amorphous

I was running and overheard a woman say to her walking companion as I passed:

“I’m doing some amorphous things.”

Outside of any context, the utterance is a little poem containing worlds of possibility, each word so vast and idiomatically… amorphous (from Greek roots a, ‘without’ and morphē, form or shape, outward appearance).

What things? How many is some? What is the nature of the doing? And who or what is ‘I’?

The water in and on the Minnehaha Creek was doing some amorphous things too.

The word doing is also at the forefront of my mind recently, in the context of meditation, living, writing, and parenting. Meditation is often described as ceasing to do what we habitually do, which is think incessantly and in such a way that thinking is mistaken for being. This is what’s meant by identifying with thought. With a little distance, thoughts can be seen for the automatic emissions of brain processes that they are, bundled with emotional urgencies and the force of repetition.

How many of your thoughts are about doing, about what you “should” be doing?

As I ran, I was listening to an episode of the podcast Hurry Slowly called “It Doesn’t Matter What You Do, It’s Who’s Doing It.” The host, Jocelyn K. Glei, was talking to the healer who helped launch her transformation with the question: “Who are you without the doing?”

This got me thinking about some of the things we get most hung up on: the cruel correlations among doing, being, and self-worth. The self-flagellation takes the form of whatever your chosen, or fated, vocation, or “passion,” is: maybe it’s writing, being a writer, being a published writer, being a “real” writer. As doing morphs into being in these phrases, the judgmental valuations intensify. If you feel the urge to write, isn’t it enough to write, without also having to “be a writer” or a published one to feel real? Do you wear your doing as an identity, as a badge of your status as real?

For a long time—we’re talking three decades—this is a hook I’ve been hung up on. I’ve been writing all the while—poems, journals, essays, books, a dissertation, a blog, “some amorphous things,” another blog, and so on—and believing none of this is enough to feel real when I say “I’m a writer.” It wasn’t until recently that the idea of turning the whole concept of “being something” upside down really settled in.

In the realm of parenting, I’m tuned in to the potential harm of the culturally programmed innocent question adults ask children: What do you want to be when you grow up? Here, the emphasis should shift to the doing. “What do you want to do when you grow up?” doesn’t circumscribe the answer to identity. The pressure to “be something” can be inhibiting and cut off avenues as well as lead to feelings of low self-worth in the event that you feel you’ve failed to become the thing you set out to be.

Don’t become a writer, or be a writer, just write. Don’t do something to be doing something or to become something. I’m not suggesting being passive or having no goals. But don’t let some concept of what you “should” be or be doing cramp your possibilities for unfolding.

My answer to the question, “Who are you without the doing?” is “no one”—which opens space for creativity, play, and for “doing some amorphous things.” It’s very freeing—not to be striving to arrive at some final form; accepting that the metamorphoses continue ad infinitum. Or as Emily Dickinson put it:

I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – too?
Then there’s a pair of us!
Don’t tell! they’d advertise – you know!

How dreary – to be – Somebody!
How public – like a Frog –
To tell one’s name – the livelong June –
To an admiring Bog!

task

One of my favorite passages from Rilke, of which there are so many, is from a letter he wrote while beginning the Duino Elegies:

There the external thing itself—tower, mountain, bridge—already possessed the extraordinary, unsurpassable intensity of those inner equivalents which one might have wished to represent it. Everywhere, appearance and vision merged, as it were, in the object; in each one of them a whole world was revealed, as though an angel who encompassed all space were blind and gazing into himself. This, a world seen no longer from the human point of view, but inside the angel, is perhaps my real task.

I keep this quote on an index card on the corkboard by my desk, where that word task rattles around with my Outlook Tasks, those colored flag icons, and notions like the task network describing the patterned brain activity when we’re “on task” and not mind wandering. Rilke often connects this task of vision and of transforming his vision into poetry to living in the here and now, being alive with all one’s senses tuned to what is really happening. I connect this vivid living to meditation, where I feel my task arising again and again, each time I notice a veil and push it gently away. Often these veils involve the tasks of daily life.

I also just read Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, which narrates his discovery, while in the concentration camps, and then summarizes his theory, of the key to a meaningful life. Frankl’s logotherapy, a method for treating existential frustration or the distress or malaise that comes from feeling life has no meaning or purpose, places at its center the discovery of a task that orients one toward meaning creation and self-transcendence. “In the Nazi concentration camps, one could have witnessed that those who knew that there was a task waiting for them to fulfill were the most apt to survive” (104). While not at all discounting the great role of luck, he gave central importance to the discovery of the task—which could be a work, service, loving another person, or suffering with dignity. “… It did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected of us” (77).

How will you respond to life? This question keeps arising in the reading I’m doing. What is your task? Just as important as asking these questions, I think, is keeping in mind that we’re not looking for One Big Task, necessarily. As Frankl assures the anxious, “The meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour. What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person’s life at a given moment” (108).

What is the relation between this kind of task that brings meaning to life and the daily tasks that seem to get in the way of life? It can help to consider the historical kinship of the word task with the word tax. A task was a required payment, and then an imposed duty in the form of labor or work. The degree to which a task is imposed has a lot to do with how we feel about it and how much we consider it a response to what life asks. I resent some of my tasks and embrace others. “Duty” feels less desirable than “purpose.”

