“Proust had brought off the tremendous feat of letting the whole world go by a lifetime in an instant.☼ But this very concentration in which things that normally just fade and slumber consume themselves in a flash is called rejuvenation . . . the constant attempt to charge an entire lifetime with the utmost awareness . . .
☼ To which brings to my mind – John Lennon singing about Instant Karma's gonna get you, momento mori, think Rembrandt's etching of 'Faust', or Jaun de Valdes Leal and 'The Allegory of Death' - Ω - in octu oculi -
. . . The wrinkles and creases on our faces are the registration of the great passions, vices, insights that called on us; but we, the masters, were not home”. (p.212-213)
Like a pearl diver who descends to the bottom of the sea, not to excavate the bottom and bring it up to light but to pry loose the rich and the strange, the pearls and the coral in the depths, and to carry them to the surface, this thinking delves into the depths of the past-but not in order to resuscitate it the way it was and contribute to the renewal of extinct ages. What guides this thinking is the conviction that although the living is subject to the ruin of the time, the process of decay is at the same time a process of crystallization, that in the depth of the sea, into which sinks and is dissolved what once was alive, some things “suffer a sea change” ψ and survive in new crystallized forms and shapes that remain immune to the elements, as though they waited only for the pearl diver who one day will come down to them and bring them up into the world of the living – as “thought fragments” as something “rich and strange”, and perhaps even as everlasting Urphanomene. ~ (p. 51).
~ Archetypes. Or perhaps I could offer = perennial threads?
ψ From the Shakespeare’s – The Tempest, I, 2 ☈
In a sense, every individual is a historian of his or her own personal experience . . . .This task of making sense of the past again becomes important in old age. . . . Having a record of the past can make a great contribution to the quality of life. . . . It makes it possible to select and preserve in memory events that are especially pleasant and meaningful, and so to ‘create’ a past that will help us deal with the future. Of course such a past may not be literally true. But then the past can never be literally true in memory: it must be continuously edited, and the question is only whether we take creative control of the editing or not.” (p. 132-133). Csikszentmihalyi - FLOW - And Cole presents the metaphor of life as a journey. And there is Odysseus again and Sophocles and the riddle of the Sphinx. Again, there is the wheel of life and the wheel of fortune. And Time moving from seasonal/circular to linear/clock-bound. Father Time (Chrono–Saturn). The circle was broken and the stages of life in lock-step sequence becomes dominant, revisiting old friends again. Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and then oddly enough the similarity with the author’s name Thomas Cole’s paintings from The Voyage of Life and I almost fall out my chair when Thomas R. Cole (the author) also included a reference to a poem by Oliver Wendell Holmes titled, “The Chambered Nautilus” as a symbolic metaphor for the spiritual pilgrimage of life. The Nautilus again! I remember the first time I saw the beauty of its design in my biology class many years ago - My path was altered and it was biology that captured my soul and later Holmes’s essays, “Over Tea Cups” are discussed and that is where several threads [memory + Nautilus + time] became interwoven:
Unlike his expansive, forward-looking vision in ‘The Chambered Nautilus,’ (1857-58), the chambers of eighty-year old Holmes’s consciousness centered on memory: “In the midst of the misery, as many would call it, of extreme age, there is often a divine consolation in recalling the happy moments and days and years of times long past.” (p. 157). Moreover, Holmes argued that the mind in deep old age did not expand progressively like ‘the Chambered Nautilus’, leaving its past behind. Rather, mentation consisted of recollecting, repeating, and reweaving the material of lifetime” (p. 157).
<Switching gears in my thought process. On another track> ========
A slight digression to clarify something here !
Hold it! Stop! Not quite right, Mr. Holmes and Mr. Cole. I see your point and I concede that the chambers of the Nautilus give the appearance of looking forward, especially with the fact the animal, Nautilus pompilius, lives only in the last chamber, but in fact, the other chambers are not left behind, they are not completely sealed off because the walls (septa) dividing the chambers are actually pierced by a tube (siphuncle), much like a thread connecting the different chambers together, they are interconnected, so that gas and liquid exchange occurs through the siphuncle and it is in fact the way the Nautilus can regulate its buoyancy. Yes, it appears forward-looking but it is still connected to the past chambers and the connections to its past, its history in a sense, threads connected to the past, enable the Nautilus can be effectively mobile in the ocean. <Janus-faced, beginnings and endings, Janus-faced> We don’t see the siphuncle, the inner thread, but without it, would there be the wonderment of the creature and beauty of the shell? Moving forward, but still carrying with us the chambers of buoyancy, connected by the thread, Ariadne’s thread, out of the labyrinth and through Picasso’s painting, “Minotaur Moving His House” and into Jasper John’s series of paintings, “The Seasons”, the ladder and rope. I believe, No, wait! It is more that that - It was also there in the Rooke’s chapter where she wrote the profile. Here it is in my notes -
The task of the Vollendungsroman is to discover for its protagonist and for the reader some kind of affirmation in the face of loss . . . Out lives are temporary; all are circumscribed by the reality of death. But this is felt more strongly in fiction concerned with old age, so that a special intensity, resulting from the darkness to darkness, characterizes the Vollendungsroman. The writer’s imagination is challenged by the prospect of the character’s demise and by the need to ‘capture’ a life before it vanishes. (p.248).
