Although our Korrektiv Summer Reading Klub seminar on Lost in the Cosmos may seem like one of those dreams where you find yourself at the end of the term and panicking to realize you’ve forgotten to attend class since day one — or one of those real life seminars where the professor has been phoning in from never-never land and all you have to do is appear to be breathing and you’ll get an A — in fact I suspect it has been quite a reading adventure for the vast silent majority of readers. If you have been reading, or long since finished the book and moved on, please drop a note in the comments here and let us know how you did and what grade you think you deserve. We’ve still got the Space Odysseys to consider, and we will, but in the meantime, here’s an old link from Prof. Finnegan to bring us a little further along.

Joel Garver, a professor of philosophy at La Salle University, uses Percy’s take on depression as an entry point for talking about hope. Read it here.

Relation of Self to World:
Hopefully tending towards creaturely cohesion, transparency under the transcendent I-Thou creator, sustainer, redeemer — hallowed be thy name; but fraught with problematic immanence and transcendence troubles per usual: at times fucked up beyond belief and falling off both sides of the horse whose cart I keep putting first, etc, i.e. a sinner constantly weaving and unweaving a web of lies to cover my own ass; occasional bouts of anxiety, depression, momentary elation; but nevertheless a participant in sacramental reality and thereby a recipient of tactile signs of God’s transcending love and grace (my wife’s eyes, the words of absolution, Christ’s body and blood) paradoxically incarnated within the spheres of immanence.

Relation of Self to Others:
It’s always been shifting sand, the parable of the lost sheep, losing them and running after them, or getting lost my own self and avoiding every effort at being found. Putting undue store in signs of synchronicity, astrological mumbo jumbo, fortune cookies, parlor games, coincidence, flips of the coin, blips on the radar screen signifying my path and yours converging and then diverging in a deep fog. Also trafficking in quirkiness and goofball humor, poesy and suchlike, wishing to attract your attention with fresh reformulations and approximate revelations of truth and beauty — and you rarely ever noticing.

Identity of Self:
A Married Man, a father, a son, a mower of lawn, a castaway who’s heard and believed the news from across the sea but now what. A 10th grade poet.

Movement of Self vis-a-vis World:
Pilgrim, wayfarer, traveler, occasionally consulting the map and seeing that I’ve lost the trail, occasionally enjoying the view, occasionally stubbing my toe, occasionally asking for a sign and occasionally receiving one.

Chart your own semiotic profile.
(Cf. Lost in the Cosmos, Question 13: “The Transcending Self”)

JG: Half-jokingly, you were going to subtitle Lost in the Cosmos: Why Carl Sagan Is So Lonely . .. . a statement obviously directed at scientists in general who try to “dissolve the uniqueness of man” and make him like all other species. This brings up the problem again and again of the doctrines of evolution and creationism. While the evolutionists don’t pretend to see their view as the “eternal truth,” scientists, like Carl Sagan and others, see the status of evolution as a logical theory — even though it is not provable in a traditional scientific method. While he can’t be proved wrong, your book points to some of the holes in his theory which caused Sagan to write and ask about Lost in the Cosmos.

WP: Yes, he wrote me he’d read somewhere that I’d written a book in rebuttal to his writings and questioning the fact that he’s left God out of the Cosmos. He said if I could show him any cited evidence that God was ever there or ever in a being, he would have to consider it. He just said he’d like to read the book. He reminds me of a pathologist who finished an autopsy and said to his students: “Where is the soul?”

JG: So he hadn’t read the book yet?

WP: No, he hadn’t, so I sent him a copy.

JG: Most reviewers come up with the idea that it is a rebuttal of Sagan, but it isn’t against him personally. It only mentions Sagan one time.

