Oddments of High Unimportance

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Allen Jacobs notes in his newsletter that it appears you can’t edit what you’ve posted or take it down.

What you publish is also not scraped by the search engines. So, as the site says, “you can scream into the void and know the form of your voice is out there forever.“

Nielsen-Norman Group UX study conclusion:

This compulsion to fill the silence is related to the Vortex phenomenon, which refers to people’s lack of control over the amount of time they spend online, due to continuous digital temptations that pull them deeper and deeper into interacting with their devices. As people feel the need to fill every single empty moment, they are more and more drawn to their devices, as an easy way to satisfy that need.

I love my iPhone SE, but I have noticed recently how it has become a fidget device. In a theater waiting for the movie to start, at a pub waiting for our drinks, in the grocery store checkout line. I check it knowing that there will be nothing new to see and nothing I can do about it even if there is something new.

I’m noticing those moments more often, which I consider a good sign. When I notice that I’ve “woken up,” I put the phone down or back in my pocket, breathe, look around, and let whatever thoughts want to float by, float by. I remind myself to be grateful for where I am now. Nothing bad has happened yet.

(Via Allen Jacobs’ email newsletter)

From the final pages of Michael Perry’s Montaigne in Barn Boots: An Amateur Ambles Through Philosophy.

He quotes from Montaigne on one of his abiding meditations, death: Death, it is said, releases from all our obligations.

This phrasing…,with its use of the word releases, implicates us in our duty while we remain among the living. Montaigne may have retired to his castle, but he did not retire from every duty. “When he contrasts the solidity of acts with the futility of words,” wrote Starobinski, “he accepts the traditional moral teachings and opts for acts.” Even after he began essaying he continued to serve as a soldier, an advisor, and the mayor of Bordeaux. Even as he lay dying he had agreed to travel to Paris to counsel the king in some affair of state. “The world is inapt to be cured,” he wrote, but never forget he stood on that world, and forsook it at his own peril. I read Montaigne in my room above the garage and think I better start speaking up more. That I should make a few more ambulance calls. Take up the cause of uncertainty, if nothing else. If reading and writing about Montaigne has taught me anything, it is not that I am on some path to perfection where I never again grab the [electric] pig fencer. Montaigne is the pig fencer, jolting me out of my absentminded musing and into the recognition that through the examination of our imperfections I can better serve my obligations to others.

That, above all, is what I take from Montaigne.

I am obligated.

I must do better.

The only thing more fun than reading Montaigne, it seems, is reading what others say about Montaigne. (1) His admirers pop up when and where one least expects.

For example, Sarah Bakewell’s 2010 book How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer was a bestseller that probably took everyone, including Bakewell, by surprise.

And over the Christmas break, I read Michael Perry’s 2017 Montaigne in Barn Boots: An Amateur Ambles Through Philosophy. Perry is a Wisconsin-based writer/musician/farmer/volunteer fireman/humorist and probably two or three more slash-somethings by now.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s review nicely recaps the book and highlights one of the best things about it: how Perry’s easy and personable approach so nicely matches Montaigne’s. Just as Montaigne took his instruction and sustenance from the ancient philosophers he read and quoted, so Perry draws from Montaigne’s life and essays some essential lessons for his own life.

Perry the Humorist makes himself known often with anecdotes and memories, capping sentences and paragraphs with quips aimed at the back seats. I got a bit wary sometimes, recognizing when he was winding up for a pitch. But when Perry the Writer and Perry the Man wrestle with issues of weight — relationships with family and neighbors, responsibility, bodily and emotional pain, ego, leading a life of integrity along with the costs that that decision imposes — Perry’s own essays achieve a solidity and a quiet authority. Montaigne and Perry speak for themselves, and by doing so, give voice to many others. Both men are flawed; both are always trying to do better.

Montaigne in Barn Boots is not a biography; Bakewell has done that. Perry’s book is something to me that is more interesting: an intelligent person riffing on a classic from the past to help him live better for the future, laid out for us in the style and manner of his personal patron saint. I loved it.

(1) Or what Montaigne says about himself. My own personal favorite Montaigne book is Marvin Lowenthal’s The Autobiography of Michel de Montaigne, which stitches together Montaigne’s writings from the essays, letters, and other documents, to create a chronological self-portrait that is sometimes more fun to read than the essays. Montaigne’s essays and the Tao te Ching would probably be my desert island books (but don’t ask me to pick only one translation!).

My typical New Year’s Day tool for many years has been selecting a Word of the Year, most often using Christine Kane’s process. This year, I already knew that my word would be Bold, as that is my current coach Mary Schiller’s word for the year. Bold is not how I think of myself; so it expresses a quality I want to call forth from myself this year.