Constance Rooke (1992). In Cole, Van Tasel, and Kastenbaum (Eds.). Handbook of the Humanities and Aging. Springer Publishing Co.
Capture a life before it vanishes. Hey, that’s it! This blog series – Damn, there it is.
One must wrestle with the experiences of life and at some point along the way we may find that a reweaving a collective past into the present and reweaving a personal past into each stage of life are essential means of preparing for one’s journey into the unknown future (p. 250).
• From Giambattista Vico, I have learned that our history and our “times” are a worthy object and subject {a play on words perhaps?} of human knowledge and thus, verum factum, can be found in mythology, Chronos or Saturn and tradition and language.
Our mythologies agree with the institutions under consideration, not by force and distortion, but directly, easily, and naturally. They will be seen to be civil histories of the first peoples, who were everywhere naturally poets (#353),
We made our history. Our sense of chronology, ingenium, thus why can we not understand it as such? It’s not some mysterious unknown. We have met the history and it is us. Not just cogito ergo sum but the importance of place and time, embedded in the swirling mix of what humans have made. Contra the Cartesian Cogito. Start with history and work from there, best stated by Vico:
The great fragments of antiquity, hitherto useless to science because they lay begrimed, broken, and scattered, shed great light when cleaned, pieced together, and restored” (# 357 – the New Science).
But with his focus on integration and synthesis, I have also wondered, was the work of Vico not only underestimated —– but considered anachronistic during his time? Which would be ironic. Or like Dr. John would say: I been in the right place but it must have been the wrong time.
which brings me to Julia Kristeva’s book, Proust and the Sense of Time. It was here that he discovered the notion of Proustian time, and metamorphosis, an embodied imagination, and an interesting declaration by the author:
Memory is but the servant of imagination: it performs an alchemical role in soldering the reality of things to their spiritual equivalent (p. 90)
And from Barbara G. Meyerhoff,
Memory is a continuum ranging from vague, dim shadows to the brightest, most vivid totality. It may offer opportunity not merely to recall the past but to relive it, in all its original freshness, unaltered by intervening changes and reflections . . . Remembering is requisite to sense and order. Through it, a life is given shape that extends back in the past and forward to the future, a simplified, edited tale where completeness may be sacrificed for moral and aesthetic purposes. Then history approaches art, myth, and ritual. Perhaps this is why Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, is the mother of Muses. Without Remembering, we lose our history and ourselves (p. 383).
Is it interesting that Jean Amery in his book on Aging – opens up with a passage from Proust – from his book Time Regained -
I had lived like a painter
climbing a road overhanging a lake, a view
of which is hidden from him by a curtain of rocks and
trees. Through a gap he catches a glimpse of the lake, with
its whole expanse before him, and he takes up his brushes.
But already the night is coming, the night in which he will not be able to print anymore
and upon which no day will follow.
• From Timeshifting by Stephan Rechtschaffen
What lingers in the memory are only those moments when we’re truly present, whether those moments were momentous or ordinary. The rest of the time, when we’re doing things just to get them finished, simply going through the motions of life—all of those days, months, years, recede into a gray blur (p. 191).
