The Unconsoled

I made it to the bank (Union Bank of California) this morning. Finally. I was sidetracked several times. I needed to get this money in there before I bounced a check. It did bounce. But I made it to the bank. I felt as if I'd been trudging upstream in a chest high river.

There is a novel titled The Unconsoled, written by Kazuo Ishiguro, who wrote The Remains of the Day. It's about seven hundred pages long, and it is tortuous to read. It's about a man, a concert pianist, who is in an unnamed town in an unnamed country in Europe somewhere. He is anxious about his parents making the trip to hear this concert. Early on, weird things happen. Weird things pop up here and there. At first it was very disconcerting, and confusing. Eventually I convinced myself that the author was writing a narrative as if by a man dreaming, or experiencing alzheimer's disease.

Things pop up that divert this concert pianist character from carrying out various intentions. 'I must ask the receptionist exactly what time the concert begins.' But he forgets, or the receptionist is gone, or they miscommunicate somehow. Again and again this diversion happens - will he ever just ask a straight question and get a straight answer? Many of my dreams have this character, where I am not just thwarted, but turned off into a new, unintended direction.

The book is agonizing to read. When I finally made it to Union Bank this morning, I felt like I'd lived that book.

Back to Steiner. He is a fantastic philosopher. I started reading Rudolf Steiner's books back in about 1989 or so - twenty years ago. I was reading mostly his gospel lectures and some historical overviews. I didn't know his philosophy per se. That would be his books Truth and Knowledge, and Philosophy of Freedom.

Those are essentially his only truly philosophical works, in an academic sense. The two books actually make up one complete treatise. It is a profound work of phenomenology. It's very simple and straightforward, but not dry. You can hear a young, enthusiastic degree candidate behind it.

It's in the appendix of Philosophy of Freedom that he discusses the occurrence of experiencing the thinking of another person. What he states is that we experience the thinking of others all the time. We just don't realize that that is what it is. We notice it. We just are mistaken about what it is.

One reason we make this mistake is because our consciousness is overshadowed by other consciousness, which is something like itself, so isn't as noticeable a change. It's still consciousness - instead of just having your consciounsness blanked out, as in sleep.

I once thought that I had witnessed those moments where my consciousness was overshadowed by an other consciousness. It was all very ordinary, just like Steiner described it. I thought: You mean that some of the chatter in my head might be the chatter of another consciousness, even a non-human (e.g., mountain) consciousness?

Pretty heavy stuff.