Owl Be There

Photo by Madalene Murphy

On our way home from walking (and in the case of our dog Terra running) along in the sand of Salisbury beach along the shore of the Atlantic Ocean, we drove through the fjorded salt marshes lining the road where we saw an SUV pulled over to the side, and standing behind it a man looking through a telescope out into the marsh. We knew there were Snowy Owls in the area, driven south of their usual range in search of food. 

Friends of ours had seen (and photographed) one back in Pennsylvania, and we were frankly a bit jealous. We stopped and asked the man along the road what he was looking at; he gestured toward a white spot in the distance and offered to let us look through his scope at the Snowy Owl. As we looked, he noted that this was the purest white one he had seen. While we looked and talked, cars began to arrive and disgorged people with tripods and cameras with lenses as big as their arms. 

When we left there must have been ten cars parked along this stretch of the road with people looking at and photographing the distant Snowy Owl, who was serenely combing the ground for rodents. The next day that we came, a Snowy Owl on a lump of snow quite close to the road also attracted a seeing frenzy. The group photographing the owl was the subject of the front-page picture on today’s paper: "Snowy Owl Draws Crowd." Who was the big news? 

Worlds of the Imagination

In a post in her Anthropocene Mind blog in Psychology Today "Our Myopic Imagination," Michele Wick reported on a study that concluded we generally fall for "The End of History Illusion" and assume that although we see ourselves now as different from ourselves in the past, we also see ourselves as a stable product of that past experience, unlikely to change much in the future. Wick's particular concern is how that illusion would affect our ability to cope with the kind of personal change we must envision and enact to cope with global warming. Leaving myself open to the when-you-have-a-hammer-everything –looks-like-a-nail criticism, I see a place for literature as a tool of evolutionary adaptation, like Kenneth Burke's assertion of "Literature as Equipment for Living."

Not to realize we have changed would be a failure of memory; not to realize we will change is a failure of imagination. The most ecologically efficient way to exercise the imagination is one person telling a story to another, an activity that consumes no external resources. With current technology, stories can be recorded and sent to many people, consuming some bits of resource. The least efficient way to tell a story right now is to make a film: hundreds of people consume staggering amounts of resources. A book, especially an electronic one, is the work of primarily one person with editors and publishing company people supporting it. The reader takes care of the actors, the scenery, and the special effects. So with a few additional resources, a shared act of the imagination in the form of an MP3 or a book can engage many people. An important characteristic of the book, too, is that it is private: one author talking to one person at a time. No peer pressure from the reaction of fellow audience members becomes an inextricable part of the experience so the individual imagination has a chance to build up muscle before confronting the Captain Bringdowns of the world.
I have another self-serving suggestion. To encourage our imaginations to break the shackles of the world view of the culture that surrounds us, we might look to literature from the past. There have been some wonderful modern reimaginings of the world in film—The Matrix, Inception, The Adjustment Bureau—but they all have their roots in the present and reflect extrapolations from our current fears and wishes. The past, however, is beyond our experience. The past has never heard of us. When we look at the way storytellers from past ages imagine another world, we can see the constraints they impose and the freedoms they allow themselves.
The story of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a Middle English poem from the turn of the 15^th Century, plunges Gawain into a bizarre adventure when he accepts the challenge to deliver a blow with an axe and then a year later to receive one back. He beheads the Green Knight who recovers his head, and, after reminding Gawain of his obligation, rides off. As a result of this beginning, Gawain ends up in a castle where he discovers himself enmeshed in a set of three interlocking games. The anonymous poet who wrote the story was immersed in a world so saturated with meaning that there were no random events or meaningless objects. Deus's organizing Logos reached to the bottom of creation. Gawain's shield contains a pentangle and the poet spends many lines, admitting that he is delaying the story, to describe the "five fives" the shield symbolizes. Whatever bizarre thing happens, it will be part of a plan. The medieval poet could casually dispense with realism, but he did not imagine a world without ubiquitous meaning.
Such cultural constructs remind us that we understand our experiences within a frame of reference that on some levels seems inevitable. Climbing into the past (or another culture) suggests ways to step outside our tidy sets of assumptions. Even if the past is entirely wrongheaded, it may suggest a crack in our own thinking that we may be able get some purchase on, so we can see what happens when it starts to break apart. Sometimes all the king's horses and all the king's men can't put our old thoughts together again, and we need to make something new of the pieces.

Mysticism and Migraines

Hildegard von Bingen, the 12^th Century German nun, wrote of her transcendent mystical experiences with such clarity that modern doctors (Oliver Sacks for one) have been able to diagnose them as migraines. Within the last few years I have been getting ocular migraines, whose dominant feature is not the severe pain, so much as the way the vision is disrupted. As with all things migraine, there is a great deal of variation, but those admitted to the order of the migraine understand each other's experiences in a way not available to outsiders.