A gray blur. There is something about that phase that I like and I believe I have come across that feeling and that expression before. Remember the Proust and Hegel connection? Gray on gray and Montainge’s expression, hair freshly gray, and while Lachesis has thread to spin, and there is George Gray in Spoon River Anthology. Gray – grey. I can feel it, it’s right there. What is it? What am I trying to get a handle on with this? Gray and getting older, not black and white, but gray And what? What about the gray? What does it mean? There is something there but just out of reach. Maybe it will manifest later and at the right time. In the mean time, perhaps the message in the movie Gattaca was meaningful enough. We can still aspire to great things and overcome the limits in front of us. If there is no gene for fate or the human spirit, we can, despite our flaws and limitations, grow the wings of Daedalus and take flight. We can change and yet still be the same -
- And what was it about that time in and around the year 1922? The creative energy. The literary works produced in that year – Ulysses, The Waste Land, Siddhartha, Dunio Elegies, Sonnets to Orpheus, The Golden Bough, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus – and in that same year Marcel Proust died. À la recherche du temps perdu. And so where did the time go on June 16, 1904? It depends. There is Leopold Bloom walking, thinking, reflecting back and forth in time to where time it mashed and melted and reconstructed. Joyce’s words float, they ebb and flow, and drift suspended, like Dali clocks made of wax, persistent yet disintegrated, streams of life, steams of consciousness. Whose consciousness I wonder? Leopold Bloom’s? Molly’s? Stephen’s? All three intertwined? Proust with tea and madeleine and Bloom with his soap. A Gordian knot. A uroboros. A labyrinth. Yes, it is quite gray. Gray searching eyes, gray clouds, gray clothes, gray flags, and ineluctable modality. History, which Stephen is trying escape from. But not quite like the crab of history that Nietzsche talked about in the Twilight of the Idols where one who looks backward also believes in backward-ness. No it is memory which Joyce is trying create. That becomes the art of the story. The story has wings to escape the labyrinth up and over. Joyce you are the fabulous artificer. You escaped your nightmare and awoke the history within us. And we ask – how to escape time? One way is to create the text and to create the story. Our history is but the story we create. Habent sua fata libelli. The layers of the pearl. The gray pearl. Our memory the nacre. Vita brevis ars longa and if that is the case then I better get moving. One thing is certain, at least subjectively, is that it all moves even faster with each year that goes by. Or is it that the momento mori, which was relegated to the back row in youth, is now our walking shadow? Yes, the shadows dancing. The celestial light in the mirror. In ictu oculi. We strut and fret into our middle years and now afraid that our story will heard no more for fear that it was all for naught. La vida es sueno. The things that do not last. Vanitas. Dust in the wind. And what did it signify? – littera scripta manet –
• Α - From Şterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristran Shandy, Gentleman, I have learned that time [chronological and chrono-illogical] and the written word —– (Are Sterne’s writings really more like conversations1 as Russian nesting dolls?Ю ) can be both magical ***** and a source of confusion and chaos. Who is on first? I mean that in a typographical sense and I do believe but cannot prove it at this point that the writings of Mark Twain’s [Let’s say, for example taking the hybrid cross {χ} between A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court + Huckleberry Finn and of James Joyce [using The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as the example {but then again my only one so far}] share a lot in common with Sterne’s style of narrative and text pauses, leaps, and sidebars ▓ – but that is all assumption, by the bye, about writers in a time future beyond Sterne’s, whereas I can see his legacy grounded in Rabelais and Cervantes (neither of which I have read) {but I make note that I should} and he also makes mention of Pilgrim’s Progress and Montaigne. I have also learned that words (sub-atomic), and the sentences (atomic), and the paragraphs (the elements), and the Chapters (Solar System), and the Volumes (galaxies) are more like a spider’s web, and all interconnected joined together and just when you think the solipsistic Black Widow may appear, Sterne pulls you into his demolition derby. Even the very critics who don’t believe that the sermon should be lingua interruptus – will be nevertheless converted to his helter-skelter ∆ style of combining Ekphrasis and reminiscence scattered about like buckshot; with story lines twisted and folded like moebius strips and Necker tubes —- and yet I wonder? –
• Is Tristam Shandy ± Laurence Stern ≥ a philosophical romantic and/or comic after all?§ Or was it just a cock and bull story
1 – see first sentence Volume 11 -Chapter XI
‡ Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine; _____they are the life, the soul of reading; —take them out of this book for instance, –you might as well take the book along with them; (Volume 1; Chapter XXII).
Ю . . . I have constructed the main work and the adventitious parts of it with such intersections, and have so complicated and involved the digressive and progressive movements, one wheel within another, that the whole machine, in general, has been kept a-going,— (Volume 1; Chapter XXII).
▓ Could a histographer drive on his history, as a muleteer drives on his mule, _____ straight forward; —-for instance, from Rome all the way to Loretto, without ever once turning his head aside either to the right hand or to the left, ____ he might venture to foretell you to an hour when he should get to the journey’s end; —-but the thing is, morally speaking, impossible: For, if he is man of the least spirit, he will have fifty deviations from a straight line to make with this or that party as he goes along, which he can no ways avoid. He will have views and prospects to himself perpetually soliciting his eye, which he can no more help standing still to look at than he can fly; (Volume I; Chapter XIV).
And this my favorite:
Time wastes too fast: every letter I trace tells me with what rapidity Life follows my pen; the days and hours of it, more precious, my dear Jenny! Than the rubies about thy neck, are flying over our heads like light clouds on a windy day, never to return more____ everything presses on_____while thou are twisting that lock,_____see!, it grows grey; and every time I kiss thy hand to bid adieu, and every absence which follows it, are preludes to that eternal separation which we are shortly to make (Volume IX; Chapter VIII).
