We love to forget ourselves, but also to remember what we are: mortal creatures lustful of meaning, radiant with life, eternally alone and eternally longing for home — home in ourselves and home in each other. “I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other,” Rilke wrote in his exquisite reckoning with the interplay of freedom and togetherness in love — Rilke, who also knew that “death is our friend precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here, that is natural, that is love.”

The delicate, eternal, life-magnifying relationship between love and death, between union and freedom, is what Nobel laureate Octavio Paz (March 31, 1914–April 19, 1998) explores throughout his timeless book The Double Flame: Love and Eroticism (public library), composed in the final years of his long life.

Octavio Paz

Paz writes:

In love, predestination and choice, objective and subjective, fate and freedom intersect.

This dialogue between fate and freedom permeates Paz’s reckoning with love. Love, he observes, is not merely “the passionate attraction toward a single person” but, in the particularity of that person, requires “the transformation of the erotic object into a free and unique subject.” An epoch after Rilke, Paz writes:

Love is a bet, a wild one, placed on freedom. Not my own; the freedom of the Other.

[…]

Love… transforms the subject and object of the erotic encounter into unique persons… Its cornerstone is freedom: the mystery of the person.

[…]

The transformation of the erotic object into a person immediately makes the person a subject who possesses free will. The object I desire becomes a subject who desires me — or rejects me. The giving up of personal sovereignty and the voluntary acceptance of servitude involves a genuine change of nature: by way of the bridge of mutual desire the object becomes desiring subject and the subject becomes desiring object. Love, then, is represented in the form of a knot. A knot made of two intertwined freedoms.

Art from An ABZ of Love

Again and again, Paz returns to “the conjunction of fate and freedom” in love:

Whether the relationship is the result of accident or predestination, to reach fulfillment the complicity of our will is required. Love, any love, implies a sacrifice; and we choose that sacrifice without batting an eye. This is the mystery of freedom… In short, love is freedom personified, freedom incarnated in a body and a soul.

Lamenting the deficiency of language as a vessel to hold our most oceanic experiences, he adds:

How precarious and elusive are the ideas with which we attempt to explain the mystery of love. A mystery that is part of a greater one: the human being, who, suspended between chance and necessity, transforms his predicament into freedom.

[…]

There is an intimate, causal relation between love and freedom.

Freedom, Paz intimates, is not willed but attained through that most difficult of human achievements — surrender:

True love consists precisely of the transformation of the appetite for possession into surrender.

Art by Margaret C. Cook from a 1913 English edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. (Available as a print.)

But here is the transcendent, devastating heart of the matter: When we surrender to love, we are also surrendering to time — the entropic emperor of human destiny. Paz writes:

Human love is the union of two beings subject to time and its accidents: change, sickness, death. Although it does not save us from time, it opens it a crack, so that in a flash love’s contradictory nature is manifest: that vivacity which endlessly destroys itself and is reborn, which is always both now and never.

With an eye to our destiny as mortal creatures, “playthings of time and accident,” Paz insists that “love is one of the answers that humankind has invented in order to look death in the face.” He writes:

Love is life to the full, at one with itself: the opposite of separation. In the sensation of the carnal embrace the union of the couple becomes feeling, and feeling in turn becomes awareness; love is the discovery of the unity of life. But in that instant the compact unity is broken in two, and time reappears: it is a great hole that swallows us… Total fusion includes the acceptance of death. Without death, life — ours, here on this earth — is not life. Love does not vanquish death but makes it an integral part of life.

Observing that love is “bound to earth by the body’s gravitation, which is pleasure and death,” Paz considers the essential polarity of our richest and most life-affirming experience:

Like all the great creations of humanity, love is twofold: it is the supreme happiness and the supreme misfortune… Lovers pass constantly from rapture to despair, from sadness to joy, from wrath to tenderness, from desperation to sensuality… The lover is perpetually driven by contradictory emotions. Popular language, in all times and all places, abounds in expressions that describe the vulnerability of a person in love: love is a wound, an injury. But as St. John of the Cross says, it is “a wound that is a gift,” a “gentle cautery,” a “delightful wound.” Yes, love is a flower of blood. It is also a talisman: the vulnerability of lovers protects them. Their shield is their lack of defense; their armor is their nakedness.

[…]

Yet despite all the ills and misfortunes it brings, we always endeavor to love and be loved. Love is the closest thing on this earth to the beatitude of the blessed.

