The Pond in Winter

The chill in the air bespeaks the coming of Winter. The time is still only mid-October but the falling rain and gusty winds will soon pull the leaves off of the trees and they will be bare. Thoreau writes in his journal, “I knew a crazy man who walked into an empty pulpit one Sunday and, taking up a hymn-book, remarked: “We have had a good fall for getting in corn and potatoes. Let us sing Winter.” So, Thoreau says, ‘Let us sing winter.’ What else can we sing, and our voices be in harmony with the season?” As for me, I am not yet ready to sing winter, not anymore, and when it does arrive, I hope to be packing for warmer climates. 

But I have been thinking about “The Pond in Winter” a chapter in Thoreau’s Walden. When Thoreau lived on its shores and in winter the pond froze over to a depth of a foot and a half, Thoreau surveyed Walden. There exists his detailed surveying maps showing his considerable skill and thoroughness in the practice of surveying. In fact, Thoreau eventually worked as a professional surveyor, so accomplished in this profession that to support himself he traveled all about New England contracting as a surveyor. Thoreau was hardly an unemployed, unemployable, idle man, as he has too often been accused over the years. It may be that his skill as a surveyor, as Linda Walls suggests, led to his discovery of Walden’s bottom and the fulfillment of his purpose for coming out there to live for two years, two months and two days. That purpose Thoreau declared was “to front only the essential facts of life, and see if he could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when he came to die, discover that he had not lived, living being so dear.” I think that by his thorough survey he had found Walden’s bottom and had found in that bottom what he called reality. Walden Pond, he discovered, was not bottomless but was, indeed, rock solid at its bottom. Though Thoreau celebrates that “while men believe in the infinite some ponds will thought to be bottomless,” he knew that in such belief there would be no “hard bottom and rocks in place” which could be called reality. All would remain ungrounded, unsteady, and in constant flux. If a belief in bottomless ponds is a belief in the infinite, then there would be for the individual no solid ground on which to stand, there would exist no rock-bottom and no reality. I believe that this discovered bottom of Walden was the symbol Thoreau sought. Thoreau knew that it was necessary in and for his life to discover the bottom, to front the absolute essentials. He wrote, “Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, through church and state, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality, and say, This is, and no mistake, and then begin, having a point d’appui . . . a place where you might found a wall or a state . . . .” Thoreau declared, “There is a solid bottom everywhere," and one had only to find it. Our rock-solid bottom is discoverable: “We will not be shipwrecked on a vain reality,” Thoreau asserted.

 Thoreau’s sounding and surveying of Walden made the pond for him a symbol for he discovered that when he drew his rule across the greatest breadth and length of the map, he discovered that “the lines intersected exactly (italics in the original) at the point of its greatest depth.” He considered that the law of the two diameters that had been true for the pond might be also true for an individual’s ethics—their personal moral code—as well. As the length and breadth of Walden intersected exactly at the point of its place greatest depth, so that intersection in a person would occur at the point of greatest depth. Thoreau wrote that one could “draw lines through the length and breadth of the aggregate of a man’s particular daily behaviors and waves of life into his coves and inlets, and where they intersect will be the height or depth of his character.” I suppose that the length and breadth of any person’s daily behaviors would intersect at a point of greatest depth, but sometimes that depth would be found not to be very deep and the reality shallow. The artist, Ben Shahn, complained that his own early work lacked the reality of his self. He said, “And then I began to realize that however professional my work might appear, even however original it might be, it still did not contain the central person which for good or ill, was myself . . . . All my views and notions on life and politics, all this material and much more which constitute the substance of whatever person I was, lay outside the scope of my own painting.” Shahn’sr ecognized that his paintings might have come from his skill but not from his reality, and he had to sound his depth to paint that reality, survey the length and breadth of his activities, measure where they intersected, and sound his depth.

