Writing out [of] the moment

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.

No Time to Blog

I have not been blogging lately because I have made the excuse that I need to work on my long term project, which this blog is ostensibly an aspect of. I have not actually written anything on the large project except for three or so, brief spurts. In addition, I have been, still am way behind in responding to student papers. I need to comment on essays and correct tests and quizzes, and make up an exam. 

I do not waste great swathes of time (there might be something dissolutely grand about that); I fritter away tiny shards of time so that I need not feel guilty about the time I waste on this and the time I waste on that because no one thing occupies me for a period of time that would be useful for anything of importance. Such a practice has the effect of putting off doing student papers one paper at a time. 

Part of the problem is that focusing attention for even a brief while can sometimes produce something of value, especially if it crystallizes a network of moments into something more than a list. So is this one of those crystallizing events or is it another shard in the heap by the door. 

Brochen Spectre

"Brochen Spectre" (Wikipedia)

I could write about the cold: it is unusually as cold as it usually used to be. However, the span of one life it not enough to prove that the climate is changing. The scale of a planet’s time is so large that the span of one life in it is essentially invisible, but only nothing is invisible. An accumulation of essentially invisible things can certainly have an impact.

 I could write about how satisfying it is to read passages from Thoreau’s journals to students who don’t quite get him, but could. That “could” fires my enthusiasm because his is a voice full of carefully observed and considered ambiguity. I always (or like to think it is always) read the whole of the passage from his journals that the anthology titles “Seeing.” In it, he references the Brochen Spectre, the obscure optical phenomenon of observing your shadow contained in a rainbow and reflected back in the water droplets of fog or cloud. It is apt because observing nature is a constant battle between self and other: the proper balance is essential. And what is proper? In a mobile the balance point is not always the center, so it is possible that under some circumstances, perhaps a little less of me is called for, though in my little world I will never be able to approach invisibility.

I drove in possibility

Driving in imaginary snow is demanding.

When we left Amesbury, MA for the 440 mile trip to Wellsboro, PA early Sunday morning with four or five inches of new snow on the ground, it was snowing and in the thirties (F). Our street had been plowed in a way that increased its treacherousness—not quite clearing the street and compressing the wet snow undersurface into ice. Elm Street, an important artery in the city of 16,000 , was essentially clear with some snow in the gutters, but it was very wet. A percentage probability of rain predicted for that morning had been long ago proved wrong and silently changed.

The route we were taking, angling down through central New York, is notorious for snow, and a 50% probability of snow showers through there (Oneonta, NY was our metonymic location) seemed like a slim chance for a smooth trip. I was gripping the wheel tightly, anticipating a Buddhist-nightmare drive where the ambiguity of the road surface would require me to be alert for danger that more than likely did not exist except in my head.

We went from icy and snowy on our street, to very wet and slightly slushy on Elm Street to wet on I 495. As the miles on the wet-but-possibly-icy-at-anytime interstate (driven at closer to the speed limit) passed under us, the wetness of the road became less puddled until light strips of dry pavement showed where vehicle tires had gradually peeled off the moisture in the right lane. Eventually, the road dried completely, and the sun shone intermittently. On a dry road, I let go of the threats posed by the road and settled back into the threats posed by the drivers on the road, me included. The dangers posed by sentient beings seem more manageable, primarily because there is a chance that the negative effect will be softened by rational motivation. The probability of that characteristic in the weather is zero.

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.