Understanding is a process of contemplating and confronting mysteries. It’s like we have two selves, the observant and the enlightened. One ingests with absorption while the other processes by simmering. Their timing is not always the same. Sometimes understanding arrives much later than input data. But it is our pricking drive of curiosity and our slow-cooking insight that comprises learning–and living.
Frank Conroy, writer and musician, says in his essay entitled “Think About It,” that “Education doesn’t end until life ends, because you never know when you’re going to understand something you hadn’t understood before.” This elasticity of understanding, the distance between input and processing, is the expanse of the canvas of our lives, covers the whole painting. Conroy so aptly puts it, “The physical body exists in a constant state of tension as it maintains homeostasis, and so too does the active mind embrace the tension of never being certain, never being absolutely sure, never being done, as it engages the world. That is our special fate, our inexpressibly valuable condition.”
We doubt. We feel insecure in ignorance–some of us–and so we look for answers. Sometimes we find them in our immediate search, like when I ask my students to Google a word, ‘avuncular’, for instance, when that word turns up in their reading. Other times, we don’t find the answer or solution until much later–or never.
I remember one ex-client explaining his divorce. Of his wife of 30 years, he said, “I did not hear what she said–or I did not understand her words.” He told me his wife complained that he didn’t work hard for the family, which baffled him since he was putting in 12-hour days and weekends, socking away retirement and college money. He could not understand how that was not working for his family–until he did. “Now I know she wanted me to look at her, to work hard at being there for her and our boys each day by spending time and focus on them, not my work,” he confessed. He shuttered out simple words spoken to him before his experience allowed him to “see”.
That lag time between learning and understanding is the human condition. Some would even say that inside that gap–between ingestion and digestion–is rubbery, elastic life itself. Maybe.
credit: wikipedia
Writing to Know Me
I, like many, write to grow myself and grow knowledge not only of all that’s out there but also of all that’s on my mind.
Novelist Judith Guest in the Foreword to Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones writes: “It is easy to lose sight of the fact that writers do not write to impart knowledge to others; rather, they write to inform themselves.”
That may seem egocentric, but isn’t that all that anyone can be? I read writing advice daily: write for others, give readers something to chew on; enrich them. Well I, for one, know that I may never sit down to write with my readers’ benefit in mind. That I could not do. I would write not one word (and did not for decades) with so much burden, so much expectation.
Besides, it’s presumptuous to believe I have anything to offer my reader–knowledge, advice, tips, beauty–beyond my human experience. I offer one person’s view of one person’s observations.
After I have sent something out there–to be read–then, that is when I send my hopes and wishes that someone somewhere finds something in my words, something worth the time spent reading them. But if I wrote with that same desire, that my recollections reach a reader, I would not write for fear of disappointing.
Anyone out there? (sound of crickets)
Pot
I suffer from insomnia, always have. My brain either does not shut down at night or does not stay shut. It is not a constant condition but revisits often enough to make me miserable.
The usual cycle begins when I divert, even slightly, from my regular sleep and awakening time. For instance, if I work a night shift on one job and then teach an early class at the other, I lose sleep. By the time I settle down to sleep, it’s late and my optimal 7 hours of sleep is down to 6 or fewer. And too little sleep one night does not result in a guaranteed better night the next. In fact, the opposite is usually true. I get over-tired, making sleep impossible when I am wide awake from having gone through too many tired hours.
Ordinarily, I fight insomnia with sufficient exercise, healthy diet and strict sleep times. Sometimes months pass without a bout. But lately–the last two years lately–I am not able to avoid it even with careful attention.
I am not one to medicate. Yes, I like a glass of wine with dinner and a cold IPA after a long week, but pharmaceuticals I avoid. Most sleep aids leave me with a hangover and homeopathic remedies have not proven successful for me to date. And every one knows alcohol disrupts sleep when the effects wear off during the night.
A friend donated “medicinal” marijuana to me for the cause a while ago, which helped me sleep during some of those insomnia episodes. After high school, pot stopped being fun since it only made me fall asleep, a condition I wanted to avoid most of my life. But now, that is just what the doctor ordered–literally.
