When the Cogs Align, or, Synchronicity 2

For this week’s blog, I really didn’t have anything of importance to discuss. The only thing I can think of is the discussion I had last week, time and moving on, all wrapped up in trying to finish this paper. I was thinking about Thoreau’s quote, “We loiter in winter when it is already spring,” and thought “When did it become Thanksgiving?” This semester, more than any I think I’ve been through, has breezed by unbelievably fast. Where did the time go?

One minute, I’m anxiously awaiting my first day of teaching classes, the next, I’m getting ready for the First Year Celebration. What just happened? I’ve also been thinking back to one of my first discussions in the blogs, about the passage of time. It seems that the idea of “time,” in all its manifestations, has been following me around.

For instance, on the extreme nerdy side of things, I’ve been re-reading the graphic novel Watchmen in preparation for what surely will be a poor movie adaptation (I’m a little jaded when it comes to movie adaptations of my favorite comics, especially since League of Extraordinary Gentlemen). One of the chapters discusses Dr. Manhattan, a character who sees all aspects of time, past, present, and future, in a continuum, like seeing all sides of a diamond at once. The chapter makes good use of the “watchmaker theory,” the idea that since life has an inherent structure to it, but is full of mistakes, catastrophes, and coincidences, God was a “watchmaker” who made the watch, then left it to its own devices. It’s a philosophically and symbolically loaded chapter, and one that touches on the bombing of Hiroshima, which was immortalized in a Time magazine cover of a watch frozen at the time of the bombing, as well as the theme of the book, which is essentially: how do you draw the line, in a hypothetical world where superheroes exist, between what is being done for the good of the people, and what is playing God? Heady stuff, but it sticks with you long after you finish it.

But back to my discussion of time, along with our discussion on the faultiness of memory: how do you, as a writer and a human being, make sense of events in your life, and separate the facts from the fiction we create in our heads? In other words, how do you tell your own narrative? We essentially take loosely related events, or unrelated events, and place some sort of order on them when we remember them anyways. Is it really that ordered? Are the cogs in the watch ever aligned? As for me, I’d like to think some things happen for a reason, and there is an order to what’s going on. Sometimes, though, I forget that.

Synchronicity

For this week’s blog, I honestly couldn’t think of anything to write about, other than the difficulty I’m having writing this paper. It’s not that I don’t know what I want to say (it could be that I have so much to say that it’s becoming hard to whittle it all down), but the story I want to tell involves me revisiting past events that aren’t necessarily the most positive. And then I realize: this is the theme of the entire paper, trying to let those things go. Maybe I’m in a wistful mood, or maybe I’ve been jamming Van Morrison’s Veedon Fleece too much lately (check this out if you haven’t, and everything he did from ‘68-‘74 if you haven’t), but I really started thinking about this, and thinking about the discussion we started a few weeks back about memory, and it’s ultimate faultiness. Are situations ever really as bad as we remember them? If they are, can’t we be allowed to forget them, and move on? Or at least incorporate them and move on?

Then, along with this theme, I’ve had one of those strange, universal moments of synchronicity we all seem to have when we’re not looking for those connections, as we often do as English majors. Reading for the comps, I just finished taking notes on Thoreau’s Walden, and this cosmic quote hit me, and encapsulated everything I had been thinking:

“We should be blessed if we lived in the present always, and took advantage of every accident that befell us, like the grass which confesses the influence of the slightest dew that falls on it; and did not spend our time in atoning for the neglect of past opportunities, which we call doing our duty. We loiter in winter while it is already spring” (245).

We do indeed loiter in the winter, and sometimes miss all the good and alive things rushing past our window, like craning our neck to see something on the side of the road that’s already long past. Thinking about further connections, Van Morrison’s “Who Was That Masked Man,” features lyrics about not being able to move on, and the detriment it can cause to that person. He says “Oh ain’t it lonely, when you’re living with a gun/When you can’t slow down and you can’t turn round, and you can’t trust anyone.” His metaphor, “living with a gun,” is a little more paranoid than I would like, but check out his conclusion: “When the ghost comes round at midnight/Well you both can have some fun/He can drive you mad, he can make you sad/He can keep you from the sun.” Now, I don’t mean to be reaching here, but the “ghost” at midnight sounds a little like Dickens “ghost of Christmas past,” haunting the person in question with past sins that keep him from seeing the daylight. Sound a bit like Thoreau’s “loitering”? I don’t know, but this will definitely be incorporated in the paper.

