JUNE 9, THURSDAY

SACRED AND PROFANE, MYTH AND FACT

(From one Don Quixote to another, remember when reading this that Don Quixote was nuts and so accept my own nuttiness.)

Don Quixote Des La Manchas is Spain’s greatest novel. I think iit has such impact because Don Quixote is so alive and captures our imagination. But what makes him so fully alive is that he lives most fully in his own imagination, in a mythological world. He refuses to accept the everyday world as it is, in the way we can rationally agree is provable, instead he lives in his dreams of what could be, of what feels most real to him. He doesn’t listen to people around him, to Sancho Panza, he lives in his dreams and is wildly alive.

But from a Sancho Panza perspective he is nuts. I wonder if the world we live in with no knights or monsters or giants the modern secular world is so different from the actual world of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. We may still be living in the same world. Maybe we live in this same tension between mythologies, the great religions, that make us feel fully alive and a secular, scientifically measureable world in which none of this mythology is provable. Maybe the intense appeal of this story is because it grapples with the tension within each one of us between what we feel is most real and what science proves is actually measurably out there.

I write this as a comic Don Quixote whose most alive moments are projections onto other people which gives them the power to touch me intensely through their stories and their presence. It is more than empathy. The sacred power of other people over me seems perceived and enhanced by some unconscious archetypal drives that exist in my unconscious which drive me in the same way that they drive all animals who have similar drives which impel them through life: to eat, to protect, to mate, to nurture, to explore and on and on. Other animals are driven unconsciously, the human animal is conscious but our conscious understanding of these drives is often rationalization rather than rational. We believe and act on what we feel most deeply and what makes us feel most alive. Don Quixote is driven, I am driven, by these deep inner drives to feel fully alive.

Sancho Panza isn’t. He is practical and realistic. He believes in the actual measurable world. We have never been more able to measure the actual actual world. Even statistics which to me seem to be almost random and which I dislike are usually eerily correct and when wrong are only off by the tiniest percentages. We can measure everything scientifically. We know exactly how fast the ice is melting and how much adding CO2 to the atmosphere will cause a degree of global warming. We even know what the prehistoric past was like, what the world of dinosaurs was like. We are charting a universe that gets more wierd and more intense every day. It is a time of unparalleled scientific discovery and knowledge.

But then there is this other side, not only of me, but of everyone apparently, that believes that what is real is what touches us with the most intensity. Our blind inner visceral drive, our animal drive, what impels all the other animals in an intuitive way and has come thorugh evolution drives me, drives us as well. We are driven by fear and driven by desire and what gives us pleasure and be excess not by balance. And that leads to all kinds of dreams and projections similar to the ones that lead Don Quixote on. Which leads to a split between the sacred (inner feelings) and profane (outer measureable world). I am both Don Quixote off on a trip that is intended to allow me to be fully alive and I am Sancho Panza who sees an old man who might crumple stepping out of the train or begin to wheeze with Covid and be stuck in an ICU somewhere.

And as I write this today I am watching the televised January Sixth hearings. I see another old man, another comic Don Quixote, hiding his bald head under an orange wig who refuses to believe in fact when it doesn’t suit him, whose only truth is what he feels makes him feel most alive. As Bill Barr stated, Donald Trump, “seemed detached from reality,” with his lies about voter fraud consuming him just because he insisted that the way things are in his imagination must be right because they feel right to him. He is riding his hobby horse furiously and appears to be as fully and intensely emotionally alive as Don Quixote and is so convincing that thousands of his followers believed his lies and fully alive with rage and tribal bonding attacked the Capitol and caused mayhem to stop a fraudulent election. If there really had been a fraudulent election we would be honoring them as patriots willing to sacrifice themselves to save their country. But led on by lies we think of them as being nuts and deserving of jail time.

So that leaves me with a terrible quandary. We can be most alive when we are Don Quixote, letting go of the conventional world and following our inner dreams, living in our projected inner imagined world. Jesus was a form of Don Quixote, insisting impractically that being fully loving is being fully alive and being crucified for it. Gandhi, Buddha, Mother Teresa and countless saints put what feels real to them in what they imagine to be most real. But so do Donald Trump and Adolph Hitler as they are consumed by their inner resentments and furies that propel them, and their followers, to act out these projections of the way the world is.