To
capture a moment in writing is to step out of it; to preserve that moment means
to no longer be a part of it. Of course I can think back on that day at the
beach after it has naturally played itself out, perhaps later that day, or the
following week or decade. But it is a commonplace that memories lose their
sharp edges and mix with our desire to have found that almost perfect sea
urchin shell on her birthday. Surely it was then. And it was purple, her
favorite color, or was it gray. I don’t know because it crumbled to dust later
and is gone. If I do not attend to events almost as they happen, I do not see
them well enough to write about them. To write about my life is to live it differently
because stepping out of my life becomes an essential part of living it. I must
give my life up to keep it, an annoying paradox because it is both facile and
bleak.
But I
must write. If I am not doing that, my life becomes meaningless because it is
simply lived, not reflected on. And as Plato has Socrates say in the Apology, “The unexamined etc. is not worth etc.”
If I walk out the back door and down the hill across the thawing, muddy surface
of the driveway and down again past the wood pile with its scattered mess of
sugar maple bark arcs that have detached themselves from the logs I have spilt
over the winter like scabs from a healed wound, if I walk this way and do not
somehow take notice of them as separate from me and worthy of notice, then they
disappear into the stream of events that flow through my life and have value
only insofar as they create me. That is not enough value to make those events
meaningful because I am so ephemeral. But if they form the basis of discourse
that can spread from mind to mind, beyond the here and the present, then the
world takes on meaning beyond me and beyond the subject of that discourse.
But is
that meaning necessary. Isn't being itself enough meaning. The Prime Mover says, “I am who am.” And what
is the difference between my wish to write about my life and the compulsion of someone
who must share on Facebook and Twitter. In a story by Tovia Smith on All Things Considered today, she
interviewed a psychologist, Joseph Burgo, about the Boston Strong Tchotchke
phenomenon and the attraction of displaying your support for something. Burgo
complained, “I
think there's a kind of a feeling that unless you share your experience with
other people it isn't entirely real to you unless you announce it to other
people . . . . It's just part of this narcissistic culture of ours where everything
is about self-display." However, I would like to think that my
desire to say something well, to use language derive meaning that can be shared
may make it about more than self-display. Just because I experienced something,
that does not make it interesting, but in the telling of it I can both shine
and disappear in the same act.
