July 16th, 2009
But I don’t.
Because I’m running around in the manner of the newly decapitated Gallus gallus domesticus in preparation for flying with the four boys to Albquerque on Saturday, only this is the week one set of boys has camp in the morning another set has camp in the afternoon and trying to keep track of where everyone is/ought to be feels like patting my pockets for keys and phone every few minutes and flying into a panic when things aren’t quite as I think they ought to be. Plus I just got summoned for jury duty and need to deal with that before I go out of town, as well as emailing my parents my children’s dietary preferences (which are varied and contradictory), renting a viola for the second child since violas are technically too big to be carry-on on Southwest airlines, finding performance outfits for each of them, coming up with a plan for the fourth child’s birthday while we are there, and dealing with things like library books due next week and regular lessons and the food in the refrigerator which I am just going to have to throw out.
But that’s not what’s preoccupying me, anyway.
Which is ancient. Actually.
The wrestling that I do is with where one comes up with the humility to strive at the limits of one’s abilities even if one feels completely mediocre?
If you were here sitting across from me, and we were to have the leisure for a real conversation, this is what I would want to ask you.
I have been wrestling with the acknowledging that to apply oneself to a Discipline is to come to terms with the Discipline having degrees, to having better and improved Practicing, which I keep getting stuck with logically meaning some practitioners are better at the Discipline, and with only a little more logic, meaning some practitioners are worse.
And that practicing a Discipline involves wanting to get better at it. And that this does involve both refinements, abrading the bad habits, adjusting Technique for desired results (I somehow see Discipline as being composed of Technique and Expression; I would love for you to digress and argue with me). But all of the incremental bits of improvement may result in the apparently sudden “quantum” ascent from one plateau to another
And because the practice and application of one’s deepest self to the Discipline is Work and sometimes — often, in fact, is something other than rewarding — I mean, tedious, exhausting, precariously doubt-filling, lonely, sweaty, achey or terrifying — it must be driven by a sort of desire. My first identification is that my desires are for glory/respect/approval/acceptance or, (sigh) sometimes ass-kicking competitiveness and Showing Them vengefulness, but I recognize some ‘pure’ desire beyond these little insecure self-based ones. For the Discipline itself. For the smudging of the boundaries of self within the perfection of the Discipline itself, as if the Discipline itself were doing the desiring, and it is no longer the self. I trip over my Ancient Greeks and the notion that happiness is the cessation of desire, and yet believe in the deep happiness of communing with the Discipline.
[Here my religion creeps in, and the closest I can come to defining my religion is as a sort of awareness of the self as created and separate from the Creator, a place where humility lives, the ardor and longing of the creation for Creator, for reunion.]
When I cannot manage humility I remind myself too much of myself as a little kid, really struggling against doing something imperfectly — learning to ride a bike, where there is one major plateau to jump to, and all of the attempts that are not riding a bike eventually are followed by the attempt that is riding a bike; but this little kid in me gets frustrated at doing it imperfectly, wants to kick the stupid bike and go do something safe and satisfying like riding on my old very fast Big Wheels which can make it down to the dead end of our street and back past the frightening dog and no skinned knees, no wobbling, no toppling. The little kid in me is all about “Why should I practice in order to be a mediocre violinist?” This feels almost intolerable. And there’s strategy: if there is something I would be great at and something that all the work in the world would only make me mediocre at, shouldn’t my energy go into the one and not the other? I’m like the Russians x-raying the hips of potential gymnasts to see who is put together with the native flexibility to be a great gymnast, in order to appropriately invest time and energy in THEIR training, rather than some other. I flirt with this discipline or that, wondering if I’m not supposed to be great at something.
But now I argue with myself as if I were one of my children. We do not practice each day for the sake of some future career, we practice each day for the sake of this day’s practicing, and if by some freak roller skating accident one of the darlings were to lose all of the fingers on his left hand this afternoon, I wouldn’t see the time we have spent practicing as wasted. Furthermore, every great practitioner was once a mediocre practitioner, once a beginner.
