Groping the ideas of Destiny and Fate

Two shall be born the whole wide world apart,
 And speak in different tongues, and have no thought
 Each of other’s being, and no heed:
 And these o’er unknown seas, to unknown lands,
 Shall cross, escaping wreck, defying death;
 And all unconsciously shape every act
 And bend each wandering step to this one end,-
 That one day out of darkness they shall meet
 And read life’s meaning in each other’s eyes.
 And two shall walk some narrow way of life,
 So nearly side by side that should one turn
 Ever so little space to left or right,
 They needs must stand acknowledged face to face;
 And yet with wistful eyes that never meet,
 With groping hands that never clasp, and lips
 Calling in vain to ears that never hear.
 They seek each other all their weary days.
 And die unsatisfied. -And this is fate.

Fate by Susan Marr Spalding 

It is always a joy of wonderment to discover poetry like this, to read lines which manifest the abstract into objective words of physicality, to read words that personify a deity of destiny. I felt ironically at the end of my first reading of this poem a sense of inevitability and asked myself, what is fate?

I read from this poem an idea that fate, unyielding to time and space, crosses lands and seas and affects invariably all, that two objects unbeknown to one another are necessarily interlinked. More than that, they share some same condition which binds them, like fate to some same end, as life ends with death.

Is an end determined and therefore fate as well? I pondered.

Although I have read this poem through, again and again, it is still a mystery to me to what or who the ‘Two’ in this poem are. Are they the two objects as I have already mentioned above, as two people? Or, are they two ideas like destiny and fate? Or, are they some sort of dualistic polar forces, whose ‘wistful eyes.. never meet’, which across time and space act against one another in attempting to dictate the finality of fate? I am not sure. But I think I might understand this poem as singing of two people being affected invariably by the same force of destiny and therefore having the same end as fate, as death.

In my exploration of this idea, I shall write out the definitions of fate and that of destiny (google).

Fate – the development of events outside a person’s control, regarded as predeterminate by supernatural powers.

Destiny – the events that will necessarily happen to a particular person or thing in the future. – the hidden power believed to control future event; fate.

Inferring from these definitions I have taken that destiny, a perhaps determinate force, encompasses that span of time and events which lead to a final fate, that fate is the end result of the destiny of a particular person or thing.

Time is intrinsic to fate and destiny, for they are set upon an order of events and the order of event is spanned by time. Alas, is that order of events predestined by a supernatural power? Is there some agency within that alters destiny, and thus fate? Is there such an agency as will?

There is an inevitability to life that is death. But is there an inevitability to life before death?

Now I shall go off in another direction of exploration into this topic, for I want to study the Moirai, the Fates.

The three Fates, the Greek daughter goddesses of Necessity (Ananke, as I mentioned briefly in my blog of my poem dedicated to Notre-Dame de Paris), were the divine arbiters of an individual’s fate. Clothos (Spinner, and no cloth is not etymological to the Greek word clothos, to my upset) spun with her distaff and spindle the thread of life. Lachesis (Allotter) measured the length of the thread of life with her rod. Atropos (the Unturnable, as in death) cut the thread of life with her shears. Zeus was fated to them, yet Zeus was lord over them and there we find the circular answer to the question, who is the ultimate diviner of fate?

The Fates from the Disney film Hercules

Where arose this metaphor of fate? First I notice the distaff and spindle are cultural realities of the occupation of Greek women of antiquity. Aristocratic women of Ancient Greece in literature have always been associated with weaving.

Take the Odyssey and Penelope, wife of Odysseus, who longs for her husband’s return and has to push off the Suitors, she attends with her maids her spinning and weaving whilst in waiting for her husband, tricking the Suitors by promising to them that if she finishes her tapestry she will choose a suitor. But each night she undoes her work that she has done in the day – is this a motif of freewill?

Take Athena who was the Goddess of handicraft and her cult that venerated the skill of weaving in her temples. When Arachne, a mortal but skilful weaver, claimed superiority over Athena, Athena challenged her, but when Arachne became victor, Athena jealously turned her into a spider (hence the term Arachnid as the classification of spiders), to forever spin her gossamer in the nooks and crevasses of olive trees.

The association of spinning and weaving to the three Fates, remembering their distaff and spindle, is an apparent one. But a question is obvious, which one predates the other? But unless the Gods are real, it follows that spinning and weaving predates the inception of these Gods. The Fates are dressed in metaphor from cultural experience.