But I digress – Back to the Stendhal and The Red and the Black, like a roulette wheel, his chapters as pockets, the Wheel in the Sky, or cups that alternate in a balanced symmetry, as black and red alternate, a Wheel of Fortune, but leave it to E Pluribus Unum {Duo} to create higher edge to the house with more green. Spinning Wheel – 0-32-15-19-4-21-2-25-17-34-6-27-13-36↓ -11-30-8-23- 10-5-24-16-33-1-20-14-31-9-22-18-29-7-28-12-35-3-26 – And Julien is helplessly a Romantic, lost in the irony of not sure which path to take, Napoleonic army or Spiritual pastor or remain a discontent in civilization. And again there is emotion and reason in conflict, the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. But Stendhal holds up the mirror to my life as well. Narcissus and Goldmund. It was easier to see the portrait of me as a young man – but now? What have I been doing? Is there anything authentic in all of this? I feel I have been wasting time. Playing games, involved in opportunistic bullshit. But nothing like the guillotine to make one an existentialist and ponder the following:
A mayfly born at nine in the morning, during the summer’s long days, and dying at five that evening: How could it comprehend the word night? (Chapter 44).
And I have learned that Julien Sorel is on the journey, like Dante, like Voltaire’s Candide, and Homer’s Ulysses, but Stendhal has presented Julien’s life as one of choices in the binomial mode. Red or Black. The damned dichotomy again. Platonist or Aristotelian? Vita active or vita Comtempliva? Beavis or Butthead? Which is the stairway to heaven? And now I hear the song of Led Zeppelin in my head – because there are two paths to go by and now I am haunted by the Road Not Taken and I hear Frost telling us with a sigh, two roads diverged in a wood, and I
I took the one that everyone said to take, and now instead of divergence, I am asked to look at convergence, but be careful because not all that glitters is gold, right Emperor Aurelius? –
• From Collingwood, I have learned —- Question: “How, or on what conditions, can the historian know the past?” Answer: “the historian must re-enact the past in his own mind” and that Occam had his razor, but Descartes had his machete, and that “history” may be seen not as a circle, ♁ cyclical movement, yes, but as a spiral Ө—- and that the historian is to show how the present has come into existence and not what the future will be and contra Hegel {one thread = ♕political history} and Marx {one thread = ♔economic history}, rather there are many threads to discover, not just one, out of the labyrinth . . . but it is still the way we conceive the world *—- sub specie praeteritorum. It is the world, the world of ideas—-
Ө History, on the contrary, never repeats itself; its movements travel not in circles, but in spirals, § and apparent repetitions are always differentiated by having acquired something new. (p.114 – The Idea of History. Oxford at the Clarendon Press.1951 – London. Great Britain. R.G. Collingwood).
§ Have not come across my friend Nautilus pompilius in a while – Logarithmic
spirals and instead of Roulette numbers. Could it be Fibonacci numbers?
* If I look at the sun and am dazzled, ☀ my being dazzled is here only, in me and not the sun; but in so far as I perceive the sun, by thinking ‘what dazzles me is there in the sky’, I perceive it as there, away from me. Similarly the historian thinks of his object as there, or rather then, away from him in time; and because history is knowledge and not mere experience, he can experience both as then and as now: now in the immediacy of historical experience, but then in its mediacy (p. 158).
• From Wilhelm Dilthey, I have learned <and in the interest of time I my readings were focused on key chapters only> —–that Dilthey talks of fog banks [to which I say – ‘he should know’ – given that his writings are as dense as Augustine], but in the context of the flow of time, this emerges as a powerful ‘thought fragment’ to add to the weaving of a palimpsest -
As a state of consciousness the past is distinguished from the present by all the traits that distinguish memories from lived experiences. The future is indeterminate merely in terms of imaginary representations. It is a world of possibilities constantly pursuing us like fog banks ♒ when we look down from the Alps. But these possibilities are images connected with the attitude of expectation. The dawning future always influences the changeable consciousness of the present in terms of a mood – great happiness, imminent death, the tragic feeling of life with old age in Faust, Part II (Vol. 1; Book Four; Chapter 4; p. 382).