But another argument occurs to me today, about the trickiness of judging oneself (or discerning, Dana?) However high the plateau one is on, there is no practitioner who has reached perfection. And it’s like math. Infinity minus two is the same as infinity minus nine hundred ninety nine thousand nine hundred and ninety nine. The person striving at her seventh appreciable plateau is at the same time closer and as far from some Monolithic Perfect Practice of the Discipline as the child who has just made the struggling leap to the first appreciable plateau.
It just occurs to me that what humility means to me here is a sort of longing for the Discipline’s perfect expressionso that one puts forth one’s best effort with a sort of detachment and longing to keep struggling and even though it’s never going to get all the way and it’s not futile, or if it’s futile, the futility is beside the point, it’s the longing of the lover for the Beloved who loves the Beloved for the Beloved’s sake and not his own.
July 12th, 2009
“Mara __” prompts the Facebook status updater like some wordless existential question. I am out of the glib and the funny and the clever and thinking of the two hundred people whose status updates I look at and who, if they haven’t politely, discreetly, hidden mine, if they haven’t sworn off Facebook or dismissed it because they have more interesting things to do — might read whatever I say in this little box, their faces swimming before my eyes, and the impossibly different persons I would be to them all respectively, all at the same time, I realize I have not Something to Say, but something to say, or rather that what I would say doesn’t fit in small boxes today. And that I am not ready to give up the blog.
Not that I come back to the blog and think everything I want to say fits neatly here. Some (but, we note, not all) of my favorite blogs have been dormant or nearly so recently, and not to be one of those annoying people who thinks that whatever their friends are doing is a trend, I’d wondered if blogging had peaked for me. That the best part of blogging has been the sense of deep conversation. (And as I compose this over-long entry on an overcast Sunday afternoon when I have isolated myself from my family, one of the friends who has been faithful with his own blog emails me a question, saying he would get my “inner blog going.” Which reminds me that the conversational responsibility flows this way and that.)
A few weeks ago my domain name registration lapsed and for a few hours I had the ambivalent relief of thinking it might all be gone, which, oh, I’m attached to some of what I’ve written here, but oh, the fresh start — the fresh start has all of the mendacity of any good fantasy, the gauzy glamours obscuring harder reality. That even the fresh start still requires a first sentence and a second, that it might in fact be no easier to open this window and frame a first entry than it is to open it and note the one sparse entry for June, the space between that one and the one before, the quiet.
Not that I don’t appreciate some quiet.
But I want to skip the awkward apology or over-explanation or even the presumption that anyone notices the frequency of the blogging or not. I would just skip to the recent preoccupations.
First off Infinite Summer, and that Infinite Jest is that great a book, not a silencing, dwarfing sort of greatness, (except maybe the silencing “Oh, dear, I’m incoherently spouting the same appreciations that I’m sure other people have already done better elsewhere…”) but a compassionate, self-aware greatness that makes connections between aspects of the modern condition, as if there were such a thing as a monolithic modern condition and I weren’t hopelessly self-conscious trying to talk about it or my perceptions of it — and yet, in reading Infinite Jest, I am again and again noting to myself “Oh! Exactly that! Yes!” and have become attendantly No Fun at Parties for it has left me prone to a babbling. Which I try to cut short out of consideration and so on.
In fact, if you aren’t already reading it, if you have felt put off by its legendary thousand pages or the fact that one of its themes is addiction, which is, admittedly, a downer, or have — I’m trying to think of all the reasons why I had put off reading it for as long as I had — annoyance at the hype? the fact that if it was going to be so great, then wouldn’t I have the same sort of possessiveness over it, over my experience reading it that I do over, say, Salinger, thus rendering the reading it as part of an anonymous internet-organized reading micro-movement like Infinite Summer as perverse and — more, a little like NaNoWriMo — somehow less special and no less work, because look at how thousands of people I don’t know are all doing it together on-line and it makes no difference to anyone but me if I am somehow a “part” of that and when have I ever been a joiner? Give me The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner over the Boston Marathon any day. And yet. If you have these, and better reasons for not reading it and make time to follow this here, I suggest you go read that instead, really I’ll understand. In this morning’s journal I note that there are certain types of action and description I’ll skim every time (the list starts with use of illegal substances, goes through hand-by-hand descriptions of poker games, any sports sequences, combat scenes and battles — even on-screen I mostly just want the skinny: who wins, how it all comes out.) In Infinite Jest I don’t skim. I care about every word, every sequence, every character. It means reading a little more slowly and neglecting a lot of other things, but it’s savorable.