But since I trust other peoples’ processes more than my own, I also pluck fruit from others’ gardens, give them a sniff, and see if they’re worth a taste.

One idea I liked came from a Michael Neill post on how he went about defining his most enjoyable year yet. The questions that prompted his imagination were:

Imagine it’s one year from today and you’ve had your most enjoyable year yet… 

What’s happened? What have you done? What’s different in your life now?

I started daydreaming about those questions and hit a wall pretty quickly. It’s similar to what happens when I’m asked what I want for my birthday or Christmas — I go blank. I have such a (it seems to me) dreamy temperament that I can’t think of wanting anything more than going with, or at least keeping up with, the flow. Which is kind of counter to the idea of Bold.

Then I remembered a Mark Forster technique for shaping vague goals into more actionable ideas. Namely: start with something you don’t want, then transform it into a positive. The essentials of a clearer goal or plan may emerge from this more productive line of questioning. So: “I don’t want a long commute” could be positively stated as “I want to live closer to my workplace” or “I want to work remotely from my home.”

From all this mental churn came the idea of asking myself what do I want more of in 2019 and what do I want less of. I had a clearer idea of ways I did not want to behave, or activities I did not want to fill my time with. That made it easier to define what I would prefer to do with the year ahead.

I filled about a page and a half in my journal on this so I’ll put only a few here. We’ll see if this is a list that lasts longer than the typical New Year’s resolution.

Eddie Smith, from 2016:

Modern survival is antithetical to everything evolution programmed us for. Today we have to:

1. Eat much less than is available

2. Move much more than we have to

3. Take many more daily risks than we have to

Today, complacency is the tiger rustling in the bushes. Vulnerability is the key to longevity.

Too often, I equate vulnerability with fragility. They’re not the same thing.

Sophie McBain: 

There is no space for unnecessary detail. It also takes only a few minutes to write, making it the perfect journal for people with busy lives, short attention spans and limited self-discipline.

I just finished keeping a 5-year diary and this article prompted me to restart it. One of the more mundane but helpful uses I found for it was tracking the movies/TV series we saw each year, each book I read, etc. When I look back at the list of 2012 movies, I find I cannot recognize a majority of the titles. Most of the movies we see — and their titles — are not that memorable.

I wonder why people who advocate keeping a journal feel the need to cite research on the beneficial effects of keeping a journal. Since McBain is writing for publication, she probably had a word count to hit beyond the simple telling of her story and what she found beneficial.  Still, I have the feeling that keeping a record of one’s days is something one is internally prompted to do because they want to do it. Keeping a journal because you think it will be good for you is like buying a treadmill to lose weight; both objects very quickly become tombstones in the cemetery of good intentions.

I found that, even with my limited self-discipline, I could not maintain a daily diary practice. I tended to more easily record the details of visitors, events, trips, and so on. Re-reading these brief entries sometimes call forth memories, emotions, and sensations I did not know I had.

But too many of my days were mundane — the daily work routine, the commute, nothing of note that was worth noting. I suspect I was making the diary a too-literal record of my day. If I hit a day where nothing much happened, then I think I will fill the space with something. Anything. Three gratitudes, a quote, my state of mind, a haiku, a doodle. Every day a line.

Driving down backroads from the Jordan Lake Christmas Tree Farm, we passed a white clapboard church with a gravel parking lot and a graveyard. On my thematic purity rating for backroad country churches, it rated a 9 out of 10. (Points are deducted for paved parking lots, brick churches, and modern architecture.)

But the sight made me wonder: what’s the difference between a graveyard and a cemetery?

We learn from Jakub Marian that for centuries, burials were the province of the church; thus, part of the church property was dedicated to yards with graves. Graveyards are therefore associated with churches.

But as the population grew, the need for burial sites exceeded the churches’ capacity. Towns and cities established much larger, standalone burial sites separate from churches and called them cemeteries.

So, as Marian says, a “graveyard is a type of cemetery, but a cemetery is usually not a graveyard.“

Cemetery is the older word, a Latinate form of the Greek koimētērion “dormitory,” from koiman “put to sleep.” According to Marian, graveyard is a later word that derives from the “Proto-Germanic *graban, meaning ‘to dig,’ and it is related to ‘groove’ but not to ‘gravel.’”

There is something satisfyingly heavy, sonorous, and Anglo-Saxon about the plainer “graveyard” — with overtones of solemnity (“a grave aspect”), the long and short “a” sounds bridged by that vibrating “v”, the hard ending of that “d.” The word’s sound and its image are well-matched. Cemetery is almost too pretty a word for what it describes.

