The Taste of Madeleine

Remembrance. Funny the nature of memory as it sails through our minds. Like layers of intangible waves, one thought pulls another and we remember our lives in cascading moments of our quiet hours. I marvel at Proust's endeavor, tracking the substance of our own intangibility through our floating memories anchored in pieces of materials gleaned as markers of our presence. The madeleine! That madeleine that opens the lid to the memory box where pop-up houses appear for the town of Combray; then, instantaneously the narrator feels the flesh of his youth clung to his old bones and a man, now aged, becomes young again. This is the genius of Swann's Way!

And so now, I look out my window on a misty midmorning and remember fragments of my conversation with a student in a noisy New York coffee shop yesterday where the encounter paralleled the memory of an old teacher who spoke to me-- a mere student then-- seated in a quiet outdoors cafe on the sidewalks of Berkeley. These gapless memories appear now in a flash as I place my fingers to the keyboard, about to write the substance of that old teacher's advice. I organize my thoughts to speak the point of this entry, as the mist outside my window continually reminds me of the ocean, layering yet another memory on the mind's panoply: the scene from an old movie resurface showing me the wake of a boat moving away from land. A voice likens this movement to life. "In youth," she says, "you see not even a ripple as you gaze out into your life. But, as you age, with expended time, it spreads before you like the wake of a moving ship, extending to eternity." These loosely bound thoughts come and go without my having to question their connections, but for the mist, romancing memory with the elements that touch us now.

But more to the point: that is to say, the aim of this piece. My writing today germinated from what was said about what was said by a teacher who calmed our sense of utter insignificance years ago. For those of us chasing an immaterial form of communication called art, battling for relevance, my student yesterday echoed these same doubts to which he succumbed, only to find a greater loss of significance in himself years later. He spoke of loss and hollowness, of spiritual vapidness amidst years of having 'pushed down,' as it were, the instincts that enlivened him. After years of children and jobs and marriage-- all the elements that wring energy out of us but suppose to give us meaning-- the deeper thirst for self-recognition persisted. This departure he took, the compromises and self-denials, his 'pushing down' have atrophied a self to a death that cries for a kind of resurrection. And this cry has turned into a violence, a kind of anger which one cannot name but permeates all things one touches. It is the flesh calling for its intangible part. And as he spoke to me of atrophy, I remembered Peter then. My teacher consoled us by saying that when an artist retreats from his discipline to hide, he may suffer in seclusion but does not suffer alone, for his suffering is shared by the community he abandoned. His decaying self is felt by the whole that misses its absent part, like an organism that loses a limb, aching to have that part back again, for without it, it ceases to be whole.

And so went the conversation with this student. He mentioned spirit in the same breath as art; conscience became synonymous to consciousness; and these words brought Peter back on the sidewalk where that cafe sat. Those words in youth sounded so smooth, with a fragrance of promise. It hit our young ears with force that now betrayed our ignorance; for however profound we seemed to have understood what he meant, in fact we understood little. The passing years now hang on the words and render them weight with the passage of time. They are what feed us now, older, yet not less hungry, who still need and find great solace in these same words as time moves and we remember them.

Coping with Stress

"When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully, "remarked Samuel Johnson...A major catastrophe that frustrates the goal of life will either destroy the self, forcing the person to use all his psychic energy to erect a barrier around remaining goals, defending them against further onslaughts of fate; or it will provide a new more clear, and more urgent goal: to overcome the challenges created by the defeat. If the second road is taken, the tragedy is not necessarily a detriment to the quality of life...Even the loss of one of the most basic human faculties, like that of sight, does not mean that a person's consciousness need become impoverished; the opposite is often what happens. But what makes the difference? How does it come about that the same blow will destroy one person, while another will transform it into inner order?..." Flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Random thoughts on homecoming...

Re-reading parts of the Zoo Story... acting is a very delicate thing...

Swear not by the moon, the inconstant moon...

Life distills a handful of lessons amidst a sea of experiences. Lesson 1: constancy is a rarity among friends, lovers and...friends. Nothing stings more than an inconstant friend. Nothing betrays oneself more than inconstancy to a friend. Blade cuts us both ways: disloyalty, ingratitude, betrayal, inconsideration...many guises to the same face. Uniformity among morphing shapes...inconstant even in its form.

