A Journal of Life Pursued

Archive for the ‘The Examined Life’ Category


A Footnote

In The Examined Life on March 15, 2013 at 4:00 pm

Tribe member and “…house…” reader Pat commented on the morning post, The Practice of Discovery, and offered a quote that makes a nice compliment to the post. The writer is Ken Gire. I thought you might appreciate it.

“Shaped from something of earth and something of heaven, we were torn between two worlds. A part of us wanted to hide. A part of us wanted to search. With half-remember words still legible in our hearts and faintly sketched images still visible in our souls, some of us stepped out of hiding and started our search.

Though we hardly knew it.

We painted to see if what was lost was in the picture. We composed to hear if what was lost was in the music. We sculpted to find if what was lost was in the stone. We wrote to discover if what was lost was in the story.

Through art and music and stories we searched for what was missing from our lives.

Though at times we hardly knew it. Thought at times we could hardly keep from knowing it.”

Thanks, Pat.

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The Practice of Discovery

In Creativity, The Examined Life, The infinity of ideas on March 15, 2013 at 6:00 am

For a while, as a young man, I wanted to be an archeologist. I moved on, as young men do. I still, however, harbor a need of excavation, which is another way of saying for discovery.

Pollock at work

Pollock at work

I recently read an essay by architect, thinker, and designer, Lance Hosey. The piece was called Why We Love Beautiful Things, and the comment that caught my eye was:

“Could Pollock’s late paintings result from his lifelong effort to excavate an image buried in all our brains?”

I am drawn to this notion, the idea that the “image is buried in all our brains.” I made a note of this sentence because it rings true. I know less about Jackson Pollock’s art than I do about archeology, yet I believe in discovery and, on occasion, understand the motive behind it.

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We live within the embrace of linear progression. That is, life on a line, moving

Art of Jackson Pollock

Art of Jackson Pollock

right. This fashion of cognition is a result, I think, of learning to read, left to right across the page. It does not surprise me that in Eastern cultures, where reading flows in other directions or is contained within an visual character, that life is,  traditionally depicted, not on a progressive time-line, but as mandala, a wheel, a circle.

If Pollock’s pursuit was to plumb the human psyche, it was devoid of the linear. It takes an artist to show us the myth that is progression; that the study should not be forward to become, but deep to be.

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You will have to excuse me please today. I know I have grown ponderous, and perhaps silly. Sorry–it’s just that sometimes you’ve got to give an idea some breathing room, no matter what. (It is a type of excavation.)

Have a nice weekend,

d

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Tipping Forward

In Books, Life, The Examined Life on March 14, 2013 at 6:10 am
Geography of the Imagination, Guy Davenport

Geography of the Imagination, Guy Davenport

I don’t recall how or when I discovered Guy Davenport, but when it happened, it changed everything. From the Paris Review interview with Davenport: 

“His books have never been widely read, by popular standards, but they tend to be deeply read by those lucky enough to find them; he is perhaps as close to being a cult writer as one can come while having been singled out for praise by George Steiner in The New Yorker, yet his work has none of the thinness of the cult writer. For all its strangeness, it seems destined to endure.”

Says Davenport, “I learned early on that what I wanted to know wasn’t what I was being taught.” Geography of the Imagination–the book to start with.

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“Life can only be understood backward; but it must be lived forward.” ~ Kierkegaard. We exist like kids on a playground, teetering backward into biography, tipping forward into hope.

* * *

Upon waking yesterday, Carole declared, “I love waking up happy.” –which reminded me of Emerson’s statement: “The days are gods.”

* * *

My father: “The woman came by to get the paperwork from the move. I told her you had it.”

Me: “Dad, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Dad: “You mean I didn’t just move?”

“No, Dad. You didn’t just move.”

“Keep an eye on me, son. I’m having hallucinations.”

Dad will be 91 in two weeks. He has had two TIAs in less than two months. Every day I observe the increasing wear and tear, the momentum of age. Difficult stuff, indeed.

* * *

As a hiker and once climber, I appreciate the occasional difficulty in moving forward–the thinning air, the heavy legs, the want of sleep.  In this situation, there is but one way to keep the body in sync with the mind: lean into the problem. When we can’t take another step, we can lean. A person will follow into a lean. Along these lines, I made a Moleskine note once, from a trip to Tibet, a monk’s statement: “He’s no more who he used to be…and he’s not yet what he will become.” Simply, Kierkegaard is right: we exist on a fulcrum. These are things I came to know, but was never taught.

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So What?

In Creativity, The Examined Life, Writers on March 6, 2013 at 6:00 am
Russo's new memoir

Russo’s new memoir

I heard Richard Russo comment last night that the writer of a memoir must ask himself “So what?” Russo, a Mainer, and holder of a Pulitzer for his novel Empire Falls, has a new book out, a memoir, Elsewhere. (I own the book, but haven’t picked it up just yet.) He continued by saying that simply because the writer grew up in a rural environment, escaped to elsewhere, and wrote a book about it does not make, necessarily, for an interesting book. Hence the challenge: So what? I am reminded of Fran Lebowitz‘s comment that, “Having been unpopular in high school is not just cause for book publication.”

I walked home from Russo asking myself, So what?

Here I am, the next day, sitting at my desk, wondering still, So what? So what does it matter that I sit here day and after day and compose my thoughts and frame my questions? The question, So what? puts the kill to any good writer’s buzz, trust me. This is an honest question–and not just for the thinker in his loft on a snowy Maine afternoon. It is a question the pilgrim of any journey must ask.

