Meditations on Responsibility, Part I: March 2, 2021

 

 March 2.

I begin this morning with the question of responsibility.

There's a picture  of my sister Sarah and I taken in Scheveningen (Den Haag) in Holland in May 1963 which I keep on the desk in my office these days. It reminds me of a lifetime of responsibility; and what I have failed at. Not that there haven’t been any successes; but Gurdjieff always felt that we should hold our failures in front of ourselves, face them, take responsibility for them. Feel remorse for them. This, not a remorse for anything but my own action in regard to others.

To be responsible comes from the old French respondre, taken in its own turn from Latin respondere, a combination of “re”— “again” and “spondere,” to pledge. So to become responsible means to pledge again. To pledge means to act as a surety to another, to help fulfill an obligation on their behalf.

The word, in other words, carries a rich set of meanings related to the idea that we are here on this planet to fulfill a set of obligations on behalf of God; that we are, as Ibn Arabi puts it, vicegerents, agencies appointed to act on God’s behalf on this planet. Gurdjieff’s work was deeply invested in this idea; and the mycelium of its body runs throughout the growing medium of Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson, penetrating every grain of it in an intimate contact that binds it into a single whole.

In this sense, the book becomes not a Bible — some record of ancient tales and moral obligations — but a map. I can't afford to approach it with any sense of worship; yet it is essential to knowing where I am. 

And the thought occurs to me here that you cannot know anything about a map unless you study it carefully. 

Not worshipfully: carefully.

Maps are very rough approximations, in fact absolute abstractions, of the substantial, three-dimensional, most extraordinary depth and diversity of the actual landscape. They only lay out broad, approximate locations; points of reference, landmarks. Even then they only convey the tiniest fraction, infinitesimal, really, of the actual nature of the landscape. And that landscape is my inner and outer life.regard to the way I dwell

How absurd, then, to refer to the map as though it were a real place. Everything about the map is already deceptive; and unless I recognize it as a map and keep it only as a touchstone, a minor point of reference in regard to the way I dwell in the landscape, I make a great mistake. The map may begin as one of my most valuable tools in terms of orientation; but, as anyone knows, maps are in the end awesomely deceiving and can never contain more than the flimsiest of sketchbooks about the land and its inhabitants. They are tales told by idiots with only one aim in mind: to let us know more or less where we are, and more or less where we might go from here.

May you be well within today.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.