Fine essay on the meaning of life (really)

[Guest]

Today I needed to read something like this, along with Sub Joe's post on the 'special day' thread. My furniture is floating about (see the essay) and I am holding on to a sofa cushion that my bunny peed on (he's fine, saner than me).

Perdita
------

Jon Carroll - March 12, 2004 ©2004 San Francisco Chronicle

A while ago -- it was either during the Clinton administration or the reign of Charles II, they're easy to confuse -- I wrote that most of the people I knew were crazy. Not zany, not weird, not antic: crazy. Their ace in the hole was that they knew that they were crazy.

I myself am pretty much nuts. I understand that reality is at best a tenuous construct. The pieces of everyday life are slowly drifting apart, like furniture in the water after a great ocean liner sinks.

It is not at all clear what's in the gaps. Obsession and compulsion, certainly; the mysteries of the universe; God or somebody like him; death; unexplained washes of color; memory; context; song lyrics. Sometimes it feels as though we are underwater; sometimes it feels as though we are flying.

Seeing the fragility of reality is not a survival skill; when you're in your 20s and 30s, it's just not useful. You gotta believe that the saber- toothed tiger is real, you gotta hold onto the common illusion while your personality is formed. But after a while, you let go, and the subjective nature of perception becomes clear. And who is to say which terrors are real; who is to say which jokes are funny?

I am, of course, capable of acting as though reality were real. Do it all the time. I just have my fingers crossed.

So I was playing with the World's Most Perfect Grandchild (she's now 3) earlier this week. I have noticed that she doesn't play with a lot of her toys. She likes stuffed animals and plastic creatures of the barnyard, but only to act as characters in her narratives.

Mostly the narratives are based on stories we have told her, which in turn are extrapolations of events she has witnessed. (At Costco once, a woman broke a bottle of wine, and a man with a big yellow mop came to clean up the mess, and the Big Yellow Mop became a continuing character in the never-ending story.)

So we were playing on a blanket on the floor of the living room. We had duck and goose, her favorite protagonists. When she tells a story, it tends to wobble quite a bit, with anecdotes left unfinished and motifs repeated. The blanket became, at various times in a 15-minute span, with no help from any adult, an ocean, a nest, a barn, a circus tent, a hollow tree, a schoolroom and the sky.

The changes were instantaneous. I was expected to keep up, and of course I could not. Sometimes we slipped into a story I knew; sometimes we sailed uncharted waters. And somewhere in the middle I realized: WMPG knows that the pieces of reality are fungible.

So here's what I think happens: We are born knowing that "reality" is just a form of interpretation. We then enter an intense period of socialization and propaganda, filled with rules that must not be broken and axioms that are always true. By the time we leave the mill, we really believe in solid ground and knowable personalities.

It's even true, sort of. It's true the way Newton's Laws are true; they work real good right here on earth, but ultimately they are just a piece of the puzzle. After a while, we become aware of the existence of the rest of the puzzle -- and the furniture starts floating.

Maybe that's why grandparents and grandkids get along so famously well --

they are working in the same reality, or the same unreality. We can just go with the flow, and if the ocean of 10 minutes ago has become the bell tower of right now, well, so what? Right now we need a bell tower. Of course it's not a real bell tower, but perhaps even real bell towers are not real towers.

I mean, there are bell towers all over Europe. I cannot at the moment see any of them; I cannot hear their carillons. I would have to be mad to believe in them. But I'm not mad; I'm just crazy.

For instance, this dagger I see before me, its handle toward my hand. Is it real? In the last recorded case, Macbeth vs. Duncan et al., it was not.

 

[dirtylover]

re

Thanks P, that's one of the best thing's I've read of late. My school's about to be inspected (OFSTED) so bit stressy, nice to put things in perspective

 

[Wills]

P
Thanks for posting that. As I head out into the deeper ocean it helps to contexturalise the changes around me.

Love the AV by the way.

W (seperating the flotsam from the jetsam)

 

[Guest]

Love the AV by the way.
(seperating the flotsam from the jetsam)

Dubya (hahaha), looking at my Venice pics, and playing around on photoshop with 'em keeps the horizon in sight for me. Always loved the term flotsam and jetsum, never figured out the diffs.

Miss you, P.

 

[Wills]

P
Flotsam "floats", the jetsum logs just under the surface to snare the unwary.

Venetian dreams.

W

 

[gauchecritic]

I always understood flotsam to be from a wreck and jetsom to be jettisoned or washed up.

Gauche

 

[Wills]

Gauche

Been trying to get back to the dictionary that I checked on but .mac links seem to be down. Maybe be connected to the MSN problem others are reporting.

Jetsam is jetisoned cargo, as you rightly say, it drifts the oceans gradually becoming water logged and disappearing beneath the surface before eventually washing up on some shore. It's the yacht sailors nightmare, some container drifting along out of sight ready to rip your keel off.
Will's

 

[dr_mabeuse]

It always amazes me how some adults can't remember anything about their childhood. I don't meanfacts about what happened, I mean the feeling of being a child in a mutable universe, the feel of imaginative play: laying on your back looking up at the ceiling and imagining what it would be like if yoru house were upside down and you had to step over the doorways and the furniture hung from the ceiling.

