Taskmaster

Hayv Kahraman, Carrying On Shoulder I & II (2008)

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“I wish I had a taskmaster,” said a friend. I looked up to this friend. The first time we met, he wore a blue scarf and stood at the corner of 58th and Broadway and his brilliant smile gave the impression that he was full of answers. I didn’t know the answers you have come from the questions you ask. He was in his thirties, urbane and well-spoken, with carefully considered tastes. We walked through the park. He showed me his favorite app that allows for seamless note-taking. He showed me his new credit card with a hybrid metal construction. Then he glanced at his watch, made a clucking sound. He had to run for another appointment.

Most of the time we talked online, where I saw my friend’s face in thirty-minute blocks. He called from Montreal, from Tokyo, from Bangkok. His job was remote. He had started working with a coach, he told me, whose other clients were “very big, very important people.” But my friend wished for something more. He wished for a taskmaster—“who has my best interests at heart, who could just tell me what to do, who could make sure that I do it.” His eyes wandered off-screen, far away, and then he laughed.

*

The instinct was familiar. In the mornings I bowed my head to a planner and conjured lists of vast achievement. In the evenings the immensity of my ambitions hung above me, unbudged. Who would not welcome an outside force to whip the day’s deeds into completion? A warden to elevate the self who dictates, over the self who cannot deliver?

*

On November 10, 1619, alone in a small house in the Bavarian countryside, twenty-three-year old René Descartes was gripped by a vision so fierce he climbed into the wall-stove and held himself, shaking. That night he dreamed the foundations of mirabilis sientiae—“a marvelous new science.” From these visions he went on to produce his concept of mind-body dualism, carving the world into two realms: res cogitans—the “thinking substance”—and res extensa—“extended substance.” For Descartes, the existence of self could only be secured by the immaterial mind; the body and nature and everything else emerged from what the mind conceived. His most famous dictum: “I think, therefore I am.”

Descartes never married but he fathered an illegitimate child, Francine, with an associate’s house servant. In public, he referred to his daughter as his niece. When Francine died of scarlet fever at the age of five, Descartes’ grief was profound. He constructed an automaton doll in her image from metal and clock parts, then poured himself back into his work, devising a philosophy that could be as clear and fixed as geometry, that could reign the physical universe under the laws of mathematics, that could conquer by sheer force of his intellect the world’s uncertainty and pain and perhaps even death itself.

*

At thirty minutes, my friend’s face broke into a wide smile. It was time for his next appointment. He looked forward to catching up again. We live today in Descartes’ world: orderly, rational, mechanistic. I wonder: But what of another world? New questions arise before me. What might our days look like if the body’s needs were placed above the mind’s demands? What use is a taskmaster if our impulse was not to control, but release? What might the dawning age bring if Descartes had said instead: I feel, therefore I am? If he had said instead: I rest, therefore I am? If he had said instead: I love, therefore I am? 🎨