Art by Sophie Blackall from Things to Look Forward to

All of our situational vulnerability springs from the supreme existential vulnerability we are born into — our mortality, the haunting fact of it, the stark assurance of it in every smallest act of dissolution pointing the arrow of time at death. A generation before the poet Mark Doty observed in his superb Whitman-lensed meditation on love and death that “you need to both remember where love leads and love anyway,” Paz writes:

Love does not preserve us from the risks and misfortunes of existence. No love, not even those that are most peaceful and happy, escapes the disasters and calamities of time. Love, any love, is made up of time, and no love can avoid the great catastrophe: the beloved is subject to the assaults of age, infirmity, and death.

Echoing Borges’s timeless refutation of time and Kierkegaard’s insistence that “the moment is not properly an atom of time but an atom of eternity,” he adds:

There is no remedy for time. Or, at least, we do not know what it is. But we must trust in the flow of time, we must live.

[…]

We are time and cannot escape its dominion. We can transfigure it but not deny it or destroy it. This is what the great artists, poets, philosophers, scientists, and certain men of action have done. Love, too, is an answer: because it is time and made of time, love is at once consciousness of death and an attempt to make of the instant an eternity. All loves are ill-starred, because all are made of time, all are the fragile bond between two temporal creatures who know they are going to die. In all loves, even the most tragic, there is an instant of happiness that it is no exaggeration to call superhuman: it is a victory over time, a glimpse of the other side, of the there that is a here, where nothing changes and everything that is, truly is.

What emerges is a conception of love not as an antidote to death but as its vitalizing antipode:

Love does not defeat death; it is a wager against time and its accidents. Through love we catch a glimpse, in this life, of the other life. Not of the eternal life, but… of pure vitality.

[…]

Love is not eternity; nor is it the time of calendars and watches, successive time. The time of love is neither great nor small; it is the perception of all times, of all lives, in a single instant. It does not free us from death but makes us see it face to face… We are the theater of the embrace of opposites and of their dissolution, resolved in a single note that is not affirmation or negation but acceptance… the presence that dissolves into splendor: pure vitality, a heartbeat of time.

The Double Flame is a superb read in its entirety. Complement it with Hannah Arendt on love and how to live with the fundamental fear of its loss and French philosopher Alain Badiou on why we fall and how we stay in love, then revisit this florilegium of two centuries of great minds reckoning with time.

“Be a good steward of your gifts,” the poet Jane Kenyon urged in what remains some of the finest advice on writing and life ever committed to words. Our gifts come unbidden — that is what makes them gifts — but with them also comes a certain responsibility, a duty to live up to and live into our creative potential as human beings. “Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins,” James Baldwin admonished in his advice on writing. “Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance.” That durational willingness to work at our gifts, to steward them with disciplined devotion, is our fundamental responsibility to them — our fundamental responsibility to ourselves.

Maya Angelou (April 4, 1928–May 28, 2014) considers what that means and what it takes in a wonderful 1983 interview, included in Black Women Writers at Work (public library).

Maya Angelou

She reflects:

I try to live what I consider a “poetic existence.” That means I take responsibility for the air I breathe and the space I take up. I try to be immediate, to be totally present for all my work.

[…]

My responsibility as a writer is to be as good as I can be at my craft. So I study my craft… Learning the craft, understanding what language can do, gaining control of the language, enables one to make people weep, make them laugh, even make them go to war. You can do this by learning how to harness the power of the word. So studying my craft is one of my responsibilities. The other is to be as good a human being as I possibly can be so that once I have achieved control of the language, I don’t force my weaknesses on a public who might then pick them up and abuse themselves.

With an eye to the abiding mystery of our creative gifts, she adds:

I believe talent is like electricity. We don’t understand electricity. We use it. Electricity makes no judgment. You can plug into it and light up a lamp, keep a heart pump going, light a cathedral, or you can electrocute a person with it. Electricity will do all that. It makes no judgment. I think talent is like that. I believe every person is born with talent.

When asked how she fits her art into her life, Angelou responds:

Writing is a part of my life; cooking is a part of my life. Making love is a part of my life; walking down the street is a part of it. Writing demands more time, but it takes from all of these other activities. They all feed into the writing. I think it’s dangerous to concern oneself too damned much with “being an artist.” It’s more important to get the work done. You don’t have to concern yourself with it, just get it done. The pondering pose — the back of the hand glued against the forehead — is baloney. People spend more time posing than getting the work done. The work is all there is. And when it’s done, then you can laugh, have a pot of beans, stroke some child’s head, or skip down the street.