I visited a pot doctor and a dispensary today to get a “recommendation” and “medicine.” It was rather surreal to this old girl who has not purchased pot since 1977. I had heard about the different varietals and experienced the potency surge–like pot on steroids–but I was amazed at the various applications, combinations and methods to use this plant once purchased simply as a dime bag for ten dollars that yielded either good stuff or bad.
The dispensers at the dispensary were quite informed and professional, affording me samples and sniff tests to entice my discerning nose to the subtleties in aromas. And though I sniffed and nodded, I had to confess to total ignorance.
“Just give me something that will make me sleep–the entire night–and still allow me to teach a 7:20 a.m. class as a human not a zombie, ” I requested. After all, this was the purpose, the reason for this trip and experiment for a cure or at least relief.
“Girl Scout Cookies,” she replied, and I went home with my Rx bag of enough medicine to last me for the next one hundred bouts of insomnia or my lifetime, whichever comes first.
I must say, the number of tweaks to whatever you eat, smoke or apply is mind boggling. There is something for whatever ails you, and not merely back pain, insomnia, stomach ache, anxiety, depression and soreness. There’s even a recommended varietal for writer’s block (or was a I sold a bill of goods?).
You can spray cannibis oil on affected areas of muscle pain or rub in ointment if preferred. You can eat candies, cookies or marshmallow puffs, according to the literature I perused while at the “shop.” You can quarter, halve or pop a whole cookie in your mouth depending on your tolerance for THC, cannabinoids or late night sugar snacking.
According to my doctor, the edibles are best for sleeping through the night but not the heavy bodied indica types that leave residual hangovers (though all of them can in the wrong dose). Hybrids seem best. But timing is everything with those, not so good with an unpredictable work schedule or late night shifts. Who has the extra two hours to wait or gumption to eat pot at work? Not me.
We’ve come a long a way from pot brownies, I guess.
Curious about why California, the earliest leader of pot legalization, is late on the bandwagon behind Colorado, Washington and Oregon (D.C., maybe too), I researched and found politics, money and petty bickering between purists and pragmatists, both vying for the initiative that will finally win the day after failed attempts in 2010 and prior. As it stands, the 2016 initiative, California’s Adult Use of Marijuana Act, which is finally down to only one initiative–so far–is still gathering solidification and blessings from grandfather NORML and political power ReformCA, two big backers of pot legalization.
Hopefully, sensible law will win the day, one that de-criminalizes marijuana use completely, not in some half-assed mock health law, though I am not knocking the compassionate care legislation that gave real patients medical marijuana relief. I suspect some of my fellow office visitors at the doc’s today just wanted to recreate, and so played the sick card. The farce should end.
As for me, I’m playing the guinea pig and research subject (this whole experiment is merely for research purposes and a good story, right?). Stay tuned for updates.
cause and effect
Though once a huge fan, I have become disenchanted with cause and effect. Formerly hailed as counterpart of or precondition to logic, itself some powerful amulet to ward off irrational emotion since the Age of Reason, cause and effect aka reasons or origins, somehow dissolve into explanations and/or excuses, thereby de-motivating change.
For example, my struggles with anger, judgment and mind-chatter, seem endless. Now, I certainly can and have traced the origins of each of those behaviors as inherent or learned. My father flips into uncontrollable, body shaking, nerve-wracked rage on a hair trigger. His primary feature, besides negative, might be dubbed anger. Whereas my mother never was prone to anger–as much. But she was awfully judgmental, and over the border of cautious into the territory of suspicious. She was quick witted, the product of an agile mind, but also quick to judge. She carried pre-conceived notions and prejudices: “That long-haired boy is dirty,” she once complained to me, though I knew intimately well that he showered–with soap and shampoo–daily.
The mind chatter may be inherited or environmentally induced or unique to me, though I seriously doubt it. Mind chatter is nearly everyone’s 21st century (and much, much longer) problem. But analysing roots to my own traits and those of my husband, children, siblings, nieces, nephews, cousins and parents is a favorite pasttime in the post-Freudian/Jung era. My family loves to do it. However, tracing origins does little to eradicate unwanted behaviors and knee-jerk reactions. In fact, the comfort, even downright smug confidence, in the careful analysis of reasons–for me anyhow–thwarts efforts to eliminate unthinking behavior by believing the job half completed.
