Ever since I was a child I have had a contrary streak several light years long. First manifesting in a refusal to do household chores (at least until the day my mother poured a shocking jug of water over my head for not setting the table), I soon graduated into the typical adolescent rebellions of tattered clothes, unsavory companions, and experiments in sex drugs and rock music. But even this was not enough; I had to drop out of school, declare myself an anarchist, and actively protest every value or assumption that our culture holds inviolable (if one could say such of our culture). But then the contrariness turned on itself; I rejected both the cultural norms and their radical opposites, and, whenever I had found some new perspective or idea to explore, as soon as it achieved some cultural recognition I would immediately grow contrary to it as well. One might think this as outright nihilism, except, instead of rejecting all perspectives and beliefs for the sake of rejection, I have struggled to observe the overlooked and unknown, perhaps out of some desire to find a point of view not so easily compromised, an idea that did not admit, or even have, a contrary.
As I’ve matured I’ve recognized a couple things about this contrary impulse. First, as I’m descended from a long line of poor Southern farmers, the contrariness of digging in my heels is in my blood. And though I may never be able to act except against the grain, recognizing this has allowed me to accept the impulse and not turn it against myself, or act out of pure perversity or spite. My contrariness is ideally not personal. Second, I only began to fully understand the value of this contrariness as a method after grappling for years with its presentation in Blake’s poem, “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.”
As Blake says, “without contraries there is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence.” Beyond implying that opposites necessitate each other, Blake goes on to suggest that the contrary of every assumed truth is itself also true. This means that we can only get at any real Truth by pitting smaller perspectives against each other, a method similar to the Hegelian dialectic where thesis and antithesis are united in their synthesis, the alchemy of ideas. Except from my own experience I found that every synthesis in turn becomes a new thesis one can be contrary to, so that starting from any given truth, one could contrarily synthesize all reality ad infinitum, till if possible you reached that Archimedean fulcrum some call the Tao and others God. This also seems to be one of Blake’s aims, for he says, “if the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite,” if finding such an ultimate and un-contestably cleansed perspective is possible for us mere mortals.
This approach to infinity through the corrosion of assumed truths was part of the aim in suggesting that everything is ultimately real, the result of uniting various contraries (between fiction and reality, faith and logic, etc). But this view is itself the contrary of the Buddhist belief that all is illusion. I have always found this “noble truth” to be specious, as it contradicts our very senses, but then again, the idea that the contents of our imaginations have an agency and reality must at first strike one as equally absurd. These two perspectives are on closer look functionally the same (or at least, on the same coin): either all is true or nothing is true, beyond which is the baffling position that everything is both true and false at the same time, not just in subjective contexts, or even as a spectrum of truthiness, but as the underlying paradoxical fabric of our world, not unlike a quantum uncertainty of the soul. The benefit of this meta-perspective, contrariness in extremis, is that it keeps me from taking anything too seriously: any perspective I claim to hold, no matter how passionately I express it, I also hold its contrary, and am thus relieved of the limitations of being dogmatically attached to any point of view when the ability to change perspectives at will or whim is of the utmost necessity for intellectual and spiritual freedom.
A personal upshot of this is that I have been able to sympathize with my mother’s complete frustration at my youthful rebellions, and even laugh with her at myself, and now am inclined to do my dishes with even a willing joy (contrary, of course, to most people’s utmost loathing for the task).
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