◘ Make cross-reference to Caspar David Friedrich’s “Wanderer above a Sea of Fog”; and remember Elijah Browning? – from Master’s Spoon River Anthology – “And I saw the mists below me hiding all below them”
- And what exactly is being woven here? Okay there is the representations of the past and the future, but as we sit here in the present, there should be the Proustian recognition of the details, the moment as it exists before it becomes the past or lost in the mists of the future. But something else is present above the sea of fog ? ♒ The wanderer is reaching for the star. What is being woven here is perhaps Bildungsroman. Yes, what I have learned from Dilthey is that notion of that our lives can, perhaps, be structured as Bildungsroman. Holderin. Hyperion. Novalis. Ofterdingen. Goethe. Wilhelm Meister. What a minute! Whose life are we talking about? And are the threads the same for other people too? How in the hell can that be? Those are just stories from the past. What could they possibly offer to me a white – middle-class male, and born in the middle of the previous century, a baby boomer, and looking ahead in this century too. And here is Dilthey proposing that -
“ . . . the Bildungsroman is distinguished from all previous biographical compositions in that it intentionally and artistically depicts that which is universally human in such a life course? . . . .Life’s dissonances and conflicts appear as necessary transitions to be withstood by the individual on his way towards maturity and harmony.” (Vol. 5, Part II; pp. 273-274)
A universally human in a life course? How can the lived experience – Erlebnis – be universal? Or are there patterns, traits, experiences that are common threads? And across the generations? I doubt it. Everything seems to be about wiping the slate clean, ❏ a new start by throwing out the old dogma and the old rules of the few and elite. Born the USA means never having to say ‘just because,’ because it’s the big Etch-A-Sketch in the sky. But yet, regardless of culture, gender, race, income, age or cohort group. Are there universals for all us? I’m confused as hell here. I see more and more bifurcation and choice and possibilities and endless branching of roads not taken, and in the end, when it is time to look back, ☚ the Eriksonian ‘integrity’ of it all, we ask ourselves – No regrets? Or the regret that there was not enough time spent at bringing up the pearls and the coral. In other words, too much time spent in Groundhog Day? And then when the end appeared on the horizon or just over our shoulder one day – Boom! Kierkegaard’s sledgehammer writings on the earnestness of death, but by then too late, game over, and right there on the edge is when I ask for a reprieve, a second chance, to reset the clock, to begin again, when in quick flashes I all I can see are the straight lines ═ carved by the Corps of Engineers, no digressions, no sidebars, no curves, no back eddies.
It’s like the joke I have heard before, ‘Why is it, and maybe it is the only time it will ever happen, that you get a police escort and get to run through all the red lights, is only after you are dead on the way to your own funeral? Yep ’straight to the grave’ and all that time your life was spent at stop lights and you waiting to get moving again. I could have used that time for more digressions and ‘fifty deviations’ from the planned trip ahead. But if that lesson and all of those lessons from the past are still present and available, then why have we not increased our individual and collective wisdom about the precious pearls and coral brought up from the depths? How can you read this from Tristram Shandy and not pause to reflect, ‘days and hours of it more precious, my dear Jenny! Than the rubies about thy neck, are flying over our heads like light clouds on a windy day, never to return more.’ Just one more moment more to reflect or give pause on the meditations of Marcus Aurelius? Or all the rest that has passed before me? Maybe because it is the past and it is all still broken! Here we are in 2008/2009 and still no great revelations about ‘how we made to the promised land.’ Nope, we are still digging around, scratching and clawing through the muck, and mucking through it. All that literature, all of the stories, all of the epic poems, all of the biographies, all of the memoirs, all of the journals and dairies, notebooks and post-it notes. Toward what? Tell me! Damn it. What is it? And please don’t tell me just ‘dust in the wind’ Or even the Nan-ism, which only a grandmother could possible come up with, ‘Someday you’ll know.’ If I don’t know by now, I never will ❮as he reflects upon the scope of his metaphysical questions ~ he then quickly decides not to go onto the slippery slopes of an ontological solioquium, but keeps the blogging soliloquy going❯ Is it all a complete unknown? Like a rolling stone. Shit, here we go again. Through the past darkly ☁, but dandelions don’t care about the time. Really? I am the walrus – koo-koo-ka-choo -
So let me re-group – huddle up. The past is a representation and tolerable and sometimes instructive via the Schopenhaurian tapestry flipped over and then to love and to work, to harmonize passion and reason, to be ready for the ‘sea-change,’ but the “sea-change” will occur with more attention to detail, and our focus on thinking poetically. God, I’m tired just thinking about it. Is not it easier just being comfortably numb. I wonder, if Pink Floyd thinking about the movie ‘The Graduate’? Or television in general? As I kid I could spend hours and hours putting together the plastic model airplanes and battleships. There were tons of pieces, but no problem, for tt was heaven in the moment of seeing it all in parts and then bringing it together, with every decal just right, the dollop of glue just right, the paints brushed on just so – comfortably numb? No, something else. But it’s been a while since I felt that intense, that focused. It was a happy innocence and I remember the adventures of traveling to the mountains. I was King Arthur in search of sweet maidens and to the beach in search of mermaids. I was the brave Ulysses and now I remember the song by Cream, ‘Tales of Brave Ulysses’ and then the sensory experience of Stephen Dedalus and girl on the beach. O heavenly God! The hopes and dreams, the possibilities, all before me. But now? What has happened? Can I retrieve all of that from my past? Is any of it worth putting to text? Into a web of connections? Can I weave the threads? Better yet, can I flip into the second half and be ready to show how they all create. Wait! Better yet still, can I recreate the spark and the fire of all the colors and designs from the second half? And would it be worth the energy and the time? But all of it for whom? Can my singularity, my individual live experience be of any worth to anyone beyond me? I mean who cares? And I’m just as guilty, because do I really want to wade through all the gravel of other people’s lives? Give me the biographical CliffsNotes. Just give me the gold nuggets, just show me the instructive threads. I don’t need to see the whole showroom of carpet – I don’t have the time.