So yeah. The journal. I still fill those up. Only I find myself annoyed that I want to remember how I phrased something to myself two weeks ago and wishing they were searchable, because I am never patient enough to re-read them, and, frankly, my handwriting is atrocious. Which is another reason to try and at least capture the highlights of the journal electronically, the stuff that, if it isn’t written to entertain, or explain, or meet my anticipation of other people’s expectations, is at least not going to be offensive or hurtful because I’m trying to work out why I don’t feel the things I sort of think I’m supposed to feel which are always so much worse unarticulated and stuffed down than when they are exposed to air and sunlight.
I had this realization that because so many things I read online have convenient little “share on facebook” buttons that I could use FB almost — not solipsistically — but as my own personal record of what I was reading and responding to, and if anyone else wanted to have a conversation about anything, that was just icing on the cake. Only I started wondering if my link to Sandra Tsing Loh’s sad Atlantic Monthly piece on the dissolution of her marriage or the reviews of Christina Nehring’s Vindication of Love were going to give people the wrong impression. And then suddenly I felt all scopophobic on facebook, the ancient fear of being seen in ways that I had no control over, without full space to explain or make myself clear. I’m not sure the blog is better, but if you care enough to wade through all of this, then I’m less worried about you making a hasty judgement.
So other preoccupations. In the journal, strangely where things are most personal, I find myself freely enjoying the use of the third person “one finds” which, one notes, is almost an antidote to the narcissistic third person of FB where, in the third person, one feels like the star of an endless series of fascinated headlines, a singular tabloid. The voice, here, one fears is precious or affected sounding, and yet, oh the liberation of being able to make observations without it being all about the endless, wearying “I” or the presumptuous “you”!
Also, it now amuses me in the journal to insert notes to the literary biographer, having perhaps read too much literary biography this spring and summer. My favorite note — oh I paraphrase because, in the last hour I just wasted much time reading entries from a month ago which are still painfully vivid but do not contain the bit I want:
“Dear Literary Biographer, this morning I rather resent you for knowing how all of these ambivalences get resolved, for having an aerial view while I blunder through my labyrinths. Maybe one could find a sort of comfort in thinking that what feels painful and difficult from right here will be seen in retrospect as the shaping force that led to all sorts of growth and development. One could, maybe, but one doesn’t.
I would like to remind you that retrospect lies. That when one is past the stage of being dewy and having countless strangers extolling one’s “potential” one forgets that all of that possibility we see for someone just starting out tends to be the good possibility, the success following success. One ignores the fact that when one was twenty the possibilities seemed to include living in cardboard boxes and embarrassing not just oneself but one’s family and friends as well as the possibilities of greatness and producing stunning works. In fact the only possibility one seems to really overlook are those of the not-so-notable ordinary life, the nice kids, the functional marriage, the bake sales for the PTA and the endless driving (the minivan!) — perhaps because at twenty one has the harshest condemnation for the selling out and the compromising and the complacency one detects in one’s elders.
So maybe I don’t just resent the future ghost of my literary biographer, but also I resent my twenty year old self. All a little Dickens for me, sorry.
On an unrelated note, but among recent preoccupations, I wasn’t just going to blather on about Infinite Jest, but one of the bits I most appreciated was a character commenting on the state of “humble frustration” that allows one to proceed from one plateau of development to another, and the character was talking about tennis, but I could immediately see it in music and in writing, and the friend I have who teaches yoga sees it in yoga and dance, and her husband in aikido practice and this tiny remark was one small thread in a lot of really great conversation last night, and I was happy to see he had written about it here.