Complement with Susan Sontag on writing and what it means to be a decent human being and Olga Tokarczuk’s magnificent Nobel Prize acceptance speech about storytelling and the art of tenderness, then revisit Maya Angelou on courage and facing evil, identity and the meaning of life, and her cosmic clarion call to humanity.

“The mind is its own place,” wrote Milton, “and in it self can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.” But in an age when machines can simulate, with the sheer force of computation, mind-things like poems, is the mind still a sovereign place? What heavenly and hellish creations can it alone make that no algorithm can reproduce or mimic?

I read in Milton’s words the intimation that the mind makes meaning, and meaning — which is different from information, different even from knowledge — is uncomputable. Meaning might be the last stalwart of human consciousness in the age of AI — the supreme existential yearning irreducible to computation, the great creative restlessness that foments all our poems and our passions.

The poetic neurologist Oliver Sacks (July 9, 1933–August 30, 2015) takes up these questions in a prescient April 1993 New York Review of Books essay occasioned by the Nobel-winning neuroscientist Gerald Edelman’s book Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On The Matter Of The Mind but, like every great book review, soaring far beyond the book itself and into the broader questions of consciousness, the nature of the mind, and what it means to be human.

Oliver Sacks (Photograph: Adam Scourfield)

Reviewing the surge of literature on the science of mind and matter, Sacks laments that “beneath the enthusiasm about scientific developments, there is a certain thinness, a poverty and unreality compared to what we know of human nature, the complexity and density of the emotions we feel and of the thoughts we have.” In a sentiment reminding us how miraculous it is that a cold cosmos kindled consciousness at all, he writes:

We read excitedly of the latest chemical, computational, or quantum theory of mind, and then ask, “Is that all there is to it?”

With an eye to his own excitement upon first encountering Norbert Wiener’s pioneering cybernetics in the late 1940s, with its staggering insistence that “we are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves,” and the generation of reckonings with logical automata and nerve nets that it inspired, he recounts thinking, like many did, that humanity was on “the verge of computer translation, perception, cognition; a brave new world in which ever more powerful computers would be able to mimic, and even take over, the chief functions of brain and mind.” And yet, as a neurologist who has devoted his life to the inner workings of enfleshed human minds, he cautions:

We must indeed be very cautious before we allow that any artifact is (except in a superficial sense) “mind-like” or “brainlike”… If we are to have a model or theory of mind as this actually occurs in living creatures in the world, it may have to be radically different from anything like a computational one. It will have to be grounded in biological reality, in the anatomical and developmental and functional details of the nervous system; and also in the inner life or mental life of the living creature, the play of its sensations and feelings and drives and intentions, its perception of objects and people and situations, and, in higher creatures at least, the ability to think abstractly and to share through language and culture the consciousness of others.

One of William Blake’s engravings for Milton’s Paradise Lost

In a sentiment he would later develop in his insightful writing on narrative memory as the pillar of the self, he adds:

Above all such a theory must account for the development and adaptation peculiar to living systems. Living organisms are born into a world of challenge and novelty, a world of significances, to which they must adapt or die. Living organisms grow, learn, develop, organize knowledge, and use memory in a way that has no analogue in the nonliving. Memory itself is characteristic of life. And memory brings about a change in the organism, so that it is better adapted, better fitted, to meet environmental challenges. The very “self” of the organism is enlarged by memory.

Reflecting on Edelman’s work, Sacks considers the body as the ultimate representation of the self in consciousness, throwing a prescient stick in the spokes of ChatGPT:

To become conscious of being conscious… systems of memory must be related to representation of a self.

What is needed, Sacks observes, is a new theory that recognizes our mental life as more than the sum of computational processes — “a theory of self-organization and emergent order at every level and scale, from the scurrying of molecules and their micropatterns in a million synaptic clefts to the grand macro-patterns of an actual lived life.” Such a theory of mind can only be biological and not mechanistic — an increasingly urgent idea in our present era of disembodied AIs churning out increasingly convincing simulacra of consciousness, yet remaining forever severed from the pulsating totality that is life.

Katharina Fritsch: Display Stand with Brains, 1989. (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2009. Photograph: Maria Popova.)