• From Theodore Adorno, I have learned, to appreciate the beauty —-and the art —-of writing so cleanly [God knows ---- I am still the pilgrim and have a long ways to go] and his adept way of presenting the critique with precise scalpel cuts and you are left in the hands of the most competent surgeon – when it comes to repairing the two cultures of the sciences and the humanities –
The simplest reflection on the life of consciousness would teach us to what a slight extent insights, which are by now means arbitrary hunches, can be fully captured within the net of science. The work of Marcel Proust, which is no more lacking in a scientific-positivist elements than Bergson’s, is an attempt to express necessary and compelling insights into human beings and social relations that are not readily accommodated within science and scholarship, despite the fact that their claim to objectivity is neither diminished nor abandoned to a vague plausibility (Notes to Literature; the Essay as Form; Vol. I. p. 
And how does one attempt to express the necessary and compelling insights into human beings? —-Well, I am glad you asked bon ami [see Sieur de Montaigne]—-One way is through text [the essay form]and the narrative of memory and time —-and we need it now more than ever but it has become an anachronism {so sayeth Adorno} – Yes it has the ability to engage in weaving the interconnections – and it’s formal law is heresy (so sayeth Adorno}; heresy against orthodoxy and is skeptical of lofty ideals. Yet, and yet again, if the essay, if the narrative, if the text, can aspire to the enthusiastic fragment ! of Nietzsche:
If we affirm one single moment, we thus affirm not only ourselves but all existence. For nothing is self-sufficient, neither is us ourselves nor in things: and if our soul had trembled with happiness and sounded like a harp string just once, all eternity was needed to produce this one event (Nietzsche; from Vol. I; p. 23)
! Maybe that it was I have been searching for in all of the readings (?)
And I have learned of an interesting connection: Theodor Adorno writing about Thomas Mann who died in 1955 and written for Hermann Hesse on July 2, 1962 [Vol. 2] July 2, 1962? What the . . . .? – I was seven years old, the Berlin Wall went up. John Glenn and then Cuban Missile Crisis began to roll. To Kill a Mockingbird, Lawrence of Arabia, but written for Hesse? I don’t get it. Hermann Hesse died in 1962, but I thought Hesse died in August? What did Adorno know on July 2, 1962? –
I have also learned of Adorno’s love for books and his analysis – No—-I take that back {is it too late?} —-his sensitive insights toward Proust and what is at stake in Remembrance of Things Past –
The sense that he [Proust] emanates of something familiar in the midst of what is most out of the ordinary is due to the unparalleled discipline with which he handles things every individual once knew, in childhood, and the unrepressed, things that now return to him with the force of the familiar. What seems so extremely individuated in Proust is not inherently individuated; it seems so only because we no longer dare to react this way; or are capable of doing so. Actually Proust restores the promise of the universality we were cheated of. In his texts it makes us blush, like the mention of name carefully kept secret (Vol. II – Appendix- On Proust – p. 316).
- Guess what? It’s time to wrap this one up. (I wonder if you made it this far – my good reader)
So when you stop to think about it, all it takes is a little memory, because when we think it is something new and novel, it has probably happened before, twenty-like in 1965, in South Central Los Angeles, Watts, and again that had started on a routine traffic stop. And what were the conclusions from the commission that investigated the Watts riots? Something deeper was out of balance in the cities and it was related to jobs, housing, and schools. Something was also out of balance five years later from the Watts event, on May 4 at Kent State, the National Guards were called in, and then four dead in Ohio. Sometimes the world does change and evolve, but I wonder if the students in my class today know that after the Kent State event. In June of 1970, Congress changed the minimum American voting age from twenty-one to eighteen years of age, leading to the approval of the Twenty-sixth amendment to the constitution. Maybe all of this stuff, Watts, Vietnam, Woodstock, the Apollo mission to the moon, Kent State – all that is already history to them. The past – maybe it’s like what the end of the Korean War was for me. The armistice agreement in 1953, I wasn’t there, I wasn’t born yet, just twenty years difference, but what a difference it makes.
