Enough sea for the soul

Circumspect

Tonight I am precarious, or tilting precariously, or relishing the precariousness of this grand adventure we call life. This afternoon I sent hope winging out, speeding along electronic lines to be printed and set in stacks of paper, to be reviewed and judged, and then to either bring me an olive branch or not. Cautious person that I am, I smile and wave, and then I tuck plans B and C in a place where I won't forget them. Because it would be a shame to have nothing to hold if that hope doesn't come through.

This is a lonely adventure. In the end, the person it most affects is me, and that makes a difference, I think, to the feeling of community.

Lonely, I said, but not alone. Not really. Ask the people I've pestered over the last few months for letters and a critical eye (again and again and again); ask the people who have said "this is exciting!," or the one who said, "I can share in rejection, too;" they'll tell you. Lonely, maybe, but not for a second really alone.

Merry Christmas, Adorno (and other reflections on the season)

I wanted to know if Adorno bought Christmas presents--a question inspired by the overwhelming displays of mass-produced merchandise in mall windows and on billboards. For the most part, I like shopping--especially shopping of the Christmas variety--, but sometimes the overabundance of it all disheartens me. I leave feeling unhappier, smaller, and less of a person than when I began; more often, I find myself stumbling in the morass of choice.

That I am an indecisive person is an understatement, and, though misery loves company, I think this is one vice that I would be better off bearing alone. Unfortunately, there is more than enough indecisiveness to go around. We live in a culture of choice. Strung out on possibility, we loiter on the doorstep of commitment, unwilling to make decisions, content in the worst way to remain outside. We are glutted with options, and the more we have, the harder it is to act:

Pink or red? Cherry or vanilla or orchid? Plaid or printed or solid or striped? Silver or gold? I have to choose what for free?

I'm not saying that choice is bad (I prefer pink to red, cherry to orchid or vanilla; plaid and printed are both necessities; gold, yes, but also silver; and free is cool), but I do think that maybe a few lessons in how to handle choice could be valuable.

Four years ago, I remember being frustrated with resumes. I felt that it was decidedly unfair to those of us who "really loved" knowledge that leadership and activities seemed to count for more than good grades (no matter how hard we worked for them.) I'm wondering now if maybe the higher-ups were on to something: buried beneath the intoxicating variety of modern American life is the simple fact that choice really isn't enough. Just as valuable as the ability to see our choices is the ability to make them, to both have and do.

***

The real question, of course, is what any of this has to do with Adorno, but you'll have to figure that out for yourself. I couldn't decide.

Happiness

by Raymond Carver

So early it's still almost dark out.
I'm near the window with coffee,
and the usual early morning stuff
that passes for thought.

When I see the boy and his friend
walking up the road
to deliver the newspaper.

They wear caps and sweaters,
and one boy has a bag over his shoulder.
They are so happy
they aren't saying anything, these boys.

I think if they could, they would take
each other's arm.
It's early in the morning,
and they are doing this thing together.

They come on, slowly.
The sky is taking on light,
though the moon still hangs pale over the water.

Such beauty that for a minute
death and ambition, even love,
doesn't enter into this.

Happiness. It comes on
unexpectedly. And goes beyond, really,
any early morning talk about it.

(HT: Gnuegend Gnade)
______________

Today, happiness is sleeping in late, a Christmas shopping trip planned with one of my favorite people, one last writing center session to polish my personal statement for the University of Chicago.

Happy Thursday!

Something about mystery

I am concerned with mystery. In these first weeks of Advent, the world is pregnant with expectation; fecundity reigns; the questions, as it turn out, proliferate.

The title of the book, Madeleine L'Engle's The Irrational Season, should have warned me, but I am oblivious to warnings sometimes. She mentions the man presumptuous enough to think he can know everything. She says that we know better than that, and I am worried, not because I believe I'll ever know everything, but because I want to believe that everything can be known.

And yet, they tell me, the unknown is powerful. There is beauty, they add, in mystery; in the end, it is a sign of our cosmic insufficiency that we have to admit we know only that we don't know.

I balk at this. I return L'Engle's book to the library; I begin formulating questions and subdivisions of questions: I want to know the degrees of mystery: why and how and how much. I ask, pettily, for some token--something physical on which I can place my hands, something small enough to wrap my mind around, something that will make me feel confident in my small self and the stabs we are all making in the dark.

