I keep thinking and turning around in my head... what is the ideal way of looking at things? How am I suppose to think and act in a certain circumstance? To solve this problem, we scour through our memory, search our past, and find something in the dregs of our consciousness telling us that when we acted THIS WAY it worked out okay. We also base our habits and actions off of others and every influence we come across. Our brain is a giant database that catalogues every instance and files it away, or maybe, connects itself to the event through an invisible strand to the time or place where this event occurred. If there is no such thing as time except as a human and wordly conception, then maybe our mind and memory is extradimensional, going back (and forth) in time, recalling instances that have happened to us.
Buddhist religions and many other spiritual practices have focused on the importance of now. Nothing has happened before and nothing will happen in the future. Here I use the word "nothing" as no-thing, but really it also means nothing, nil, blank. Nothing is happening in the past and future. Everything is happening right now. Every breath that we take in is new and fresh. We remember our last breath and act because this is how we learn. We would never survive, and for that matter, no species would have ever lasted more than a few seconds if we didn't have the function of memory. Memory is biological, necessary for survival. Our brains are rooted in the classic flight-or-fight syndrome and when we choose a memory, we are choosing the correct response, determined by our brain on how best to act in that situation for our biological imperative.
If memory is for the means of biological safety, why does it remember a beautiful sunset? Why our the most special moments the one that we treasure the deepest? Maybe memory serves two functions. One is for our physical health and the other is for our emotional. We remember the times when we felt most at peace and in touch with the world. It is a feeling that is stored in our mind, when we recount the memory, the feeling permeates our body and tingles to our toes. I would argue that the beautiful times we remember are when we felt most "natural." The times when our mind dissappeared for a brief few seconds and we were able to see the world and it's creatures in the simplest, yet most wondrous light. The light of truth.
Why would our mind want us to remember the few times that we were free from it though? Free from thought...
Recently I have been seeing the mind as something malignant. Like the Hindu ascetics I have cast it as something evil, something that needs to be shaken off and conquered. To be free from thought it so to be happy, the mind spins a web around us and traps un its pulpous snares, trapping us in its bile and sweet stickiness. It bites and nibbles at our happiness and peace of mind until we give ourselves up and submit to its mastery. Yet when we see its maliciousness we can be free. By recognizing its pervasive control over us and our actions, we begin to see that every action we take is usually first dictated by the mind, and the memory, it's evil minion that it draws on.
How wrong I have been..
Tuesday, October 23, 2012
Wednesday, October 10, 2012
Adagiu?
It's about 10:00 A.M. and I'm trying to stay awake. I woke up early and am suffering from the consequences of staying up late, berating my eyes to melodrama and my ears to choruses of background laughter. So now this morning, with my head in hands and my legs stretched out the full extent, I flip open Wallace Stevens to a few different poems in the Ideas of Order, my eyes setting faster than a Montana sunset, looking for an idea that I could grasp and something that resonated with me. Nothing was really hitting the mark, so I shut my tome and clicked on the computer. Scrolling through the blog posts, I instantly chose the blog, The Rambler. I love the little quotes that Penwell chose and especially the first one, "An evening's thought is like a clear day of weather." It is such a beautiful sentence that even without trying, sums up imagery unique yet similar for all of us. It doesn't matter where we are, we can all remember that moment when we were completely at ease. Looking back on the day in harmony and peace, sitting in silence and joy.
It is ironic that these two events that feel so similar are also somehow intrinsically tied. I can remember my most peaceful moments of discourse in the hills of Lenox. It is a cool 65 degree day, the sun starting to set, and me in the middle of Massachusetts during the peak of fall season. Walking through the woods, and feeling everything and nothing, completely absorbed, looking forward. Smelling and sensing the trees around me, listening with rapture the swish of the leaves I step through; piles of multicolored, transparent, gatherers of light.
Yet, the darkness rises in me recalling this. A bitter pill is left to swallow. The next part of the story is that as I read this small sentence that brought so many pleasant memories to mind and took me to another place, reserved in the banks of my memory for joyous days and hours of reflection, I felt like I needed to investigate further. The quotes were so good that I needed more. I looked for the Adagia and found the Adagio. The poem goes like this,
Drone, dove, that rounded woe again,
When I bring her to-morrow.
The wood were a less happy place,
But for that broken sorrow.
Tell her in undertones that Youth
With other times must reckon;
That mist seals up the golden sun,
And ghosts from gardens beckon.
My golden sun dissolves under the shadow of something that I can't seem to shake off. A rough year it has been, with my Dad dying, my dog dying, and then my grandpa, in a span of less than 2 months. But life goes on and soon we are caught up with the strains of I and the daily business that this contains. Once you think you have shaken these things off and life seems to return to its normal flow, you are brought back to death. Is it a coincidence that when I look for life in the Adagia I find the death in the Adagio? I would think it is besides the fact that it has happened so many other times. We sometimes think that our "I" is all powerful, I am the only one that can choose my lessons. Yet, life is a giant lesson, or remembrance. We cannot choose our lessons, we can just be ready to receive them.