A Grand Force

Without us realizing it fully, we do live the life we intend, for the life we live is a residue of our character which, in spite of ourselves, articulates in the choices we make or disavow. However meticulous one surveys each option, the marks of our spirit will force us to follow some path, be it circuitous, resembling our inner desires. Even in the absence of the trappings we, at one point, perceived to be the appendages of our choices-- be it money, security, fame, prestige--if we taste the fullness of our lives, we will recognize the joy abundant in our activities even in its austere nakedness. You cannot fake interest for long, I remember Ann Bogart saying in some book. It's either there or it isn't. What a concept in a world of compromises. One can substitute luxuries as prizes, but the time, energy-- elemental factors of your existence will have been squandered in its vapid pursuit; the luxuries would have waned like tired, old consolation trophies you store in your back closet for some new novelty to soothe the ache of the absence of that which would have carved your energy into the shape meant for it. From the food you swallow, to the color of your dress: they are like words pouring out your lips announcing your name. All are constituents of how you've developed. You are your final product. Life is constantly giving birth to a new incarnation, even in spite of ourselves.

Stricken by Proust

"...It has since struck me as one of the most touching aspects of the part played in life by these idle, painstaking women that they devote all their generosity, all their talent, their transferable dreams of sentimental beauty (for, like all artists, they never seek to realize the value of those dreams, or to enclose them in the four-square frame of everyday life), and their gold, which counts for little, to the fashioning of a fine and precious setting for the rubbed and scratched and ill-polished lives of men."--Swann's Way, Marcel Proust

The Untitled One

Sequestered in my apartment for four days due to laryngitis, I have spent the days attempting pages on Swann's Way--I say attempting, when I should say attempting to read, but constantly failed to produce the necessary concentration to follow the thread of the Proustian prose, in spite of the beauty of the words that drive at the heart of something highly delicate. So I gave way to endless movies depicting characters of the pre-Victorian to Victorian age as substitutes for the experience; hence, a string of Helena-Bonham Carter and Vanessa Redgrave films, i.e. A Room With a View, Wings of a Dove, etc., all day long. They were palliatives to empty afternoons, as my tonsils break ground in battling the waves of bacterial invasions deterred with reinforcements of salt water gargles, tablets upon tablets of vitamin C, and that herb Echinacea, (if I ever commit to memory the spelling of it, I may one day be spared of any more diseases, vey!), multi-vitamins, with the constant douse of lemon ginger teas. I ate, I slept, with the hopes of conquering this chronic ailment. On the third night, my voice was resurrected , but still with the accompanying sore throat. At least I have my voice back!...which by itself, I have to confess, constitutes a minor miracle (well, at least for those of us unscientifically observing the baffling disappearance of sound upon opening one's mouth which prove to be alarming to say the least: efforting a word out but producing nothing except huffs of air. Where did that sound go? And then to find, after over 48 hours of bed rest, that damn thing return. 'There she is!' That's HOW I sound. That's ME. This voice is a constituent of my identity. Never thought of it that way before...) And of course, no sooner do I find a decent timbre resounding from the depths of a minor death, did the phone ring...

Oh, Joe, dear sibling who sometimes irk, but oftentimes delight, to what do I owe this distinct distraction? He laughs, as he always does at my petulance--the devil got her pitchfork back and is ready to attack in the next rhetorical battle...damn that herb echinnnnaciaeia, however you spell it! And here I was calling, not to console an ailing sister, necessarily, but hoping to have the floor and take advantage of her temporary muted state. But hah! (more like, holy ssshhhhyat! She's talking again. Oh, well, might as well ask her a question.)

And then, boom: not just a question but THE question. The trillion dollar question that if anyone pre-death cracked with convincing certainty would topple the wealth of the likes of Bill Gates...in fact, if answered by such an individual, he or she, in a single stroke, would have annihilated the seeming gargantuan advancement of the human race and perhaps halt the much needed evolutionary inevitability of Kurzweil's prediction, namely, technological singularity--this mounting effort to assume an immortality for the human race who is weary of the guarantee of its preservation by a previous invention called God.