Go back twenty years from my birth year in ’55 and you got FDR signing the Social Security Act, and Huey Long – the Kingfish – was assassinated in Baton Rouge. And the Hoover Dam is finally done and I believe Ken Kesey was born then who went on to write,“One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” which became a movie in ’75 with Jack Nicholson, and Kesey also wrote Sometimes a Great Notion, which became a movie in ’71 with Paul Newman. Again all of which happened before this year’s freshmen were even born. Or what about Richard Brautigan, again born in 1935, and eh went on to write Trout Fishing in America in ’67 and In Watermelon Sugar in ’68. Elvis was also born in 1935, and so was Sonny Bono, and Gloria Steinem, and Carroll Burnett, and the best pitcher ever in baseball – Bob Gibson of the St. Louis Cardinals, and Woody Allen. They were all born in that the year, twenty years early from my birth year when Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. had died, and so did T.E. Lawrence, who was known as Lawrence of Arabia, who wrote Seven Pillars of Wisdom, who became the subject for the film directed by David Lean in 1962, who then directed Dr. Zhivagho in 1965, based on the book written by Boris Pasternak, who won the Nobel Prize in literature in ’58, and ten years later, the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, Martin Luther King Jr., and Bobby Kennedy assassinated, 2001: A Space Odyssey at the movies, and so was Planet of the Apes, and then back to the topic of the cold war, when the USS Pueblo was captured by North Koreans, and in ’68 - John Steinbeck died, and I became a teenager of thirteen, and twenty years later, the Summer Olympics were held in Seoul Korea. Pistol Pete Maravich died, the TV show “The Wonder Years” started up, which was really about growing up in the 60s and early 70s, and I got to read Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Marcia Marquez, which was a book about memory and the rivers of time, and the ageless love of Fermina Daza and Florentino Ariza, a remembrance of time and love, A la recherche du temps perdu, A Remembrance of Things Past, A searching for time lost, to Sonnet 30, I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought, And with old woes new wail me dear’s waste, to the Chicago Transit Authority in 1969, Does anybody really know what time it is? I don’t, but does anybody really care? If so, I can’t imagine why. About time, to Sonnet 19 and the Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion’s paws, but heading back to 1970, Guess Who? Well, there’s no time left for you, but lots of time for me. I guess that is one thing I will have in a few more months – lots of time. Time to finally read Proust. Damn I got through Dante, so might as well climb another mountain of words, and then back to Dante, Petrarch, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Blake, and Swinburne. Yes, from April to April, and in between Swinburne, and here we are in April, and I have learned about the triumph of time. It is not much that a man can save on the sands of time and in the garden of Proserpine. We are not sure of sorrow and joy was never sure, today will die tomorrow, time stoops to no man’s lure, especially in the Waste Land, Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean, we have drunken from things Lethean.
Yes, there is passing of the old guard, I can feel it, something new and different on the horizon. Time keeps on slipping into the future, along with me and a bunch of other baby boomers. And I can feel me and us moving into the next bracket. And those ahead of us saw it in a whole different light, and those behind us, in my classes, probably see it way different than me. What’s wrong with them? What do they want? Back in my days. God, I sound just like my father. Same threads, but being woven in different patterns, same fire, but it burns differently for each generation. Sure, it’s didn’t start with the baby boomers like in Billy Joel’s song beginning with Harry Truman in 1949 and going through 1989 with the cola wars because it’s been going for centuries and continues with Noriega, Gorbachev, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Desert Storm, and the Gulf War, but the torch has been passed. I can feel it, I see it in the classrooms. Do I tell my students about our first color TV in 1965? Well, it was because my old man wanted to see “The F.B.I. Show” with Inspector Lewis Erskine in living color. Maybe Coupland’s had the next group in the relay race figured out with his “Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture.” Maybe I’m just jacking off with legislated nostalgia, yuppies and slackers, Bonfire of the Vanities, and American Psycho, Bleeding Ponytails and Boomer Envy, Nirvana, Soundgarden, Spin Doctors, and then that freaking song from Pearl Jam. Time, memories, and aging. What the hell am I going to do next? But then again what am I afraid of? I can do just about anything. There won’t even be a portrait of the artist as a middle-aged man. Carry on wayward old man. What ever happened to the dreams? And the imagination? And the limitless possibilities? Now there is only the dark wood. The doors are shut. This is the end my beautiful friend. The end of my elaborate plans and end of the soft parade. It started back in ’69, back when I was in high school and I didn’t see the message at that time. All our lives we sweat and save, building for a shallow grave. Must be something else, as Jim Morrison would point out. Apocalypse now or never. Shit – only the good die young. Wow, how fast I’ve gone from Epicurean to Stoic in just a few years –
Time dominates experience. We live by watch and calendar. We eagerly trade megahertz for gigahertz. We spend billions of dollars to conceal time’s bodily influences. We uproariously celebrate particular moments in time even as we quietly despair its passage. – Brian Greene. “The Time We Thought We Knew” (New York Times, January 1, 2004).