Life is compared to a thread, a thin and delicate line which has a beginning and an end. I note that in this metaphor lies the idea that Time is on a lineal continuum, in saying that this metaphor is perhaps an, or the, ancestral idea to Time conceived in Greek philosophy, and thus philosophies such as modern sciences like physics. And doesn’t Time feel like a continuum? An event seems to precede an event which precedes another event, or conversely follows and follows.

But let me now take Zeno’s Paradox to illuminate the idea that between two events there are events which lie between them, and between them, and between them, and so on and so on, until we reach the understanding of an absurdity.

Let me tell the old story of Achilles and the Tortoise who have a race – pertinent to the subject since Achilles was so invigorated by his destiny.

The Tortoise is given a hundred metres head-start. Achilles is faster than the Tortoise. They begin a race. By the time Achilles reaches one hundred metres the Tortoise has gone beyond a hundred metres. By the time Achilles reaches the Tortoise’s previous position at Achilles’s hundred metres, the Tortoise has moved ahead. And so on and so on. Does Achilles ever actually reach the Tortoise and overtake him?

I perhaps have failed to fully explain this scenario, but perhaps you can see the idea that arises from it, what is called infinite regression. That there is always an interim moment, a continuum between events and the events between. Intuitively we know that Achilles will overtake the Tortoise, unless he stumbles and falls, that there will be a moment reached and passed. Maybe we know that he will pass the Tortoise because we have experienced the passing of events in our everyday lives. But is it as obvious as we think?

The idea of fate being at the end of destiny involves the idea of a series of events – at least this is a construction, an abstract model. The arguments that support the idea of determinism lie, to my knowledge, in the idea of causation, that an event infers a cause and then an outcome and thus another event.

I must remind you here, the reader, that I am only playing with ideas, exploring, researching and writing. I have probably faltered in my understanding, or missed a point, but that is why I am exploring, not to be correct, but just to explore and in the end learn something.

But this all goes back to the Fates, the spinning of a thread of life, that they create it, measure it, then they cut it and finally finish it. The whole metaphor is an accurate visualisation of life. Because we know we were born and we know we will die – our life is bounded as a length of thread is bounded.

What is fascinating is the cultural heritage of these ideas. For one, the Fates are an example of the common Proto-Indo-European heritage that all Celtic cultures have inherited. This motif is found in Antiquity all over European societies at that time and beyond, the polytheistic explanation of fate in this form.

Just look at descendent Norse Mythology and their idea of fate and find that they have three goddesses weaving the same fateful story. To jump, I recall the words of Galadriel in Tolkien’s works – a modern English myth steeped in these same influences – quoting from lotr.fandom.com…

‘She told them that to some she could command the mirror to show what they desire to see, but that “the Mirror will also show things unbidden, and those are often stranger and more profitable,” for the Mirror “shows things that were, and things that are, and things that yet may be.” ‘

The idea persists even now and it is no accident, for it descends in the tradition and heritage of ideas. Here in Tolkien’s words, or Galadriel’s, is embodied the idea of the three Fates. But notice the last part, ‘and things that yet may be’. This is a difference to the three Fates, where Lachesis has power to measure and Atropos has power to cut, the measure of Tolkien’s characters’ lives is steeped in choice and as such their fate is their own choosing. This is a recognition of freewill, that fate is not predestined, that Frodo had a choice to make, to see the Shire lost or to see it saved.

It is interesting the analogy of the Mirror in Tolkien’s work, for it evokes the idea that we constantly and innately understand ourselves in where we are and where we have come from – that is the mirror. But the confusion is that the mirror only reflects us and does not represent us truthfully. Our past is a strange mystery of memories, distorted by our own delusions of ourselves and maybe that is why we cannot see our destiny and fate; because we are embroiled with momentary delusions and cannot see clearly what has happened and is happening, and therefore cannot perceive the future – our fate.

The problem that I have begun to recognise in writing this, is that our ideas of destiny and fate are intrinsically assumptions on the nature of our reality; human assumptions in the least. That they in themselves are ideas and ideas themselves are distinct within the fabric of reality. They are like, or are, subsets of reality. They exist perhaps as only imaginings of our imaginations and the truth of them are beyond our reckoning, so we are blinded from designating our destinies.

But is this not the awe of destiny? Is this not why we summon so often in jest the phrase, ‘this is my destiny’?

Perhaps our destiny does not lie in absolutes, but lies rather in the gulf between understanding and not. For to understand is to separate the understood from the understander, and as such we divide the possibility of unity in absolute knowledge. We are dumb because we struggle to bind ideas that are related but apart, dualistic. We struggle to bring together past, present and future – destiny and fate.

