innocent ineptitude

A phrase I came across in my Mem­rise (Com­mu­nity) Hebrew Course gave me pause: 

אֲנִי לֹא עָשִיתִי שׁוּם דָבָר

It roughly equiv­alates to the Eng­lish phrase, often uttered insis­tently and pre­ceded by “but”:

“I didn’t do any­thing!”

— apart from the fact that it is an example for the double neg­a­tive, idiomatic in Hebrew but ver­nac­ular in (modern) Eng­lish, lit­er­ally saying: 

“I didn’t do nothing!”

This con­struc­tion seems to defy the strict arith­metic of “two minuses make a plus” logic (which only applies to mul­ti­pli­ca­tion and divi­sion, not addi­tion and sub­trac­tion, hence the rule in German is „minus mal minus gibt plus“ – “minus mul­ti­plied with minus makes a plus”). According to Wikipedia article on Double neg­a­tives, there is a large minority of lan­guages with “neg­a­tive con­cord” or “emphatic nega­tion”, including Old English.

In a neg­a­tive polarity sense, it could mean: “‹At least› I didn’t do nothing!”, i.e. “At least I tried (some­thing)!”, but even aside of that under­standing, taking it as a strict emphatic nega­tion, the phrase made me wonder: is it a dec­la­ra­tion of idyllic inno­cence, or inane inep­ti­tude, or both?

Why do most of us seem over­whelmed by the demands on our daily time and atten­tion? Why are we so “busy” and unable to ded­i­cate suf­fi­cient time to the mat­ters dear to us, so that often we have to admit: “I haven’t done any­thing!” (which in Hebrew may be more like לא הספקתי כלום, lit­er­ally “I haven’t achieved/supplied all”, straight back into the double-dizzying eddies of logic: does it mean “I didn’t achieve all I could have”, or “I didn’t achieve my lot for the day”, which may still be a lot more than nothing…) 

Are we so engrossed in resisting that we rather do nothing? Are we so afraid that we fall into the trap of “Show me a man who has never made a mis­take, and I will show you one who has never tried any­thing.” ( ~ anony­mous, a quote rich in vari­a­tions with an origin seem­ingly lost to time according to the inves­ti­ga­tors. )

Make no mis­take: it is better to make mis­takes in order to learn and “fail better next time”, as per the man­age­ment pep quote shame­lessly lifted from Beck­ett’s « Worstward Ho », which in its full glory is much more grotesque and bleak, like life — for we all fall short and lack glory, but without that lack there’d be no glory to show for.

Beck­ett’s piece strikes me as very close to mys­tical Hebrew thought: the בריאה (world) is con­stantly cre­ated as a stretched illu­sion of space and time, a צמצום (retrac­tion) of the אין סוף (infi­nite one­ness = noth­ing­ness) that is G‑d. All exis­tence emerges from sense, from making sense, and Beckett is tee­tering play­fully on the precipice of the abyss by cre­ating an art­work that is time­less and famous and yet says very little with almost non­sen­sical words. The meaning emerges from the self-ref­er­ence of the empty, con­torted phrase­ology. As elu­ci­dated here, the con­tin­u­a­tion just fol­lowing the bit quotable by perky man­agers reveals that only through “worse” we can refine: that only failure is sublime.

The צמצום (retrac­tion) is con­crete and real yet non-lit­eral: really, all that cre­ation is, is a fig­ment of the imag­i­na­tion of an end­lessly pow­erful and infi­nite being. Beckett intu­itively grasps this: from a dim pri­mor­dial light, the duality of the old man and the child seems to emerge, oscil­lates back into one-ness and back into duality: “Unchanged? Sudden back unchanged? Yes. Say yes.” all progress in this work, as in cre­ation, is brought about by speaking: “Say…”, as if Beckett is inviting us to par­take in a thought exper­i­ment: “For the sake of argu­ment, say…” Just like the words of cre­ation that, by being con­tin­u­ally spoken keep the thread­bare impres­sion of an exis­tence of a phys­ical space-time con­tinuum alive.

“No try no fail.” is the antithesis to man­age­rial pep-talking. The cre­ation can only fail. To a degree, that is its pur­pose. Put an enticing tree in the middle of a per­fect garden, create an inquis­i­tive mankind and tell them this tree was off limits, and pre­tend to be dis­ap­pointed when they dis­obey? In a staged play, yes. This was clearly set up to fail, so that good could come from it. Is failure good then? No, but nec­es­sary evil. The only mode of existing in a world that is not per­fectly uni­form and infinite. 

So better sit back and do nothing, nothing gained, nothing lost? All is vain, as Kohelet (Eccle­si­astes) preaches? Sure – not quite. There is a fine line between emp­tying your­self to become con­duc­tive, as only a hollow shofar can sound, and inval­i­dating your­self, shat­tering the shell. We are not at lib­erty to squander our being. We have been made inten­tion­ally for a pur­pose: to play the game along, knowing it is futile, or rather, futile is what is called “you”, but the game is not. Carry on caring. Do some­thing, real­izing it is nothing. Freedom emerges once ceded that free will is not some­thing for us fig­ments to claim. At best, we can be mortal coils spooling off our spiel con­sciously. We are being imag­ined by an all-pow­erful being — re-imagine that! What other than wor­ship could our response be?

Maybe it behooves us to dabble less in such lofty con­cepts as eter­nity, redemp­tion or damna­tion, and con­sole our­selves in us being there, right now. If all van­ishes back into infi­nite noth­ing­ness, so that even any remem­brance shall be gone, who are we to argue? What point do we have? And yet, pre­cisely our res­onating with the Cre­ator by re-sounding our thoughts in wor­ship, may be our highest, soundest life.