No doubt changing behavior, especially ingrained thinking patterns and involuntary reactions, is enormously difficult for most. It is for me. Most emotional reactions go unrecorded, unthought of. My litany in the driver’s seat on any given day is one such example. An hour of yoga in the morning concentrating on and then achieving a connectedness with the universe, its inhabitants and all that exists flies out the car window a half hour later in the 15 minute, muttering-filled drive to school: “What are you some kind of a moron?” I might ask aloud to the car swerving into my lane ahead of me, without a mite’s notice. The violence of that question, that mindset, goes completely undetected mostly. Maybe not undetected, but completely unrestrained in the uttering.
And then I judge myself for lack of control, criticizing myself–Miss Yoga–for the irony and absurdity, for its impeding progress to judge and anger less and focus on chatter-free presence more. Now, I might lapse into congratulating myself for a clever analysis of the causes for such “bad” behavior, like lack of sleep, lack of yoga, lack of control, lack of you name it, when that happens. Knowing and admitting my weaknesses is half the battle, right? That is the psychological lore anyhow.
But that comfort in doing half the work–incorrect math–is illusory, justificatory, rationalization. Enormous effort effects change, enables me–or anyone–to cease automatic behaviors acquired before consciousness. First, the mind chatter must quiet, reduced by half at least, so as to hear, see and smell immediate surroundings of the moment. Quieter still, to “listen” to emotional reactions as they occur or watch them arise. And then neutral observation may have a chance once the way is paved–stillness–to regard the workings of the mind and body. If I can watch the anger gather me up in the car (or anywhere I perceive my efforts thwarted or my path blocked), note it and think of it without judgment, I might short-circuit the cyclic occurrence, the connection between driving and anger severed–one street of one drive at a time. Baby steps.
The requisite discipline overwhelms me just the thought of it, sometimes. I am too tired to separate myself out like that most days. But at least I know I have this problem and how to fix it, right? Wrong. Cause and effect unconsciously, silently and insidiously strikes just like that.
Costa Rica
That trip, a peculiar humid mixture of venality–yoga and sexting–changed my life. I left some part of my former self in Costa Rica. I felt amputated, as if a piece of me was missing when I returned. This haunting continued for many months afterward, a sensation like I never left the Carribbean, where I spent four days detoxing the poisons of a lifetime of accumulated dissonance: misdirected dives into careers and relationships that formed an image I believed I was–not who I was.
On the fifth day, I descended from the jungle bungalow where I lay hammocked asleep with a book on my lap, recovering from four yoga classes a day: sun rise, late morning, late afternoon and late evening. Only on that day, my fiftieth birthday, after a morning yoga session spent weeping to the chant inside my head: “Where have you been? Where are you going?” did I go to the tiny boat village to dine at a local restaurant and wade in the clear waters of a native beach. Only then did I join the rest of the sea hut world layered along the shore, leaving behind the longing lover living in my phone, the headphones of seclusion, and the drowning jungle chorus of howling monkeys, cicadas and neon frog-lets.
The colors of the rain forest in phosphorescence glittering on the wings of giant blue butterflies or on the backs of lightning flash lizards delighted me as much as the colors of flesh, lips, hips and hair of lovemaking in my imagination. On a life-shift trip, I turned around.
Quote of the Day
I really have no idea what that means, but after reading this wonderfully packaged quotation by someone I know not, I considered that my day actually did struggle with me for control.
I awoke at 4 a.m. with a total of four hours sleep, after which I suffered in bed awaiting daylight. When I finally surrendered to the day, I went off to teach my 7:20 a.m. class only to discover I left the pile of essays I corrected til midnight the night before, on my dresser. The absurdity of that condition annoyed me but did not throw me into despair as it might have on any other day. Notable.
After my husband graciously agreed to deliver the papers to me, all seemed to be righted again, like tipping the corner of a crooked picture. My two cups of coffee were sustaining my teaching mind, and class went fairly well considering it was an unusual day of mostly grammar lessons. That is not what occurs on any other day of the semester. I preside over a writing class full of students assumed to be competent writers (assumed, anyhow).