WP: I only mention him in one question and one footnote. People like to latch onto something, and the two most obvious names are Donahue and Sagan. They’re featured in different parts of the book. But you know where the loneliness comes from? It comes from a triadic creature, scientist, whether it be Einstein or Darwin or Sagan, who tries to explain the whole world by dyadic theory and mostly succeeds. Darwin was trying to do it — thought he’d succeeded. Darwin’s theory of evolution is purely dyadic. Organisms compete, then small, accidental changes occur, which survive through adaptation and survival of the fittest. But notice that there is a curious moment taking place while you’re explaining the whole world by dyadic theory: you yourself are getting more and more removed from it. There you are sitting making up these theories, but how do you fit in? So you feel a little isolated and so end up with these fanciful notions of ETIs and talking chimps. Sagan wrote books which appear to explain not only the whole Cosmos but the human condition, how humans got to where they are, through his theories about the reptilian brain and cortex brain as computer and so forth. But why is Carl Sagan so anxious to find an ETI (extra-terrestrial intelligence)? Because the triadic scientist gets lonely. If everything gets put in the sphere of immanence, the sphere of dyadic interaction, one gets more and more isolated. Where does one fit in? Then he has a problem of reentry. How does one lead his life? Well, one way to it is to communicate with extraterrestrials. If one is a great scientist like Einstein, one simply does science. If not, then one starts longing for encounters with extraterrestrials. What people like Sagan don’t realize is that humans are far more mysterious than any extraterrestrial they’ve yet imagined. It’s a fanciful idea of Sagan having explained the whole Cosmos and the human position, then trying to find an ETI to tell it to, to communicate with.

Conversations With Walker Percy, p. 296-8 (reprinted from The Southern Review, 20, Winter 1984).

To descend to more particular similarities, we might first notice that when we initially come to realize our personhood, we find that we are in a world, as Percy in Lost in the Cosmos (p. 96) phrases it, as opposed to just an environment. An environment, in his sense, is a setting in which only efficient causal relations are to be found. A world, on the other hand, along with environmental factors, also includes significance, meaning, interpretation, understanding, and selves. These additional factors Percy places under the heading of triadic behavior, or sign-use. Percy’s discovery was that such triadic relations cannot be reduced to conglomerates of dyadic relations. Or, worlds are not reducible to environments. In this point Percy is actually an independent rediscoverer (see Percy’s “The Delta Factor”) of the almost identical principle noticed by Peirce about 1866. I have traced aspects of these two parallel discoveries elsewhere (“Peirce’s ‘Most Lucid and Interesting Paper’: An Introduction to Cenopythagoreanism”) in considerable detail.

It is a major confirmation of my thesis that Percy, after a period of intense immersion in the literature of existentialism, rediscovered this point independently. Only later did he come to realize that Peirce had worked it out almost a century earlier. That the two thinkers are so close on this fundamental point is a major confirmation, and hence perhaps the principal point of comparison that tends to support pragmaticism really being an existentialism.

– Kenneth Ketner, in A Thief of Peirce, Appendix II: “Pragmaticism an Existentialism?” p. 291-2.

From Lost in the Cosmos, “A Semiotic Primer of the Self,” Section XI:

If the sign-user first enters into an Edenic state by virtue of his discovery and constitution of the world by signs, like Helen Keller or any normal two-year-old, and if aboriginal sign-use is a joyful concelebration of the world through an utterance in which the ancient environment of the Cosmos is transformed and beheld in common through the magic prism of the sign, it is also, semiotically speaking, an Eden which harbors its own semiotic snake in the grass.

The fateful flaw of human semiotics is this: that of all the objects in the entire Cosmos which the sign-user can apprehend through the conjoining of signifier and signified (word uttered and thing beheld), there is one which forever escapes his comprehension–and that is the sign-user himself.

Semiotically, the self is literally unspeakable to itself. One cannot speak or hear a word which signifies oneself, as one can speak or hear a word signifying anything else, e.g., apple, Canada, 7-Up.

The self of the sign-user can never be grasped, because, once the self locates itself at the dead center of its world, there is no signified to which a signifier can be joined to make a sign. The self has no sign of itself. No signifier applies. All signifiers apply equally.

You are Ralph to me and I am Walker to you, but you are not Ralph to you and I am not Walker to me. (Have you ever wondered why the Ralphs you know look as if they ought to be called Ralph and not Robert?)

For me, certain signifiers fit you, and not others. For me, all signifiers fit me, one as well as another. I am rascal, hero, craven, brave, treacherous, loyal, at once the hero and asshole of the Cosmos.

You are not a sign in your world. Unlike the other signifiers in your world which form more or less stable units with the perceived world-things they signify, the signifier of yourself is mobile, freed up, and operating on a sliding semiotic scale from — ∞ to ∞.

