If I remember right, one of my friends from Reed used to say that a miracle is what happens when a person makes the decision to just pick up and move their life into something vastly different. Like just up and going to a different city. That kind of magic is the kind of thing he would call a miracle. It is a miraculous sort of thing to follow an inspiration and to pull it off.
Another story that's been in my head for at least the last 3 years, that I actually thought I had posted before, but I guess I didn't because I can't find it anywhere...
I was reminded of this story by a friend's post on Solotude.
I don't watch Star Trek often, but once it happened to be on and I think to was Spock telling a sort of fable:
Here, I brutally paraphrase it according to what I remember right now:
*******************************************************************
A fox had come to a swift-moving river and was preparing to swim across it when he heard a voice calling to him. He turned to see a scorpion there. "Excuse me fox, I need to get across this river. Would you please give me a ride on your back? I can show you a good place to cross, but if I try to cross it myself, I will be swept away by the current."
The fox took a step back, "No," he said to the scorpion. "What if I take you on my back and you sting me? I can't take that risk."
"But I have no cause to do that," reasoned the scorpion. "If I stung you while you carried me, then I would be lost in the river and we would both die."
The fox considered this and decided that it seemed reasonable. "That makes sense." He said. "Ok, climb on my back and show me where to cross this river."
So the scorpion crawled onto the back of the fox and led him to a point of the river which was a little easier to cross. The fox, carrying the scorpion, began to swim across the river.
Suddenly, the fox felt the sharp prick of the scorpion's tail. He felt the poison entering his system and as he began to sink beneath the current, he called to the scorpion, "Scorpion! Why did you do that? Now we will both die."
"I'm sorry," apologized the scorpion, "It's my nature."
A few days ago -
While walking to the bus, I'd been pondering what I considered to be a connection between early heartbreak and increased maturity due to insight from having to deal with necessary lessons, whether or not they were what a person wants to learn.
There's something about the way that ideals and expectations when followed sometimes collide against the unyielding consequences of reality. And, the only thing to do with the pieces is to learn.
Then later, reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, I came across the following passage,
"He had become much more mature, as if the abandonment of his inner goals had caused him somehow to age more quickly."
This seemed relevant, but I am wary of the kind of 'aging' mentioned. Maturation and aging are different processes.
Later - talking with my brother - we concluded that it is not such a heartbreak alone that induces maturity. The victim must already be mature and willing enough to begin to climb the lessons instead of letting them bounce off ineffectively or in a way by which nothing is really learned.
And today, I noticed a quote from a friend's facebook stating that she thought "...certain maladaptive coping mechanisms are really just a lot more fun than more adaptive alternatives..."
It's true.
Even if the only thing to do is to learn, some people chose to view situations in a way that does not challenge or require them to change who they are. It is easier that way. They don't see anything to learn from.
But, those who have eyes to see find things to learn from and learn not to be afraid of the broken glass and mirrors.
This is a difficult curriculum to follow.
But, I am a student.
Discard what you can't use, and keep drawing new cards from the deck. If it's in there, that's the only way you'll find it.
In my Origins of Western Morality class, we talked about the Epicureans and their ideas.
The Epicureans thought of the world as consisting of atoms, tiny particles of every sort that fall and swirl, and void, the nothingness that separated the atoms. They tried to apply this model to determining why it is that some things, like horses, have an agency to choose to move and run while other things, like rocks, do not move.
I have been wanting to write about the Epicurean reasoning of how a horse begins to run.
The idea deals with the event that must occur between the before of a still horse and the after of a running horse. They considered that running was caused when an atom for running fit into the right place like an ignition key, causing the horse to begin running when previously, it was still.
The desire to run shapes the horse's mind in a way that is able to receive atoms of running. All things on earth are constantly bathed in a stream of all kinds of invisible atoms, so if the horse positions its mind properly, it is only a brief matter of time until a running atom finds the place prepared to receive it.
Once this running atom fits into the prepared place, this ignites the running ability, and the the horse runs.
I think I believe this.
