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Nowhere to Get To

My wife and I were at the breakfast table having a cup of coffee. She was doing a crossword puzzle in the morning paper. “Have you ever heard of a martlet?” she asked. “M-A-R-T-L-E-T?” I had not. She read me the crossword puzzle clue: “A mythical bird without feet that can never land.” I was intrigued and later looked it up. Because it has no feet, the martlet is continually on the wing from birth until death. In heraldry, the martlet symbolizes the younger son who has no claim to ancestral lands. Martlets are mentioned in Shakespeare’s Macbeth in connection with the doomed protagonist’s castle. Macbeth had claim to his own land, but his path to the Scottish throne was in doubt, and he had no heir. Martlets were said to have decorated the coat of arms of the saintly Edward the Confessor (1042-1066), the last of England’s House of Wessex and founder of Westminster Abbey. Edward died without an heir.

Martlets are found on the coats of arms of a number of educational institutions in Britain and abroad, including University College at Oxford, as well as Magdalene College and Pembroke College at Cambridge. The martlet’s inability to roost has been symbolically linked to humanity’s ceaseless quest for knowledge and learning. Like the human intellect, martlets are in constant motion. It’s not that the human intellect is incapable of coming to rest. But it is, by nature, restless, constantly seeking to pursue new avenues of inquiry.

The intellect’s restlessness may be a byproduct of evolutionary changes in the structure of the human brain that occurred some 300,000 years ago, notably the rapid enlargement of its frontal lobes. This is the area of the brain that controls higher cognitive functions, such as symbolic speech, abstract reasoning, and foresight. Embedded in the frontal lobes is the prefrontal cortex. The frontal lobes enable modern humans to engage in counterfactual thinking — the ability to consider alternatives to what is happening right now. Our souped-up brains give us the intellectual horsepower to explore the “how” and the “why,” as well as the “what if.”

As long as we are on the subject of “why,” we might ask why our Stone Age ancestors were endowed with brains equivalent to a Ferrari when a sturdy bicycle would have gotten them where they needed to go. According to classical Darwinist theory, evolution works in a series of tiny steps over many generations to produce incremental changes that provide a selective advantage. A selective advantage over what? Our main rivals for the top perch on the food chain then were our dim-witted cousins, the Neanderthals. They, like we, were able to build fires and hunt large game with spears. So why did we need brains that could write the works of Shakespeare and land astronauts on the moon?

Granted, our capacity for counterfactual thinking is the chief reason why we are not still hunter-gatherers. Yet, like the martlet that can fly but never land, our restless minds make it very difficult to focus for very long on what is actually happening right now. Since we are no longer foragers who must always remain on the lookout for prey — or predators — we can perhaps afford to indulge the mind’s flights of fancy. At the same time, our predisposition to look elsewhere for fulfillment puts us in danger of overlooking everything that lies close at hand.

D.H. Lawrence singled out our ceaseless striving in an essay written near the end of his life: “On and on we go, for the mental consciousness labors under the illusion that there is somewhere to go to, a goal to consciousness. Whereas of course there is no goal. Consciousness is an end in itself. We torture ourselves getting somewhere, and when we get there it is nowhere, for there is nowhere to get to."

This tendency is never more pronounced than among those who fancy themselves to be embarked on a spiritual journey. What is God — or enlightenment or nirvana — if not somewhere to get to? At every step we are egged on by priests and shamans and holy men who purport to show us the way. The destination goes by many different names in different spiritual traditions, but it is always elsewhere, whether in time or place. It’s invariably somewhere over the rainbow: to a time when the messiah comes or comes again, to a time when we die and go to heaven or even to another lifetime altogether, if we happen to be Buddhists. In the meantime, there is no end of spiritual toil to perform: prayers, pilgrimages, prostrations, penances and rites of purification, all designed to bring us to a proper state of spiritual perfection.

“We torture ourselves getting somewhere,” wrote D.H. Lawrence, “and when we get there it is nowhere, for there is nowhere to get to.” This can lead to profound disillusionment — or it might lead to precisely the spiritual breakthrough we sought in trying to get somewhere. We need not envy the martlet whose wings enable it to soar into the heavens. We should pity the poor creature that is never able to come to rest. If we never realize the futility of our incessant seeking, we will never understand our journey from here to there has got it exactly backward. In the words of the poet T.S. Eliot, we will never arrive at where we are.

D H Lawrence, Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation (1929)
T.S. Eliot, “East Coker III”

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