I hear experts telling us what their research tells us about how children learn to read, and I wonder why they can't remember themselves what it was like to learn to read. I can certainly remember, and my memory's not that great. (I can remember the first time I encountered the word "house", the most complicated word I had run into up to that point, and I thought, "Whoa, Momma! O and U together? And what's with that E at the end? What's going on here?") I can remember perfectly what it's like to both believe in Santa Claus and know that he can't possibly exist and not think twice about it.

But he's right. The older I get, the more flexible things become. There's plenty of room in my world now for things that can't be explained, and I can see the greasy thumbprint of my overweening adult intellect in everything I think I understand.


---dr.M.

 

[Guest]

Not stunned. Gauche is right.

flotsam / jetsam: Your colleagues at work may jokingly refer to the flotsam and jetsam in your office but, technically speaking, they would be wrong unless you were truly adrift or sinking. Flotsam in maritime law applies to wreckage or cargo left floating on the sea after a shipwreck. Jetsam applies to cargo or equipment thrown overboard (jettisoned) from a ship in distress and either sunk or washed ashore. The common phrase flotsam and jetsam is now used loosely to describe any objects found floating or washed ashore. (per Bartleby.com)

Perdita

 

[NoJo]

Wow, upside-down house -- I remember that too!

I remember a very strange day when I was nine: I was sitting in the park, by myself (that shows my age!) and suddenly said to myself -- "Whatever happens, I'll never forget this moment." There was nothing particularly special about that moment, besides my decision to commit it to memory.

 

[Guest]

When I was eight one hot summer day in Detroit I was standing alone in our yard. For no reason I held my arm up and began to stare at it. Suddenly I felt as if it were not my arm, that it was not connected to me. I could not understand how this odd looking thing in front of me was connected to "me". I realized that "I" was not my body, but that I was stuck inside it.

I have never forgotten that moment, and it is still a struggle to live with my body. (When I was 49 I wrote a poem about it.)

Perdita

 

[minsue]

When I was eight one hot summer day in Detroit I was standing alone in our yard. For no reason I held my arm up and began to stare at it. Suddenly I felt as if it were not my arm, that it was not connected to me. I could not understand how this odd looking thing in front of me was connected to "me". I realized that "I" was not my body, but that I was stuck inside it.

I have never forgotten that moment, and it is still a struggle to live with my body. (When I was 49 I wrote a poem about it.)

Perdita

I can't remember the first time I did that, but I find myself still doing that regularly.

Thanks for the essay, 'Dita. Loved it.

 

[dr_mabeuse]

When I was eight one hot summer day in Detroit I was standing alone in our yard. For no reason I held my arm up and began to stare at it. Suddenly I felt as if it were not my arm, that it was not connected to me. I could not understand how this odd looking thing in front of me was connected to "me". I realized that "I" was not my body, but that I was stuck inside it.

I think mystical experiences like that must be pretty common in kids, before all that ego reinforcement sets in.

When I was about 10 or so I remember standing over the toilet taking a leak and wondering who I would be if my mother had never met my father, and in that moment I realized that everyone in the world was my unrealized parents and that I was in fact the child of all and any of them. That's as well as I can explain it, but I saw with absolute clarity that ego and my sense of identity were illusions; that I was everything there was and was only kept from realizing it by my mistaken belief in myself.

I remember I had a violent chill when I realized that: a whole body shudder. Then I finished my pee, flushed the toilet and went back outside to play.

---dr.M.

 

[Guest]

Goodgawdalmighty! (the way Otis used to sing it), Mab. You gave me a shudder.

On a lesser note (you brought it up either above or somewhere else, re. learning to read; well, this has to do with language -same thing, haha).

When I was 6 or 7 (I was in first grade) I was sick one morning and vomited in the toilet. My teacher knew I was ill and asked why I was late. I was about to say that I "threw up" but I recalled bending down to do so and paused because I thought perhaps I should say I "threw down", only I knew that was incorrect. I stood there dumb, "caught in a web of words".

Perdita

 

[sweetnpetite]

My daughter says the strangest things sometimes.

Like this one time, I was trying not to break these clay things my daughter made and she said, "that's ok mom, nothing lasts forever." and then she proceeded to tell me how everything breaks down and has to be replaced, and how some day she would get old "and my daughter will carry on in my place" (her exact words) she was 6 or 7.

Another time after this, something she made got broken and she had a fit!

...Moments of Clarity...there just that, just moments. Everything makes perfect sence, and then it passes..

I remember when I was a kid, I'd get these thoughts like, "I bet when it's nighttime here, it's daytime somewhere else." and I remember my cousin telling me that yes, that was true.

I remember someone calling me a 'moter mouth' and I pictured a little cartoon vw bug driving by with cartoon smoke coming out the back.

I *swear* I saw my aunt, who was sitting on a blanket with me outside (and drinking coca-cola from a glass bottle) reach down, pick up and ant, wrap a thick blade of grass around it, and then watched it hop away. She turned it into a grasshopper! (That aunt is passed away so I can't ask her about it) --Now were did that 'memory' come from? It wasn't a dream. I never remembered it as a dream.

I remember being at a fireworks show and wandering off with a friend, and running into these 'giants' who were dressed -I guess I'd say now, as Vikings- and thiniking that they were making the fireworks, and they told us that we weren't supposed to be there, so we left.

This last one makes the *most* sence, because our only high school in my hometown has Vikings as the mascot, so probably they were working on a float or somthing. But now I wonder, did it ever really happen that I wandered away during some fireworks?