But the real task would be to equalize the value of all tasks within a sense of the greater good, something for which we also pay taxes. What is the greater good here? To be awake in every moment, to live vividly aware—of the wonder around us and the veils of judgment that obscure it—and not to renounce life by going through it, and all of its tasks, like an automaton. Rilke again: “There is no task as urgent for us as to learn daily how to die, but our knowledge of death is not increased by the renunciation of life; only the ripe fruit of the here and now that has been seized and bitten into will spread its indescribable taste in us” (117).

Sometimes my task is to bring order and beauty to sentences. Sometimes it’s to raise children with a sense of wonder and belonging. Sometimes it’s to bake better bread.

Quotes are from:

Rilke, Rainer Maria, Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus, ed. and trans. Stephen Mitchell, New York: Vintage, 2009, p. xiv.

Rilke, Rainer Maria, Letters on Life, ed. and trans. Ulrich Baer, New York: Modern Library, 2006.

Frankl, Viktor, Man’s Search for Meaning, Boston: Beacon, 2006.

lying

A few months ago, some people broke into my house around 3 in the morning. We were lying in bed, sleeping, breathing, hearing nothing but the noise machine whooshing a constant snowstorm of static.

I heard a loud bump and woke up. The light was on in the kitchen – why? We got up, started to sneak around the rooms, and as this feeling of invasion leaked into consciousness, the house was transformed from mine, an extension of me, into something unfamiliar, other, not me, uncanny.

Freud’s discussion of the experience of the uncanny pointed to the heart of this feeling through the German word unheimlich – meaning un-home-like, unfamiliar, strange – which includes the home within the concept of the un-home-ly. Freud uses the example, in his essay Das Unheimlich, of wandering in the woods in circles; suddenly, you see a cluster of trees you know you’ve seen before, and the repetition is uncanny, because you thought you were somewhere new. My home had become this zone of the uncanny by being invaded and transformed without my knowledge.

We walked unnaturally through the rooms and saw empty places where electronic objects of value had been lying minutes before. Charging cords dangled.

Backpacks, credit cards – all could be replaced except the pencilled writing that had been accumulating in the notebooks that had been lying on my desk. Or the marginal notes in my copy of a beautiful small-form hardcover book that had been lying with them, Sam Harris’s Lying. Why did they take these things?

Would one of the thieves open this book and begin to read? If so, he or she would find these opening sentences:

Among the many paradoxes of human life, this is perhaps the most peculiar and consequential: We often behave in ways that are guaranteed to make us unhappy. Many of us spend our lives marching with open eyes toward remorse, regret, guilt, and disappointment. And nowhere do our injuries seem more casually self-inflicted, or the suffering we create more disproportionate to the needs of the moment, than in the lies we tell to other human beings. Lying is the royal road to chaos.

What follows is a crystalline argument for honesty in all things, at all times. Not blunt or harsh, unfiltered, unkind utterances, but statements that are not untrue. One can still be tactful. But lying, Harris argues, deprecates the receiver of the lie and the speaker. It cuts off the possibility of learning, growth, and change. It is anti-social and causes harm.

Stealing depends on lying: this is mine to take, this is mine now because I hold it in my hand and know the secret number, this is mine to keep, this is mine to sell, the person whom I steal from is nothing, is no one.

Grammatically guilty?

Have you noticed how people avoid the word lie except in the sense of being untruthful? Lie is often replaced with the grammatically incorrect lay – as in “I’m going to lay down” or, famously, “Lay, lady, lay.” The awkwardness arises because lay and lie are different kinds of verbs. Lay is a transitive verb, meaning it needs an object; you lay something down, you lay down the law, but you don’t just lay down. No, you lie down. You lie on the bed. You can lay a blanket on the bed and then lie on it or under it. I believe many commit these linguistic contortions – called solecisms – because no one wants to say, in any form, “you lie” or “I lie.”

A solecism is a grammatical infraction and, according to Merriam-Webster, a “breach of decorum.” But how often do we exaggerate, or tell a “white” lie with no qualms, no sense of infraction, no shame? While you may not be harming grammar when you do, you’re harming yourself and others. And unless you’re a sociopath, if you’re honest with yourself when you lie, you’ll notice the shame. Don’t push it away… look into what it is saying to you.

Amazingly, some of my stolen items that had identifying details turned up – one a few days later in a neighbor’s stolen car, another three months later in someone’s bushes a mile away.

I wonder where the little book called Lying ended up. I hope someone will find it, and read it. It could change their life.

Quote from Sam Harris, Lying, Four Elephants Press, 2013

umwelt

A German neologism coined by theoretical biologist Jakob von Uexküll in the 1920s, umwelt refers to how any one creature or species experiences its environment—a personal phenomenology, or what it is like to be a particular organism. An octopus, which, as I learned in Other Minds by Peter Godfrey-Smith, has neurons not only in its large brain but also in the suckers on its tentacles, has a completely different umwelt than the diver who encounters it.