But then I went home to write an article with a three hour deadline that was already on extension. My tired brain could not muster up the 1500 words in three hours, and I was about to miss the deadline or ask for yet another extension when I realized I had already missed the deadline 12 hours before. Oh shit! But wait, the missed deadline was somehow overlooked as my project was not automatically terminated as it would be on this site. Oh shit! okay.
So I asked for another extension, not actually caring whether I got it or not, pretty zen about it, and made my way to the DMV appointment to replace my lost license, expecting at least a couple hour wait. No sweat, since I had yet another batch of essays to correct for the next morning’s class with me. Amazingly, however, I filled out my application for my license, handed it to the gentleman behind the government issue desk, who promptly handed me a number I glanced at just as I heard that same number called to window 21. Wtf? Could it be? I completed my entire transaction in less than 9 minutes, a first in my five and a half decades.
Then I worked my third job of the day, dreading the drudgery of holding up on my feet on four hours’ sleep until 11 p.m., ending a 19 hour day. But a surprise impromptu training session arose, and time swallowed up my shift with me none the wiser, even as I glanced at my phone every half hour waiting for it to be over.
Days are like that occasionally, pushing and pulling me along with fortunate and unfortunate events, or good turns from bad ones back into bad, then good again. Kind of like today. And all the while, I took it all pretty well, rather evenly, notable in itself.
I think the above quote by the person about whom I am not curious enough to Google, should read, “Sometimes the day runs you and you run the day too.”
Umberto Eco
“I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.”
― Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum
I first learned of Eco after reading The Name of the Rose in graduate school, though I cannot remember whether it was the first round in 89 or the second in 2003. I saw the movie of the same name and cannot remember whether I saw it before reading the book or vice versa. I do know I enjoyed both immensely, so much so that I read a second book, the one from which the above quote comes, which I also enjoyed, though I believed that the text was far more about the title namesake than it was before reading it. I had read Michel Foucault, who I found as intriguing as mystifying, so naturally was drawn to the title.
The text, like all Eco works, is complex and dense with plot and erudite history, lore and textual references–not your read on the beach in paradise. Eco demands you grapple. And while many details of both books I read are long forgotten, the words and specific scenes remain etched in the beautiful keepsakes section of my brain.
Like many faithful readers, I seek treasure–that unique turn of phrase or universal truth that hangs with me, bubbled to the surface when I need a lift, a reason or insight. Countless times the belief in mystery became and becomes my mantra. Some people often sigh, “It’s God’s will” when at a loss to explain the inexplicable and I just as often say, “Bow to the mystery.” Though both signal surrender, one does far less resignedly.
That the “world is an enigma” satisfies, becalms and relieves humans of the burden of making sense of chaos and that which we cannot understand due to the size of our brains, undiscovered truths or components necessary to solving riddles, or both–or neither. That we madly “attempt to interpret” the world smacks of vanity or fruitlessness but not necessarily. Human’s drive to know, to understand and control is itself an enigma, one with benign origins though sometimes malignant intent or results.
This quote counters another oft-pronounced snippet pulled out of pocket at the cause-effect chain’s logical end with no solution: “Everything happens for a reason.” Eco obviously disagreed and wrote legions against that idea, wracking ordered plots with disordered interferences from magic, evil intent, human contaminants and other messy interlocutors, all in historically altered (small and large) and imagined context.
One thinker, writer and human I mourn, Umberto Eco died yesterday, a significant loss or gain for the mystery.
Two Years
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmBxVfQTuvIhttp://youtu.be/OmBxVfQTuvI
Two years ago, life was as different as it was the same as it is now. While so much has changed, not much has either:
Two years ago, my mother could speak and recognize me fairly often. She does neither now, or rarely. But she is still here.
And both daughters were in high school then, the older just having turned 18, a senior and the younger a freshman. They both played soccer for their school, which took up much of our time between playing, attending and enjoying games, volunteering and fundraising, etc. Now neither does. One left home and came back. The other continues on without and now with her sister. We spend time doing other things now, like talking in coffee shops, shopping, bookstore browsing and eating. Sisters are still sisters, daughters, daughters.
And about that same time, I was teaching six classes and running–and not just exercising. Too busy to think about anything. Two years later, I teach two classes and refuse to run.