I’ve wondered: does one first sound one’s Walden to find its depth. Or does one find its depth by measuring where the length and breadth of activities intersect?  Of course, for a bottomless pond there would be no depth and therefore no intersection of length and breadth would ascertain the place of greatest depth. Indeed, there would be no depth. There would be, then, no knowledge of self. But I wonder what would be the skill required to survey the length and breadth of a person’s action, to find the point of the intersection of the lines and to know the depth of character. I think Thoreau knew that to be good was not an immanence but an effort in the daily life of the individual. In Iris Murdoch’s novel, The Nice and the Good, Willi, a holocaust survivor says, “We are not good people, and the best we can hope for is to be gentle, to forgive each other and to forgive the past, to be forgiven ourselves and to accept the forgiveness, and to return again to the beautiful unexpected strangeness of the world.” That would be one answer, I suppose, but it would not be one Thoreau might profess. He wrote, “It is not necessary for a man to put himself in opposition to society, but rather. to maintain himself in whatever attitude he finds himself through obedience to the laws of his being, which will never be one of opposition to a just government, if he could chance to meet with such.” 

But yes, let me measure the breadth of my daily activities and the lengths to which I go to fulfill them. And where they intersect I will discover my depth, my rock bottom, my reality.

 

Maybe more than the time of year

                       

Maybe it was the time of year or maybe it was the time of man. Rosh Hashanah had ended the previous week and now, ten day later the shofar signaled the end of Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, the most sacred day of the year. Torah says on that day you should afflict yourself, and the Rabbis have interpreted the requirement to mean that for the whole of the day—from sundown to sundown—one should abstain from food and drink, from anointing, from wearing leather and from sexual intercourse. These denials should allow one to focus the mind not on the body but on the spirit. Teshuvah, the act of return after the confession, offers to the world a soul that has been forgiven and that can enter life in a new beginning. Sometimes over the years I have experienced this state, but throughout any number of bygone and recent years not so often. And certainly not lately. The historical materialist in me remains suspicious of this ideology. Freud has suggested that the past is never lost, forgotten or forgiven, and I have long held with Faulkner who had said in his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize, “The past is never dead. It is not even past.” Nonetheless, at Yom Kippur this year as in sixty-five years previous I have afflicted myself: did not eat or drink, did not anoint myself; I wore leather only on my belt so that my trousers would not fall down and I did not engage in sexual activity. This last was the least difficult, such as is my age. But at the end of my fast and at the blowing of the shofar I was aware that I had not experienced any spiritually transcendent moment, and  I left the shul not expecting my transgressions to have been forgiven and forgotten. I do not know when I might have lost the capacity for the experience, if indeed I ever did possess it, but now it was certainly  . . . unavailable.

            But two evenings later, on that Saturday evening at the concert, I enjoyed just such a spiritually transcendent moment. John McCutcheon’s presence, by which I mean the songs he sang and the stories he told to the room of perhaps 200-300 folks, many of them gray-headed or bald, many hopefully retired and at some peace, all who had been through the wars both social and political and who had come there to be present, John reminded us of the struggle which over the years he had shared with us and spoke and sang of the work still to be done. He sang of the joys and sorrows of this life, and he told stories of the sorrows and joys he had experienced as he traveled and performed throughout the world. I sensed that some of what he said had been scripted prior, but there in his narrative I felt unrehearsed emotion and meaning in the choice of stories and songs he would sing. 

            I have had for almost forty years’ experience with McCutcheon’s work and have attended more than several of his concerts in a variety of venues and states. In my storage unit are a dozen or more of his CDs. I do not listen to CDs anymore, but that situation demands another blog post. But last night my seventy-eight year old body, uncomfortable as a way of life and uncomfortable in the unupholstered bridge chairs at the Cedar Cultural Center, seated between my partner and my 31 year old daughter, who perhaps didn’t know to what experience to which she had accepted invitation and who was perhaps unprepared for what she would hear, but I was overwhelmed by an experience of transcendency at the intensity, sincerity and beauty of his singing and his playing on a variety of instruments, banjo, guitar, fiddle, hammered dulcimer, autoharp and piano. And I mean, not playing as in cursory performance, but singing and playing with a passion and a demand for social justice, for human rights, with an advocacy for the better parts of all of us in the multitude who sat with him. There was love in that room, and I knew somehow that I was not alone.