So here goes: Do you believe in God?

Okay.

He was, he said, engaged in a friendly conversation with a friend whom I may meet very shortly on our anticipated trip to Boston. "She speaks French, like you! Smart."

Uh, huh.

A Christian girl, more importantly a colleague with whom he conversed and shared differing views on the comforts and burdens of adhering to a religious practice as a way to combat existential angst. His position, he discloses, is not necessarily a belief but an adherence to the practice of a more secular life. 'Oh,' think I...'Compare and contrast, is it?'

"I think I believe in God." I said plainly. To which he laughed heartily. To my surprise. (I know I could be funny but I didn't think that phrasing was all THAT funny.)

"You THINK you BELIEVE in God?"

Apparently the intrusion of the word 'think' seems to pose as some qualifier to the word believe--as in 'I am kinda pregnant'.

"I think so."

And then, another question to serve as an illumination of the first, a way to redouble an assault, "Do extra-terrestials exist?"

"Absolutely."

Silence.

It would be utter hubris, I told him, to think that in the grand immeasurable history of the universe, that we are the only intelligent life-force that exists. I am with Carl Sagan in his intricate calculation in predicting the probability that there are numerous advanced intelligence in the universe. I, personally do not have empirical data to support this claim but it does not necessarily follow that this data does not exist elsewhere, nor that even in the absence of such evidence that this truth is not highly probable. So to answer the question, ABSOLUTELY.

"Absolutely?" He echoed, as if to catch a fallacy in my speech.

"I didn't claim absolutely true, as in absolute truth but absolutely I think so. As in, I absolutely think so." Look to what absolutely modifies, brotha!

"You sound like an ad for vodka." Funny. (wwwelll, not bad, actually...may just monetize this piece for that commercial elixir...hmmm.)

Your point? What is your point? Go!

"Interesting...YOU believe or think you believe in God."

(I hope that was not a pejorative from a modern thinker which he fancies himself to be.)

Dear reader, and Joe, there are things in the world of which I can only claim ignorance. Well, ignorance would be the inadequate way to phrase this thesis. Let me use an anecdotal note by way of an explanation: at one point, I befriended someone at my previous work who thinks of himself as a modern, sophisticated thinker, a literati who is not given to the lure of superstition of which religion and metaphysics, in his mind, is part and parcel. In his words, 'this world of magic' that man has composed for himself to keep his fears at bay was his unwitting nod to the existentialists who see the notion of god as a calming tool amidst the reality that man is alone in an indifferent universe. Darwinian, his actions underscore the roar of the competition amidst other fit creatures whose survival only depends upon their actions and random circumstance. When I mentioned at one point an intense, rigorous practice I undertook to meditate silently for ten days, intimating the power of a deepening spiritual practice, likening this to a pianist I once heard who spoke of playing his instrument, whereby he said that the more he delved deeply into music the more boundless he found it to be and recognized how little he knew, that the deeper in art one lives, the more hubris it extracts, for in the search, you are confronted with a greater possibility, that whole terrain, which is art itself, expands and one is left to recognize only the depth of one's true ignorance. And so is the art of spiritual practice, of the search for the thing that is unamed or unnameable.

I cannot possibly fault him for not understanding and sticking to his gun for in the face of all logic and evidence, there will be evidence and logic enough to sustain either argument: God is or God is not. This is the grand mystery and debate of the ages and the sages and I don't purport to find the final solution here. I surmise that once the light dims in this realm for each of us the debate will find its resolution then. Ultimately, we will all know. Not now. The arguments that ensue from this seem futile if not in the interest of an enlivened discussion, investigating a deeper question in relation to it, which is the ways in which we form our beliefs. Inevitably, after the mind has fashioned the logic that follows from all premises pointing to the existence or non-existence of God, it is the breadth and depth of one's experience in life that will point to one's conviction. I knew a girl with whom I have shared intimate confidences and I believe when she spoke to me of paranormal events that have happened to her. These were not only vivid but viscerally notable in her experience, the kind that is beyond my immediate comprehension. In spite of it, who am I to disqualify these as unreal: her clairvoyance, her visions of ghouls in broad daylight...things that would make one's hair stand on end or the subject of a fantastic blockbuster. She is not insane nor fantastical in nature but sincere and kind. In fact, she told me of such things whilst confessing that she eschewed the notion of further investigating them, hoping to put these experiences asunder. The fact that there are things beyond the pale of my understanding, to my mind, does not preclude their existence; hence, I sympathize with my previous colleague. To force the issue would be like talking apples and oranges. Spiritual conviction is not a matter of persuasion but a matter of experience. Life will teach us what we need know. I think I believe in God. Yes, so far as there have been moments of absolute certainty--yes, the old Descartian notion has hit me--of simply knowing.

