land or sea?

Sunday... trying to stay with the theme of making tomorrow's theme on Sunday a journal prompt... here it is:

Land or sea?

Land

Land spreads out with security under darkening skies. Land holds its cold in winter, its warmth in summer, its tender wetness in spring. Land holds its own while the prairie sweet grass trembles purple in waves, wind sighing through the sea of blades.

Land sends up growth through its soil. Land is porous, receiving rainfalls and decay and returning shoots and virginal green emergence. Land offers its fruits for grazing and upon its bedrock wander buffaloes and gazelles, sandpipers and quails, snakes, foxes, and beetles... ancient human ancestors, modern traffic, pilgrimages and questions, searches and home.

Land is a form, a scape, a mass, a mark, a place, a park, a farm, a forest, a home, a wood, a south, a north, a fertility, a burial, a dream. Land is a bad, crisscrossed by red scoria. Land is a border, crisscrossed by foreign voices and the unknown. Land is a mission, a journey, a locator, a frontier. Land is an acre, a mile, a hectare, a kilometer, a millimeter, a pole, a perch, a link, a furlong. Land is altitude and atmosphere. Land is a zone, a bounded entity, a permitted use, a mapped quantity. Land is topography, traced over by contours that never intersect. Land is embedded, embarking, bounded, bountiful, and beholding. Land is: was, because, and always.

Land is a place to run. To run to. To run from. To run forever upon. Land offers the choice -- settled or nomadic. Rest or movement. Land is a tenant. Land is burned, eroded, tectonic, and overlapping. Land is overrun by glaciers, marked by lakes, burned by fires, toughened and rebuilt and reborn again and again. Land is time existing in strata, layer upon layer of deposition, beds weighted down by ages and eras and epochs. Land makes memory visible -- black shales and stromatolitic structures and extinct trilobites... things that once flourished in success and then perished into obsolescence.

Land fractures, it uplifts -- its shock waves of orogeny producing mountains through violent collision. Land brings us up close to the sky, holds us up amidst clouds and oxygen-thin air. And upon land we land. We fall with the tides upon its edges. We arrive. We ascend and descend. We orbit, alter, cultivate, and divide and conquer it in kingdoms.

Land sweeps and over it we establish our lives, our movement, our homes and memories. It is our place and space. We drop anchor when it is finally within our sights.

Sea

The sea is an abundance, a quiet mirror reflecting an infinite azure sky, a fathoms-below depth harboring misunderstood life, dramatic canyons, abyssal plains, molten rock. The sea is constant movement, oscillating waves, more sound than sight. The sea races with calls and voices -- trilling, groaning, pulsing songs traveling hundreds of miles with messages of orientation, navigation, meaning, connection, mystery.

The sea is restless, slipping out and flowing back in, collaborating with lunar forces and gravitational pulls. The sea circulates, fluctuates, eddies, swirls, and surges. The sea is a frequency, a salinity, a continuity, a boundlessness, a submergence. The sea understands pressure. The sea contains silence and great force. The sea reacts in displacement and throws itself upon us when equilibrium is upset. The sea travels because it must. The sea dominates our planet and places us in abstraction where we can contemplate vastness, the sublime, our own insignificance. The sea is now, why, and over and over again.

Caspar David Friedrich, Monk by the Sea, 1810

James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Harmony in Blue and Silver, Trouville, 1865

The sea crashes upon our shores and whispers its captured secrets in the cavity of a conch shell. Whooshing and echoing, all is recreated. All is forever timeless.

The sea eludes and is an illusion. It sparkles with particles of incandescent light, diffracting, reflecting, refracting, bending, shifting... phosphorescent glow... luminous haze. Its eclipses its own depths. It drowns us and offers no comprehension. Caught in the middle with nothing else to see, we feel helpless. We swim, immerse, become lost, and listen to repetitions and vibrations from netherworlds.

The sea contains our oceans of tears, drenching and spilling them back upon us. The sea is a voyage, a space, a theory, a reverie. The sea is lonely. The sea is grand. We stare at the sea and it stares back. The sea contains the unknown and the untellable. The sea is secretive and open simultaneously. The sea is perpetual. The sea is maternal and pure. We drink it in and long to tell of its tales.

Over land, we carry life on our backs. The sea carries us in its fluid arms. Land remembers and the sea transgresses all understanding. Upon land, we leave our footprints. Upon the sea, we cast our dreams.

Though inland far we be,
Our souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither.

(William Wordsworth, Intimations of Immortality)

Between one and the other, we watch the sun fall away. We rise, we fall. We exist in watery, wandering in-between.

journey into the labyrinth

Today is World Labyrinth Day! In order to celebrate, tomorrow's theme will circle around this intricate puzzle.