McCutcheon had created in that not very large room a community where for some brief moments all dissension ceased, and we sat and smiled together as we sang. Oh, we knew that there was an ugly world out there—McCutcheon reminded us of that in his choice of songs—but the songs and singing kept the wolf at bay for just a few moments. I felt warm despite the air-conditioning, secure and almost at peace amidst the chaos. For just a little while as we sang, hallelujah, the great storm was indeed over.
            As I stepped out into the sweltering October night, I knew, the storm that had been ended in there raged still out here. But for just three hours in there it had, yes, been over. And that would be enough for now.

Prep Time

The recipe for my Minnesota Wild Rice Soup said that prep time would take ten minutes—though that measure would not include the 30 minutes preparing the wild rice which is actually a semi-aquatic type of grass and not rice at all. Preparing the wild rice should have been considered prep work because when it was cooked it would be added to the soup and not cooked as the soup. I could even prepare the rice ahead of time, test for its chewiness and add it at the appropriate time. I did so.

Why exactly should prep time be distinguished from say, cook time?  Prep is the necessary gathering, peeling and chopping of the vegetable and fleshly ingredients that will constitute the meal when cooked, though to be sure, as a vegetarian I do not prep any meat or fish product. The distinct designation of prep time seems another example of the establishment of time standards by which activities can be measured and life organized. In the novel Measuring the World, Daniel Kehlmann attributes to Alexander von Humboldt the idea that measurement creates reality. Numbers become a means of controlling chaos. The notice of prep and cook times places boundaries on the process of meal preparation and makes chaos containable. But Thoreau writes “We are compelled to live so thoroughly and sincerely reflecting on our steps, reverencing our life, that we never make allowance for the possible changes.” For Thoreau it was the wild he sought, perhaps the wild another name for chaos. He opens the essay “Walking,” with an advocacy of wildness: “I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil.” I do not think Thoreau would adhere much to the establishment of requisite prep times. Me? I am a somewhat careless cook and experience the kitchen chaos as my usual modus operandi. Sometimes it seems a bit wild in there. And yes, I understand that defining a time for prep time and cook time does seem to control the chaos of running between cabinets and shelves pulling down and drawing out and preparing ingredients immediately required to the recipe. But the establishment of prep time and cook time are irrelevant to me: I prefer to prepare the meal in some leisure listening to music to accompany the rhythmic chopping, peeling and shredding. I sometimes wear ear buds to leave my partner in her silence and her reading in the next room. Also, during what is referred to as prep time I place at some safe distance an alcoholic beverage to accompany my engagement in gathering and preparing the ingredients for the dish. I am careful to to keep any of the worked-over pieces of vegetables as they are being gathered, chopped, ground and shredded from flying into the shimmering liquid in the crystal tumbler. I am a careless cook and I never do meet the standard set by the prep time established in the recipe. I turn the volume of the music up. I take another sip.

Prep time. The readying of materials that when done are to be transformed into the meal. But I wonder now why prep time is separate from cook time. Is it really a distinct and separate activity? Ecclesiastes says that there is a season set for everything, though Kohelet does not designate an order or time dimension for the occurrences of anything; he says only that there is a time for everything. “There is a time to be born and a time to die; a time to kill and a time to heal; a time to weep and a time to laugh; a time to seek and a time to lose, a time to plant and a time to reap, a time to rend and a time to sew.” And so to follow Kohelet there must be a time to prepare and a time to cook! A time to consume and a time to wash the dishes. But one thing is also very clear to me from Ecclesiastes: everything will occur in a life though there is no set time or even order for when or for how long anything might occur. Except, of course, for the times of being born and dying. Nor is there much direction as to what is to be done while waiting for each happening. The recipe sheet says that prep time is 10 minutes, but that is not consistent to my movements. I am not so ordered. In fact, I am not prepping, I am cooking dinner. And it all began at the market! Thus, it might be that our lives can be understood as always prep work and simultaneously always cooking. I do not need to be cautioned about prep time because in fact I couldn’t cook anything without first preparing; why then is prep time kept separate from cook time on the recipe sheet. What chaos is being controlled? Having read through the recipe and setting my priorities I think that I can decide how much time I want to spend setting a dinner on the table, when to begin the process and how quickly or leisurely I want to work. Thoreau welcomes the chaos—wildness—as a way to be alive in the world. In the film “The Taste of Things, cooking is life. We are always cooking. As I chop my vegetables I wear my cut gloves to forestall the time to rend. But as Hamlet says, if it be not now, yet it will come. I don’t know why I care to distinguish prep time from cook time. It is all one continuous activity. 

