The Functionality of Consciousness: Encounter and Response

I knew the Bridge to Nowhere during the 1980’s when it spanned the tidal creek there, outside of Manahawkin, New Jersey, the Long Beach Island Causeway beckoning in the distance, the juxtaposition of the two forming a kind of tonal relationship—like a calling to something unknown.

Two Notions

All my life I’ve been haunted by many things, but I’ll name two for now and try to stick to the latter especially in this post: the notion that I belong among the most brilliant of thinkers, and that consciousness alone is an effective mover of the human world. The functionality is essentially a relation to the world that moves more than oneself.

To begin with the claim that this guy who’s blogged about fishing the last decade-and-a-half belongs among thinkers like Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Buber—that may seem too absurd to laugh at, but I’ve struggled to keep it in the closet, instead of botching fishing stories with stuff that belongs in a philosophy blog. I’m a wreck like that bridge, but I’ve felt as if my ability to process ideas goes beyond the moderately gifted level I’ve scored at. Most of the time I tell myself that’s all I can do—moderately gifted—and that seems to be true, surely is, but I make the acquaintance of great thinkers in my reading because my yearning for the spiritual is real.

It’s not really outrageous egotism, as my mother used to think it was. Nietzsche himself was more like it than I am, imploring of his “brothers” the belonging among “higher type exceptions” that exclusively would be his own company. No, I’ve always felt “Oh my brothers!” and the like to be unique to Nietzsche and his time. I don’t feel I belong in the way Nietzsche addresses his friends, but I’ve read so much of Nietzsche, so many times, that of course I feel familiar. I also feel able to live and breathe without needing to exclude myself as an exception.

If you want to read more on the same idea, I wrote about it for the introduction to the Literature and Philosophy blog category.

Life in the Working Class

Before I get to the second idea I noted in that first paragraph, I want to express my gratitude for having done wage work for decades. Having lived out an adult life in the working class has taught me that ordinary people are unaware of consciousness as effective power. Everything is defense—making “damn sure” you have the physical moves down—and push. “Moving” product is getting it sold. There’s room for good customer service—I sometimes excelled at it—but at the end of the day, work is not about fulfillment. It’s about the profit margin. You could almost say the closest anything came to fulfillment at the supermarket I worked for, was the year-end bonus management earned.

That’s not exactly true, because I used to derive a lot of pleasure from getting things done as they needed to be, and from helping customers in a way I saw served them well. It’s not only the profit margin that matters. The pleasure you take in meeting expectations is your own business, but it results in having better relations with customers and coworkers alike.

I never rose to management level, even though, when I was 28, the owner of a Haagendaas ice cream shop where I worked eight months as a shift supervisor, offered me the general manager position.

Having Left Society

I left ordinary society at age 19, more than a decade before I fully returned from the bays of Long Beach Island, New Jersey. I did self-employed clamming. Fully committing myself to holding a job for a credit union as a courier—I had just become a family man—made me one among the rest of us, rather than a man alone with nature, his books, and the spirit. A few sparse friends and the memory of a girlfriend, besides. Society with its institutions like college, however, had cut into my ability to sustain and expand upon consciousness. That sustenance, expansion, and levity chiefly amounted to an encounter with nature as a self-empowering exchange. My awareness addressed reality, which responded by answering in turn. Not only as a tonal exchange, but one of energy and motion. I had lived out such wholeness all my life by spending much of my time in nature, whether alone or with friends. I didn’t like how institutional demands cut into that, without giving back. I hated that enough to pretty much abandon everything at 19. For most people, perhaps, college defines their future.

Even though I spent a semester at St. John’s College in 1982, and Hampshire College—two semesters—in 1985, my loyalty remained with the shore until I was ready to deal with what ordinary people call the real world. I have no regrets for coming back to society. Not because it fulfilled my life, but because I survived it and have found, now that my holding of jobs is over, that the same ability of consciousness to encounter reality and draw from it a response is with me yet. Even after decades of beating it down.