Things happen because a place has been prepared to receive it.
Sometimes it is said that things are 'for the best' because 'something good will come of it.' I don't agree with the thoughts of good things coming from bad things (to the extent that such a judgment is reasonable). But, I do think that good things will find those who are able to keep their heads up enough to see them.
I must continue to choose open windows.
Sshh, sshhh.
Just let the colors move. Even if they don't spread and blend the way you hoped or thought they might, it's still a beautiful aurora now.
And besides,
they just might spread and blend in a way you didn't know to hope for.
Friends and family who remember and tell me again by their presence who I am,
a heavy pincushion of stars filling through tree branches above,
a firefly valley in the summer below,
This is where I'm from.
Every time I go back, I feel crazy for leaving again.
Some things and processes are inevitable.
There are ways to modify, prolong, or moderate, but I have yet to find a way around.
This is how it works
I am not a particularly girly person. I spent a lot of time with male friends and tended to prefer them to female friends, (with the exception of the female friends that I felt good enough about to consider closer friends) and have invaded the male-dominated classrooms of physics and theoretical math.
I had thought that this meant I was not a victim or adversely affected by the 'patriarchal society' I'd heard so much about.
I now think this actually means that I was rather foolishly ignorant.
I have lived and grown in this culture for more than two decades, and only recently realized that the men elevated in history, science, and politics - the men with buildings named in their honor and whose likenesses are carved into public houses of justice, of business, and of religion -
I only recently realized that I am not supposed to grow up to emulate these men. I cannot. They do not represent me or my future.
I am going to grow up to be a woman.
And I am only beginning to understand that there is a difference, and to realize what this difference might mean.
For the record,
I have been deciding not to write in this blog for my own good. When I can write clearly and honestly again, I will do so.
I decided this when, about 8 months ago, I wrote a letter home to my mom, and realized that it was the first time in too long that I actually felt as though I were preparing a message for someone other than myself.
I'm taking this moment to remind myself
that with the future and the whole unknown thing and all...
a major perk is that it is prime space for making adventures and for trying things that are different than the part of the future that's already happened (it used to be the future).
There's so much of it to fill with new and different things. Or old and deeper things. This is very exciting.
Sometimes I forget.
Reading through an old journal today,
I discovered this message to myself.
**
I already know what's important. We all do.
Our lives depend on remembering.
**
I think I hope it's true.
And I hope that I can act on it.
Today I shared 2 mangoes with a housemate.
After unsuccessfully cutting most of the the fruit away, I tried the soft yellow around the seed with my teeth.
And I found myself again in Cairo. I felt it before I recognized it. I felt it before my mind filled in the nighttime, people, traffic, and dust.
There are not juice stands here, on every other corner, the way they are in Cairo. The sense Mango filling my mouth and the memories that filled my brain took me back to buying glasses of fresh mango juice from the juice stands - a tall glass filled with liquid fruit - we competed with each other to find the best and cheapest stands.
I maintain that Tiff and I won.
I don't remember the exact price, but I remember it was less than anything else we knew of, and the juice was first rate - eating mangoes that you didn't even have to chew. The place is in Arbaa-Wa-Noos - I think it's in the Northeast. Hop in a mini bus that goes to Seleb! Seleb! Seleb! and get off when you see the sign for the textile factory: 'ال سلاب,' if I remember right. There was construction here, a few years ago, so it probably looks different now. But find the school - ask someone to take you to Central, school for displaced Sudanese. Stop at the school and play jumprope with the kids and drink tea with the teachers. Ask them if they ever got the pictures we took with them. Ask them whose gone back to Sudan and if there are new teachers. Ask them if Bafi is still there, or if he and his family have made it out. Then keep going down the direction you were headed in. I think you'll come to a fork in the path between sand and abandoned buildings. They're not abandoned - most buildings are not falling apart but rather are unfinished, so as to avoid the tax that applies to completed buildings. Take the right fork. In that direction, I think, and not too much farther, is the best mango juice stand I know of.
