May 2012 – Andrew James Taggart, Practical Philosopher, Ph.D.
As social animals, we have needs and desires. Part of growing up involves learning how to fulfill more of our needs and desires without the aid of others. The other part involves learning that some of our needs can only be fulfilled by others. Here is where social life gets interesting and quite often fraught.
We have needs that we ourselves cannot meet. “By ‘needs,’” the philosopher Charles Larmore writes, “I shall mean desires that are ours not in virtue of our having adopted them, but rather in virtue of our being the sort of beings we all are.” On this definition, needs are ‘given’ to us, they cannot be removed so long as we are alive, and we cannot go on and still be ‘our selves’ so long as we deny them.
Because we have needs that we cannot meet, we make requests of others. Who are these others? Before making a request or after making one that goes unfulfilled, we may ask ourselves a number of questions.
1. What is the nature of the request? That is, what do I really need (from this person)?
2. What kind of person am I asking to fulfill my request? Is it possible for her to so fulfill it?
3. Will he ‘get’ it or ‘get’ me?
4. Is this person the right kind of person (for this particular request), or am I asking the wrong person in this case or more generally?
5. If the request is understood, will it be fulfilled properly?
6. Will the other fulfill the request but only by larding it up with eye rolling or further conditions or heavy breathing?
In the space of the request, we may feel quite alone or especially exposed and ‘needy’ or not entirely independent. We may wonder about the people we have around us and we may examine how we got to the point where this is the person in our lives, the one we are going to in order to have our needs met.
This scene belies a story about our lives. Tomorrow, I want to suggest that many of the questions raised above are simply ‘too far in.’ They are ‘too far in’ in the sense that they tell us more about what has gone awry with this way of life and with our intimate sense of knowing. I want to argue that once we are more fully in a good way of life, then asking good others for help comes more naturally.
If I could not touch, could I be touched?
This morning I lay in bed, looking at my hand. I extend the web, I turn it over, I hold it up to the sky. It is tanned and fleshy and the freshly laundered sheets are very white again.
I grind coffee beans with my hand mill. I put the spoon into the bowl, then into the front of my mouth, pulling it away as the food settles on my tongue. I steady the coffee mug with two hands, bringing it up to my mouth. I pick up and move out of the sun a bucket smelling of sea water. I roll the pencil between my fingers, look at it intently, press my thumb and forefinger into the yellow flesh, and watch the pencil make delicate and not so delicate marks on the page.
What would it be like not to have a hand? Not to have two? Without a hand, I could not pull the Zen bow tautly back into its home. I could not squeeze my bicycle brakes before a car crushes me with my knee caps. I could not take simple joy in smoothing loose strands of hair out of my face, putting them back behind my ears. I could not touch a woman’s arm, her shoulder blades, the side of her cheek just so. I could not touch. And if I could not touch, could I be touched?
Could I live without a hand?
I am looking at your photos. You have such a good eye for these quiet moments that open in the midst of all else. I think what all your photos share–not just these but all those you’ve shown me–is a sense of wonderment and a meditative eye for what is just now coming into being.
Maybe, let’s say, it’s the stillness at the heart of transience. I see the man’s hands, tied to boat, tied to rope, moving yet still. I see the evening light shining through the aperture. The hands and light are all so fleeting yet all very beautiful in virtue of their fleetingness.
The good camera does not belie the coming into being of this moment by ‘freezing’ and ‘petrifying’ it; the good camera holds it softly up to us even as it intimates, as though in a meditation on death, the moment’s passing away in one moment hence. The good camera holds up and reveals and lets go like a band of gypsies. The good camera is a still right hand crimping supple rope.
I am thinking in mid-sentence, as you know I always do. I think, just now, that perhaps what these photos are revealing is a kind of meditation: a meditation on the beautiful moment, on being ready for a loving opening, on reawakening to life and love and… and, yes, to the love of life. The changes you describe in your life are perhaps not so much ‘internal’ or ‘external’ as changes in your perception of the world–that is, not ‘internal’ or ‘external’ but a way of being in the world in which the new rises up, unencumbered by the stale, the taken for granted, the familiar, the habitual… The new discloses itself not in opposition to the everyday, not as a mere cosmetic, but from out of the everyday like a once-lying rope converging in a figure-8. I see you meditating daily, here where aesthetic perception meets patience and courage. Grace follows of course as love flows of course.