Fra Lippo Lippi

A flâneur, a purposely lost rambler, is how I like to characterize myself. I know that I hadn’t always been such; once I had worn my clothes tight-fitting and my shoes stiff and highly polished. But I had experienced some wonderful moments when I knew what it felt like to wear my clothes loose. But it was an all too brief summer and when it ended, so, too, did my sauntering; I returned once more to my tight-fitting wardrobe and stiff shoes. Sometimes, even Thoreau would complain that “it sometimes happens that I cannot easily shake off the village. The thought of some work will run in my head and I am not where my body is—I am out of my senses.” That is, though his body is walking his mind is bound too tight. There had been, of course, those times when my walk was no saunter: I had felt too encumbered and unfree, and I would discuss with my therapist the unsatisfactory experience and the sources for my anxieties. I learned a few things and sauntered more, and during some walks there would occur transcendent moments when the world and me were transformed. Thoreau says he thinks “not much of the actual . . . It is a sort of vomit in which the unclean love to wallow.” Whew! But no, HDT doesn’t avoid the actual—in a sense it was where he always started—but at times he could not transcend it.  I hold with Robert Browning’s Fra Lippo Lippi who says, “This world’s no blot for us/Nor blank; it means intensely, and means good—/To find its meaning is my meat and drink.” In a way this was Thoreau’s method.

Fra Lippo Lippi struck out from the staid, cautious style then in vogue in the art communities and developed the realist manner of painting though not without harsh critique and chastisement of his work from his clerical superiors. They would have had him paint the soul so that the people would forget the physical, their hard labor, their oppression and their poverty. His superiors scolded,  

Your business is not to catch men with show,

With homage to the perishable clay,

But lift them over it, ignore it all,

Make them forget there’s such a thing as flesh.

Your business is to paint the souls of men—

Lippi stressed that if he painted the world about him it would lead people to the soul. To lose the physical world was not the purpose to which art aspired. Art, Lippi believed, returned the world to us. In a conversation with a guard who had apprehended Lippi as he returned to the monastery after a night of ribaldry Lippi responded: 

For don’t you mark? We’re made so that we love

First when we see them painted, things that we have passed 

Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see;

And so they are better, painted—better to us

Which is the same thing. Art was given for that;

God gives us to help each other so,
Lending our minds out.

His art, Lippi asserted, should give people the world that they were too busy, too distracted or too oppressed to see. For Lippi art might be the invitation to saunter and to transcend. Art might be the impetus for the achievements of other freedoms as well, as Thoreau seemed to understand. Those who would so saunter would see the world’s meaning that they had not before been aware. They would find in the art what would scratch their itches and then come to apprehend soul. Indeed, Lippi’s art would provide them access to meaning and it would begin with the physical world. Art was not a distraction but a summons. Centuries later Bertold Brecht would hold that his theatre was meant to portray the world for his audience and not an opportunity to lose that world in the exhaustion of catharsis. He did not want his audiences to sit passively and forget themselves in a work’s story, Brecht wanted his plays to inspire his audience to think about and question the world they live in. 

Once I had believed that all I needed to know was that beauty was truth and truth beauty, but since then I had experienced and learned a great deal. I recognized that beauty was not an immanence within the object but appeared as an event. Beauty was a description of a feeling that arose in as a response to a relationship between the particular work of art, between anything experienced and the one experiencing it. And I considered that beauty occurred when an experienced tension in the work was felt, and beauty happened from the experience of the release of that felt tension. That release made possible moments of transcendence for the one experiencing the work. I have been listening for years to Leonard Bernstein’s recordings of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Beethoven’s symphony was one of the most beautiful works I have known, though I admit that I have experienced a great deal of beauty in my life. But every time I would hear that music he experienced beauty. He remembered Harvey Sachs’s description of the third movement of the Ninth that followed the difficult, turbulent, sometimes even violent images of the first two movements. He writes “ . . . the third [movement] tells us that we have both lost and won—that as aware human beings, we have no choice but to wade through the horror and anguish and then die, but that we are able, from time to time, to see beyond and soar above these facts and to understand just enough to be able to appreciate the beauty of being moral.” For me the third movement released the tensions that the first two movements had caused and it prepared for the magnificence of the final choral movement. Sachs’s words described transcendence, to recognize the tensions and to experience a resolution of them, to feel one’s itches and to scratch them. Then I knew beauty; then I had beauty. Yes, the experience of beauty scratched one’s itches. All experience of beauty in art—visual, aural, tactile, gastronomical, aromatical—what Lippi referred to as simple beauty, would be found in the quotidian and it was from there that transcendence would happen. 