The signified of the self is semiotically loose and caroms around the Cosmos like an unguided missile.

From the moment the signifying self turned inward and became conscious of itself, trouble began as the sparks flew up.

No one knows how such a state of affairs came to pass, except through the wisdom (or folly) of religion and myth. But, semiotically speaking, it is possible to describe the consequences.

As a consequence of the unprecedented appearance of the triad in the Cosmos, there appeared for the first time in fifteen billion years (as far as we know) a creature which is ashamed of itself and which seeks cover in myriad disguises.

One semioticist defined the subject of his study as the only organism which tells lies.

The exile from Eden is, semiotically, the banishment of the self-conscious self from its own world of signs.

The banquet is still there, but it is Banquo in attendance.

The self perceives itself as naked. Every self is ashamed of itself.

The semiotic history of this creature thereafter could be written in terms of the successive attempts, both heroic and absurd, of the signifying creature to escape its nakedness and to find a permanent semiotic habiliment for itself–often by identifying itself with other creatures in its world.

Among Alaskan Indians, this practice is called totemism. In the Western world, it is called role-modeling.

The question must arise: What is the nature of the catastrophe of the self? Is the catastrophe nothing more or less than the breakthrough itself, the sudden emergence of the triadic organism into a dyadic world? And is the predicament of the self the price of naming and knowing? Or is the catastrophe a subsequent event, a bad move in the exercise of its freedom by the sign-user? Is it a turning from the concelebration of the world to a solitary absorption with self?

It is fruitful to speculate on the possible nature of other intelligences (ETIs) in the Cosmos, if they exist.

Presumably, they too have achieved the triadic breakthrough. Might they not have achieved the world of signs without succumbing to the terrible penalty? Might there not exist preternatural intelligences who do not necessarily share the shadow-life of the earth-self?

Much of current speculation about the nature of ETIs–what level of technology have you achieved?, etc.–is misguided. The first question an earthling should ask of an ETI is not: What is the level of your science? but rather: Did it also happen to you? Do you have a self? If so, how do you handle it? Did you suffer a catastrophe?

From Lost in the Cosmos, Question 11, “The Depressed Self”:

Thought Experiment: A new cure for depression:

The only cure for depression is suicide.

This is not meant as a bad joke but as the serious proposal of suicide as a valid option. Unless the option is entertained seriously, its therapeutic value is lost. No threat is credible unless the threatener means it.

The treatment of depression requires a reversal of the usual therapeutic rationale. The therapeutic rationale, which has never been questioned, is that depression is a symptom. A symptom implies an illness; there is something wrong with you. An illness should be treated.

Suppose you are depressed. You may be mildly or seriously depressed, clinically depressed, or suicidal. What do you usually do? Or what does one do with you? Do nothing or something. If something, what is done is always based on the premise that something is wrong with you and therefore it should be remedied. You are treated. You apply to friend, counselor, physician, minister, group. You take a trip, take anti-depressant drugs, change jobs, change wife or husband or “sexual partner.”

Now, call into question the unspoken assumption: something is wrong with you. Like Copernicus and Einstein, turn the universe upside down and begin with a new assumption.

Assume that you are quite right. You are depressed because you have every reason to be depressed. No member of the other two million species which inhabit the earth–and who are luckily exempt from depression–would fail to be depressed if it lived the life you lead. You live in a deranged age–more deranged than usual, because despite great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing.

Begin with the reverse hypothesis, like Copernicus and Einstein. You are depressed because you should be. You are entitled to your depression. In fact, you’d be deranged if you were not depressed. Consider the only adults who are never depressed: chuckleheads, California surfers, and fundamentalist Christians who believe they have had a personal encounter with Jesus and are saved for once and all. Would you trade your depression to become any of these?

Now consider, not the usual therapeutic approach, but a more ancient and honorable alternative, the Roman option. I do not care for life in this deranged world, it is not an honorable way to live; therefore, like Cato, I take my leave. Or, as Ivan said to God in The Brothers Karamazov: if you exist, I respectfully return my ticket.