To know oneself, is the step to know the Divine; in Islamic doctrine, at one point, if I remember correctly, it was taught that God is closer to you than your own skin, that to understand God, one must go deep into understanding oneself. Quite the cousin of the teaching of meditation, of absorbing the moment as is, simply in the presence of the breath, Prana; in Judaism, Ruach, is the breath, the wind, the Spirit. This intimate gathering of air that is the closest activity of the body to life is itself the intersection of the Divine and Man. The breath absorbs me as I absorb the breath and in the observance of it, I come to know.

To know what? What the Brahmans call the One, the Unnameable which is unseen.

But I digress. To go back to my previous discussion with my brother which I left off a couple of paragraphs ago, I remember being fascinated by the limits of the definitions of God, this higher power about whom many debates have arisen. To anthropomorphise God is problematic, to my mind. We fashion our understanding of God based on the limits of our imagination which is human-centric. This paradigm runs into incalculable critiques which I find valid: a case in point was my brother's assertion when I problematized the question of free-will. In the pervading paradigm of free-will, man is free to choose but the choices are already weighted, for one set of actions are labeled as 'righteous' and another as 'unrighteous'. However true that man is free to choose, these choices are not neutral choices but have embedded implications that sway decision and threaten judgement. To say that one has free-will, absolute free-will free from any force of persuasion means to maintain a neutrality on the nature of the choices, e.g. red is neither better nor worse than blue, which precludes this kind of bias at the outset. My brother retorts by asking why must we think that there is this transcendent judge that interferes with the business of the universe. Why, he says, can we not accept that the universe just IS, with its own set of rules without the necessary existence of one who fashioned these rules; or, if one did create the rules, why must we assume that he cares about interfering after the whole caboodle has been made. Isn't it possible, he adds, that the universe was made and the Transcendent said, 'fine, now, I'm going laissez-faire on your ass, you manage the estate, just don't do what Enron did, and if you do, well, let's see who gets jailed...makes for one interesting show either way.' It's possible, I conceded. But suppose that was the case, with the caveat that yes, universal law, as far as we can detect, the physical law of the universe seem to exist. Life needs air, food, soil, sunlight--a host of bountiful graces required for its fulfillment. In addition, gravity acts on our feet, the universe expands, etc. In some religions, these are the constituents of the higher power, the life-source, the universe itself. In Buddhist terms, it is the emphasis on the concentration on the here and now: meditating on the present moment is the path to liberating the mind. For Spinoza (correct me if I'm overreaching on Spinoza) whatever substance that exists is identical to God, as in (this is an oversimplification, I'm sure) the universe itself is God. But suppose that that is a philosophical trick of the mind, and that one insists on the existence of a transcendent hand in the molding of the universe, the laissez-faire guy who said, here are the rules now play, my brother's rejoinder to my earlier bone to pick with the question of choice and free-will-- then, consider the Word, meaning the rules that govern the universe, the abstract, so to speak, as God. In other words, have there not been innumerable mentions of the Word as God itself? In the absence of this anthropomorphized Transcendent, his/her/its Word is Him/Her/Itself. It acts as his proxy. The laws governing the universe that defines all things material were born from the Word, issues of this abstraction, as invisible as the breath. The Word is God and God is the Word. All substances issued from the Word is the constituent of God; thereby all things are God. Therefore, the very rules that govern even the existential's indifferent universe--his world which does not hoist one individual's interest over another by virtue of some moral code, springing a system of rewards and punishments-- even that world operates under the terms of this universal law, i.e. God itself, which is perhaps indifferent, according to our human perspective, but omnipresent just same.