People have moved in and out of my life yet somehow all still remain, though the live connections grow more tenuous and infrequent.
Stronger, thinner, and lighter then but calmer, wiser, and slower now, I am, all for the better and worse, in just a matter of days, weeks and two years.
Two years ago I started this blog with no other intention than to write, no expectations. That has not changed. And though WordPress reports hundreds and thousands of posts and views and followers attributed to this blog, which has grown in words, mine, yours, and others’, the daily writing discipline over the months has not changed–I write.
I am still happy then as now to have shared words for all eyes who have cared to read–and am grateful for any morsel of insight, amusement, pleasure or education I may have bestowed upon a passerby here; touching another is the aim and hope.
Peace and blessings.
Thank you,
Gaze
Dayenu
Just like any other mother, naturally I did not want to make even minor let alone crippling mistakes in child rearing. So when it came down to the uncomfortable decisions that arose daily as my children grew, I examined my own childhood to weed out the unwanted inheritances.
While I had an unremarkable childhood, pleasantly healthy and largely uneventful (a good thing), there are certain cultural traditions I would have eliminated. In hindsight, I wish I was mollified less and respected more as a child. I had a great need to be seen, not for attention (though that too probably) as much as for recognition of what I was capable. As the middle child of five, that was my specific plight–invisibility. I did not feel unloved, just unrecognized.
I bristled at statements like, “Oh you’ll understand when you’re older” to my exasperation at illogical or unfair reasons or causes, for example, why my father was allowed to call my mother mean names while she served him hand and foot. She was right. I would not understand then the subtleties of relationships, but I wanted someone to try me nevertheless, see if I could grasp complexities. I wanted honesty and direct explanation. Still do.
So when it came to decisions my husband and I made about imaginary beings like the tooth fairy and Santa Claus, I was adamant that we not build a relationship of lies at the outset. I did give in, however, to the argument that kids thrive on fun, and these fantasies were fun. Also, I did get to explain to my now mostly adult children what I wanted for them and the reasons for our decision to build their reality in the way we did.
So much in childhood goes unexplained and we blindly carry pieces of childhood with us, never examining them, never even looking at them, just wearing them like skin. Memories, information, habits and beliefs are all carried without notice. One battle I won is the one for deferring religion until a time the children grew old enough to choose. Religion is inherited for most of us. My children have since thanked me for giving them that option to decide for themselves.
I was raised Jewish, a culture more than a religion. Seder songs and Chanukah rituals patterned my days and years, just as a sliver of them pattern my own children’s life. While I did not pass down ritual, I did my part for the economy by indoctrinating them in the gift-giving commercial holidays like Chanukah with its alluring candle-lit solemnity and awe, and Christmas with its bright celebratory colors and good will. They knew when the getting was going to be good, counting the days to a secular consumption feast.
One song I know from my own childhood as well as candle-lit menorahs, Chanukah gifts and chicken soup was Dayenu, the passover song. Passover was not a fun holiday until after the ceremony, requiring young children to sit for far too long at a table where unintelligible words and actions played out, mystifying and boring. Until the singing of dayenu, a catchy tune that signaled eating and then running off with cousins to play.
Forty-five some odd years later, on this very day, I learned the meaning of this Hebrew word. Not that I was curious and looked it up out of the blue. No, it happened by chance. Last night I enjoyed a Valentine’s Day dinner on a stool at a local bar around the corner. I had a long day slinging sweets at the shop and craved a beer. So, while in the throes of feel-good satiety (seafood soup and roasted artichoke) and a slight buzz, I looked to the words written over the entry to the establishment, which read, “if you are lucky enough to drink wine by the sea, you are lucky enough.”
I raised my glass to the thought and the written words and did what anyone would do: I posted a bastardized version of it to fit my current circumstances–drinking an IPA–on Facebook: “Drinking an IPA by the sea. It is enough.” The next morning’s comment from a friend was “dayenu.” After lamely asking if the word was the name of a beer as well as a song, I googled the word before receiving a response only to find the word means something like “it is enough.”
Who knew? I obviously did not. While this may be a case of syncronicity, kismet or mere coincidence (no major planetary alignment), it should remind and caution all of us of an interesting psychological and cultural phenomenon: we are products of much we do not understand or even think about.