I think I have searched in my life for beauty and now understand that its potential was present always with me. Walking down a dusty, noisy street today, I thought, yes, the experience of beauty and the source of transcendence comes from having faith in the seed. That within that seed there was a tree that would burst forth and in time flourish. Beauty was truth as Fra Lippo Lippi had asserted. “If you get simple beauty and naught else,” he says, “you get about the best thing God invents—/That’s somewhat; and you’ll find the soul you have missed/within yourself, when you return him thanks.” The awareness of the soul was not a permanent presence but a transitory happening in the experience of beauty. The soul was called into being by the experience of beauty. Transcendence he knew now was not to lose the world in abstraction; rather transcendence would be experienced when the world appeared with new perspective. The experience of beauty led him right back to the world, and he would give thanks by making available the experience of beauty for others. 

 

 

If it Were Up to Me

The latest obscene shooting at Annunciation School in Minneapolis is yet another violent and deadly occurrence in what is turning out as a horrible, horrible several years that has been filled with wars, mass shootings, assassinations, and among other things, a cruel, ugly, vindictive government headed by Trump and meekly followed by sycophantic (and terrified) Republicans. The latest shooting is another instanceof the callous disregard for human life displayed by opponents of gun control. The shooter, Robin Westman, wrote in her journal dated July 4, “Oh my God! I got it! I have a shotgun! It was not too difficult at all!” Exactly the problem! She added that a high-powered rifle was next on the shopping list. I read in the New York Times that earlier this year Ms. Westman wrote that she had been watching so many mass shooting videos online that she worried about being placed on a Federal Bureau of Investigation watch list. But in early July, her state-issued gun permit had arrived in the mail. Exactly the problem! 

            I will not rehash the obvious arguments for gun control in the United States. But I will angrily address stupid comments by people like J.D. Vance who said that the shooting suggested that more mental health care is necessary. Of course, the Republican cadre had already assented to cuts in Medicaid and Medicare, to health care fundings for mental health facilities. The hypocrisy is blatant and dangerous but will be almost certainly ignored by a deliberately blind, intellectually vacant and ethically compromising (and compromised) MAGA electorate. 

            Yes, I know that greater access to mental health ought to be made available; so, too, by the way, should medical care for the physical well-being. The two are not disconnected. But first it must be acknowledged that if the guns weren’t so easily available then those suffering with psychological problems wouldn’t have access to them. No access, no mass shootings. I have heard statistics that there are more guns in the United States than people. For every 100 people there are 120 guns. There are 393 million guns in the United States.

            I watch a great many detective shows many of which are British: Inspector Morse, Lewis, Shetland, Vera, Grantchester, Endeavour, Brokenwood Mysteries, Foyle’s War, George Gently, Midsommer Murders. etc. etc. etc. Firearms in Great Britain are heavily controlled: one must show a very good reason for having one and then be subjected to a heavy vetting process. Pistols are banned. The detectives in these shows carry no weapons. Unless confrontation with and arrest of a suspect seems to be dangerous, guns are not issued to the police (the uniformed coppers!) including the detectives. Yes, the criminals sometimes do have weapons—guns—but the difficulty of obtaining them means that acquisition must have been difficult and for most criminals been y rarely successful. Most suspects do not have weapons, and the detectives chase after and arrest the bad ones without need of guns. Indeed, often the arresting detectives and uniformed police have to chase after the suspect; many discover they need to be in better shape.