Much of our lust for artificial intelligence stems from what Sacks calls in an even older essay “our almost irresistible desire to see ourselves as being somehow above nature, above the body” — a desire channeled throughout the long history of our damaging dualism, from Plato to Descartes to the very notion of artificial intelligence. Spinoza threw down the first great gauntlet at it with his insistence that our entire conscious experience requires we be understood as embodied beings, for “the body can, by the sole laws of its nature, do many things which the mind wonders at.” The sum total of those things is what we might call experience, and it becomes the lens through which we comprehend — which is different from compute — the world:

The world does not have a predetermined structure: our structuring of the world is our own — our brains create structures in the light of our experiences… Through this structuring and restructuring, the infant, the growing individual, constructs a self and a world.

[…]

It is characteristic of a creature, in contrast to a computer, that nothing is ever precisely repeated or reproduced; that there is, rather, a continual revision and reorganization of perception and memory, so that no two experiences (or their neural bases) are ever precisely the same. Experience is ever-changing, like Heraclitus’ stream. This streamlike quality of mind and perception, of consciousness and life, cannot be caught in any mechanical model — it is only possible in an evolving creature… One is not an immaterial soul, floating around in a machine. I do not feel alive, psychologically alive, except insofar as a stream of feeling — perceiving, imagining, remembering, reflecting, revising, recategorizing runs through me. I am that stream — that stream is me.

Consciousness thus emerges not as an operation of the mind but as an embodied interaction between mind and world — a dynamic flow of exchanges in which the whole organism, not just the brain, participates and, in the act of participation, creates itself. (The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio has since made a compelling case for consciousness not as a brain function but as a full-body phenomenon, and other work has demonstrated again and again that “our mind is body-bound.”)

Sacks writes:

During the development of the fetus, a unique neuronal pattern of connections is created, and then in the infant experience acts upon this pattern, modifying it by selectively strengthening or weakening connections between neuronal groups, or creating entirely new connections.

Thus experience itself is not passive, a matter of “impressions” or “sensedata,” but active, and constructed by the organism from the start. Active experience “selects,” or carves out, a new, more complexly connected pattern of neuronal groups, a neuronal reflection of the individual experience of the child, of the procedures by which it has come to categorize reality.

One of neuroscience founding father Santiago Ramón y Cajal’s little-known drawings of the brain.

Eventually, these distinct neuronal circuits synchronize with each other to shape “the inner life, the mind, the behavior of the creature.” With an eye to this and other strong evidence for a biological basis of consciousness, he writes:

From Boole, with his “Laws of Thought” in the 1850s, to the pioneers of Artificial Intelligence at the present day, there has been a persistent notion that one may have an intelligence or a language based on pure logic, without anything so messy as “meaning” being involved… This is not the case, and cannot be the case.

Our search for meaning, Sacks intimates, will be forever part of the human organism’s experience of optimal functioning — an experience, to me, qualitatively different from anything an artificial intelligence can approximate, to the extent that it can even have experience at all. In a passage that strikes me as the supreme refutation of ChatGPT’s bid for consciousness, he writes:

That feeling we have when we are functioning optimally, of a swift, effortless, complex, ever-changing, but integrated and orchestrated stream of consciousness… coincides with the sense that this consciousness is ours, and that all we experience and do and say is, implicitly, a form of self-expression, and that we are destined, whether we wish it or not, to a life of particularity and self-development; it coincides, finally, with our sense that life is a journey — unpredictable, full of risk and uncertainty, but, equally, full of novelty and adventure, and characterized (if not sabotaged by external constraints or pathology) by constant advance, an ever deeper exploration and understanding of the world.

Again and again, the correlates of consciousness root it in the life of the body, the pulse-beat of experience hungry for meaning — something lacking in a machine of even the most astonishing computational capacity. In a lyrical antidote to millennia of dualism and a maelstrom of trendy hyperboles about the future of AI, Sacks writes:

We are not incoherent, a bundle of sensations, but a self, rising from experience, continually growing and revised. The brain is not a bundle of impersonal processes, an “It,” with the “mind,” the “self,” hovering mysteriously above it. It is a confederation, an organic unity, of innumerable categorizations, and categorizations of its own activities, and from these, its self-reflection, there arises consciousness, the Mind, a metastructure… built upon the real worlds in the brain… Through experience, education, art, and life, we teach our brains to become unique. We learn to be individuals. This is a neurological learning as well as a spiritual learning.

Complement with Meghan O’Gieblyn on consciousness and our search for meaning in the age of AI, then revisit Oliver Sacks on the three essential elements of creativity, the psychology of writing, and mortality and the meaning of life.

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