And this I have often argued is how racists and bigots form most often: through mindless heredity, unthinking but powerfully instilled. This is how a culture perpetuates–unknowing, unheard, and undetected. We do not know why we know what we know or do what we do, unless we make the effort to understand, observe and mind. How else do we make changes local and global?
It is obvious from the wacky state of U.S. politics this election season that Americans hunger for drastic change and reject the mindless status quo business as usual, regardless of the wisdom or catalyst of that change: Trump the savior or Sanders the socialist, if you believe campaign rhetoric and vitriol. But this hunger is good. Feeding automatic feel-good responses, age-old prejudices and knee-jerk reactions dredged in a rotten history of exclusion, bigotry and fearmongering is not. We must examine where our frustrations and reactions derive. Are they mere mimicry? inborn? calculated? truth? Riotous urges to shout and defy are necessary sometimes but not without mindfulness. Otherwise, we are mere primates.
Being vigorously and mindfully curious, now that is enough.
The Measure of the Times
Rousseau walks on trumpet paths. Joni Mitchell, “The Jungle Line” in Hissing of Summer Lawns.
I always wondered what Joni meant in that line from the “Jungle Line.” At first I thought she meant Jean-Jaques Rousseau, the philosopher of Confessions and The Social Contract fame. In college I read the former and only remember the book as a journal of the man’s affairs, extra marital and political, and wondered why he ranked as an important philsopher since the content seemed trivial. I later revised my opinion after reading The Social Contract, the underpinning of early social justice and democratic government theories.
I once searched for a Rousseau painting with trumpet paths when I realized she referenced the painter not the philosopher/author. I had never seen nor recalled seeing a Rousseau painting and the internet was not at my disposal then. The Hissing of Summer Lawns album came out in 1975. I checked books and found Rousseau’s work, which I found pleasing, colorful and fun. The man appeared to have a sense of humor, squeezed joy from days. Unfortunately, I broke the limited art world I knew then at the ripe old age of 16 as serious and unserious art, Rousseau deemed too childlike to be serious.
Today I read the following:
With a kind of perverse timing, the child’s paradigm emerged in art at just the moment when Newton’s mechanical view of reality was most triumphant. The Chinese yin and yang symbol is a graphic representation of this relationship between opposing principles. The rival viewpoint makes its first tentative appearance at the height of the power of its complementary obverse.
How very appropriate that just before Einstein’s discovery, a naïve artist like Rousseau, whose paintings could be the settings for fairy tales and who routinely distorted forms, would be hailed as one whose view of the world was a valuable contribution! It is an amusing exercise for anyone to specualate upon the reception Rousseau’s work would have received at the court of Lorenzo de’ Medici. Then the Humanists were proclaiming that man was the measure of all things. For a long time, children were not to be trusted to measure anything. Leonard Shlain, Art & Physics
At the tender young age of 55, I understand Rousseau with his child-vision. The world he paints for his audience is important to see, again and again, not just as counterbalance to the cynical, practical world of the adult in politics, technology, science and economics, for instance. But to remember the special conception of space and time that children hold. They experience lengthened time and unconfined space compared to their parents’ lived time-space. Children know the science of happiness instinctively.
Earlier in class, before I read the above Shlain excerpt, I reminded students about child time vs. adult time, temporal elasticity, and technology’s time effects. Hopefully, my stories illustrated time’s illusion, for example experiencing child time as a dragged-along, unwilling captive of Mom’s department store shopping as a 7 year old or an 18 year old sitting in a two-hour lecture course at 7:20 a.m. (mine) as opposed to sleeping or playing/partying with friends for the equivalent time. Time slows or speeds accordingly even as time ticks unceasingly in even increments.
I was not much younger than my students now when I first heard Joni’s lyric and then went searching for Rousseau. And it was only a matter of hours between narrating child-like time visions in the classroom and reading Shlain’s commentary on Rousseau’s yin to Newton’s yang or vice versa, the innocent artist and sophisticated astronomer, ending with the situationally ironic children as the measure of nothing.
I love that the world and mine are round.
credit: wikiart.org
In the gaze of the other 