After Canberra I did not see Dick Rorty again, though we corresponded for a couple of years. He sent me an inscribed copy of Consequences of Pragmatism, and I reciprocated with a copy of Allegories of the Wilderness, which also appeared in 1982. And when my wife died in September 1983, Dick sent his condolences with a phrase that conveyed that passionate acceptance of contingency without which it is difficult to survive any loss, yet communicating that sense of hope without which it is impossible to envisage a future: “I only wish there was something useful I could do.”
As it turned out, his work proved to be more useful than he, or I, could have imagined, for in the months after Pauline's death I spent several hours every day methodically reading, and taking notes on, the collected writings of William James and John Dewey. Had Richard Rorty not introduced me to these writers, I would perhaps never have realized how directly and profoundly pragmatism speaks to our struggle to recover a raison d'etre in the face of catastrophic loss. Unlike Boethius, whom I also read at this time, I found no consolation in thought as “the one true good”; rather, it was the realization of the limits of abstract thought that enabled me to yield to the natural processes of mourning, which always occur in their own good time.
One can never know for certain how one's actions or words will impact on others. But sometimes it is a person's struggle to be good, or decent, that impresses one more than his or her achievement of such virtues. In my observations of Kuranko initiation rites, I was impressed by the concerted effort of preceptors and neophytes alike to realize manhood or womanhood. So completely did social order and continuity depend on this transformation of sexually amorphous children into gendered adults (and, by implication, the strict separation of men and women in everyday life) that any failure to achieve this goal doomed a person to be a butt of jokes for the rest of his or her life. But the apotheosis was impossible. No one could fully realize the gender stereotypes and the ethical codes associated with them. Personal dispositions and the vicissitudes of life made it inevitable that men and women would sometimes fail in their duties or fall short of what was expected of them. As with gender, so with rank—one could only gesture ritualistically toward the ideal. This impossibility of ever closing the gap between collective ideals and real individuals may explain the theatrical plays on gender identity with which initiation rites are replete: men presuming to give birth to the male neophytes, nurturing them without the need of mothers; women aspiring to inculcate the stoic virtues they associate with men. In the many role reversals that occur in the course of public performances—women acting as hunters or soldiers, men obliged to perform tasks normally done by women—one sees the physical impossibility of the transformations to which initiation aspires. But the dramatic power of these performances lies in the very clumsiness and ineptitude with which the actors pretend to be someone they are not. The blurring of role distinctions ironically sharpens our sense of these distinctions, reminding us that identity is partly pure artifice. Something similar is true of philosophers who aspire to change the world. Not only are our philosophical pictures of the world artificial, as Rorty points out, but the world itself lies largely beyond our linguistic and intellectual grasp. Yet it is in those moments when thought struggles to become worldly or the world seems to conspire in our struggle to understand it that we most clearly see the impossibility of the unity of mind and matter but find in that disappointment a sense of oneness with those who have travelled the same path, engaged in the same struggle, and come to the same conclusion. Rorty once wrote that “the meaning of one human life may have little to do with the meaning of any other human life, while being none the worse for that.”6 But it is gratifying nonetheless to recognize affinities, sympathies, common ground when divergent backgrounds, affiliations, and intellectual capacities led one to expect none. In such recognitions we realize the usefulness of Rorty's observation that discovering unity beneath appearances may be less exciting than discovering that comity is compatible with radical and contradictory variousness, and that there is nothing necessarily wrong with bringing Trotsky and wild orchids together in a single story without first explaining what they have in common.
Not long before his death in June 2007, Richard Rorty wrote a piece called “The Fire of Life”7 in which he meditates on being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and speaks of the consolations of poetry. He concludes, “I now wish that I had spent somewhat more of my life with verse. This is not because I fear having missed out on truths that are incapable of statement in prose. There are no such truths; there is nothing about death that Swinburne and Landor knew but Epicurus and Heidegger failed to grasp. Rather, it is because I would have lived more fully if I had been able to rattle off more old chestnuts—just as I would have if I had made more close friends.”
I take Rorty to be saying something more than that poetry and friendship provide pleasure. He is saying that they carry us across the threshold of the self into richer and stranger regions than any we have known alone. Philosophy needs the language of poetry to enter the penumbra—that force field around us, partly lit, partly in shadow, that shapes who we are yet defies our attempts to fully control or comprehend it. Whether we refer to this realm as natural, spiritual, historical, or political is less significant than its essential ambiguity. It enthralls us to the same extent that it eludes us. And though it may unsettle and even destroy us, it may become a source of generative power.
In a magisterial study of Sinhalese sorcery, Bruce Kapferer explores this ambiguity. His starting point is the “magicality” of human existence, a term he borrows from Sartre to emphasize that “human beings are at once individuals and beings who transcend and transgress the boundaries and space of their own and others' organic individuality.”8 This field of wider being in which we are immersed is “magical” because our knowledge and mastery of it always remain slippery and uncertain. Thwarted in our efforts to achieve presence, prosperity, and power through direct social and economic action, we have recourse to magical, occult, or ritual means of attaining our goals. In the Sinhalese social imaginary, this is the field of sorcery, embodied in the image of Suniyam riding a blue mare (emblematic of his power), carrying a broken pot of fire in his left hand (destructive heat) and a sword in his right (judgment and punishment), and his body covered with snakes (venomous punishment). What fascinates Kapferer is that the forces of sorcery permeate both the body politic and the individual body, so that the struggle against political anarchy implicates a psychological struggle against madness. This is compellingly shown in the life story of Lillian, a “soothsayer” (sastra karaya) able to work with demonic forces in ways that enable her to dispense medical and spiritual advice to clients.
Lillian was in her seventies and had been attending supplicants at a temple in Colombo from 1935, though she had her own shrine in the poverty and crime-racked shantytown of Slave Island where she lived.
Her father, a rickshaw man, had come to Slave Island from an equally notorious part of the southern provincial city of Galle. Lillian and her parents lived among a group of Tamil drummers, members of an outcaste community. As Lillian tells it, she would dance at their ritual occasions, and at eleven she experienced her first encounter with the goddess Bhadrakali, who possessed her. Three years later she married Liyanage, who sold tea to the dockworkers. By then her father had died, but his ghost (preta) maintained an attachment to her. When she became entranced by her father and danced possessed, her husband was infuriated and beat her. Her husband continued beating her as Lillian had other possession experiences. The ones she recalls in particular are her entrancements by the goddess Pattini, whose violent and punishing form she connects with Bhadrakali. In 1935, after bearing five children, she left her husband and journeyed to the main shrine of Kataragama in the southeastern corner of the island. While she was at Kataragama, her husband, who was still fighting with her, met with an accident and was killed. Lillian felt that he had been punished by the god Kataragama and by Bhadrakali for beating her and her ill-treatment. Lillian possesses the violent and punishing powers of Bhadrakali and Pattini. She has her warrant (varam) from the main Bhadrakali shrine at the Hindu