Now notice that as soon as suicide is taken as a serious alternative, a curious thing happens. To be or not to be becomes a true choice, where before you were stuck with to be. Your only choice was how to be less painfully, either by counseling, narcotizing, boozing, groupizing, womanizing, man-hopping, or changing your sexual preference.

If you are serious about the choice, certain consequences follow. Consider the alternatives. Suppose you elect suicide. Very well. You exit. Then what? What happens after you exit? Nothing much. Very little, indeed. After a ripple or two, the water closes over your head as if you had never existed. You are not indispensable, after all. You are not even a black hole in the Cosmos. All that stress and anxiety was for nothing. Your fellow townsmen will have something to talk about for a few days. Your neighbors will profess shock and enjoy it. One or two might miss you, perhaps your family, who will also resent the disgrace. Your creditors will resent the inconvenience. Your lawyers will be pleased. Your psychiatrist will be displeased. The priest or minister or rabbi will say a few words over you and down you go on the green tapes and that’s the end of you. In a surprisingly short time, everyone is back in the rut of his own self as if you had never existed.

Now, in the light of this alternative, consider the other alternative. You can elect suicide, but you decide not to. What happens? All at once, you are dispensed. Why not live, instead of dying? You are like a prisoner released from the cell of his life. You notice that the cell door is ajar and that the sun is shining outside. Why not take a walk down the street? Where you might have been dead, you are alive. The sun is shining.

Suddenly you feel like a castaway on an island. You can’t believe your good fortune. You feel for broken bones. You are in one piece, sole survivor of a foundered ship whose captain and crew had worried themselves into a fatal funk. And here you are, cast up on a beach and taken in by islanders who, it turns out, are themselves worried sick–over what? Over status, saving face, self-esteem, national rivalries, boredom, anxiety, depression from which they seek relief mainly in wars and the natural catastrophes which regularly overtake their neighbors.

And you, an ex-suicide, lying on the beach? In what way have you been freed by the serious entertainment of your hypothetical suicide? Are you now free for the first time in your life to consider the folly of man, the most absurd of all the species, and to contemplate the cosmic mystery of your own existence? And even to consider which is the more absurd state of affairs, the manifest absurdity of your predicament:lost in the Cosmos and no news of how you got into such a fix or how to get out–or the even more preposterous eventuality that news did come from the God of the Cosmos, who took pity on your ridiculous plight and entered the space and time of your insignificant planet to tell you something.

The difference between a non-suicide and an ex-suicide leaving the house for work, at eight o’clock on an ordinary morning:

The non-suicide is a little traveling suck of care, sucking care with him from the past and being sucked toward care in the future. His breath is high in his chest.

The ex-suicide opens his front door, sits down on the steps, and laughs. Since he has the option of being dead, he has nothing to lose by being alive. It is good to be alive. He goes to work because he doesn’t have to.

From Walker Percy: A Life by Patrick Samway, SJ:

How did Walker feel at this point? [After having written Lost in the Cosmos.] One gets an indirect glimpse from his reply in the December 6 [1981] edition of The New York Times Book Review to the question of what book he would most like to have written and why. Walker selected Don Quixote because of the happy conjunction of narrative and satire. He could imagine how good Cervantes must have felt to have hit upon telling a superb, funny, tragic adventure and at the same time getting in his licks at what’s wrong with society. “Now there’s a happy man.” (p. 361-2)

The revised text of Lost in the Cosmos was forwarded to Bob Giroux. “Brilliant” was Bob’s first word to describe the book. “It’s funny, bitter, satiric and in places savage as Swift. It will certainly do better than The Message in the Bottle, because of its humor. It’s hard to assess its potential because you offend established religious positions in every direction.” Encouraged by this response, Walker sent his editor many corrections, insertions, and deletions. Bob Giroux’s instincts proved correct; when it was published, Lost in the Cosmos found an immediate and dedicated following, eventually outselling Walker’s other books. (p. 366)

