Detours and continuity

Sunday, April 17, 2022

6:10 a.m. Somebody must be anxious to say something. Three times I was awakened. Three times I noted the awakener but declined to get up. Three times – twice, anyway – I thought I was writing about it here, only I was actually still in bed. First it was the cat, with one audible meow, and when I opened my eyes I thought I saw her, dimly, in the hallway, but then I remembered that she wasn’t here. The second time was, what? The telephone? Doorbell? Something, ringing just once, but then I dismissed it. The third, I forget. In any case, I decline to be led by the nose. But now I am up and ready to go. Gentlemen? Was that your impetuous presence I experienced?

Focus first, please.

Yes. Focus, receptivity, clarity. Presence. Add another that I suppose I could call bodily quieting (inelegant though that label may be), to indicate turning my awareness away from things like aching back as I used to turn it from asthma or headache. Proceed, then.

You have interrupted your reading of mythology by reading of young Hemingway.

Yes, Charles Fenton’s The Apprenticeship of Ernest Hemingway, that I had lost sight of until the other day when it surfaced as I moved some books.

No harm in the interruption, and of course your lives all proceed like that. You may concentrate your attention on one strand of your life, but other things go on at the same time, recorded or not. It is only retrospect – a particular form of tunnel vision – that makes your lives seem more straight-line and more continuous in intent than in fact they are, or ever could be.

But –

But don’t let what is mere punctuation derail you from your sustained intent. Just because you don’t see why you should be doing whatever it is you are moved to do, if you are moved to do it, there may be a reason for it. Sustained intent is a different order of things than is a momentary impulse.

I’m very used to both. It can be hard to distinguish momentary interest from long-term continuity, even in retrospect.

That is one of the values of mindfulness. You can always sink into yourselves and be reminded of who you are and what you want and – therefore – what if anything you want to do.

“If anything” is right!

By that, we don’t refer to some great project. That, you may have in prospect, or may not. But every day you face decisions on how to spend your time. Those decisions add up. What is life but a series of decisions, moment by moment?

I find I want to mention Edith Hamilton’s Mythology, which arrived in the mail Friday. I had read only the first 25 pages or so – enjoying it – when I got diverted by Fenton’s book.

You now have the prospect of going from Bullfinch to Graves to Hamilton as the impulse takes you. None of them had that opportunity. (Hard to read a book that hasn’t yet been written.) Make note of your thought written here.

Yes. Friday at 9:10 a.m.:

“Suddenly I get, ‘No right or wrong!’ The Greek stories are told, not as a byproduct of eating from the tree of perceiving things as good and evil, but from a more innocent line. They looked at what the gods did, what people did, as judicious or otherwise, obedient or otherwise, impious or otherwise. Not as good or bad in itself. It is an entirely different way of seeing things, one that wasn’t clear to me at all until just now.”

And, at 3:30 p.m.:

“Edith Hamilton’s Mythology arrived in today’s mail, and I find myself entirely out of sympathy with her introduction. But it makes an excellent precis of how the 20^th century “modern” point of view saw the previous views of reality. It never occurs to her to question whether her view might be less accurate – like that of the Greeks – than other ways of seeing.”

So you see, life continues, even if your attention to what is actually happening wavers.

My life has been very little about what was happening within  me, in one sense, and entirely about it, in another sense.

Refocus, and we’ll make a point. As usual, we will use your specific example to illustrate a tendency that may apply to others.

Of course. Okay, then.

We keep saying it: Everyone is the center of their own universe, and this is as it should be. Everyone is also a bit player in everyone else’s world, and this too is as it should be. Therefore, how much attention to your own life would be disproportionate? How much attention inner, how much outer? The only reliable answer has to be, It depends! It depends not only upon circumstances, but upon your viewpoint. Even someone whose life becomes as important to the exterior world as Caesar experienced his life from inside in a different way than anyone else experienced it, at the time or subsequently. And by the same token, the most anonymous obscure person, someone nobody ever heard of, has its own universe of which it is the center,. You all face the same dual opportunity, all the time, though it may manifest differently from one moment to the next, due to changes in your focus or due to changes in the input from the shared subjectivity.

The point, if it has been made, is still blurry, at least to me.

You never have the data to judge your lives, yet you are required to judge, moment by moment and often in retrospect. How reconcile these two facts, but to see  that all judgments must be provisional, subject to reconsideration? What you look back on with regret today, tomorrow you may see as a wasted opportunity, and the next day you may see as the seed of something that blossomed later, and on another day you may see in yet an entirely different light.

Therefore, how can you reliably judge if an impulse is interruption or continuity? Does the distinction even make sense? It does, in any given moment. But another moment may result in your moving things from one column to another.

I get it. Take life as it comes.

Well, you don’t have any choice about that: That is one of the advantages of living your life in time-slices.

It shows the ridiculousness of my eagerness as a very young man to find a way to know the future. (In those days I assumed there was a “the” future.)

But you see, even that impulse, that drive, led from something and led to something. Was it lunacy if it led you to who you are now?

I thought, the other day, about Kazantzakis saying something to the effect of “woe to the one who beings his life without lunacy.” I took it to mean, too much “common sense,” realistic, balanced, safe and sane –. Can’t even finish the sentence, but I imagine you can.

Why restate it? He was right, for his kind of person. But of course rules for life are always rules for a certain kind of life, and a different kind of life will have – and will require, and will repay listening to – different rules.

You don’t make it easy for us. Said with a smile, but seriously as well.

You don’t want easy. Every person’s life automatically contains the kind and the amount of difficulty suited to that life. Too little difficulty would perhaps be boring; too much, perhaps overwhelming. But no one, in 3D or out, could tell what is “too much” either at the time or afterward. You yourself at any given moment may be overwhelmed by the difficulty you must address. That doesn’t mean it is somehow unfair, or a result o a flaw in life’s design, or a result of a flaw in your moral character.

Yes, I heard it: asthma.

What could be more compelling and difficult than a physical problem that must be addressed moment by moment? Or take Dirk’s level of unrelenting pain that brought him to the very edge of killing himself? Or your friend Bob’s wife Karen’s pain that did finally lead her over the edge of suicide? And of course any number of people’s life-problems could be cited to similar effect. Psychological, physical, whatever, life’s pain can reach overwhelming levels while other people’s lives appear charmed. Does this show that the world is unfair in reality rather than merely in appearance? Or does it suggest that – as we keep saying – you never have the data to judge? Your illness, Dirk’s, Karen’s, served you well and served the world well. Of the three, Karen is very likely to have the greatest effect on the 3D world, due to her husband’s recounting of her ordeal to open the eyes of the medical profession – but again, how can anyone judge? Everyone is at the center of a web of relationships and consequences, but the interconnection of webs is such as to make it impossible to say this is central. Everything is potentially central, if you look at things from that point. Nothing is central in any absolute sense.

“God is a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.” Can’t remember who said it, but I imagine that’s more or less what he meant. So what was today’s theme? Even looking back, I’m not sure I see it.

Try, “Straight lines and detours,” or “Living v. judging.” Our point is mostly, live with more confidence. Don’t worry so much if you can’t see where you are going. Somebody is steering the ship, and just because you can’t tell who is at the wheel doesn’t mean you’re adrift.

Okay, well, thanks as always, and when I transcribe I’ll come up with some header or other.