I had misunderstood what my daughter meant when she said she could not read with a migraine, since I thought it related only to the pain making it too uncomfortable to read. When I had my first ocular migraine, I discovered I could not read because what I looked at on the page made no sense. Print began as squiggles, and as the episode passed, they became individual letters. Then they became individual words that I could not string together into phrases. Within an hour, having worked my way through all the intermediate steps, I found the sense effortlessly flowing from the page again. Once I was diagnosed, I also realized I had been having symptoms for years, instances of disorientation, faintness, and difficulty seeing that had disturbed me but had spontaneously disappeared.

I am not trying to dismiss Hildegard's experience; there is no reason why her god should not use the migraine to communicate with her. Even a mild migraine attack for me has the skeleton of a transcendent experience. As with the letters, I will notice that the world around me is changing. Individual objects seem to glow from within and begin to stand out so that things don't seem to be connected with each other or at least their relationships are slipping. The bathroom disassembles itself into sink, window, toilet. The last square on the toilet paper role attached by its perforated edge hangs down and seems to tremble almost imperceptibly; its irregular stubby fringe, sometimes with a small triangle that did not rip properly, makes it clear that something is gone that was a part of the whole. My life falls apart as each perceivable thing demands center stage. The fabric of interwoven events that make up my day separate into threads, and at some point I realize I am going to die. I too am going to fall apart. Because I am alive, I cannot get out of dying. I begin to feel weird, light-headed, unsteady on my feet. I wonder how I will stay vertical all day, talk to people when they ask me questions.

My response is to do what is in front of me, moment by moment. Considering even a few links in any chain of events that could bind me would be too overwhelming. I stagger along one word at a time, and eventually, I realize connections are reemerging, and I am steady on my feet without thinking about it. My faith grows stronger; though the world is still composed of bits and pieces, the irrational faith that the pieces fit together into something begins to recover. And when I realize that has happened, I feel joy and relief. From the outside I am engaged in routine activities, but on the inside, I have been passing through an ordeal. It is not a realization of something new, but a rebirth of the sense of wonder at the constructive experience of being alive. It would not take much to turn that into a religious experience if the faith that holds life together involves a god.

On being gulled and not gulled

It is November and we are back in Amesbury, MA, again. We left in August so I could return to teaching and we could prepare our Wellsboro house for sale. When we left the trees were leafed out, and the hill behind our house was a tangle of green all the way to the edge of the pond. The pond itself was nearly covered in green, growing out from the water lilies in the middle to the water chestnuts (?), which reached almost to the shore. Now, as we return in winter, the leaves are wind-piled in heaps and the pond looks as it did when we first saw the house--an expanse of open water seen through the skeletons of trees. The view that seemed so hemmed in in summer, though the big trees doing the hemming are a wonder themselves, is now open and expansive.

Being is about place and time. I keep wanting it to be about abstract ideas and transcendent truth, but being is what it is, and since we are people, even at their most abstract, our ideas must be embodied. Whenever I think I should have been a philosopher, I always come back to the idea that ambiguous truth in the context of story appeals to me more than absolute truth in the context of a constrained system.

This afternoon I saw a white gull flying over the pond in a fog that seemed to arise out of its flickering surface like a magic spell. The arcs the gull traced with graceful ease may or may not have had meaning in any human sense, but the gull was doing what it wanted to do--by design or instinct or both. It landed on the surface of the pond and floated for a few seconds, and then it was up and making another big swoop. I am intrigued by the question, "What does this experience, which I was both part of and not part of, have to do with me?" Finding the answer without forcing it is what literature is all about.

de temps perdu

I drove from Wellsboro to Erie, PA to meet with nine of my fellow Venard graduates, and I began drafting this blog post in a motel in Erie at the end of the day; I left early the next morning. The Venard was a Roman Catholic junior seminary (i.e., a high school) where we lived and studied with the intention of becoming Maryknoll missionary priests. Thirty-four of us graduated from the high school; two of us actually became Maryknoll priests: one left the priesthood and the other eventually left the order and became a diocesan priest in Erie. Father Tom Hoderny is living at a priest's retirement home there, and we met at his place. Three of us are dead.

As usual, when we get together we talk about the past, present, and future as if they were a single thing, as indeed they are. But we have gotten older and while our thoughts and words can travel up and down the flow of our lives, our bodies are carried by the current in one direction only. I was surprised at how many of us had survived cancer. After we separated for the day, I felt a twinge of uncertainty about whether the particular group that met that night could meet again. It is not that there is anything special about this particular third of the class; it is just a thought experiment that sparked a response. This feeling is a new ingredient, and one that will leaven more and more experiences. For how long does this reality last? When does a state of being become what was instead of what is? When did I become no longer young? There was a day when I could still be young the next day, but the day after that one, I could not be young again.