What the Biographer Wrote

I didn’t really have any particular topics that have caught my fancy this last week, other than researching and writing my essay, but I did come across an idea after reading this week’s entry on the “Much Ado” blog. You should check it out; it’s good. This project has gotten pretty hard, and I’ve run into a snag such as the ones described in Minot’s chapter on “Ethical Questions: How Much is Real?” When writing our personal academic essay, do we “adopt a policy of unqualified adherence to the facts,” or do we allow ourselves some “flexibility” (43)? Apart from the ethical issues, there’s always the matter of how we remember certain events, even if they didn’t necessarily occur like that. Our memory is a powerful mental tool, but like an old microwave, is sometimes faulty and will burn our oatmeal. Like the character Leonard in the film Memento, we often remember what we want to remember, and how we want to remember, and cut out the more unsavory parts. Next thing we know, we’re in a shady motel room and we’re covered in cryptic tattoos. Sometimes, we focus only on those unsavory parts, and can’t remember the good. The problem with honesty, and self-honesty, when writing these essays is having to sift through so much mental debris to tell our story.

But then again, how important is this? If we are telling a story about our own lives, we never remember something exactly as it was because we see it through the prism of time and experience, even if it was last week. We’re never the same person twice, only a bundle of experiences and memories written, and re-written, about those experiences, like our own personal (auto)biographer sitting with a typewriter in our brain, who never seems to write down the good and important stuff while it’s happening, and only later gets around to piecing together a narrative. He’s not the best at his job, but he’s all we’ve got.

Long story short, how can I be honest with myself and the reader if I can’t exactly remember how everything went down? I can’t. I can only capture the sense I got from the experience, how it made me feel, and what the biographer wrote.

A Benign Assembly of Phantoms

For this week’s blog, I’ve been thinking about several things, one of which is my essay, the other of which is the passing of time. When did it become the middle of the semester? How often do we say, “soon, I’ll really get down to working on my assignments once the school year settles in.” But, like John Lennon said, “life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans.” Often, we can’t wait until we’re in the mood for something, or when we feel the time is right because there is no off button for reality.

This is partly what I was thinking about in regards to my personal academic essay. As Marius writes, “like a story, an essay imposes order on reality by establishing connections…[even though] words cannot convey all there is to reality” (82-83). I took this to mean that basically an essay is a lasso on reality, albeit a small one, that encapsulates some small part of experience. But how do you convey the passage of time? What I’ve been thinking about with my essay is playing with the structure of it to indicate the passing of time. I don’t know how I’m going to do this yet, but a big portion of my essay will be about how we as academics spend a good deal of time within our brains while the outside world soldiers on, oblivious to our theses and books. The struggle will be how you marry those two things. How do you live a full life, or at least a non-crappy one, and still work in this field? It’ll be about other things too, but the overarching theme may be that life goes on.

I’m also having another problem, and I wonder if any of you are having it too, with my voice in the essay. How do I write this thing without sounding pretentious? I really do want to write it in the most natural voice possible, as if I was talking to the reader. No fluff, no bullcrap, just a conversation with the reader. But then again, I do want to make it structurally complex, so I might have to have several different voices in there. Bloom’s chapter on the Six Degrees of Separation talks about all these voices, and as natural and authoritative as her voice is, I’m inclined to believe her. She even discusses this notion of time moving forward in the chapter: “Nevertheless the life that is being scripted for us, not necessarily the one we write about, is running forward” (125). She continues that “although our writing may provide the voice-over…there is no pause button in the flow of time, in the stream of events and phenomena to which we have no choice but to respond” (125).

Why do we write stories then? As a “temporary stay against confusion” as Robert Frost wrote? Do they make sense of our own senseless lives? I think the answer is even simpler than that: so we don’t forget them. The “pentimento image” of us will bleed through, but like songs written for a long-gone relationship, stories will cease to be about just one person or situation, especially stories that are made for reading or listening, and instead become opportunities for readers to use their own memories and experiences to make “connections between parts of reality explored by the writer” (Marius 83). Or, to put it more poetically, they are “like an incantation” that calls up “the ghosts of summer evenings long departed…a benign assembly of phantoms, gathering shadowless in the circle of afternoon sunlight falling in our front yard” (80).