So many problems might be resolved if guns were less available. Certainly a military presence in the cities of the United Sates would be unnecessary: but maybe Trump enjoys the military might he controls and strict gun control would render occupation by the National Guard unlikely.
With better access to health care so many troubled individuals might be helped before they went on a killing rage. I am weary of the days of prayer solution to the violence. The children were praying!! I have long believed that the skills to recognize and reject the hypocrisies of people like J.D. Vance ought to be developed in schools, newspapers and journals. 

As Cheryl Wheeler sings, there are many targets for blame for mass shootings, but “If it were up to me, I’d take away the guns!”

 

Plots and Stories

Time returns me to the blog. It is there that I begin to work out ideas that have their origin in my day and that compose the substance of my dreams. 

At the end of Canto IV of Dante’s Inferno I find these lines spoken by Virgil. He is at the moment in Limbo and there sees the great spirits of the past who, born before the Christ have not been baptized and cannot therefore enter Paradise: the Trojans, the Greeks and fabled figures of early Rome; then Virgil sees the philosophers, scientists, mathematicians and doctors, and the Moorish scholar, Averroës But Virgil bemoans that he “cannot enumerate them all fully;/my long theme so drives me on that many times/my words fall short of the facts.” That is, Virgil must abandon the telling of the facts so that he can narrate his story. The story exceeds the facts. In Daniel Kehlmann’s novel, Measuring the World, Alexander von Humboldt says “a renowned traveler was only renowned if he left good stories behind.” Though Humboldt believed that by his physical measurements the “cosmos would be understood, all difficulties pertaining to man’s beginnings, such as fear, war and exploitation, would sink into the past,” but he seems to be also aware that the measurements must be a source of the story in which the measurements are embedded. Outside of a story the measurements lack meaning. Isn’t this about what Virgil complains,that there are too many facts and he must continue the story. In Kehlmann’s novel Carl Gauss avers, that “the world could be calculated after a fashion, but that was a long way from understanding it.” The measurements were the facts that required a story to mean anything. And then the measurements fade into the story.

Maybe the measurements were simply the plot. In George Gissing’s New Grub Street, the novelist Edwin Reardon suffering from a version of writer’s block and trying desperately to produce something that he can sell for publishing complains that he must now “put aside his intellectual work and begin again once more the search for a ‘plot.’” That is, he would rather have a story and not a plot, the latter an ordered narrative of events that might drive forward what will become the story. Story explores the motives and consequences of the actions narrated by the plot. Yes, Joyce’s Ulysses plots the movement of Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom through the streets of Dublin, but the story wonders about their character and the motives for their journeying and the thoughts and emotions that arise in their movements and charted meetings along the way. The story arises out of and includes the plot. The narrator of Orley Farm says the “I will not attempt to report the words that passed between [Lady Orme and Lady Mason] for the next half-hour, for they concerned a matter which I may not dare to handle too closely in such pages as these . . .” This narrator acknowledges that the plot might be in the words but that the story exists in the silence. And in Kehlman’s novel, Carl Gauss, when asked what science was responded “If such a man didn’t give up before he reached an understanding, that, perhaps was science.” Science was the story. I recall a statement by Neils Bohr, a physicist whose work helped develop the atomic bomb: “Science was the result of experiments and not reality.” The story arose out of the plot. 

I think I have spent a good part of my life in stories, both those that I have read and those that I have been told. I have narrated not a few stories myself; I am constantly in the process of storying my life. It is the only way I can know my life. I do act in the world throughout my days, measure it as it were, but those actions lack meaning outside of the story I can narrate about them. I sit writing since 6:30 am and paused only to go to the bathroom, but what and why I am writing, where does it all come from is the story. In James McBride’s novel, The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, Newspaper, whose nickname is Paper, narrates the news to the community that cannot (or will not) read. But her listeners insist that she make the news be a story. Rusty, one of her listeners, says to Paper, “C’mon Paper . . . story it up like you know how. Put a little pop in it, a little scoop.” Why should she do so, Paper asks, and Rusty answers, “’Cause if you tell it any other way, it’ll sound like a lie.” Unless there is a story all that would exist would be the facts, and the facts are empty and meaningless outside the context from which they were first embedded and from which they are drawn. We demand context for sense, and the narration of that context provides the story. The Stage Manager in Wilder’s Our Town says, “In our town we like to know the facts about everybody,” and though the play displays the facts, that is not the story that the play depicts: it is the lives that Emily comes to understand that are imperfect without the story. Emily says, “They don’t understand much, do they? . . . That’s all human beings are!—Just blind people.” To see only the facts is to miss life. Thus, we narrate, and “story it up . . . put a little pop in it, a little scoop.” The story narrates our life. The narrator of José Saramajo’s novel, Blindness, says, “All stories are like those about the creation of the universe, no one was there, no one witnessed anything, yet everyone knows what happened.”  Nevertheless, we tell a story so that we might know what happened, and until we narrate the story, we don’t know what happened.