It's past Gheda's house and near the restaurant where we took her out to dinner. Gheda, who spoke a little more of our language than we knew of hers, who was engaged to be married, who invited us into her home, and whose friendship with us consisted mostly of smiles, nods, and laughter to replace the words, but none of it ingenuine.
I am going against Pascal's musings.
I am trying to be everything
Is this why I unravel?
Is anything correlated?
I think I cast the thread of these stories in the partial hope that someone will recognize the spool that spins them or the fabric they might be trying to weave.
I hardly dare ask for causes,
but is anything correlated?
At one time, I'd asked for a sign
to help me identify a person
A friend asked me once, what I would do if I got it.
'I think I'd cry'
A year later, my ideas of fate and signs had changed, but I knew when I found its equivalent, and
I was right.
I cry at things I don't understand
and things that are true
and I'd just found something all of good, longed-for, unexpected, and real.
However, the near future contained sudden modifications to the situation I thought I'd found, and the side-effects from it which I'd accepted on temporary conditions swelled like ice until entire paths turned to rubble. The maw between what could and what was yawned until one gray morning I woke for the last time for the next year beneath my bed, unusually confused by my surroundings and feeling like a seasick sailor. My first task was to understand that I'd never before understood what being homesick really felt like.
For a year, I lived with experiences and colors at once too subdued and too brilliant to be continuously real. I looked out windows as if they were closed eyelids. When I awoke suddenly this January, my memory of the time preceding seemed to fade more quickly. My inclination is to explain this in terms of a lived dream, but this is probably not useful as I'll only confuse myself with attempted justifications for uncorrelations resulting from a poor organizing metaphor. It is poetic though.
The hope I'd let dissolve revived in the real world, and I searched for a phrase to describe how I felt. I wanted to say it felt surreal or felt like I was dreaming except that those sentiments are both cliché and false. If anything, I felt like I'd finally woken up.
But further complications continuously submerge me into an underwater realm of subconscious. At times I find myself free of this fishbowl, but eventually my sense of the vitality of reality fades. I don't know if I'm exaggerating or getting complacent.
I sometimes find a distinction between waking and sleeping useful because knowing that the reality I exist in will not stay helps me get through dreams. I had a sign above my pillow saying 'Reality' with an arrow pointing towards the rest of my room. But,
I probably do not help my situation by dividing time between dreaming and awake. It might all be one tangled string of possible correlations and attempted explanations.
.
I heard that there was a study done on rats in which the rats received random shocks regardless of what levers they pressed or what actions they did or didn't perform. I heard the rats ceased to function.
The ability to function is an extremely important one to me. Perhaps this is why I feel like I have so much trouble with it. Perhaps I want the wrong kinds of explanations - the kinds that use words and begin with 'because'.
I think I will never get out of the fishbowl by specifically trying.
(further thoughts might unroll, I feel them curled like ferns around these images)
I
perched on a couch in the SU
the setting sun
leaving gleaming fingerprints on the warm grid-of-windows-wall,
reaching like a sheet across wood-paneled floors
listening
to the figure at the piano fill the room with
notes like
rain falling through fog, as seen from below and slowly turning.
Intently Attentive to
enjoying the physical processes and perceptions of my
environment and very temporary body
before moving on.
I have just been trying to look in the mirror as though I were not myself, and trying to understand what I would see.
***
He told us about how,
himself 19,
he'd cleaned house for the Master in his last year of life,
and listened to one who'd ever-pondered consciousness
confounded:
"I just don't get it!" He would say, "the light comes in through my eyes, and it goes out! ...I just don't get it!"
and thought, if after so long this man doesn't, how can I ever expect to?
***
He was so glad to find out it was me who'd put up the Olde LJR around Reed
so that he could ask for the copy of the Perennial Pedagogy and Macbeth's Give sorrow words/ the grief that does not speak/ whispers the o’er-fraught heart and bids it break.” that he'd nearly taken off the wall before.
***
He told us how,
at the Master's memorial service, Macbeth's 'Give Sorrow Words' was displayed, and
Calligraphers came from all over the Northwest to pay their respects and to write a weathergram. The quadrangle was feathered with hundreds of fluttering weathergrams.