Something stuck with me when we read the sonnet by Spencer honoring his dead grandmother. I feel a bulge in my throat right now for some reason. Something is left to do, the dead need to be honored.
It is ironic that these two events that feel so similar are also somehow intrinsically tied. I can remember my most peaceful moments of discourse in the hills of Lenox. It is a cool 65 degree day, the sun starting to set, and me in the middle of Massachusetts during the peak of fall season. Walking through the woods, and feeling everything and nothing, completely absorbed, looking forward. Smelling and sensing the trees around me, listening with rapture the swish of the leaves I step through; piles of multicolored, transparent, gatherers of light.
Yet, the darkness rises in me recalling this. A bitter pill is left to swallow. The next part of the story is that as I read this small sentence that brought so many pleasant memories to mind and took me to another place, reserved in the banks of my memory for joyous days and hours of reflection, I felt like I needed to investigate further. The quotes were so good that I needed more. I looked for the Adagia and found the Adagio. The poem goes like this,
Drone, dove, that rounded woe again,
When I bring her to-morrow.
The wood were a less happy place,
But for that broken sorrow.
Tell her in undertones that Youth
With other times must reckon;
That mist seals up the golden sun,
And ghosts from gardens beckon.
My golden sun dissolves under the shadow of something that I can't seem to shake off. A rough year it has been, with my Dad dying, my dog dying, and then my grandpa, in a span of less than 2 months. But life goes on and soon we are caught up with the strains of I and the daily business that this contains. Once you think you have shaken these things off and life seems to return to its normal flow, you are brought back to death. Is it a coincidence that when I look for life in the Adagia I find the death in the Adagio? I would think it is besides the fact that it has happened so many other times. We sometimes think that our "I" is all powerful, I am the only one that can choose my lessons. Yet, life is a giant lesson, or remembrance. We cannot choose our lessons, we can just be ready to receive them.
Something stuck with me when we read the sonnet by Spencer honoring his dead grandmother. I feel a bulge in my throat right now for some reason. Something is left to do, the dead need to be honored.
Friday, October 5, 2012
The Fly Revisited
The Fly: Part Deux
Buzzing, spinning, dancing across my eye
Moments are precious
So says the fly
It walks, it talks, with the speak of a wing
Dancing, twirling, it settles on my things.
I close my eyes and hear its call
The sound of a moment, a dream, a space
That slips away from my mind.
Watch it spin and me try to swat it
Watch it's dance and the way it captures all
I huff, I puff, I smote it with my eyes
It spins, it twirls in the blink of an eye
My backpack is a perch
My ears are it's home
I fell for it's call
And it buzzed me ever since.
Buzzing, spinning, dancing across my eye
Moments are precious
So says the fly
It walks, it talks, with the speak of a wing
Dancing, twirling, it settles on my things.
I close my eyes and hear its call
The sound of a moment, a dream, a space
That slips away from my mind.
Watch it spin and me try to swat it
Watch it's dance and the way it captures all
I huff, I puff, I smote it with my eyes
It spins, it twirls in the blink of an eye
My backpack is a perch
My ears are it's home
I fell for it's call
And it buzzed me ever since.
Wednesday, October 3, 2012
The Fly In My Eye
I've been waking up a few mornings in a row to a fly. It buzzes around my head and disturbs my dreams and peace and slumber. Something wells up in my wanting to SMASH this fly into the ground. I swat at it with angry, clumsy hands, swishing through empty air and inciting it to further incite me. I put my head back to the white, downy pillow and it attacks. Buzzzzz, Buzz, buzz, Buzzzzzzzzz. I pop open my eyes in fury and try to smite it with my angry burning eyes of madness. A few half-hearted attempts at swatting it and it disappears into the air. I stay with my head perked and my arm extended, muttering curse words in my mind. The time is 10:00 AM.
Settling back down, I burrow into the blanket of down and fluff. My head tucks in, hiding under the white protective sheets. I hear it outside. It buzzes around my head, looking for me. I want to scream but that will be to no avail. All I really want to do is sleep.
It has so disturbed my peace of mind that I have looked for this fly and its family in every nook and cranny of the house. One is dead. Others will follow. My religious zeal in exterminating these flies knows no bounds. Something about the buzzing of a fly and how it will constantly attack your face and ears, trying to penetrate into your eyes and hearing, infuriates me. Yet, the more I focus on it the more it follows me and taunts me. It buzzes in my ear when I'm eating lunch, it follows me into Sexson's class, hovering, waiting on my backpack for me to depart. It is the source of discourse in my other class, The Revenge Tragedy. It is a constant torment. I'm afraid that soon I will metamorphosis into a fly one morning and find that I am one of them. Then I will be the one persecuted and swatted at. My playful dabblings will be seen as malicious, my curiosity-as sinister.
The meaning of the fly in my eye is that it won't take part. It buzzes, it scurries, it swoops, it dives, it delights and incites, and wow does it make me mad.
