Speaking of Choices…!

I’m such a sucker for anything that stretches my ideas of what is culturally-prompted behavior versus innately human.

And to counter the happiness I got from my last choice….

Thank you Sheena Iyengar!

Taking Good Care

Hair, fuzz, skin flakes, and dirt collected for weeks on my toilet. As I spent exactly the time needed to brush on mascara and secure my hair in the morning, or to floss and brush my teeth before collapsing into bed at night, I noted the growing filth in my living space. I took pride in it. The dirty corner warmed my heart because I felt no guilt in leaving it dirty.

Grungy toilets are counter to my upbringing. I’m Lutheran–think “Cleanliness is next to godliness,” think, “Protestant Ethic.” I’ve performed chores for almost as long as I can remember. I started learning to clean the bathroom in kindergarten. This sort of chore was part of the list of responsibilities my brother, sister, and father shared on a rotating schedule by the time I was in first grade. I’ve been appreciating cleanliness and order for a solid 20 years.

So why would a bacteria garden please me? Because the bacteria garden was a choice. I recognized that I had better things to do than clean. For weeks, I preferred to appropriate my new job, look nice and feel clean, eat a leisurely breakfast, and snuggle under my duvet rather than spray disinfectant.

My mind is like lacy underwear–beautiful but leaky. In my headspace, ideas come in, people catch my interest, and the best of these make tenuous connections to my heart. Think of the connections like baby plant roots–so fine, easy to kill, but essential to growth. You’d think I would be selective about what I let grow in me! But I’m not. And once something is in my head and makes the connection to my emotions, my brain is barely present enough to thin out the seedlings, or tug out the weeds. A lot of my seedlings wither and die. Because they so often have grown down into my heart, I experience guilt. (If seed imagery doesn’t do it for you, think of it as tending kittens so young that they don’t have their eyes open yet. And then neglecting the kittens. And then having to bury the kittens because you let them die. Now you see why) I tend to carry around a fair bit of guilt. I neglect a lot of kitten plants to death.

Allowing for a dirty bathroom was perhaps the first time I have ever released with great abandon a responsibility with deep roots. I let that kitten go on its way, with no negative repercussions.

Is this a glass cauliflour? Yes it is. Pate-de-verre mistress, Kimiake Higuchi, sculpts, melts and polishes up nothing but the healthiest of gardens!

Story Arranging

I bought Rilke’s, “Duino Elegies & The Sonnets to Orpheus,” last summer from the Elliott Bay Book Company (ben oui!), and have slowly been working my way through the poems. Funny thing, while I bought the tome more for the Sonnets to Orpheus, I can hardly get to them because the Elegies encompass WORLDS. I keep rereading. I want to share a bit of it with you. Sharing Rilke could only be a goodness, and it creates a structure for how I now think about the last year. (More on the last year will come in other posts!)

So, the Eighth Elegy, dedicated to Rudolf Kassner, as translated by Stephen Mitchell. This piece contains the lines that inspired my blog’s subtitle….

With all its eyes the natural world looks out

into the Open. Only our eyes are turned
backward, and surround plant, animal, child
like traps, as they emerge into their freedom.
We know what is really out there only from
the animal’s gaze: for we take the very young
objects–not the Open, which is so
deep in animals’ faces. Free from death.
We, only, can see death: the free animal
has it’s decline in back of it, forever,
and God in front, and when it moves, it moves
already in eternity, like a fountain.
Never, not for a single day, do we have
before us that pure space into which flowers
endlessly open. Always there is World
and never Nowhere without the No: that pure
unseparated element which one breathes
without desire and endlessly knows. A child
may wander there for hours, through the timeless
stillness, may get lost in it and be
shaken back. Or someone dies and is it.
For, nearing death, one doesn’t see death; but stares
beyond, perhaps with an animal’s vast gaze.
Lovers, if the beloved were not there
blocking the view, are close to it, and marvel…
As if by some mistake, it opens for them
behind each other…But neither can move past
the other, and it changes back to World.
Forever turned toward objects, we see in them
the mere reflection of the realm of freedom,
which we have dimmed. Or when some animal
mutely, serenely, looks us through and through.
That is what fate means: to be opposite,
to be opposite and nothing else, forever.

If the animal moving toward us so securely
in a different direction had our kind of
consciousness–, it would wrench us around and drag us
unfathomable, and without regard
to it’s own condition: pure, like its outward gaze.
And where we see the future, it sees all time
and itself within all time, forever healed.

