Despite Knowing

There is a question that runs underneath every serious contemplative tradition and that most people encounter only in the abstract. If you could see the whole arc of a life you were about to enter, including the specific losses that life would contain, would you enter it anyway? The traditions have answered this question in various vocabularies for as long as they have existed. The Bhagavad Gita answered it through Krishna's instruction to Arjuna on the battlefield. The Christian mystics answered it through the language of accepting the divine will. The Sufis answered it through fana and the annihilation of the self that clings to preferred outcomes. Buddhism answered it through non-attachment. The specific vocabularies vary. The underlying recognition does not. To love a life fully is to love it with knowledge of what love in that life will cost, and the loving does not depend on the outcome being what the loving self would have chosen.

This question is not academic for most people who take it seriously. It is the specific question that arrives in the middle of grief, in the shape of a difficult diagnosis, in the fact of caring for someone who will die, in the recognition that any deep love is also the guarantee of a future loss the loving self does not want to face. The traditions have addressed it because the traditions have always known that human life places the question in front of every person who lives long enough to love, and that most of us handle it badly.

In 2016 a filmmaker named Denis Villeneuve released a film that dramatizes the question with unusual precision. The film is called Arrival. It was adapted from a 1998 novella by the American writer Ted Chiang called Story of Your Life, which Villeneuve and screenwriter Eric Heisserer restructured for cinema without losing the philosophical spine of Chiang's original. Its central character is a linguist named Louise Banks who is asked, through circumstances the film unfolds carefully, to answer this exact question about her own life. Her answer is not stated as answer. It is performed as choice, and the choice is what the film is finally about. This dispatch is about the film, about the perennial territory the film enters, and about what happens when a specific piece of longform art delivers a recognition the traditions have been trying to deliver for millennia.

I. What the film is

Arrival opens in ambiguity that is only revealed as ambiguity by the end of the film. Louise is shown in a series of quick moments with a young daughter. Playing. Growing. Being diagnosed with a rare disease. Dying. The sequence takes perhaps three minutes of screen time and functions, on first viewing, as a prologue that establishes Louise as a woman marked by loss. Then the plot begins. Twelve alien ships arrive at twelve locations around the world. Louise is recruited by the military to help communicate with the aliens at the American landing site. What follows is her sustained engagement with the aliens' language and, through the language, with the aliens themselves.

The aliens' written language is the film's central device. Each sentence is expressed as a single circular symbol. The symbol is not built up from left to right as spoken language builds. The symbol arrives complete. Louise, learning the language, begins to think in it, and thinking in it changes her cognition. Her mind starts to work non-linearly the way the language works non-linearly. What she experienced as fragmentary flashes of a life she thought was behind her turns out to be perception of a life ahead of her, delivered through the cognitive shift the language has produced.

The daughter she was shown with in the opening is not a daughter she has lost. It is a daughter she has not yet had. The scenes were not memories. They were previews of an arc she has not yet lived. And by the film's end, she knows the whole of that arc, from meeting the man she will marry through the daughter's birth and childhood and diagnosis and death. She knows before she has begun any of it.

The film's final movement is her choice to enter the life anyway.

II. The monomyth as it appears here

An earlier dispatch on this site walked through Tool's Lateralus as a specific instance of the arc that Joseph Campbell called the monomyth. Departure from the ordinary world, threshold crossing, road of trials, transformation, boon, return. The pattern appears across every serious mythological tradition humanity has produced because the pattern is what stories look like when they trace the movement of consciousness meeting itself through difficult transformation and returning to the ordinary world carrying what has been received.

Arrival is the same pattern in film form.

Louise's ordinary world is her life before the ships arrive. A linguistics professor. Private grief that the audience does not yet understand. Disconnection from the students in her lecture hall. The call to adventure is the military recruitment. The refusal of the call is brief but present. The crossing of the threshold is her first entry into the ship, where gravity itself operates by different rules. The road of trials is her extended encounter with the aliens' language and with the international political pressure that mounts as other landing sites move toward conflict. The transformation is her cognition beginning to change. The boon is the ability to perceive time non-linearly. And the return is her walk into the marriage, into the birth of the daughter, into the life she now knows will contain the loss she now knows is coming.

The pattern is not decoration on the film. It is the film's structure. Villeneuve did not accidentally build a monomyth. He built a monomyth deliberately, and he built it in a medium that most audiences would receive as science fiction rather than as spiritual work, and the receiving is doing exactly what the perennial traditions have always relied on. The recognition arrives through the vehicle the receiver was prepared to accept. A viewer who would not sit through a Vedanta lecture will sit through a science fiction film. The film delivers what the lecture would deliver, or something close to it, in the form the viewer could receive.

