January 2001

Reminiscing in a Vacuum

I'm alive. This is a developing realization like that spider plant in my house that every once in a while I realize is bigger and reaching out to unknown surfaces further than before-" Oh, that's at least another inch since I last noticed." I thought I should share this realization with you, my friends.

I've been avoiding real life as much as I can so that I might do something closer to what I want. Experimenting in retail and office work has shown me just how nasty things and I myself could be if I'm not careful. It also gives me the chance to learn to live for myself, which is one of the most important lessons that life has offered me so far, and made all the more meaningful by my having done the opposite and fallen on my face. But this is abstract and I suspect your eyes may be glazing over as mine are. "Give me concrete pictures and analogies," you say. "Give me something I can wrap my lazy brain around because the eye mistrusts the fancy of the mind just as the concrete questions abstraction!" I'll do my best.

So, what I have discovered in what I call my awakening or my renaissance is that I am alive with wonder at the things I experience. And, though there is nothing new under the sun- no religiousness intended unless that's what you want to do and, if so, then go right ahead- and millions have trod some part of the path that I now take, it is as though I am the first man to walk here and experience every piece of the life that I now live.

But why this newness? Do I actually think that I am the only one to have done the things that I now do, and could the accompanying feeling be anywhere close to the feeling the first man to step on the moon felt when he thought, "no human has ever been where I am now?" Not actually, but essentially. I might as well be the first one to have seen a beautiful woman who holds herself with poise, and then to experience the beautiful mind of another person and find that this beauty eclipses the physical. Or the first to smell a warm spring day when the green is not yet broken through but is swollen and pregnant under a husk of red, and then to be transported through space and time to when I was young and without burden- all because of a scent. For who can communicate what they experience? Who can tell me about the smile of a teacher for his gifted and generous student or the cold touch of a misting winter rain or the sound of a train two miles off in the quiet starry countryside? No one. I am a slave to my experiences in that, if something is described to me, I must use my experience to either know it exactly, to synthesize it from other experiences or else to have no idea of what is described.

Things can become very exciting. Learning through experience is a wonder. This is part of the reason that I love school. I am going where no one has ever trod and feeling what has never been felt. Exploring language and people and music and food. The smell of a food made with love and the anticipation of an empty stomach. The sight of equally hungry eyes. The sound of the most lovely siren in the form of a voice singing to you alone through a room of nameless people, universes in themselves. These are feelings that cannot be truly held by thought. And therefore cannot be turned into words and cannot be spoken. These, at the same moment, are understandable in the way that the look on a person's face is read or that something unseen is known. Is it a pulse in the right, feeling side of the brain, that sixth or seventh sense, something that the cold left logic deceives us into discounting as nonsense? It is certainly ignored as impossible or a thing that cannot be known as fact. But it will recur again and again and we will eventually listen to that force that tells us what is in the realm of feeling and we will know it just as we know what logic tells us. But differently too, because logic cannot hear it and vision distracts our inner ear.

And where has the strand gone of my narrative gone? Too far to reach round to the beginning to create a nice circle since I digressed in the last paragraph. Did you notice? I didn't.