not exclude one another, but rather enrich one another. As Territories later says, “Better the pride that resides in a citizen of the world; than the pride that divides when a colourful rag is unfurled.” If your pride divides and needs others put down so you can feel superior, you are doing patriotism wrong.

So, turn the eyeglass back around. Make your world a bigger world, an endless universe. Broaden your perspective, don’t limit it. As the great hermeneutic philosopher, Hans-Georg Gadamer wrote in his book, Philosophical Hermeneutics: “The principle of hermeneutics simply means that we should try to understand everything that can be understood.” Who wants to look through the eyeglass in reverse and obscure the other territories when we could turn it around because, about those territories, there is “so much to be interested in, to learn, to contemplate?”

Note of shameless self-promotion: I’ll be hosting an upcoming episode of Rush Roundtable over at RushFans discussing the entire song Territories with a group of other Rush nerds. Check out the YouTube channel for that and other great Rush-related content.

I Will Choose Freewill... (except when I cannot or should not)

Permanent Waves was a significant turning point in the music of Rush. It represented new sounds and styles the band was exploring, and it introduced shorter songs with lyrics that communicated more “literally” than previous more metaphorical or symbolic songs that had come before. Although it would be the next record, Moving Pictures, that significantly broadened their appeal and their audience, another thing Permanent Waves did was to get the band on the radio a little bit more. Let’s face it, The Spirit of Radio is a lot more radio friendly than Cygnus X-1, Book Two: Hemispheres. 

The Spirit of Radio and Freewill, the first two cuts of the album, are readily recognizable and still make it occasionally on classic rock stations. But it is a verse from another song on Permanent Waves that I want to focus on. And considering Freewill is a well-known and celebrated song among Rush fans for its insistence on determining one’s own path in life rather than let it be determined by external forces, this song on the same album might seem, at first glance, to contradict the message of Freewill. Consider this verse from Entre Nous, the opening track from the record’s second side: 

“We are islands to each other 

Building hopeful bridges

On a troubled sea 

Some are burned or swept away 

Some we would not choose 

But we’re not always free” 

We go from “I will choose freewill” to some things I would not choose, because I am not always free to make the choice I would like. Of course, it is not difficult to understand why these two passages on the same record are not contradictory. Only if one takes what I will call an “absolutist” view of the message of Freewill does it present certain problems. Rather than seeing these two songs as presenting a contradiction, it might be more helpful as understanding them as presenting a tension. 

The truth of the matter is that in some things in life, you and I have freedom of choice while in other things we simply do not. In some cases, we can do something (that is, we can exercise our will to do a particular thing), but for ethical or other reasons we should not do something. There are three different things going on here: 1) The ability to exercise freewill in some things; 2) The inability to exercise freewill in other things; 3) The ability to exercise freewill in a particular thing but choosing to act otherwise for some more important or higher good or value. Understanding these three things is what we philosophers (and others) like to call wisdom. This juxtaposition on the subject of freedom of will between these two songs on the same album suggests that Neil Peart (who penned the lyrics to both songs) understood this tension and was wise about it. 

There are different ways to approach this in philosophy. In his early work, philosopher Paul Ricoeur explored the nature of the “voluntary and the involuntary,” especially as these are manifest in the body. We live in our bodies, and it is within the body that this tension between the voluntary and the involuntary are experienced and made manifest. It is in my body that I can exercise my will to move it in ways that I want. However, also in my body I am acted upon. For example, I cannot prevent my body from experiencing hunger, but I can choose what I put into it to alleviate my hunger. 

The Stoic philosopher, Epictetus, in the Enchiridion, framed it simply by saying that in life some things are “up to us” and some things are “not up to us.” Things that are up to us are things we should concern ourselves with and things that are not up to us (things we cannot control) we should not get so caught up with them lest our lives be constantly miserable. 

In Aristotle, there is what is often referred to as the principle of non-contradiction. Simply stated: a thing cannot both be and not be at the same time or in the same respect. In terms of freedom, I cannot both be free and not free at the same time. It can be that I can be free at one time, but not free another time. So, I am free to go where I will at vacation time, but when it is not vacation time, my freedom is constrained and I have to go to work. In terms of different respects, I can be free and not free at the same time, but only in different respects. So, for instance, I may be free with respect to what I choose to do, but not free with respect to where I do it. 

In terms of the ethical life, Aristotle also said in his Nicomachean Ethics, Book 2, Chapter 9: “It is no easy task to be good. For in everything it is no easy task to find the middle…anyone can get angry—that is easy—or give and spend money; but to do this to the right person, to the right extent, at the right time, with the right motive, and in the right way, that is not for everyone, nor is it easy; wherefore goodness is both rare and laudable and noble.” This speaks to that third observation above where we can do something, but knowing whether we should or how we should or to whom we should is where wisdom lies. 

Yes, we should choose freewill. It is best to determine our own lives to the extent that we can and to take responsibility for ourselves. Yet, as Neil’s words in Entre Nous suggest, whether it is in terms of human relationships and interactions (the context of the verse) or any other vast number of things, we are not always free. So much of the talk of freedom and liberty that goes on today in the United States, I fear, does not possess the wisdom of understanding the difference.