III. The language question

The film's most philosophically distinctive claim is about language.

The idea that language shapes what its speaker can perceive is not new. It has a name in linguistics — the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, in its stronger and weaker versions. The stronger version says language determines what can be thought. The weaker version says language influences what tends to be thought. Contemporary linguistics has largely settled on some version of the weaker claim, with the stronger claim treated as overreach. Arrival dramatizes the stronger version to its extreme. Louise's cognition is not merely influenced by learning the aliens' language. It is transformed by it. She becomes able to perceive time in a way she could not perceive before because she now has the linguistic apparatus that makes the perception possible.

This is a science fiction premise and it takes the theoretical linguistics further than the theoretical linguistics goes. But it also touches something the perennial traditions have known and have described in their own terms for millennia.

An earlier dispatch on this site opened with a passage from the Zhuangzi about the fish trap. The reading was that meaning can arrive before the vocabulary, and that recognition is possible without needing to be named. This is one true half of the relationship between language and reality. There is a complementary half that the traditions have also known. Some meanings cannot arrive at all without the vocabulary. The specific teaching that opens a specific recognition is not incidental to the recognition. The words are the door, and without the door the room stays closed.

The Sufi tradition has always understood this about specific technical vocabulary. Fana is a word that names a specific state of self-annihilation before the divine. Someone who does not have the word can have experiences that approximate what fana names, but the specific configuration of experience-and-vocabulary that produces the full Sufi understanding of fana requires the word to complete itself. Advaita Vedanta says similar things about neti neti and about the recognition that the vocabulary of not-this-not-this produces in the practitioner who uses it as sustained inquiry. The Zen tradition uses specific koans as linguistic devices that produce specific breakthroughs, and the breakthroughs are not separable from the koans that occasion them.

Language is not just a description of what already exists. Language is also a specific apparatus that shapes what can be perceived and how what is perceived can be received. Arrival takes this claim to a cinematic extreme, but the extreme is only extreme in degree. The underlying observation is old and it is real.

There is a specific implication of this that the film handles with unusual delicacy. Louise's transformation is not something she chose. It arrived through the practice of learning a language she was asked to learn for reasons that had nothing to do with her personal development. The transformation was a consequence of engagement with the material, not a goal she pursued. The perennial traditions have always known that recognition works this way. The practitioner does the practice. What the practice produces is not what the practitioner sought and often is not what the practitioner would have chosen. Louise did not learn the language in order to be able to perceive time differently. She learned the language and the perception followed. The traditions call this grace. The film does not use the word.

IV. What the light knows

The film touches only briefly on the scientific principle that Chiang used as the entry point for the aliens' non-linear cognition in his original novella. Villeneuve compressed it into a single scene where Ian mentions the principle to Louise. Most viewers pass through the scene without pausing. But the principle is there, and it is doing quiet work, and it deserves attention because the territory it points at is where science and the perennial traditions have been circling each other for a long time without either being able to close the distance.

The principle is called Fermat's principle. It was formulated by the French mathematician Pierre de Fermat in 1662, and it is a foundational principle in optics. It states that light traveling between two points takes the path that requires the least time. This sounds unremarkable until you examine what it actually claims. For light to take the least-time path, in some sense it must "know" its destination before it starts. It is not enough for light to move forward and check as it goes. The principle requires that light have some kind of access to the whole path in advance in order to select the optimal one.

Classical physics is not comfortable with this framing. Classical physics prefers descriptions in which a thing at one moment causes the next thing at the next moment, moving forward through time in local steps. Fermat's principle refuses to fit that framing. It describes light as if it were surveying all possible paths at once, evaluating each for travel time, and then selecting the minimum. This teleological quality — the appearance of goal-direction, of the light "aiming" at an outcome — has bothered physicists and philosophers for three and a half centuries. Fermat's principle is not alone in this. The principle of least action in classical mechanics has the same structure. Several formulations of quantum mechanics via path integrals do too. Physics has a whole family of variational principles that describe reality as if it were making choices, and no fully satisfying account of what this means at the level of what reality actually is.

Chiang used Fermat's principle as the philosophical anchor for the aliens' cognition. If light effectively perceives the whole path at once in order to select the minimum-time route, then a consciousness structured on similar principles would perceive time as a whole rather than as a sequence. The aliens' non-linear cognition is not arbitrary. It is what perception would be like if it worked the way Fermat's principle suggests light works. Chiang's novella develops this at length. Villeneuve's film compresses it into a scene most viewers do not linger on. But the anchor is there, and it changes what the film is doing. The film is not asking the viewer to accept an arbitrary science fiction premise. The film is dramatizing what would happen if a specific structural feature of physical reality — a feature that has been in our best physics for three hundred years — were also a feature of consciousness.

