Motus Mentis

Around the Outer Cape in the off-season I’m reminded of how many people here are capable of subduing, commanding, and profitably plying the proximate physical world, and how stark the contrast is with the cosmopolitan, soft-handed symbol-manipulators who spend their time and money here in the summer. A great many of the people who live year-round in my little town — with the general exception of retirees from elsewhere — have these skills, and knock together a living building and repairing things, and/or pulling food from sea and marsh and forest. (The sexes seem sharply distinguished as well, which I think is not a coincidence.)

In Gurdjieff‘s system of inner work, the practice of “self-remembering” stressed awareness of the body. This is effective because the grounding of our experience in the physicality of the body is what brings us back to our actually existing selves in the present moment: to what is real, now. Practical engagement with the physical world works in the same way to keep a life of symbols, ideas, and abstractions from becoming wholly unmoored from reality and drifting off into cloud-castles and hallucinations. The physical world, and its truths, are stubborn, and persistent, and in the end will make their claim on our attention, whether we like it or not.

This division, between those who must in some way engage and control the physical world in their work and those who do not, is a chief feature of the great cultural fissure in present-day America.

It all makes me aware, when I’m in New York, of how brittle and technology-dependent the whole shebang is nowadays. if something goes badly and suddenly wrong — a Carrington Event or something like that — it won’t be pretty, and it would be good not to be in the cities.