[We recently toured the nearby Maplewood Cemetery, courtesy of Preservation Durham. Three large city-sized blocks of burial sites, mausoleums, funeral urns, and the like; you see the history of Durham’s street names in the headstones. When the cemetery was established, it was on the outskirts of a small town; now, a growing city surrounds it with apartments, subdivisions, commerce, churches, and a bit of Duke Forest. A portion of each block was set aside for a Potter’s Field, and — it perhaps goes without saying — the rich and well-to-do’s plots are always on higher ground.]

I believe in going to the funeral.

I believe in going to the wedding.

I believe some occasions, though ceremonial, can be important to the emotional health of the individual and the community.

I believe in making order out of chaos -- or, if possible, making the chaos a little less chaotic.

I believe there is more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in Stoic philosophies.

I believe we are physical creatures evolved to live on this planet, in this universe, through a million-years long process. I believe we need to respect the soft animal within and what it needs. I believe the brain is a useful organ, but the socially programmed ego-mind can be a trickster.

I believe art is essential but not necessary.  

I believe art, creativity, spirituality, and deep religious feeling all draw from the same well and can evoke similar energy in its beholders.

I believe if I had started writing fiction seriously 30 years ago, and persisted, I would be a different person today. I believe if I had persisted if only for 10 years in any of the many artistic projects I took on, I would be a different person today. I believe I was a different person then and that I am a different person today. I believe I will be a different person next year. 

I believe whenever I feel envy or regret that I am feeling my thought in the moment. I believe that negative energy carries no truthful information for me and can be safely ignored. 

I believe there is a spiritual dimension to life that has been expressed throughout the centuries in such sacred texts as the Tao te Ching, the Baghavad Gita, the Dhammapada, the Torah, the Koran, the Bible, and other similar documents. I believe they all point to spiritual truths using the language of their tribes and times.

I believe mythologies are also sacred texts that express life's spiritual patterns and human psychology as noticed by sages and enlightened individuals over generations. I believe if you read them as poetry rather than as prose, as metaphors rather than instructions, as ambiguous rather than declarative, they will always have something new to teach.

I believe all sacred texts and mythologies are true or all have their own way in to the Truth.

I believe the Tao the Ching to be "my" Bible. 

I believe there are modern sacred texts also, but we're too close to know which they are. I believe time will tell.

I believe that, physically and psychologically, we make emotional decisions and then reason backward to justify and explain them. 

I believe thinking is a power tool that, when applied to matters of the soul or psyche, can make life worse or at least less fun.

I believe our human psychology and social programming separate us from an experience of the Divine. I believe we create our own experiences of the physical world and we call those experiences "reality." I believe that creating those experiences doesn't make them hurt less. I believe I can recognize that I am making up that experience in the moment and I can choose to see where that takes me. 

I believe that what we call "God" is the Tao, the Divine, Universal Mind, the Formless, the Source Energy that is the resonating frequency of the universe. Another word for this divine creative and generative energy is Love. I believe when we feel Love, we feel at one with the universe and everything.

I believe all matter in this physical universe was created from this Formless energy, so all of us -- even Donald Trump -- are connected to the formless and the eternal. I believe we can acknowledge this as truth or simply carry on as if it were true and we should never stop looking for evidence to prove or disprove. I believe knowing this should not stop us from doing what needs to be done to change conditions in the physical world, or our little piece of it, that need changing, for the highest good of all.

I believe that voting matters, particularly in local elections. 

I believe there are few things better in life than a good laugh. 

I believe in Science as a verb, as a process for analyzing this material world. I believe that expecting a Final Answer from Science on any question -- from diets to dark matter -- is a foolish expectation because organized, formalized knowledge is always being revised. 

I believe that what some people call Science is more properly called Engineering.

I believe scientists or engineers who have spent their lives studying a specific topic know some things to be true, even though they cannot prove them empirically. 

I believe in writing and mailing birthday cards, Christmas cards, and sympathy cards to friends and family. I believe doing this for its own sake is satisfying.

I believe the understanding that underlies the 3 Principles to be about as close to the spiritual, philosophical, and psychological truth as I understand it at this time. I believe I have no other need for a self-help or therapeutic method than to continue studying the implications of the 3 Principles. I believe there is also a spiritual component to the 3 Principles that, when it goes missing, makes the whole less than its parts.

I believe I have not had the "Holy Effing Mother of God" moment that some 3 Principles followers have talked about. I believe it will come when it will come.

I believe I am still asleep and have yet to wake up.

I believe that I feel and live better when I have less on my mind. 

I believe in randomness and synchronicity as phenomenon that point to an order I cannot separate from chaos. I believe Tarot cards and coin flips are as good a way to make decisions and know myself as anything else.

I believe writing is "thinking on paper" (or onscreen). I believe publishing what I write -- even to a blog at the end of the internet -- is essential for my creative and spiritual sake, if no one else's. 