What I get is beauty and power. Crystalline edges of light, the piercing shards of a sunset, undeserved love: physical things rendered intangible, and intangible things rendered physical by the sheer wonder of the unknown.

Umberto Eco "On Some Functions of Literature"

[I am not] idealistic enough to believe that literature can offer relief to the vast number of people who lack basic food and medicine. But I would like to make one point: the wretches who roam around aimlessly in gangs and kill people by throwing stones from a highway bridge or setting fire to a child--whoever these people are--turn out this way not because they have been corrupted by computer "new speak" (they don't even have access to a computer) but rather because they are excluded from the universe of literature and from those places where, through education and discussion, they might be reached by a glimmer from the world of values that stems from and sends us back again to books. (p. 4)

Things the universe didn't owe me (but that I've been given anyhow)

• Sharply chill air
• 15-minute finals in Ancient Greek
• The tops of brick buildings and the edges of leaves rimmed in a frosty, golden morning glow
• Philosophy of Art take-home finals that turn out to be more interesting than expected
• Coldplay
• The Weepies
• Madeleine L'Engle
• Books of poetry, fiction, and philosophy ordered through the library for Winter Break: justice, feminism, the 1919 Spanish influenza epidemic, university life
• Perfect and almost-perfect sentences
  
• Encouraging words from student writers: "You saved my life this term;" "This is the first time I've had fun at the Writing Center;" "Thank you;" "Thanks"

***********

Happiness (fortune-born, rationally-secured)

The second stage in the classic model of creativity is the "incubation stage." An idea or difficulty presents itself to the person and then subsequently slips out of the person's consciousness before reappearing in a new form or in the context of new possibilities during the "moment of insight." We don't really know what goes on in the mind during the incubation stage: some say we stop thinking about the idea altogether, others claim that we are unconsciously mulling it over, both sides admit that this stage of the creative process is important.

I am nearing the end of fall term. A paper and a take-home final still need to be written, there are three finals to study for, and the first set of graduate school application deadlines is looming in the near future.

But today is Friday. The plan was to write unceasingly; mostly, I thought a lot, rearranged some words, worked up a new thesis statement, wrote a new outline. I slept, too. Now, a few hours away from an evening full of activities, I am trying to decide whether it would be wise to commit the problems of the day to my unconscious and let them have a night to resolve themselves.

I am leaning towards yes, but at this stage of the game, the question has less to do with creative efficacy than it does with the demands of deadlines. Can I afford the time?

Fine Art Friday

René Magritte

December light

It is afternoon, the sleepy-time of these winter days when a lulling darkness begins to lap at the air and my mind is heavy with the past hours of work. This is not, I repeat, the most productive slice of my day, but I had promised that I would meet her, and so here I am.

This draft, we decide, is better; her face glows. But today I know it's none of my doing. I have to apologize, in fact, for confusing the last draft with a bad explanation of a key term. "I'm glad," I say, "that you got things sorted out in spite of me."

She touches me lightly on the shoulder, still smiling. She says it's alright. We're in this together, she says. Learning together.

***

Tonight, in the still of this first December night, I struggle through my own writing project. I am starting with a blank page because the old one was too confused, too cluttered with bad explanations of crucial terms. I am frustrated because I want to mean what I say and then say it well, but the words dodge and shift, syntax confounds, and it's just. not. there.

***

I wish I could bottle the moment and bring it to work with me.

I've said this before, haven't I?

But I think it's important to say--not too often, of course, but deliberately: it's a hard business, this business of word-smithing; we confuse ourselves, or are ourselves confused; we're wrong a lot of the time; we have to start over.

But then we come back, re-open, re-think, and maybe this time something clicks into place.

Our faces glow.

Along the same lines

There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations--these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit--immortal horrors or everlasting splendours. This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn: We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously--no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption. And our charity must be a real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner--no mere tolerance, or indulgence which parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment. Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbour is the holiest object presented to your senses. If he is your Christian neighbour he is holy in almost the same way, for in him also Christ vere latitat--the glorifier and the glorified, Glory Himself, is truly hidden.

— C.S. Lewis (The Weight of Glory)

(HT: The thoughtful author of Semicolon)