I began this conversation not to crush one set of beliefs in favor of another but simply to investigate the question from its various angles. The surprise I ran into was, in speaking of this God, the notion expands. Like art itself, it grows and I am left pondering, aware of my own ignorance. Nonetheless, at the bottom of it, one identifies a question begging to be asked: if this notion of God expands then why are our current compartmentalized definitions limiting? As we organize ourselves into various collective religious entities, why do we limit our view to the one part of the elephant we could comprehend? Perhaps it is human nature to treat things we do not know as unimportant for we can only digest things in piecemeal. One cannot swallow the whole cow. Perhaps...which hearkens back to an earlier problem I held in regard to the question of how well I think I believe: I believe God exists within the limits of my ignorance. Only within my own prison wall. Only there.

And there goes the whole ABSOLUTE truth in my caboodle.

Excerpted from Electra Complex of 2/3/05

I have to qualify the "republishing" of this excerpt: the full piece from where this is taken is, in fact, rediscovered today as an unpublished draft in the queue which I then opted to post. To my surprise, this is one of several pieces I found as I perused the list which remain unfinished, during the time when I wrote prolific notes on daily observations, essays, creative pieces, et al. This I confess is an indulgence of which I beg your patience...

[...]what i say is not a grand truth. the opposite, in fact. it is a glimmer. it comes then washes out in the blasted sunlight of a higher spirit. the smallness of my perception aches for a grander frame. that's what it is in the end, isn't it? minute. deep in the core a sensation of life happens, a thought, a feeling, then it tints the world a little at a time and we see everything in that bit of color. until we clean ourselves anew with someone else's description of the thing we gaze upon. sometimes this is done in cruelty. sometimes in kindness. if so, we pray for friendship. a touching of the soul if only every so often. just enough times to clean us anew, with a brand new perception, or if not, a different shape of frame. that's when the core changes. that's when life touches to teach us of a new way. the core metamorphosizes into a foreign shape. that's the birth and rebirth we hope for. a new child is born. indeed. at each juncture. sometimes in cruelty. sometimes in kindness. but always praying for a true kind of friendship.

this i am sure is not an easy read. nor is that my main concern. nor is it done to impress. it is an essay, an attempt to put words finally in place of some color. to arrange like the alphabet arranges sounds put together by the tongue. finally. the longing doesn't seem to end. or is it the air that travels in this place? if, as the woman with a crutch across the continent advised me, i were to move there, would the thought recede in the column of forgetfulness. contain it there, finally? it must be the circulating air in this place. it blows around in constant reminiscence of some fragrance, a scent of past laughter that reminds one of the same instinct to place joy in front of sadness. it is the glorious murmur of living, after all. the intoxication of a giggle. all muscles jerk in accordance to some primal urge. a cup of happiness in one sound.
if one is to regret anything it is to regret one's cruelty. i know it each time the demon in me passes. i know a part has been chipped away. if anything,( i am not sure if it be a consolation) the kindnesses of the past resurface in better shine. it doesn't erase the memory but does the opposite. memory bobs to the surface and teases us to revisit that grander time when the devil has not seized the situation and the air is pure. when laughter cleans it every so often. is it the same for you? i know that's the cause of sadness for me. every so often.
but, what is to be done? i never claimed perfection as a human being. only that i be truthful as far as what kind of an animal i am. what kind of an animal am i? the question in this regard never seem to cease. i am a conglomeration of vanity, lust, greed, ambition. only hoping to be better than those things i see; hoping to find in my thoughts a release to some better place. a kind of divinity in my attempt with other human beings who face the devil in them and be brave enough to fight it or point to the skies to watch a meteor pass by as an act of greater force, a oneness with a universe. finding at last a beauty, a kind of beauty that will sustain them and balance it all out. in this last regard i weep. i too, shamefully, weep. because those moments do exist. when the moon shone and the tides washed to shore some gift. an instrument of conversation. and beauty happened in the stories that we told watching the night sky unfold some dream of grandeur in the stars.