So, too, is that the idea in Ann Patchett’s novel Tom Lake. Patchett’s Emily narrates to her adult daughters the story of her summer affair with the television and movie star, Peter Duke, a passionate affair that had ended when Duke had taken up with the actor who had replaced Emily in the play and in life when Emily’s Achilles heel became torn. In modern parlance, Duke ghosted Emily: he stopped all communication with her. Hearing this story, Emily’s daughter, Maisie, responds with anger, but Emily says, “The rage dissipates along with the love, and all we’re left with is a story.” She is narrating that story to her daughters. At the end of the day (and even of a life) the story tells what it all felt like and even what it all might have meant. But, of course, it is only a story. In James McBride’s novel, The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store “somebody’s up late and talking” at the livery stable. They are telling a story. All we ever have is the story. We define ourselves by the stories we tell. We know others from the stories they tell. Fatty, in McBride’s The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, had learned that the Nate Timblin he has come to known now was not the same Nate Timblin who had served time in prison. “Rather, he was a story, a wisp, a legend, a force, a fright.” I think the same might be said of us all: we are stories, and our storied lives are the stuff of our dreams.  

Thoreau complains in his journal that he prefers the company of wood nymphs or wood gods because the men “did not inspire me. One or another abused our ears with many words and a few thoughts which were not theirs.” Conversation here was all plot and there was no story. Perhaps we search the world not as did Demosthenes carrying a lantern in search for an honest person but as writers with their metaphorical pens looking for the story.

 

 

On Time in Time

In the essay “Walking” Thoreau writes, “I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least—and it is commonly more than that—sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly engagements.” I have been wondering how Thoreau knew that it was four hours a day or more that he had been out walking. Did Thoreau wear a watch? Was there a clock in his cabin at Walden Pond? Sometimes he walked with a friend: did he then possess something to measure the time? I ask this because increasingly and annoyingly. Too often I complain about time’s controls on me; by time’s pronouncements and imperatives that are delivered and sealed on the multiple devices that ironically I seem incapable of leaving unwound or uncharged, and that I yet carry about and that unfailingly measure my life in minutes and miles.

I realize that I have allowed myself to be controlled by my devices and the announcements it sends to me of its measures and critiques of my life activities. For example, I allow my smart phone to announce the time of day, and to even note what day and month it is; The phone can inform me how many hours and minutes I have slept, can awaken me at the hour I have set for waking, and put me to sleep when at the hour I set. I think that my smart phone can now measure the quality of my sleep, as if I wouldn’t be aware of that character myself! On the phone I can use the timer function to set time-limits to my naps and to correctly time my coffee preparations. The phone measures my daily steps and keeps a record how today’s walk compares to that of yesterday’s amble, to that of last month’s walking, and to even those of the previous year, and then it has the audacity to chastise me if I have not walked as much today as I did yesterday or last month or last year! The phone announces how many calories I have expended for the day, month and year, and offers me a measure of my physical effort, of what it refers to as my METS(?). The only METS of which I am familiar or about which I even care is the baseball team for which I was a fanatical fan until they won the World Series in 1969. The phone tells me how many minutes I have stood (60 minutes), how many minutes I have exercised (74 minutes), and offers an assessment of my cardio fitness, though I don’t know to what the latter refers! I have refused the phone access to my heart rate and blood pressure though I possess a blood pressure machine that also counts the beats of my heart. There is even more recorded and stored on the smart phone but I have reached the end of my patience, technological expertise and ciuriosity. Nonetheless, when I return from my every walk I religiously check the steps report because the goal I have been cautioned is 10,000 steps and 45 minutes a day, and rule-bound that I seem to be I attempt daily to achieve that mark. And now I possess an Apple Watch because I was tricked into thinking that it was free but really I am paying for the line, though what line is meant I am not certain though I believe I have certainly crossed it. A very kind flight attendant showed my what else my Apple Watch can do but I soon lost interest. And while I depend on the devices to govern my enjoyment and measures of time, my mentor Thoreau had looked to the rooster as his measure of time. “Unless our philosophy hears the cock crow in every barn-yard within our horizon, it is belated. That sound commonly reminds us that we are growing rusty and antique in our employments and habits of thought.” Thoreau urges me to live in the present which is apparently all that concerns the cock in his crowing. I seem obsessed with Time and I seem to be focused on something quite apart from the present.