Soon the reviews started appearing. Writing in The New York Times, Anatole Broyard found that Walker worries about “all the right things and expresses his fears with a naturalness and elegance that are all his own.” Linda Hobson in the The Times-Picayune said that this work defies categorization: “It is designed to shock the complacent, bored reader out of his own predicament and loss of the self, and it certainly has the effect desired.” Having recently completed her dissertation on Walker’s use of the comic and Christianity in his fiction, Hobson called attention to this dimension of this work. Gene Lyons in Newsweek found that Walker’s work was getting, like Alice talking about mad hatters and Cheshire cats, “curiouser and curiouser!” But deep down, he postulated that Walker’s readers would be “challenged and amused.” R.Z. Sheppard stipulated in Time that Walker’s voice in this work was “beguiling” and “civilized.” Jeack Beatty in The New Republic found the book crackling with “thought, ideas, exotic information.” He praised Walker’s wit and found him to be a “maestro of fear and trembling.” In Gambit, a local paper, Jesse Core, a longtime correspondent of Walker, found that the work “stands brilliantly alone as a work of non-fiction.” As Walker had suspected, the reviews showed a wide spectrum of criticism. In writing to Cleanth Brooks, he said he was well aware of the critical reception of Lost in the Cosmos. “it is a somewhat mischievous book and it has elicited already considerable irritation as well as approval from reviewers. (p. 370-1)

Walker allowed David Duty of the Austin Independent School District to pursue working on a PBS series based on The Message in the Bottle and Lost in the Cosmos. (p. 371)

Jess Walter is a novelist who lives and writes in Spokane and frequents a coffeeshop I stumble into some mornings after I drop my daughter off at her pre-school across the street. Jess hangs out at this coffeshop and plays chess with a semi-retarded urban real estate developer named Stevie. Jess himself seems to be a good sport and a generous soul in addition to being a writer of considerable talent. His latest novel, The Zero, a Kafkaesque take on the aftermath of 9/11, was nominated for the National Book Award and probably should have won. His previous novel, Citizen Vince, won the Edgar Award and is currently being adapted by Richard Russo for HBO. His two novels before that are pretty damned fine as well. Jess reads a lot, too, as evidenced by the running list he maintains, a tidy little blog of sorts, on his website. So when I invited him to join the Korrektiv Summer Reading Klub’s reading of Lost in the Cosmos, he — having read and liked a Walker Percy novel or two or three in the past — agreed to join in the fun. Here’s Jess’s first report and my reply:

So I’m finding Lost in the Cosmos pleasantly unreadable. At first, I thought it was just that it was dated (A 12-page sendup of Donahue? Donahue?) But it’s also so repetitious and seems to build on the faultiest of logic (How is it we know more about Saturn than ourselves … uh, we don’t … And how is it we can zoom past Mars at precisely the right moment but we don’t know what we’ll do that day? … What? How is it that an orange peel is orange while a car accident is noisy?)

And parodying a self-help book seems sort of pointless. Everything that I like in Percy’s fiction seems missing here. But I’m only eighty pages in, so maybe it’ll redeem itself, although I don’t hold out much hope for what’s around the next bend: a theoretical intermezzo that can be skipped without consequence.

That said, I am enjoying myself. Honestly, reading an ambitious failure is almost as fun as reading a successful book. And the fact that the book fairies dropped the thing in my car helps greatly.

The Critical Self

My reply: Well, you’re not the first to react thusly to the book. Your response echoes much of the initial critical response to the book. And the literary quality of the novels is of a different, more refined order, no doubt about it. (On the other hand, my co-blogger Quin Finnegan makes the case for calling the book a novel that out-Vonneguts Vonnegut.) The space odysseys might redeem it for you if you make it to the end. Maybe not, though.

The logic of the stuff at the outset might seem faulty, but it all hinges on the intermezzo material. We know more about Saturn because it is defined by dyadic relationships, whereas the self is defined by the much more mysterious triadic phenomenon of language. It’s Peirce’s triad that frames all of the freakishness and foibles of the self.

It might, furthermore, be the case that you really do need to see yourself as lost — in at least approximately the way Percy posits the lostness — in order to resonate with the book. Which may be another way of saying maybe it’s a litmus test for die-hard Percy fans.

Anyway thanks for the report. It’s mighty nice of you to read the book just because it slipped out of my hands and landed in your car.*

* Jess drives an old convertible, the same model car JFK was riding in when he got shot, into which I dropped a paperback copy of Lost in the Cosmos, just as a street evangelist might drop a Chick Tract into such a car in hopes of winning a soul for Jesus.