Re-write the Stars

My daughter, Bella, took me to see ‘The Greatest Showman’ and I really enjoyed it. In fact I’ve been playing the soundtrack ever since.

I especially like the song ‘Rewrite the Stars’ in which Zac tries to persuade Zendaya that despite their differences they can choose their destiny.

I like it because I have spent my life so far – personally and professionally – trying to ‘rewrite the stars’: being able to see the destiny of things, of people, of an industry, and trying to change it.

It’s been tough. I think I have failed over and over again. I don’t feel like I do it by choice. It’s like some compulsion to fix the un-fixable.

Truth isn’t as Wittgenstein thought ‘all the things that are the case (all the facts)’ – it’s more like a radio station. I often listen to Radio 4 on the internet, and sometimes switch to FM. The FM is a little ahead of the internet.

Truth is like that. It is, as Heidegger said ‘a sending of Being’. It’s a kind of unraveling of destiny. He calls our awareness of the truth ‘attunement’ and that’s a pretty good word – like tuning in to a radio station. This is why people like Steve Jobs make the remark ‘you can only join the dots looking backward’ – the pattern is only obvious after it has unfolded.

If you are one of those people unfortunate enough to be ‘tuned in’ to the truth, you see things coming before other people do. That doesn’t mean you get to see ahead – you still don’t know what the radio presenter will say next – it just means you live your life in a kind of perpetual ‘I told you so’. Knowing what is just round the corner but powerless to change it. A few minutes ahead of the broadcast everyone else hears. Looking backward, but a little bit earlier.

From this perspective life is either a continual tragedy or perpetual comedy. People play out their lives like actors reciting a script you have read. At some level you know you do too. You can try warning them about what is coming, but it is mostly fruitless. They are passengers in their own destiny. I have a lot of sympathy with Chomsky when he councils optimism in the face of despair. I choose comedy in the face of tragedy.

Life is terrible. I mean that the natural state of things is death, disease, divorce, depression and despair; the human face of entropy, I guess. It is only by our efforts that we hold back the tide.

That might sound depressing but I really don’t think it is: it helps me remember that time is short, that each day we have opportunities to build a little island of magic, that we should really enjoy the brief bits when things aren’t horrible. Every day we have the chance to build these little islands of happiness in a sea of despair. We’re idiots if we don’t. If you don’t recognize this picture yet then, trust me, you will. This is why Nietzsche wrote 'We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once.' (and he saw further than any of us. Fat good it did him.).

People don’t realize this of course: they spend time worrying and chasing goals, until the sandcastle crumbles and they find themselves facing the bitter end and telling everyone how they should make the most of their lives. It’s a silly and tragic pattern – and we should laugh at the comedy of it.

Another funny thing is the sheer fruitlessness of explaining all this: eventually you learn that the important lessons you have to experience first-hand. I think when you are young there are cognitive limits on your perspective and you live in a world which – at least in the West – largely shelters you. You grow up thinking the world is white with black stripes when really it is black with white stripes.

And human destiny really is unraveling fast. It turns out we were only ever a stepping-stone; a kind of half-creature that allows a new creature to be born – one that can change its physical form as well as its thoughts. We were just the fuse not the firework. I can see that the firework will probably go off in my lifetime, though what that will look like I cannot say – it will all unravel so much faster. It’s a sort of ‘event horizon’ (what Heidegger called the ‘clearing’ and Kurtzweil calls the ‘Singularity’).

Sometimes I despair. I am tired of battling the inevitable.

Larkin captured it better than anyone I know:

Standing under the fobbed
Impendent belly of Time
Tell me the truth, I said,
Teach me the way things go.
All the other lads there
Were itching to have a bash,
But I thought wanting unfair:
It and finding out clash.

So he patted my head, booming Boy,
There's no green in your eye:
Sit here and watch the hail
Of occurence clobber life out
To a shape no one sees -
Dare you look at that straight?
Oh thank you, I said, Oh yes please,
And sat down to wait.

Half life is over now,
And I meet full face on dark mornings
The bestial visor, bent in
By the blows of what happened to happen.
What does it prove? Sod all.
In this way I spent youth,
Tracing the trite untransferable
Truss-advertisement, truth.

But I heard an interview on Radio 4 yesterday that was hopeful: a young man had turned his back on a life of crime and turned his life around. That’s a story everyone likes to hear. A story of a boy who re-wrote his stars. Eddie Mare asked the question we all wanted to know: ‘how did you do it?’.

‘I found God’ he replied, and my heart sank, then he added ‘I realized I had a purpose’ and it made more sense: perhaps the only thing that can rewrite the stars is a purpose.

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