            Thoreau comments that we do not ride the railroad, but that it rides upon us. It is time to which he refers. The appearance of the railroad made an immediate awareness of and obedience to time essential. Trains ran on schedules and if you wanted to ride on one you had better be in the car when the train was leaving the station. Thus, one needed a watch or a well-wound clock. No cock crowing would serve. Factory work contributed to the tyranny of time as did punch cards that recorded the times for entry to and exits from the factory floor. I seem to be governed by my anxieties that causes time to be with me late and soon. I have consider that a mountain top retreat (but not Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain where everything is controlled by a strict time schedule) or a desert escape might be a means of releasing me from the imprisonment I feel regarding time, but I am afraid of being away from the grounding time’s offers and the distractions that all of my devices grant me. Thoreau writes, “It is true, we are but faint-hearted crusaders, even the walkers, nowadays, who undertake no persevering, never-ending enterprises. Our expeditions are but tours, and come round again at evening to the old hearth-side from which we set out. Half the walk is but retracing our steps. We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return,—prepared to send back our embalmed hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms. If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again,—if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man; then you are ready for a walk.” Alas, I do not think I am such a free man. As for the rooster: “Where he lives no fugitive slave laws are passed.” As for me, I check the news too often. 

Walking, and before that running, has served me as lucky charms: every day that I walked or ran I believed I would not die. At 78 years old I am still walking and still alive, so I think this incantatory practice to be thus far effective. But now the walking seems to count only if I approach the step goal. I often manage to come close and even at times reach ten thousand steps and even more, but the walk is not free. I pay with some peace and some distance from time’s term. Thoreau writes, “I, who cannot stay in my chamber for a single day without acquiring some rust, and when sometimes I have stolen forth for a walk at the eleventh hour, or four o’clock in the afternoon, too late to redeem the day, when the shades of night were already beginning to be mingled with the daylight, have felt as if I had committed some sin to be atoned for . . .” Thoreau, too, understands his walk as charm, but I observe how that his walk is also committed to time: he might achieve his freedom in a walk but it must be accomplished within a specific time. I find that I like to walk early and grow rust in the afternoons. 

There is a natural order to the measurement of time: the stages of the moon, the motion of the earth about the sun that defines a year, though the results of this movement vary according to geography. For example, New York experiences four regular seasons, but Costa Rica seems to enjoy only two: the rainy season and the non-rainy season. Minnesota in my experience has four irregular seasons: a long winter, a day of Spring, several months each of Summer and Fall. The tides are regular but it has been only since the invention of the time piece that this movement can be given a specificity in time.

I think à la Kant, that time is not something we enter or use but something we create though not in the sense as in “I can make time for that . . .” That suggests an already existing schedule into which a new activity can be made to fit. Time already exists in this formulation. To allow time to be defined outside of us restricts me to the prison world of the devices. I grow rusty and lose the present. I am always somewhere else and in another time. Simon and Garfunkel sing, “time, time, time, see what’s become of me,” Sandy Denny sings, “Who knows where the time goes?” Dylan sings, “time passes slowly up here in the mountains.” I am cautioned that “Time waits for no one!” In these thoughts time is external to me and we enter into it: time precedes me. But to ignore time is not to make it disappear as if it was something external to us. Rather, to ignore time is to live in the present: Thoreau writes of the cock’s crow: “He has not fallen astern; he has got up early and kept up early, and to be where he is, is to be in season, in the foremost rank of time.” That is, to be ever in the present and therefore, unconcerned with time.