While the concept arose as a heuristic for speculating on the experiences different animals might have of their environment, it lends itself well to the recognition that we each construct our own realities out of perceptions as they chime with thought patterns and “priors”—as neuroscientists refer to constituents of beliefs.

Another, related, concept I came across recently is affective niche, a concept that describes the set of things that influences our affect: what we care about, what we react to emotionally. An example from Lisa Feldman Barrett’s book How Emotions Are Made is the different ways a human child and a young chimp relate to a toy car: the kid is interested and curious; the chimp doesn’t care. The toy car is within the affective niche of the child but not of the chimp. Extend this outward metaphorically to one’s entire umwelt and it becomes apparent how our perceptions—the ways our visual systems and hearing and so on—weave with patterned cognitions, predictions (for the brain is a prediction machine constantly pushing out simulations), and emotions to create the reality we think we are in. Some things we don’t notice at all; others seem to ensnare our attention.

Part of this plays out in the phenomenon of heightened salience: when we learn a new thing, want a particular thing like that style of boot or type of car, it suddenly appears everywhere. This happened to me with the word umwelt! I read it in Annaka Harris’s book Conscious, and then I read Other Minds, and then a friend—in a completely different context and without knowing anything about my reading interests of the moment—said he was reading von Uexkull’s book itself, A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans, where the word first entered language.

Umwelt translates as world or experience-environment, and even though it is the whole world of one’s experience, implicit in its definition is finitude and limitation. Think of the very limited portion of the light spectrum we can perceive, as just one example of the bounds of a human umwelt.

Then consider conceptual and emotional limitations caused by confirmation bias and affective niche. Etymologically, niche has two possible origins, but both are cozy concepts: one root derives from Latin nidus, for nest, and the other is from Italian nicchio, seashell. Since around 1600, niche became associated with recesses in walls, nooks; later, it became a term of ecology describing the “place” in an ecological network where any one organism fits.

The trick of course is to learn these concepts, explore them in imagination, and be humbled as well as committed to understanding that concepts indeed are a veil, as are emotions, and that we see ourselves as little beings in bubbles, bound by space and time. But it’s not easy.

Meditation can help… as poetic insight did for Rainer Maria Rilke, who lamented our umwelt-niche-bound sense of existence:

Never, not for a single day, do we have
before us that pure space into which flowers
endlessly open. Always there is World
and never Nowhere without the No…

But the intensity of his longing reflects the intensity of his experience of “the Open,” which he has felt in

… an hour, or perhaps
not even an hour, a barely measurable time
between two moments—, when you were granted a sense
of being. Everything. Your veins flowed with being.

Between two moments… it is possible to be Nowhere without the No…

Quotes from the Eighth and Seventh Elegies, in Stephen Mitchell’s translation

space

“Space is the relationship between bodies, and without it there can be neither energy nor motion.” So Alan Watts launches an explanation of our misguided dualism, and reaches the insight (among many): “differentiation is not separation,” “for every individual is a unique manifestation of the Whole, as every branch is a particular outreaching of the tree” (The Book, 79).

Some lines of William Wordsworth chimed in my mind when I read those words of Alan Watts’:

A slumber did my spirit seal;
I had no human fears:
She seemed a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.

No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees.

She has no motion now, because she has become other manifestations and is now nothing.

Space is no thing.

Actually, it’s more like time.

The word entered English around 1300, and its first meaning was temporal—the duration or extent of time “between two definite points or events” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, in which the entry for space goes on for five densely printed pages. And of course space implies time, because it can only be known in time.

But as we know, “definite points or events” don’t really exist either; where do you draw the boundaries to make them definite? In that little elegy from 1798, Wordsworth marked the boundary between two definite events—her life and death—with the space between stanzas, which is also a pause, a caesura.

I just received a package from Amazon from someone who is also thinking a lot about space:

… the paperback edition of a book I had the honor to work on with Nona Orbach, an inspiring artist and art therapist in Israel who thinks about space and time in very interesting ways—through the unfolding of culture as seen in excavated artifacts, and through the dynamics of permission between people that trigger transformation. She’s an inspiration to me to think of creative living as an open process, rather than as something to “do” in a genre.

place

I used to ride my bike, first down to the Connecticut River, then up the continuous hill from this glacial-age river valley up through Norwich, along Main Street, up Turnpike Road as the pavement stopped and gravel took over, past hundred-year-old orchards, along the path carved by the Blood Brook.

I was on my way to the trailhead to park my bike, then up the trail to the fire tower on Gile Mountain. There was a hand-painted sign partway up the road—just a board painted white with big black letters saying: THIS IS THE PLACE.

I liked its self-reflexive declaration—of thisness, of existence, of definitiveness, of hereness, and of the power of words to create. Was it that the sign marked a place? This would be one interpretation, of a simpler semiotics in which words are signs. But what place was “this”? It was “the place” the words called into being.

This blog will be a place to collect fragments of thinking about words and things born of words, like places, in words.

“Civilization is a word,” Sam Harris says, “predicated on the meanings of other words” (Waking Up App, “The Necessity of Thought”).