I know that that I have a tendency to get promiscuous with the metaphors, to lose track of tenors and vehicles, referents and antecedents, but — beyond gratitude for people we can have dinner with who don’t look uncomfortably away, re-folding their napkins on their laps and glancing at their watches as I get excited about an idea, I love that they got excited about parallels between their own passions and disciplines and my specific ones, and being struck by this notion that the work of being a human being again and again boils down to the same stuff, and it’s not that one just does Rocky-style training (cue the inspirational music and the running against different backgrounds, doing sit-ups and punching a punching bag montage) it’s that humble frustration is the only way to get anywhere, the slow learning of the things I’m working on with my kids, ideas of patience and generosity and compassion and persistence, can be developed with a pen or a tennis racket or yoga mat or the wedding ring or the football that Aodán and I throw at each other when all other communication fails us — and it’s not that there aren’t great violinists or great tennis players or great writers who are assholes, it’s just that the work required of us in our various disciplines puts us all up against the same obstacles, and that seems to me to render open and honest discussion of these obstacles as especially important and helpful.
Which all comes out as a little more facile and easy than my thinking abut it. But music has gotten more hours than anything else this summer, the kids being out of school and all wanting me to be part of their practices still and finding someone to do duets with for myself and finding myself — because the kids are involved maybe? willing to — not settle, exactly but willing to be a struggling-competent-often-frustrated-by-the-limits-of-my-ability-as-a-musician (oh to call myself a musician is even more uncomfortable than calling myself a writer) — and yet in the process of learning to treat myself with the gentleness with which I would treat them, it’s that struggle that seems to have value, to leave lasting marks more than the ringing of a note very nearly in tune. And still the terror of being a dilettante forever, of standing on the edge of all sorts of disciplines able to appreciate them without ever approaching any mastery of them for myself…
Finally — seriously, this is like doing laundry, after a month of the washing machine being broken, and discovering things one has forgotten owning, much less wearing. Some preoccupation lately with the subject of miracles. There was discussion between Bahà’ís and non-Bahà’ís on the occasion of this Holy Day this week, the Martyrdom of the Bab, which is probably the only miraculous thing to get much play in Bahà’í history. And the thing is there were the miraculous sorts of things in the lives of the Bàb and Bahà’u'lláh, but they weren’t supposed to stand as proofs. In an age of special effects and sleight of hand, we are supposed to rely more on the integrity of Their teachings, to be convinced that a religion teaching the agreement of religion and science, the equality of women and men, the oneness of humanity, the oneness of all the religions, is more persuasive than watching somebody fly around the room. There’s even a lovely story of Bahà’u'lláh offering to perform any miracle that a group of clerics asked that would constitute proof to them that He was who He said He was and their subsequent utter failure to come to any sort of a consensus n the matter.
Sitll. In my experience as a Bahà’í — more than once I’ve gotten to sit and listen to people tell stories of things that happened that couldn’t be explained by science or the laws of chance or whatever, feelings of being guided, or having significant dreams. And I get sort of ambivalent about this. One of my friends turned to me and said, “Surely there are things that have happened in your life that you cannot explain!” and I was surprised at my prickly response. I didn’t say anything rude, but I paid attention to the prickles because I wondered what bothered me.
It’s not just that I value my skepticism, because that would not lead to a sort of defensiveness I suddenly felt. Maybe it was like our friend sitting there who wasn’t a Bahà’í, but has been coming to these discussions since last fall — that on hearing that there were miracles suddenly seemed to take seriously the notion that this really is a religion we’re talking about and not just a nice philosophy? I think the notion that the people who have these inexplicable things land in their laps as a sort of proof might then have some greater degree of certitude or faith may be what makes me a little bananas — that the absence of such an experience might be saying something about me?
So I affirm for myself that the absence of miracles is not the same thing as the absence of wonder. The explicable and orderly is enough for me, golden means and Fibonacci sequences, titrations where measurements conform exactly and uniformly to the numbers predicted by the rather abstract molecular weights, complex ecosystems, and the dance of light through leaves and the smell of fresh air — harmony! the circle of fifths!And in the human-er realm? Courage and sacrifice and kindness, a good joke, a nice turn of phrase? Not so un-wondrous either.