Maybe the beauty in life is not in the attaining of an understanding of our fate, but rather in the understanding of our lack of fate. Because is it not so, that when we feel fate has struck, it is only after the fact we call it fate? Yet, when we pass day by day, month by month, in constant awareness or distraction, we neglect the idea of our fate or destiny, and instead care only for the best preservation of ourselves in the present moment, of perhaps our family, our friends, our community, our toys.

Fate seems now like an arrogant ideal, which pushes beyond our immediate experience.

Alas, I feel I have missed an important criticism, for above I have assumed a supernatural power in fate, although I have not been very explicit about it.

Now I want to turn to Buddhism which differs in its understanding of destiny and fate.

Fate is often confused with karma, but karma means action. In Buddhism the idea of a subject being removed from an object is destroyed, there is no individual but the whole, there is only a momentary connection of all things and there is no cognisance of the whole as being finite or infinite. The idea of reincarnation removes the meaning of death as an end but instills instead a transition, not a transmigration because in Buddhism the belief in a soul is unfounded. A reincarnation, a destiny, is dependent on karma. Karma is the action that responds to an action. In karma lies the question of freewill, but it is found longing in the rejection of both determinism and indeterminism. Karma is not enacted through an agency of a god, but rather it is akin to Newton’s law of motion, that every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

What is fate in Buddhism? There is a lack of predestination in Buddhism, that is until the attainment of enlightenment, the awakening. Beings transition through reincarnation until they realise nirvana which is the transcendent release from all suffering, craving and desire, and that of karma and reincarnation. So is this a fate? Do all beings finally and inevitably reach nirvana? If all beings eventually reach nirvana, then I would call it fate, but if not, then it follows there is eternal destiny of suffering for some.

In my little reading into destiny and fate in Buddhism, I have pondered over the connection between the thread of life cut by the Fates and that of reincarnation. The Greeks believed the Fates spun, measured and cut their souls’ thread of life and that after death their souls’ would descend into the underworld.

The Buddhist believes that no being really dies and transmigrates, but instead a being reincarnates again and again until the attainment of nirvana; there is no measuring of life by goddesses, there is no predestination, no drawn path of life. The difference is salient and I find it hard to relate the two ways of seeing life, its destiny and ultimate fate.

But revisiting the definition of fate above, I have to say for now that in Buddhism there is perhaps no idea of fate, since there is no supernatural force compelling a being to its fate.

Alas all this above I have written is just an attempt to discover something more, to further my knowledge on the subject and I find myself perplexed as to where this all has led and will lead.

The Triumph of Achilles – Franz von Matsch. Achilles drags Hector around Troy, fating Troy to destruction. I have actually seen this amazing work in Empress Sisi’s Palace of Achilleion, Corfu. It’s a huge wall painting commission by her Majesty in the grand stairwell up to the terrace of Greek Philosophers (and Shakespeare).

In the story of the Fates, I am compelled to see an inevitability of destiny, an ordered life not revealed to myself but to be discovered only at its end. It commits my life to an anxiety born out of ignorance of my fatal future, yet at the same time invigorates my perception of my destiny because of the lack of certainty to what my future will be. This is why it is in a way heroic, because in that space between knowledge of my fateful death and my existence, in the present time, I am allowed to call a challenge, to act out my destiny in a way I believe it ought to go, or will go.

In the cognisance of Buddhism, I am compelled to see some inevitability of destiny, yet not a destiny which necessarily has an end, nor even a beginning. It commits me to release myself from the anxiety of perceiving fate, in accepting karma as the reaction to being. I am only called to awakening, not to any great feat, for whatever the feat is, it is illusionary to the attainment of nirvana.

In Spalding’s poem there is an essence of longing, ‘wistful eyes’, ‘groping hands’, ‘calling in vain’. That there is something intangible yet wanting. In the question of destiny and fate, I have sought and seek in vain the answer to the component which gives life actuality or agency. But perhaps it is the lack of certainty of what my end will be which gives my life awe. If I knew the trail of all my life’s events and its eventual end, how could I possibly act with sincerity? And could I then even change my own destiny?

Now I wish to finish this. I could go on exploring, I want to look at Christianity as well as the scientific understanding of fate and destiny, but I am done for now. I shall move on perhaps to some other ‘preordained’ thing, or choose by freewill some other task. My destiny now is with the wine I have to drink. Aux verres citoyens!