Potential and Actual

<img src=”http://www.oleoptene.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/object-width425-height344param-namemovie-valuehttpwwwyoutubecomvlby4qxaail8hlenfs1paramparam-nameallowfullscreen-valuetrueparamembed-srchttpwwwyoutubecomvlby4qxaail8hlenfs1-typeapplicationx-shockw.jpeg” border=”0″ alt=”images-1.jpeg” width=”90″ height=”117″ />Just finished Salvatore Scibona’s The End, which I loved, but my favorite parts are descriptions of one teenage character’s education at the hand of the Jesuits:

He was made to memorize what Aristotle had said about something, and then what Saint Paul had said about it, and then what Thomas Aquinas had to say by way of fitting them together. But on the exam he had to disagree with Aquinas and make a point-by-point case for the disagreement. It was another one of their dissembling SJ tricks. They knew that as a teenager he was engineered to disagree, so they commanded him to disagree, for which he had to resent them, he wanted to resist them, and where was the most obvious outlet for his resistance? With agreement, of course, with Aquinas. In this way they were making a Thomist out of him despite himself. Or some of them were; the others, the paradox crowd, were trying to turn him into a Lutheran, maybe.

(p. 213)

So in a later chapter the teenager is trying to explain his ideas of potential and actual to a priest

Father Manfred said, “The attaining of the object of the quest always disappoints, you’re saying.” He made a grandly sarcastic fake yawn.
“I mean,” Ciccio said, “I might say to myself common-sensically, I long for what I long for. But, you know, the thing you longed for is never what you advertised. Obviously. And why is that? Maybe because you’d rather long for it than get it. Which is stupid.”

“You’re saying the’rs something the matter with the sentence, ‘A potential is actualized,’ because the subject of the sentence can’t be what you say its and also do what you say it does at the same time.”

“Okay, then, that’s what I’m saying.”

“Okay, but this is not at the same time. This is motion. This is change. There are miles per hour. Time is elapsing.”

“Well, I don’t like it.”

“I’m not trying to be rough with you, boy, but isn’t that too bad? Aristotle is not your enemy, motion is your enemy.”

(p. 220)

All of which goes by way of a long preface to feeling just trapped in this post partum place of the meeting of potential and actual. I have a first draft which no longer has the potential to be all the things it did while it was unwritten, but still needs eighteen years of raising, needs diaper changing and nose-wiping and orthodontics and the thought of revising is exhausting. I try mapping potential and actual to present and future, to experience and anticipation, but it doesn’t quite work. I experience a craving for chocolate, and realize I love knowing I could ride my bike two miles to a nice little fudge shop, but I enjoy the idea of it much more than I would actually enjoy the chocolate. I think about how the unplanned throws into relief all the plans I didn’t know I had been making, like the old trick of the coin in the air where you pay attention to what you hope for as the actual means of making a decision.

I try doodling out new aphorisms for the state about how a bird in the bush could be a new and exotic species with a song sweeter than any anyone has ever heard while the bird in hand is actually a bit drab with feathers askance and its racing heart and eyes already starting to cloud over, and what is wrong with it? What diseases are you risking contracting with a dying bird in your hand? (yeah, not catchy enough to make it as an aphorism or apophthegm, right?)

And still, I tell myself, not even the most cloud-striding philosopher gets to live in the realm of pure potential, that intimacy as the trade-off for the ideal is not a bad bargain, that things not kept on pedestals can be explored realistically. I love my actual family and friends and not just the potential in them, right? Right?

I have early memories of wanting to turn images in my head into drawings and how it hurt that they always fell short. The parental me would address that hurt with “But that’s how you acquire the technique to next time coming closer to being able to translate the vision into reality” but, deep down? I think there is always the falling short and I am not reconciled to it.