Here’s what I think. I think that the very question carries its answer. By asking So what? one has engaged a degree of attention that makes the difference. It’s when we don’t ask that a soul-sucking vacuum is created. Intention verses mindlessness. I have my mother to thank for the question, What are your motivations? There is deep intention in that question and just in asking it one cannot escape the consequences. What are your motivations holds a response to So what?

The publishing writer, Russo, must ask the question So what? He is engaged in an act of commerce, as well as art. That must weigh in his motivation. Certainly, if he doesn’t ask the question his publisher or his editor will. So what?, in this instance, must be answered in a manner that includes dollars and cents. But to the self-publishing writer-blogger, to the diarist, to the lone photographer, to the home musician, to the elderly watercolorist, the laborer, the thinker, the question So what? carries a profound nuance.

Camus: "A man without ethics is a wild beast loosed upon this world."

Camus: “A man without ethics is a wild beast loosed upon this world.”

Without the weight of commerce associated with it, the question So what? is fraught and imposing. I cannot answer the question of So what? for you. But I can suggest that in the very question you will find a kernel of an answer; that the question alone poses a threat to the mindless action, the thoughtless gesture, the perfunctory exercise of existence. To paraphrase Camus, without asking So what? a person is just a wild beast loosed upon the world.

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Pinsky, Hegel, Nietzsche, Chatwin, & Faulkner

In Death, Life, Philosophy, The Examined Life, Writers on March 5, 2013 at 6:00 am

The poet Robert Pinsky made a comment I noted in my journal: “Will your children’s grandchildren remember your name?” What a plague is this question! It burrows to the core of the most tender insecurity I harbor, being forgotten. It is not death, nor dying, that troubles me so much as this. I am at my most alert to cosmic inconsequence when dealing with darkest concerns. In some twisted logic, this state brings a satisfaction.

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The great philosopher Friedrich Hegel‘s (1770-1831) last words are reported to be: “Only one man has ever understood me, and he didn’t understand me.” It has been debated who Hegel had in mind, but most scholars think he was referring to Karl Marx. It is recorded that Marx contended that he was, indeed, the one person who understood Hegel, claiming that the philosopher did not even understand himself.

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Nietzsche‘s thought experiment of eternal recurrence compels one to ask: If my life is to be lived over and over am I troubled or delighted? If I am troubled then it follows that life has been something other than what I wish it’d been. According to Nietzsche, consequently, I have yet to be that which I should become. This has been instilled deep and uprooting the thought of “becoming” is a challenge. Yet, I am learning to release this notion (of becoming), and settling with the subtle comfort of being. It is, at this stage of life, a big deal.

* * *

Bruce Chatwin, in his essay Anatomy of Restlessness, paraphrases Montaigne: “I know well what I am fleeing from, but not what I am looking for.” I used to flee. But no longer. I am, however, still looking.

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Faulkner, Library of America Edition

Faulkner, Library of America Edition

What’s on the nightstand: Faulkner.

Backstory: I was visiting with my friend, the poet, Megan Grumbling, recently. We were discussing our literary preferences and confessed, each, that we’d never read Faulkner, at least read no more than The Bear, his famous short story. One of us observed that a reader is either a Hemingway reader or a Faulkner reader, like a person is either a cat person or a dog person. (I say “one of us observed” because I don’t recall who said it. We both like bourbon and were sitting at a well-stocked bar…’nough said.) I came away from that conversation with the need to rectify my literary shortcoming, hence the Faulkner. Such is life for those hell-bent on self-improvement.


A Fashion of Discomfort

In Memoir, The Examined Life on March 1, 2013 at 6:00 am

I read in the blogosphere of a writer celebrating five years turning the wheel of his effort. With a few caveats, he comments that he is comfortable toiling in obscurity. I commend him. I am not, honestly, comfortable doing anything in obscurity. I simply harbor too much hunger, which is not necessarily a good thing. I wonder if this blogger truly is so comfortable or rather is attempting to convince himself of a comfort? Obscurity seems such a very cold corner of the universe.

I try to write a few days ahead of a post, always leap-frogging forward. This affords me a bit of space to revise and brush up my prose before hitting the Publish button. That is not the case today. Today I am up against it, having squandered my wiggle room with false starts, bringing me a tad closer to despair.  Maybe if obscurity were less intimidating I would be more comfortable in this situation. But then, upon reflection, I know that being comfortable is too often a trap.

Most of what I have grown to value in my experience was born in some fashion of discomfort. This holds true of the physical certainly, the mountains climbed, trails hiked, horizons pursued. Intellectually, it remains more challenging. There is nothing seemingly so quick to obstruction as the neural pathways. Those synaptic gaps require constant bridge building. If the universe lurches to complexity, as we’ve discussed, then the mind in its quality seems to move contrary-wise, inching a smidgen closer to the simple with each hour, a nudge toward obscurity. This is a rising tide against which we cannot afford a breaking levee. Toil on we must.

I used to play the classical guitar and every evening I would take my instrument and my sheet music and practice–in obscurity, I assumed. My goals were modest. I didn’t wish to play in public, nor aspired to anything but self-satisfaction. There seems a desperate purity to that, I think. Years later I learned that my young children came to count on falling asleep to their father’s music making. There is nothing desperate or obscure about that. Indeed, obscurity might be harder to come by than we imagine.

Most of the time we function under the impression of a self-possessed singularity, blind to the overlaps and connections in which we truly exist. A fellow blogger writes of obscurity; then I pick the theme up and now, here, you read my reflections on the subject; and quite easily we come to understand the reaching nature of each effort and expression and gesture. I might go so far as to suggest that obscurity, in the web of totality, is simply a false concept. This thought charges me with responsibility and a modicum of comfort.

Thanks for reading. You refute the premise of obscurity. Have a terrific weekend.

d