P.S. Ironically.. While I write this I'm listening to the song, "Kiss of Life."
Settling back down, I burrow into the blanket of down and fluff. My head tucks in, hiding under the white protective sheets. I hear it outside. It buzzes around my head, looking for me. I want to scream but that will be to no avail. All I really want to do is sleep.
It has so disturbed my peace of mind that I have looked for this fly and its family in every nook and cranny of the house. One is dead. Others will follow. My religious zeal in exterminating these flies knows no bounds. Something about the buzzing of a fly and how it will constantly attack your face and ears, trying to penetrate into your eyes and hearing, infuriates me. Yet, the more I focus on it the more it follows me and taunts me. It buzzes in my ear when I'm eating lunch, it follows me into Sexson's class, hovering, waiting on my backpack for me to depart. It is the source of discourse in my other class, The Revenge Tragedy. It is a constant torment. I'm afraid that soon I will metamorphosis into a fly one morning and find that I am one of them. Then I will be the one persecuted and swatted at. My playful dabblings will be seen as malicious, my curiosity-as sinister.
The meaning of the fly in my eye is that it won't take part. It buzzes, it scurries, it swoops, it dives, it delights and incites, and wow does it make me mad.
P.S. Ironically.. While I write this I'm listening to the song, "Kiss of Life."
Tuesday, September 18, 2012
Breaking out of the box of logic
With halting, gasping words I struggle to write and express myself through rational, direct states of order. Catching at every intersection, getting lost in the vast puzzle that is philosophy and logic. I try to make sense out of a world that is nonsensical. Henry Bradley, a senior editor for the Oxford Dictionary said this about philosophy, "Not that I despise philosophy or philosophers; but I feel that the universe of being is too vast to be comprehended even by the greatest of the sons of Adam." Whenever these philosophers climb deeper and deeper down into the repeating, circling rational that is our mind and that is our world, they lose sight of why they are here in the first place. The world is wonderful, large, and strange. We are creators every day, we have the power every day to discover and liberate ourselves through expression. Beautiful, dazzling, gleams of light crack and chip away at my psyche. Monuments to old philosophers and ancient relics is replaced by visions of hot air balloons manned by pterodactyls, leaping globs of light that bounce off each other and fall back down to the ocean from whence they came. Poetry is fascinated with the sensical as well though, the ordinary. Bringing an old, dusty, forgotten memory to the surface, and shining it in a new light. Stevens talks about the first time that you look up at the sky and notice how beautiful it is. Stevens writes,
Each moment is piled onto each other, waiting to be taken apart, unpacked, and examined more closely. This is what the poet does. This is his or her philosphy, not the analyzing of what is a mind, but the reflection of what is a moment. How can one express and remember a moment and its beauty through words and expression.
"It is easy to suppose that few people realize on that occasion, which comes to all of us, when we look at the blue sky for the first time, that is to say: not merely see it, but look at it and experience it and for the first time have a sense that we live in the center of a physical poetry, a geography that would be intolerable except for the non-geography that exists there-few people realize that they are looking at the world of their own thoughts and the world of their own feelings."
Each moment is piled onto each other, waiting to be taken apart, unpacked, and examined more closely. This is what the poet does. This is his or her philosphy, not the analyzing of what is a mind, but the reflection of what is a moment. How can one express and remember a moment and its beauty through words and expression.
Monday, September 10, 2012
A Postcard from the Volcano
Matilda and I scoured the hillside for trinkets and old bones of animals. My sister and I would run from place to place, delighting in every rock and hillside. Then there was the accident, and our innocence was uprooted. Our delights gave way to survival and soon we were supporting each other, living off of the animals and fruit, letting the mansion, our mansion go to ruin. Everything turned sour and the leaves lost their color during their winter, and our breath lost it's heat. We grew to hate the mansion and its large vaunted walls. Everything lost its color, and our faces begin to turn into an ugly pallor...
"Look what I found!"
"Oh my god Gerald, is that a skull! Put it down!"
"Or else what? A ghost is going to come and haunt me? Haha, dont be silly Geraldine! This house is nothing but an empty ruin. Some poor guy lost all his money and had to skip town, leaving this huge place all to ourselves. Just think of all the fun we're going to have!"
The sun sets in the sky, casting shadows on the house in all the wrong places. The children keep playing, oblivious to despair.
"Look what I found!"
"Oh my god Gerald, is that a skull! Put it down!"
"Or else what? A ghost is going to come and haunt me? Haha, dont be silly Geraldine! This house is nothing but an empty ruin. Some poor guy lost all his money and had to skip town, leaving this huge place all to ourselves. Just think of all the fun we're going to have!"
The sun sets in the sky, casting shadows on the house in all the wrong places. The children keep playing, oblivious to despair.
Wallace Stevens: Images and Judgments (John J. Enck)
Reading this book feels like going to the back of the book in 5th grade math class, only to find that it gives only the even numbers, not the odd.
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