A Bolt From the Blue
and a Blind Date
Finding “self-hood”
is a principal theme in Dostoevsky's 'The Brothers Karamazov'. The
attainment of freedom from “self” was the whole aim and purpose
of the mystical Alyosha's early submission to the Elder as a spiritual
guide. Self-renunciation was his chosen path, “to avoid the lot of
those who live their whole lives without finding themselves in
themselves”.
Alyosha's brothers
followed very different paths in their individual search for
self-hood. A “bolt from the blue” (he is wrongly accused of
murdering his father) leads Dmitri (Mitya) to discover a “newly
risen self . . . shut up inside him but only made manifest
(remembered) by the thunderbolt of relationality let
loose by his father's death”. Person-hood is only possible when the
false freedom of self-willed autonomy gives way to relationality.
Confined to the
“peeling walls” of his prison, Dimtri's “wild speech” is a
confession to his mystic brother that “the time has come for me to
pour out my soul to you. During these past two months, Alyosha, I've
felt the presence of a new man in me – a new man has arisen in me!”
Dmitri has found a
“self” he did not know: “he was shut up inside me, but if it
weren't for this thunderbolt, he never would have appeared.
Frightening! What do I care if I spend twenty years pounding out ore
in the mines, I'm not afraid of that at all, but I'm afraid of
something else now: that this risen man not depart from me! Even
there, in the mines, underground, you can find a human heart in the
convict and murderer standing next to you, and you can be close to
him, because there, too, it's possible to live, and love, and suffer!
You can revive and resurrect the frozen heart in this convict, you
can look after him for years, and finally bring up from the cave into
the light a soul that is lofty now, a suffering consciousness. You
can revive an angel, resurrect a hero! And there are many of them,
there are hundreds, and we're all guilty for them!
“Because everyone
is guilty for everyone else . . . I'll go for all of them, because
there must be someone who will go for all of them. I didn't kill
father, but I must go I accept! All of this came to me here . . .
within these peeling walls. And there are many, there are hundreds of
them, underground, with hammers in their hands. Oh, yes, we'll be in
chains, and there will be no freedom, but then, in our grief, we will
arise once more into joy, without which it's not possible for man to
live, or for God to be, for God gives joy, it's his prerogative, a
great one . . .
“And it seems to
me there's so much in me now that I can overcome everything, all
sufferings, only in order to say and tell myself every moment: I am!
In a thousand torments – I am; writhing under torture – but I am.
Locked up in a tower, but still I exist, I see the sun, and if I
don't see the sun, still I know it is. And the whole of life is there
– in knowing the sun is . . . “
Christopher Keller's
anecdotal story: a “Blind Date” (Quadrant – November, 2016):
Writing is my
search for God, he said on our second date at The Library, a bar on
Avenue A. So how's that working out for you? I said. I'm not sure,
he said, I keep finding
myself. We agreed on a third date, again at
The Library. I wonder whether I'll show up.
“Finding God” in
self-hood (“I keep finding myself”) is probably not a typical
“blind date” conversation topic. The narrator of this story is
not so sure, either, and hesitates whether to keep the next
appointment at The Library on Avenue A.
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