Yet in the alert, warm animal there lies
the pain and burden of an enormous sadness.
For it too feels the presence of what often
overwhelms us: a memory, as if
the element we keep pressing toward was once
more intimate, more true, and our communion
infinitely tender. Here all is distance;
there it was breath. After that first home,
the second seems ambiguous and drafty.
Oh bliss of the tiny creature which remains
forever inside the womb that was its shelter;
joy of the gnat which, still within, leaps up
even at its marriage: for everything is womb.
And look at the half-assurance of the bird,
which knows both inner and outer, from its source,
as if it were the soul of an Etruscan,
flown out of a dead man received inside a space,
but with his reclining image as the lid.
And how bewildered is any womb-born creature
that has to fly. As if terrified and fleeing
from itself, it zigzags through the air, the way
a crack runs through a teacup. So the bat
quivers across the porcelain of evening.

And we: spectators, always, everywhere,
turned toward the world of objects, never outward.
It fills us. We arrange it. It breaks down.
We rearrange it, then break down ourselves.

Who has twisted us around like this, so that
no matter what we do, we are in the posture
of someone going away? Just as, upon
the farthest hill, which shows him his whole valley
one last time, he turns, stops, lingers–,
so we live here, forever taking leave.

Is it different to see the picture the second time? This guy could be one of those more politically correct, challenging images of Jesus, the shepherd.

End quote.

Where the bat flies across the dome of the cracked night sky, that’s where I begin to most deeply connect with this poem. Visually, in my mind. Then:

It fills us. We arrange it. It breaks down.
We rearrange it, then break down ourselves.

Allow me to scratch at the crystals of the iceberg:

Life as I knew it broke apart in the last year. I’ve been shattered. Painful as that was, what made it worse was lacking the energy and time to take the broken shards and pull them back into a shape or a story. Voila pourquoi je n’ai pas ecrit depuis juin de l’annee derniere. I couldn’t.

The (second) funny thing is that I now think that being broken down–and having to rearrange it all–is a healthy, vital thing. It requires creativity, care, “supplesse,” and results in significant Living. This Living is rich. It even has an element of what we in the U.S. can understand as “the bourgeois.” I say bourgeois because not everyone has had the education or been raised in a culture that encourages or affords Living.

“Living” for my purposes: making things, taking walks, watching, baking, listening deeply, sipping beer, engaging with an activity or animal or material in such a way that I lose track of time, and my mind becomes dew drop clear. This is my ideal. I suppose you might also call this meditation….

What luxury!

Not necessarily monetarily expensive, but certainly those experiences are not available in frequent concert to the poorest, most vulnerable people in the world. Like the ones who can’t afford to eat. Who don’t own clothes; they own a shirt. Or who run around getting places and worrying about bills and thinking always to a foreboding future (yes, the United States have their own forms of poverty). A declaration: I would like to live above the level of subsistence, in happiness, with no shame for living more happily than others on the planet. I have to use my Living as an outlet for the discomfort I store like grain in a silo as the world’s pain, foolishness, vacuity, and chaos really bog me down otherwise. This past year, I’d even say it paralyzed me….

Now. As an aside, I’d like to explore the power of storytelling and how it intersects with all this breaking down and rearranging and Living. I listen to a lot of episodes of This American Life and Radiolab. I first started in 2008, just after graduating from Whitman when I was hating post-modern theory, especially as it related to fine art and the rejection of the validity of narratives and all that is linear. 🙂 So, I basked in listening to stories. And I wrote a fair bit. When I lived in Australia, thanks to the free time afforded me by my extreme isolation, I wrote a TON. And hearing others’ stories and writing my own–telling myself what had happened, and giving the events a structure, an exterior existence–helped me make sense of things. Beyond that, I’ve learned that telling my story channels and generates energy in me.

I don’t consider reality to inherently be a story. A story comes into being when an experience of reality is put into a syntactical structure, verbally or a l’ecrit. Stories helps us remember what happened, help us learn (get this, like, we’re actually wired for this: we have memories once our brains have developed a grasp of language), and to the extent that the world passes through the filter of our Selves, we have an element of control over how we perceive the past, how we receive the present, and how we will enter into the future.

Is that not powerful?

Back to Rilke. My perception of the world is a mess of irreconcilable fragments, which is uncomfortable. I write, which organizes things a little. It results in not just less discomfort for a while, but also in the elation of learning. And so life goes on, and living changes. And Living allows us to change.

*****

I believe this is adulthood holding out a big, friendly hand saying,  “Welcome to the jungle. There ain’t no flower gardens here unless you plant one yourself.”

A Start

Hello,

Welcome, welcome.  More to come!