Getting Outside

After a fair amount of very conventional posts, including an honest-to-God book review, I'm going to indulge myself in one of those idiosyncratic pieces which give this blog its unique flavour (or so I like to think).

In recent times, my mind has been much on the idea of getting outside, as I put it in my blog post. And, in particular, the sensation of "getting outside".

What do I mean by getting outside? In simple terms, the psychological experience of seeing something from another perspective, a larger perspective, and the sense of strangeness and (very often) liberation that stems from this.

I don't know if you ever had the experience, in your childhood, of trying to step outside your consciousness and look at it from outside. We can all do this to some extent. We call it "self-awareness" and it seems to be a step up from simple awareness. A drunk who knows he is drunk has self-awareness. Someone who knows his judgement is clouded by emotion is self-aware.

You can, somehow, look at the operations of your own mind. But what is this "you" that is looking at the mind? It has to be something outside that mind, in some sense. At least, a part of the mind outside the rest of the mind.

And then, when you find yourself thinking about that, it must be some other part of the mind looking at that part, which is looking at all the rest...it seems as though we can never directly "catch" the gleam of consciousness.

The thought is a bit giddy, like looking at the corridor of images created when one mirror is pointed at another, and a human figure is reflected again and again down the whole corridor. Or like the visual creations of M.C. Escher. Or the thought of waking from a dream, which turns out to be a dream, which turns out to be a dream..

There's always another "outside", whether we are talking about human consciousness or anything else.

When you get out of your bed, you still have to get out of your bedroom. And then out of your house. And then out of your neighbourhood. And then out of your city. And so on.

I thought I could best explain the point by appealing to this idea of successive "outsides". But the sequence is not the important thing, not the thing I'm trying to evoke.

I'm trying to evoke the feeling of "getting outside", and how peculiar and unique it is. It can be dizzying, liberating, intoxicating, unsettling, or all of the above. I'll try to give some examples.

There is a popular Irish TV show called Reeling in the Years, which I like. The premise is ingeniously simple; it's a collection of TV footage from a particular year, shown against a soundtrack of music hits from that same year. There is no narrator, only a series of captions.

When it comes to episodes on those years that I actually lived through-- the nineties, for instance-- I'm struck by a very strange sensation indeed. I remember all (or most) of the scenes that I'm watching, but I never saw them as a whole like that. When we are living through a particular period, we are immersed in one thing at a time. We don't think of them, particularly, as being a part of that year-- any more than we now thinking of the war in the Ukraine when we are discussing the Top Gun sequel.

Stepping outside of the flow of events, seeing it as a unity for the first time, gives you an entirely different perspective. It's like looking at your home town from the top of a mountain.

I've noticed the same shift in perspective, the same sense of getting "outside", occurs when I read a biography, particularly a biography of a writer or an artist or some sort of creator who has drawn extensively on their own life.

For instance, C.S. Lewis (despite his avowed hatred of navel-gazing) is a writer who wrote about himself a lot, as in his autobiography Surprised by Joy. Lewis seems so self-aware, so self-critical, so insightful, that it's easy to take his account of events as definitive. He is such a confident, forceful personality that the reader is lulled into agreement.

So it's a surprise to learn, for instance, that Lewis's account of his boarding school days seems to have been strongly distorted by his prejudice against the place. His brother, and other contemporaries, hardly recognized his description. The same is true of George Orwell and his own account of his schooldays.

Reading a biography of a beloved writer always has this quality of startled outsideness. While we were reading this author's books, his voice seemed like the voice of God. We are taken aback to find that God is just another guy, one with blindspots and naivety and gaps in his knowledge. At least, I am.

Of course, we find ourselves stepping outside once again when we are shown the biographer's own prejudices and blinkers.

We have the same reaction even more forcefully the moment we realize, towards the end of childhood, that our parents are not infinitely wise, nor are they right about everything.

Another example: I have this sense of "outsideness" when I unexpectedly find myself outside a particular discourse, a particular set of assumptions.

For instance, we are all so habituated to political correctness today-- even those of us who detest it-- that we get a jolt whenever we find ourselves in a non-politically correct discussion. I imagine a similar reaction must have been felt when the citizens of the Soviet Union heard Marxist-Leninism being openly questioned for the first time.

Another example, from my own experience: returning to Dublin after a New Year spent in London, and suddenly feeling a strong awareness that Dublin was a relatively small city, and just one place in a much bigger world. Of course I knew this, but I'd somehow never really appreciated it until then.

I could continue in this vein forever, but perhaps I have made my point. I'm not trying to make any moral or ideological point. I simply think that this sense of "outsideness" is something worth pondering, something that adds much to the flavour of life. And perhaps it does have a moral or philosophical significance. I suspect it does, but I don't insist upon any.