rhapsody in the key of hope
THE NEW MAN
by
ROBERT J. LEWIS
___________________________________
It is beyond our power
to choose
what we stand in need of.
Montaigne
In his essay “Welcome to the Age of Tropical Classical,”
travel writer/essayist/book reviewer and man of the world Pico
Iyer identifies “a new universe,” inhabited by a new
kind of “omnivorous voiced” writer: someone who is
at home in the world wherever he finds himself, and is informed
not by one but perhaps two or three cultures. He singles out,
extols the writing – the world view –of the poet Derek
Walcott, essayist Richard Rodriguez, novelists Salmon Rushdie
and Michael Ondattdje, and since it takes one to know one, Pico
Iyer himself must be included in this novel, ground breaking,
break away embryonic grouping.
We often
hear or read about the conflict and contradiction between the
writer’s orderly and eloquent prose and the shambles of
his personal life, where the former is invariably more engaging,
appealing than the latter. What distinguishes the above group
is that there is no apparent incongruity or discrepancy between
life and art: the writer and writing go hand in hand as each takes
his place in the world, advertising his remarkable reach and adaptation
wherever he finds himself. As such, they are all much more than
just professional writers since their writing has been shaped
by something antecedent – a combination of worldview and
very exceptional psychological makeup and constitution. It is
especially the latter that suggests the prototype, the emergence
of the much needed ‘new men,’ who for the most part
are isolated from each other because like characters in search
of an author, they haven’t found for themselves a name,
an identity, or uncovered the laws that shape their very particular
equipoise and manner of being-in-the-world.
Referring
to the oeuvre of Friedrich Hölderlin, the philosopher Martin
Heidegger proposes that the poet is someone who has the courage
to live in the destitution of his times. If we grant the destitution
the urgency and amplitude that are its due, and man’s primary
role in its ongoing development, ‘the new man’ cannot
come soon enough as the world’s peril (environmental, demographic)
approaches the critical hour.
What
sets apart the new man is his natural competence and facility,
which is his exceptional nature. He need not “overcome himself”
because he is already born overcome, or born with his gift, as
Einstein and Mozart were born with theirs, gifts so extraordinary
that lifetimes, if not millennia, would be required to accomplish
what came to them in flashes of genius.
What
allows the new man to tower above the rest of us is his freedom.
He is the first man -- not to break from -- to be mysteriously,
marvelously free from human nature as it is understood and recorded
in the unremitting blood flow of human history. The new man is
not a “rope between man and the Superman;” he does
not have to will himself to transcend himself in order to make
himself into something other than what he is. He is simply, fortuitously,
and quite exquisitely born free -- free from the mostly paralyzing
imperatives of man’s biological mandate. When he says no,
like many of us do, his negation, unlike ours, manifests in his
affective life: his negation is an extension of his nature while
ours is in direct conflict with it. He is not in thrall to what
Ralph Waldo Emerson describes as “the preponderance of nature
over willing practical life.”
This
new man is the antithesis of the average everyday man. With the
divide between the haves and have-nots of the world growing incommensurately
wider and deeper, and the worldwide refugee crisis at the tipping
point, never before have so many of the world’s citizens
been uprooted or have self-uprooted in order to pursue a better
life elsewhere. The creative arts are bursting with infinitely
sad, self-pitying works from men and women who have turned their
mostly self-imposed exile into a life-long orgy of brooding and
regret, looking backwards for roots begging to be planted and
nurtured in the present.
Set against
this inversion of life, like the phoenix rising from the ash trashed
landscape of the walking dead, comes the ‘new man’
who is at home in these very same conditions. If the legions of
exiliacs find themselves chronically depressed and diminished
in their unalleviated exile, the new man exults in it, recognizes
its privilege and state of grace that allow for a more comprehensive
grasp and love of the world in all its majesty and splendour.
He doesn’t travel the world in the conventional sense because
he is always and everywhere at home in it.
If the
average man is positively disposed towards his own kind based
on culture, religion or language, the new man is eerily exempt
from that biological constraint. Instead, he bonds around the
ideas and ferment and advance created by others like himself.
Points of contention and segregation that arise in connection
with race, God and ethnicity are regarded -- like hair colour
-- as mere incidentals of life: without valence, without value.
If most people measure their inner circle as an extension of family
and blood, these new men, with the exception of immediate family,
gravitate towards those with whom they share a common worldview.
The ruinous and unforgiving eruptions of pride and envy that imprison
the average man, in the new man produce wonder and awe, leading
to privileged association: Salieri and Mozart’s relationship
exemplify the former, Handel and Mozart’s the latter.
In their
choosing of friends, husbands, wives and partners, they reject
the conventional determinants (social standing, property and race)
and are instead attracted to the freedom the other embodies, and
the new order or way of being that is being improvised and elaborated
upon whenever and wherever they congregate.
Since
their disposition is so at variance to the normal, we must ask
and concern ourselves with the behavioural extremes direct contact
might excite? Will we persecute them like witches or decide to
remake ourselves and follow their example?
In Phenomenology
of Perception, Merleau-Ponty, explicating authenticity, takes
issue with the cripple whose unhappiness stems from his comparison
to the other. By choice, (and not by Dasein) he refuses to see
that when he is reading a book he is not a cripple but someone
reading a book. When Pico Iyer visits the banks of the river near
his home, the river is his for as long as he is there because
no one else is. Wherever he travels in the world, that part of
the world belongs to him because he has made it his abode, and
we know that to be true because he has so vividly written about
those worlds such that we could never doubt that he wasn’t
there and that the world he is describing didn’t belong
to him in the sense that he straddled it.
While
the destiny of the world hangs in the balance, most of the new
men are living in isolation, unsuspecting of the other; still
others are not yet aware of their gifts, of their special mission.
But there is hope for the world because each carries within him
the blueprint of a more wholesome and constructive future, much
like the small black seed in the ground carries the promise of
the miracle of the watermelon. And should the inclination to worship
find its proper expression in them, the new god will be “the
good earth.”
As a
group, these new men and their manner of being in the world is
an attitude that challenges the conventional methods and criteria
around which values are created and conflicts traditionally resolved
-- in the crucible of the death count. These new men inauspiciously
enter our lives as questions we might ask of ourselves as we march
to the incessant drumbeat of human nature that makes mockery of
our best intentions while the world’s sirens go unheeded.
What
kind of relationship can we expect between these new men and our
ailing world? Will they recognize their exceptional role as it
concerns the destiny of the world? Must they sign on to old world
narratives in order to lay their hands on the levers of power,
or is there a fourth way? Will their exceptional worldview provide
them with a new politic that will facilitate the dissemination
and embrace of their new way of being in the world?
Their
challenge is no less our challenge. How will we recognize these
new men who are already in our midst? And how will we receive
them? Will we show common pride or uncommon perception in deciding
to make their urgency an affective part of our labours? What can
these new men do to make us face up to and further disclose this
urgency -- before it turns into an emergency?
And before
the last light disappears and the reign of darkness begins, will
these new men manifest in time the kind of fitness required of
them to transform the world into their image? Will their hands,
(F.R. Scott) “turn this rock into children.”