22 August 2014
I have been doing Yoga. Not studying Yoga, but going to
classes to do Yoga. Actually, I don’t
really know what I’m doing though there is a great deal of talk (when I can
hear it—I have certainly been in
attendance at too many rock concerts) about breathing (which I have always done
fairly well!), and focusing and centering. Of course, during most the poses I
am quite off center, unfocused, and sometimes struggling for breath. I will
continue in the practice nonetheless. It is interesting, though, that when the
hour session concludes I feel a bit otherworldly, a bit . . . somewhere
else—and when I leave the studio I have to be somewhat cautious as I cross the
street and head toward my car; and when I am finally driving home (she said
during practice I was home!!) I keep
the speed carefully slow and am exceptionally concerned that I’m not seeing
something I should be seeing.
One thing
(among several things) that I am learning during practice concerns the
insecurities I experience about doing the pose correctly. The teacher suggests
that we practice with our eyes closed, but when I can’t see what others are
doing I don’t know what I am doing! And tonight I thought that my obsession
with doing things right can prevent me too often from doing things at all!
Certainly this has been true in my scholarly practice: I am forever fearful that
in my writing and speaking that I am setting myself up for humiliation. So
tonight I tried to remember the practice poses and rhythms, tried to
distinguish my Warrior I from my Warrior II, and actually (for a short while,
at least) stopped worrying if I was doing anything correctly. But I was doing
it.
In his
memoir, Little Did I Know, Stanley
Cavell speaks of his own practice, not Yoga but philosophy. He says, “At most,
day to day, isn’t what I have asked myself no more than whether I was
interested to continue what I was doing, as I was doing it?” Which I am
beginning to understand is not to do philosophy but to be a philosopher. There is
the choice between living life and writing about it: Cavell teaches me that the
two practices need not be separate.
13 August 2014
Morning Again
Stanley Cavell asks “So is it completely necessary or
completely contingent that I have come to this place to tell the story of how I
did not die from many catastrophes? And if it is neither [necessary or
contingent] then what is the story of a life? And where is a place and what is
a form to tell it?” I am paraphrasing; or I am asking the question I want to
ask provoked in part by Cavell’s autobiography Little Did I Know, a book I have not yet finished. Because though he is writing his
autobiography he is really questioning the reality of an autobiography. Does an
autobiography track a life’s inevitability or does it record its contingency.
If the former then an autobiography creates direction and the life becomes a
work of art, a creation out of materials chosen and then fashioned with intent
and forethought; but if the life narrated is understood as the result of
contingency then what events does the autobiographer narrate except those that
interest him/her in the present.
Cavell says
that the problem in autobiography is maintaining the narrative thread. This is
no easy problem, because at “each step I seem to run up against a crowd of
related matters that demand their expression.” But is it in the narrative or in
the memory that he runs up against the crowd? It matters! Since a whole life
can’t be narrated, then the life that is narrated is different than the life
that was lived and depends very much on memory. But is he trying to remember or
to forget? The autobiography is not the facts: “I mean to speak from identities
compacted in my existence, a matter of attaching significance to insignificance
and vice versa.” It is fiction, nonetheless: “Is anything other than the whole
truth even a partial truth? And is anything the whole truth?”
I have been
thinking for a long time about autobiography: if I wrote one what life would I
want to portray? From what place would I choose the events to narrate to create
the life narrated? What life would I want the narrative to portray? Who do I
think I am compared to who others might consider me? Cavell defines the
Tannhauser effect—a condition I
experience—as the discrepancy between my
feeling about my effort (my work) in the present and the effect that effort has
on others. Yesterday, I got my annual royalty check for $78.29.
My friends
support my ego, but Cavell cautions me, “what friends cannot do is to prove
that you have made yourself comprehensible to strangers.” Is the function of my
work to make friends of strangers or strangers of friends? Cavell says that
narcissism is a “suspended recognition of the separation of a world apart from
me, a wish to show oneself, to make oneself, one’s work worthy of love.” How is
my writing purely self-indulgent and narcissistic? And if I tell only a partial
truth, then what part of the whole autobiography is true. And what am I to make
of that part which is not true?
But perhaps
a life becomes so only when it is narrated and then it becomes available to be
read as fiction. Fiction, Kendall Walton suggests, are works whose function is
to serve as props in games of make believe, and that any work which has the
function of serving as a prop in games of make-believe, however minor or
peripheral or instrumental that function may be, is a work of fiction! Why do
people write autobiographies? To create a life? Why do I read them?