The reality in which we ten can meet again did not end when we parted that night because, with the will to do so, we could reconvene and, if we did it quickly enough, we would likely all be pretty much the same as we were. But the will to do so cannot be a given; it is a real contingency, and we will not know when it will no longer be possible to summon up the collective will to gather, and we cannot know when the ability to reconvene will be beyond our will. Deus vult.

We all gathered in the first place because we each thought we had a vocation, a call from God. No matter how godless any of us might have become, it is hard not to think of our time together without some scraps of tattered grandeur clinging to the memory. We gathered then to save the world; we gather in the flickering now to celebrate the time we shared so much. Tom Hoderny gave us each a card with a quote from Psalm 133 that captured the spirit of that time and explains the connection among us: Ecce quam bonum et quam jucundum habitare fratres in unum [See how good it is and how pleasant, to live as one like brothers]. And for us, of course, part of the deal is that it is in Latin.

Languaging in Obscurity

In my book group we are reading and discussing The Presidents' Club, and we were discussing the taking of notes at meetings and how reconstructions of what may have happened are so often skewed by the trickiness of memory and the personal agendas of the note taker, often unconsciously. I pointed out that not only memory but language itself interferes with our efforts to recall the past. Language too has an agenda, and it wants its part in the conversation. A language is constructed by the collective activity of ancestors who have constructed it as a scaffold to support meaning—logical, impressionistic, emotional, suppositional, and so on--a super structure that we inherit and remodel before we pass it on.

Why, for example, in English is there no way to describe our relationship to a parent's siblings or their relationship to us without specifying gender?

(From Encyclopedia of Genealogy)

That is the only relationship in our family tree that is like that. On the other hand, why is there no way for us to describe our relationship to their children in a way that does specify gender? These are collective decisions made over generations. Language shapes discourse, inserts itself into the conversation, creates ambiguity all on its own.

"All that glitters is not gold."

How much of what glitters is gold? When we use that sentence we mean some of what glitters is gold and some is not.

"All who lie are not trustworthy."

How many liars are not trustworthy? If we were to say it that way, we would mean that all of them were trustworthy. Why is it some in one and all in the other? What about,

"All of the people in the room were not represented."

Is this a golden clause or an untrustworthy one? I recall from my linguistics class that in the US, the tendency to interpret this clause one way or the other or as ambiguous is affected by what part of the country we are from. Regardless of that effect, it is likely that we could use a statement like this one unaware that it is a problem. Every conversation takes place in the context of our cultural history, even if we are unaware of it. All our efforts to be accurate will not work.

Decline and Fall

Christian, our son, and I were talking about education and its decline as its institutions are besieged by business metaphors and economic accountability and as, from within, obsessed by external perspectives, they become in response so prescriptive and unfocused that they no longer seem capable of action. We were concerned that their workings will simply clog up and they will become monuments reminding us of a lost time. I talked about how we were feeling the effects here in Rural Pennsylvania, and he felt that Massachusetts, where he lives, might be insulated from the worst of the destruction for a while, and he explained this idea by invoking Trantor, the center of Isaac Asimov's Galactic Empire, much of whose fictional history is reported in the Foundation Series.

Since I care about my university and by extension the whole educational matrix it is part of, I fret about the future. But Christian's reference to Asimov's world immediately put my concerns in a productive new frame of reference. Hari Seldon's psychohistorical analysis of the future and the establishment of the Foundation were designed to reduce the period of inter-Empire chaos from 30,000 years to 1,000. The university as a social institution is nearly 1,000 years old. On the one hand, it seems to be a durable institution; on the other hand, it does have many miles on it. Maybe the university has outlived its usefulness and is beginning to collapse toward the center. Institutions that seem inevitable from the inside can, from the outside, reveal themselves as fragile while the world changes around them and they fail to adapt. Some aspects of the Foundation series are based on Gibbons' Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire. The Roman Republic lasted for only about 500 years and the Roman Empire for another 300 years. The university has already outlasted both the Republic and the Empire, yet they shine in our historical memory as signal accomplishments. Of course, the City of Rome still exists, though nothing like what it was. Perhaps the university—from the Latin universitas*—is also no longer what it was. The university is an already irrelevant institution, but those of us on the inside, in the center of one of these institutions, have not noticed yet, and it will be a decade until it becomes so apparent that even a highly educated person can see it. But before that happens in an effort to adapt, universities will twist themselves into many unsustainable mutations. But I suspect that whatever replaces the university dinosaurs will not be their offspring, but something smaller and more agile, something easy to overlook at first.

*"In early use post-classical Latin universitas denoting an academic institution was modified by the genitive plural, as in universitas magistrorum , universitas magistrorum et scolarium (both 13th cent. with reference to the University of Paris)" ("University." OED). The modern university—tangled in elaborate rules of matriculation and hemmed in by accrediting agencies hoarding power and boards of trusties hoarding money—is hardly a community of teachers and students any more.