***
Weathergrams are meant to be transient and brief,
meant to leave the artists hands
meant to be a fleeting thought, attracted into words for a time,
not belabored in the writing
hung in kraft paper and twine from trees
part of the scene
submitted for revision by the elements of nature.
You can read the poem
But that is not the poem.
Watch the white paper
Between the lines.
Look through that white
As through white snow
To see what buttercups and lilies
Are pushing up from below.
from “How to Read a Poem”
by Lloyd Reynolds
***
At lunch with Zeb Raft during his candidacy visit for tenure track in the Chinese Department, we'd asked him a number of tough questions including expectations for students, plans for classes, opinions of the Humanities program,... his answers to all of which I thought demonstrated his being made of the right material. After finishing his answers however, he turned a question around to us:
What is your ideal class?
stunned, it occurred to me I'd never thought of the question before. Here I am, claiming to be a student, and I've never formed a picture of what I think the ideal class ought to look like.
After some thought, I responded something to the effect of,
"I suppose I would want to find someone doing something I respected, and follow them."
"Like Jesus!" a friend piped up
Yeah. I guess so.
"Well, Confucius says wherever you find 3 men walking, one of them can teach you something," said Zeb.
***
A student, writing about Lloyd J Reynolds, said that he was born at just the right time.
Too early for me, I thought. Or perhaps I was born too late.
My timing trades the man himself for the benefit of reflections and biographies, able to see his life by looking down from the end, the time between making effects of his life on this world more visible. Then again, would I have thought a yet-living Master fit to follow?
no love without growth
No growth without change
no change without death
It's back
I invited it.
I know its Master.
I will not ask him to call off his dog.
I will not roll around on this ship like a cannon ball.
I will sail with this direction all the way,
whether it seers us to treasure and glory
or destruction.
So hound,
which will it be?
***
From The Alchemist
Every blessing ignored becomes a curse
We are afraid of losing what we have...
but this fear evaporates when we understand that our life stories and the history of the world were written by the same hand
Yes,
that's what love is. It's what makes the game become the falcon, the falcon become man, and man, in his turn, the desert. It's what turns lead into gold and makes the gold return to the earth.
This is why alchemy exists, So that everyone will search for his treasure, find it, and then want to be better than he was in his former life.
When we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better too.
It's not love to be static or to see from a distance... Love is the force that transforms and improves the Soul of the World.
When we love, we always strive to become better than we are.
*****
loving is labor
labor's life
life's forever
Soco Amaretto Lime
these words look yellow, orange, green sherbet colors to me.
Thanks to imeem and YouTube, I've found a song, the guitar-string-pulse of which has followed me in pockets, around corners, and on dark ledges since the night we plucked it out on guitar and base in our own voices in the night-curtained room at my best friends' house, insulated now by memory.
I have since passed through the age of 18.
We said the end was somewhat reminiscent of Caulfield's Wake up, ya morons!
I listen to the guitar heartbeat of this whole song, partly waiting for the ending.
青春舞曲
Qingchun Wuqu
A Uighur folk song
blue-green 青 and spring 春 : youthfulness
This version is for a Chinese equivalent of American Idol.
太阳下山明早依旧爬上来
花儿谢了明天还是一样的开
美丽的小鸟飞去无影踪
我的青春小鸟一去不回来
我的青春小鸟一去不回来
别的那样呦别的那样呦
我的青春小鸟一去不回来
My experience with Chinese is very little, but here's my impression of the lyrics:
The sun descends behind the mountains, but climbs up in the morning.
Flowers wilt, but tomorrow again open.
A beautiful bird flies, leaving not even a trace of a shadow.
The years of my youth fly like that bird, never returning.
From The Rubaiyat
by Omar Khayyam
VII
Come, fill the Cup, and in the fire of Spring
Your Winter-garment of Repentance fling:
The Bird of Time bas but a little way
To flutter--and the Bird is on the Wing.