I believe the Universal Mind, the Formless, the Tao, Source Energy is impersonal and indifferent to us and to what we want, but when we move in harmony with it, then it provides us with what we need in the moment. I believe that the inspiration I feel to create comes from the Formless, bursts into this material universe as thoughts I cannot control, and that my state of personal mind -- call it consciousness -- will make those thoughts look more or less real to me. I believe I can be the thinker, and the one who observes the thinker.  I believe when I identify with the latter, and do not take my thinking personally, I generally feel and perform better. 

I believe there can be snakes in the garden and that floods will come, so it's wise to be prepared. I believe if I let myself be led by intuition and insights "from the blue," that I will be better prepared for feast or famine than if I relied on reason alone.

I believe I am less fun than I used to be. I believe that when I ignore that type of thought, refuse to take it personally, and let it float by, another thought will come along. I believe that while I'm waiting for that next thought, I can chop wood, carry water, draw a picture, watch a Youtube video, or clean the papers from my office floor. 

I believe the Universe respects energy rather than justice. I believe the perfection and pleasure is in the doing. 

I believe people can do evil things in the world and to other people. I believe people can do good things in the world and for other people. I believe we have the capacity to choose either path. I believe when I'm in tune with the Tao or Source Energy, I will make the choice that's right for that moment.

I believe this list is inadequate, incomplete, thinly argued, and likely inconsequential. I believe it is the best I can do now, at this time. I believe this list points to something I cannot see or articulate. 

I believe some of what I wrote here is truthful. I believe some of it just sounded good to my ear. 

My only experience with Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway is the exquisite 1997 movie. I'd tried listening to this audiobook version three or four times, and could never get past the first 30 minutes.

  <img src="http://tempblogfood.files.wordpress.com/2019/08/67ece-mrs-dalloway.jpg" alt="" />

For whatever reason -- a quieter mind, a longer commute -- I found the rhythm of it on this go-round, aided by the actress Juliet Stevenson's beautifully measured and performed reading. 

This is the first fiction I've experienced by Virginia Woolf. Listening to the book's numerous stream-of-consciousness passages felt very natural, with Stevenson dipping in and out the stream so elegantly I barely noticed the prose's bracing modernity and technique. 

What surprised me as a first-time reader was how much of the story was told, rather than shown, and, moreover, told through the consciousnesses of 20 or more separate characters. Sliding from one character's viewpoint to another in the course of a scene yielded deftly etched portraits of all the characters. The way Sally, Richard, Elizabeth, Peter, Miss Kilman, Lady Bruton all comment on Clarissa limns both her and them. Hugh Whitbread's shortcomings are funnier when detailed via the successive thoughts and impressions of Richard Dalloway, Lady Bruton, and Lady Bruton's stiff secretary Miss Brush, who despises him.

It's a book in which much is remembered and gone over, pondered and reconsidered, but in which not much happens, at least to the Dalloways and their set. The plot is minimal, there are no "stakes" to speak of. Ursula Le Guin wrote that we need to think of stories as having shapes and structures different and more interesting than the standard pyramidal rising action, climax, falling action. Mrs. Dalloway is a wonderful example of that. The individual streams merge to form a splashing river, with turns of phrase, images, and motifs shining out and taking my breath away when least expected.

And when I say "not much happens," that does not apply to the story of Septimus Warren Smith and his wife Lucrezia. Smith and Mrs. Dalloway were evidently intended as "doubles," according to Woolf, though they never meet and she only overhears the story of his suicide. 

Yet without Smith and Rezia, I think the novel would be only half as good, technically sterling but emotionally limited, as Clarissa and Peter's memories of their youthful summers and the winding down of their joys and possibilities are the sadnesses simply of time passing and growing older. Not insignificant themes yet not lapel-grabbers, either.

But Septimus. Poor Septimus. It's like he wandered in from a different story and refuses to leave until he's said his peace and shared his hallucinatory revelations. He lives in his hallucinations as Clarissa lives in her memories, but the anguish his shell shock causes Rezia, and the blinkered mishandling of his case by well-meaning medical men, brings emotional devastation and tragedy to the story. For me, its importance warps the gravity of the narrative flow. The description of Clarissa's party afterward feels like a dutiful epilogue; life goes on, yes, Clarissa has her epiphany, yes, but something vital has left the book. 

And too: I was surprised at how quickly the scene of Septimus' suicide went, at how little time Woolf spends exploring the aftermath compared to what one might expect today. Rezia sadly accepts that this has happened and is given an unasked-for sedative by the doctor. Peter Walsh, walking to his hotel, hears the sound of an ambulance, and another stream enters the river. It's a breathtaking moment.

Listening to this book became a thrilling experience, in its way, as I sought opportunities to spend more time with this book, its characters, and its world. I'm looking forward to hearing it again. 

Source: Naxos Audiobooks, via Audible.com