Yes, to celebrate particular moments in time. That is key, isn’t it?
What alchemy can capture the essence of holding the moment?
Effortlessly?
Continually?
How to recreate the solstice? Tempus-stice the longest day.
To make every day a Bloomsday.
How to make time stand still?
To see illumination in Platonic ideals?
By climbing a 5.10b route on granite slab?
In the electric carnal embrace of skin to skin?
Skydiving?
Meditation?
Good company and a good meal?
Prayer?
Bungee jumping?
It will probably vary for each individual. Just as the string can produce different musical notes. Who can say?
As in the variations of Orff’s Carmina Burana:
Eugene Ormandy Philadelphia Orchestra.
Robert Shaw Atlanta Symphony Orchestra & Chorus.
Chor und Orchester der Deutschen Oper Berlin/Christian Hielemann
Will it be the black-and-white photography of Ansel Adams or the color photography of Galen Rowell?
Or –
to catch an artic grayling from a high mountain lake on a wet fly,
to view Vermeer’s painting Woman Holding a Balance,
to watch a cinnamon teal on the fly,
to hold your baby grandchild in your arms,
to view Georgia O’Keefe’s Ram’s Head and Hollyhock,
to serve barbeque ribs and cold beer,
to listen to Christopher Hogwood’s rendition of Mozart’s Requiem,
to eat a fresh sweet corn on the cob,
listening to Lisa Gerrard’s voice soar in “Elegy” (if that is what I can hear in heaven, count me in) from Immortal Memory,
hearing the song “White Room” by Cream and not caring what it means
heading down to Fisherman’s Wharf in the evening, listening to Chaka Khan’s “I Feel for You” on the radio,
spending the morning beachcombing,
the smell of lavender,
listening to Bach’s Mass in B Minor,
the taste of a ripened peach right from the tree,
to hear Sheila Chandra sing “Ever So Lonely,”
it will vary according to each vibration of the string.
Timeless
time
In the Zen poetry of Ryokan -
Months pass, days pile up
Like one intoxicated dream -
An old man sighs.
And Basho -
This autumn—
why I am growing old
Birds disappearing in the clouds.
I have added (so far) in this blog - a galaxy of findings and conclusions and statistics, and after I add it all up, what do I have? More science? – Where is the story? Where is the myth? Where is the art?
I think of what Carol Gilligan has said about the Psyche and Cupid tale –
Metamorphosis—changing the shape, overcoming the form—is the essence of creativity. It is by its very nature improvisational, taking off from the familiar and heading into the unknown. Like art, like science, like love.
And here I am returning full circle, back to the beginning, heading into the unknown, to try and understand the life story, to remember, to create text, to weave the story via this blog.
And why?
Here I am. Carry on wayward, son, and then to grow old, and so I have contemplated often: Is there wisdom to share? Are there guideposts to describe along the journey? Are there digressions, distractions, adventures to offer as a part of my odyssey? Which may connect with others along the same lifetime? But why should they care?
There is death, but there is also love.
I write this blog because there is death.
The finiteness of time is motivation enough. The earnestness of death and it will happen to me, and I feel its weight now more than ever, and I know this: I know it for me. There is no more bullshit. Memento mori. Dust in the wind, wheel of fortune, ants marching, Vanitas vanitatum, Omnia vanitas, Et in Arcadia Ego, and so I write this blog in the back eddy in the river of history and against the brevity of life.
Yet, while there is life, there is love
And so the weaving of the narrative text is the work of the troubadour as memento mori against the nullity of death and the march of time. I have entered into the chambered Nautilus again, moving forward, looking backward, interconnected, brining forth the stories, tied together in threads, and I am but one of many, woven together, generation after generation, through time do we enter mystery, adding layers to the pearl.
And now it is Petrarch and his reaction to aging,
Well, let it come. I’m not the only one
who’s aging. My desire doesn’t age,
But how much time, I wonder, have I left?
And so there it is: my sentiments exactly.
How much time is left? I don’t know, and that is why I must write and submit these lines as text in this blog series -
And why? Because there is the muse and my desire doesn’t age and there is love while there is still life, even though love is,
like snow in the sun, like wax in fire, like clouds before the wind . . .
The muse is there saying: Write!
And it is inspiration, but what to say?
How to capture the time and the memories?
It is as though Petrarch would say to me or to you that such a task is like trying to capture the notion of her beauty. It is certainly no easier than
to count the stars and to catch the ocean in a little glass . . .
So I dream on. But I wonder if the green laurel is within reach. So I type this in large font and print it out from Ricoeur’s book – It will go on my wall.
Under history, memory and forgetting.
Under memory and forgetting, life.
But writing a life is another story.
Incompletion.
Paul Ricoeur (2004)
Thanks – Scott D. Wright
Marcus Aurelius