This is the specific territory where the perennial traditions and empirical inquiry have been circling each other. The traditions have described a mode of perception in which time is not experienced as sequence — the eternal now of Christian mysticism, the timelessness of Vedantic recognition, the specific quality of samadhi in Buddhist practice. Physics has described physical reality as if it operates in ways that exceed sequential causation. Both descriptions have been present for a long time. Neither has been able to close around the other. The film sits in the space between them and dramatizes what a resolution might look like without claiming to actually resolve anything. It is a specific instance of what serious science fiction can do — take a real feature of contemporary physics, extend it into consciousness itself, and let the audience feel what the extension would mean for a specific human life.

The site will engage this territory more fully in future work. There is a body of empirical material — from studies of consciousness, from certain interpretations of quantum mechanics, from research on phenomena that materialist frameworks have not been able to fully explain — that deserves treatment on its own terms. That work belongs in a dedicated section rather than in this dispatch. What can be named here is that the film is not doing what its genre packaging suggests. It is engaging real territory. The territory is old, and physics has been in it for a long time, and consciousness studies has been in it, and the traditions have been in it. Arrival is one specific point of contact between these lines of inquiry, delivered through the specific vehicle of narrative film.

V. The music

The film opens and closes with the same piece of music. It is called On the Nature of Daylight. It was written by the British composer Max Richter in 2004, released on his album The Blue Notebooks, and it existed for twelve years before Villeneuve used it in Arrival. Richter has said in interviews that he wrote the piece as a response to the Iraq War, as a specific meditation on grief. The piece has since become one of the most-licensed pieces of instrumental music in film and television, appearing in more than a dozen productions handling grief or contemplation.

The piece has no lyrics. It is a slow, sustained arrangement for strings that develops through a series of harmonic shifts without a clear climax and without a conclusive resolution. It does not build in the way most Western music builds. It sits. It shifts. It sits. The listener does not track the piece as it progresses toward a destination. The listener receives the piece as a sustained state that varies internally without going anywhere in particular.

The piece is doing, at the level of music, what the film is doing at the level of narrative. It arrives complete rather than assembling itself sequentially. The listener does not learn what the piece is about at the end. The listener is inside what the piece is about from the first note. This is why Villeneuve's decision to bookend the film with the piece is significant. The opening and closing of the film are not the beginning and end of a story in the usual sense. They are the same emotional state, entered at the start of the film and returned to at the end, with the film's plot occupying the space between them. The audience's understanding of what they were hearing at the start is transformed by what they know at the end, but the piece itself does not change. What changes is the listener.

The parallel to Lateralus is worth naming briefly. Both works are doing perennial recognition at the level of musical form as well as at the level of content. Lateralus built its architecture on the Fibonacci sequence because the sequence is what natural forms use to grow. On the Nature of Daylight refuses the sequential logic of Western tonal development because the recognition it carries cannot be delivered sequentially. It has to arrive whole. The music has to model the state it wants to induce. In both cases the medium is the message, and the message could not be delivered by any other medium in exactly the way it is delivered here.

VI. The Gita reading

The film's ethical center is Louise's choice to enter the life she now knows will contain Hannah's death. This choice is what makes the film philosophically significant. Without the choice, Arrival would be a beautifully made science fiction film about first contact. With the choice, Arrival becomes a film about the specific question the perennial traditions have been addressing for as long as they have existed.

The Bhagavad Gita is a dialogue between Krishna and Arjuna on a battlefield in ancient India. Arjuna, facing his own kinsmen across the field, cannot bring himself to act. The specific action he is asked to take will produce grief he does not want to produce. Krishna's response, developed across eighteen chapters, is the core teaching of the Gita and one of the most important teachings in the history of the perennial tradition. The practitioner acts without attachment to the fruits of the action. The reason to act is not the outcome the action produces. The reason to act is that the action is what the practitioner's specific position in the world requires of them.

Krishna's teaching is not detachment in the sense of not caring. It is the more difficult recognition that caring fully about the action itself, and about the beings the action affects, does not require the practitioner to be governed by whether the outcome is the outcome the practitioner would have chosen. The full love of the action includes the full acceptance of what the action costs. To act with knowledge of what the action will cost, and to act anyway because the acting is what the position requires, is what the Gita instructs. The whole eighteen chapters can be read as different angles on this single teaching.

Louise's choice is Krishna's teaching in cinematic form.

She has seen the arc of the life. She knows Ian will leave her when he learns what she chose to enter knowing. She knows Hannah will be born and will grow and will be diagnosed and will die. She knows all of it. The knowing does not diminish the choice. It intensifies it. She is not choosing the life because the outcome will be worth the cost. She is choosing the life because the life itself is what love means when love has full knowledge of what love will cost. The attachment to preferred outcomes that would prevent her from choosing is exactly the attachment the Gita instructs Arjuna to release. She releases it. She enters the life.

This is not a comfortable teaching and Arrival does not make it comfortable. The film does not resolve the difficulty. Louise is going to grieve Hannah. Ian is going to leave. The pain is going to be real. What the film shows is that the pain does not undo the love. The pain is part of what love in that life means. Loving the life fully is loving what the life will contain, and what the life will contain is the loss along with everything else. Louise does not choose the loss. She chooses the whole. The loss comes with the whole.

VII. The return

The monomyth's return is the stage most casual readers of Campbell miss. The transformation is not the end of the story. The transformation is the middle. What matters, in the traditions and in the works that render the traditions well, is what happens after the transformation, when the transformed practitioner walks back into the ordinary world carrying what they have received.

An earlier dispatch on this site was built around this specific difficulty. The Crucible engaged the Ram Dass letter to Steve and Anita Levine after the death of their daughter Rachel, and it argued for the specific holding-both that the letter enacts — the cosmic recognition of what is true at one level and the human grief that remains at another, with neither allowed to defeat the other. The dispatch closed on "both things. Always both."

Arrival is doing the same holding-both. The recognition Louise has received is real. The perception of time as non-linear, the ability to hold the whole arc of a life at once, the transformation of her cognition through the language she has learned — none of this is compromised by the fact that she is still going to grieve. And the grief she is still going to face is real. It is not diminished by the recognition. She is not going to grieve less because she now sees the whole. She may grieve more. The recognition and the grief are both real and neither erases the other.

This is what the return actually requires. The practitioner comes back to the ordinary world carrying what they have received, and what they have received does not exempt them from the ordinary world's specific losses. Ram Dass, returning from India after having encountered Neem Karoli Baba and having been transformed by that encounter, still went home to a life that would eventually contain his own stroke and the losses of his teachers and the deaths of many people he loved. His transformation did not spare him any of it. What it did was let him meet all of it with resources that were not available to the man he had been before. He grieved and taught and lived and died as a transformed being inside an ordinary world. The transformation was not the end of his story. It was the equipment for the rest of the story.

Louise's return is the same movement rendered in fiction. She walks into the life with the equipment the transformation has given her. She will need it. The equipment does not make the life easier. It makes the life bearable in a specific way, a way that would not have been available to the Louise who existed before the ships arrived. She will love Hannah with the full love of knowing what love will cost. She will grieve Hannah with the full grief that comes when the cost is finally paid. Both loves are real. Both griefs are real. She has been prepared for both by what happened to her in the ship, and the preparation is what allows her to enter.

VIII. What the film is finally for

Arrival is the third dispatch in what will become a longer engagement on this site with pop culture works that carry perennial recognition. The first two dispatches worked Tool's Lateralus across a paired arc. The observation these dispatches are working toward is that the recognitions the traditions have carried across centuries do not belong to the traditions. They belong to consciousness. They arrive in whatever medium a serious practitioner is working in when the practitioner has the recognitions to deliver. The traditions carried them for a long time because the traditions were where serious practitioners worked. They still do that. But serious practitioners now also work in film and in music and in other forms the traditions did not anticipate. The recognitions arrive through these forms too. The forms find audiences the traditions no longer easily reach, and the audiences receive what they can receive, in the vocabulary the forms make available.

A viewer of Arrival who has never read the Gita and would not sit through a Vedanta lecture can receive Krishna's teaching on action without attachment through Louise's choice. The reception is real. The vocabulary is different. The recognition is the same. What Villeneuve and Chiang did between them, across novella and film, is deliver the perennial teaching in a form the tradition itself could not have anticipated but that the tradition would recognize immediately as continuous with its own work. This is what serious longform art can do when it is being made by artists who have the recognitions to deliver.

The teaching Arrival delivers is not the only teaching the film delivers, and the film is more than any single reading of it. But the teaching is there and it is the load-bearing element of the film's structure. Without it, the plot would be interesting science fiction and nothing more. With it, the film becomes one of the more precise renderings of Krishna's central instruction that contemporary Western culture has produced. Whether the viewer receives it as Krishna's instruction is not the point. Whether the viewer receives it at all is the point. Many do. Many walk out of the film changed in ways they cannot fully name, carrying something they will spend years trying to understand. This is what the recognition arriving through the form looks like from the receiver's side. The film has done its work. The vocabulary for the work can come later, or not at all. The having is real either way.

"Despite knowing the journey and where it leads, I embrace it, and I welcome every moment of it."