The first labyrinth was that which was ordered by Minos, dictatorial king of Crete, to imprison the Minotaur, a humanoid being with a bull's head -- the result of Minos' wife, Pasiphae, hiding in a wooden cow (constructed by Daedalus) so that she could procreate with a beautiful bull sent from Poseidon, a bull with whom she had instantly fallen in love. As if the story wasn't labyrinthine enough, Daedulus not only assisted in the creation of the Minotaur, but constructed the labyrinth in which the beast was confined. To make a long story short, Theseus arrived in a batch of Athenians who were to be sacrificed to the Minotaur. Ariadne, Minos' daughter, fell in love with the strong, skilled and completely disloyal hero and helped him to escape the labyrinth (by giving him a ball of yarn to retrace his steps). Theseus killed the Minotaur, abandoned the beast at the heart of the labyrinth, and later abandoned Ariadne's heart when he ditched her on the island of Naxos -- an island where the young Zeus had been raised in a cave.

Island of Naxos

Theseus eventually got his own, though, when he forgot to change his sails back to white and his father committed suicide, assuming the black sails signaled his son's death. Theseus wound up being a hero anyway... and the founding father of Athens when he politically united several territories.

But back to Daedalus. Minos, short-tempered and rather paranoid, turned on Daedalus... which, as we are well aware, was not so paranoid after all considering the involvement Daedalus had in creating the Minotaur and freeing Theseus (because Ariadne consulted him on how to escape the labyrinth). For all of his innovative craftsmanship, he created a lot of complicated problems as well. As punishment, Minos imprisoned Daedalus and his son, Icarus, within his very labyrinth. At least there was no longer a live Minotaur, though the smell must have been foul! (I know the scent of a rotting cow to be one of the most powerfully obnoxious smells in existence, so I can only imagine what a decaying massive humanoid bull-beast would be like...)

Who knows why Daedalus didn't use the string trick again. Perhaps he thought himself too clever. Anyway, his new brilliant idea for fleeing from capture was to construct wings of wax and feathers... where he got the wax and feathers in the middle of this labyrinth, no one is quite sure. Icarus, despite his father's warnings, flew too close to the sun which melted his pliable wings and he fell to the sea far below, perishing upon contact.

The moral usually exhorted from this myth is one of the reckless and heedless nature of youth, the need to take all things in moderation, and the danger of attempting to exceed reasonable boundaries. However, something else happens to the story when we remind ourselves that Icarus was coming out of imprisonment in the most frighteningly complex maze of pathways and tunnels ever to exist. Within the labyrinth, Icarus could only see walls, was at the mercy of the twists and turns of confusing passageways, was forced to navigate and make decisions within a seeming chaotic mess of disorder. Yet, when Icarus flew out into the great blue high above the entangling imbroglio below, he was

lifted out of the [labyrinth's] grasp [as one is when he views an aerial map or flies over the streets of his familiar urban realm.] One's body is no longer clasped by the streets that turn and return it according to anonymous law; nor is it possessed, whether as player or played, by the rumble of so many differences and by the nervousness of New York traffic. When one goes up there, he leaves behind the mass that carries off and mixes up in itself any identity of authors or spectators. An Icarus flying above these waters, he can ignore the devices of Daedalus in mobile and endless labyrinths far below. His elevation transfigures him into a voyeur. It puts him at a distance. It transforms the bewitching world by which one was "possessed" into a text that lies before one's eyes. It allows one to read it, to be a solar Eye, looking down like a God. The exaltation of a scopic and gnostic drive: the fiction of knowledge is related to this lust to be a viewpoint and nothing more." (Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1984), p.92.)

The story of Icarus interpreted thusly brings us to a double conception of the labyrinth. Being in it requires a focus on "doing" amidst disorder. Being above it enables a focus on "seeing" a complete order. Being in it makes you "a part of the creation of space... [Being distanced transforms the labyrinth into a patten and ultimately] into fiction, something not lived..." (Kristin Veel, "The Irreducibility of Space: Labyrinths, Cities, Cyberspace," Diacritics, vol. 33, no. 3/4 (Autumn - Winter 2003), p. 160) The labyrinth is the embodiment of this duality and thereby represents an unresolvable ambiguity, a paradox. It is "an ambiguous motif..." wherein the seeming simplicity of its unicursal circuit may be deceptive and only a piece of an infinite curve thus providing us with two simultaneous interpretations -- the labyrinth is at once "order and disorder, clarity and confusion, unity and multiplicity, artistry and chaos." (Veel, p. 156) The labyrinth comprises these two sorts of navigation in one path -- the nodal navigation of isolated positionality and the abstracted comprehension of universality.

The experiential labyrinth is different and yet connected to the imaginative one. In the strictest sense, a labyrinth is not a maze. A maze is an interconnected series of pathways with the possibility of many different routes and with the existence of dead-ends. A labyrinth, by contrast, consists of only one path to its center. There is no choice-making as in a maze. Thus, the walker in a labyrinth is removed from the necessity to use the rational part of his brain and can focus his attentions inward or perhaps elevate his mind above ordinary human limits. Originally, this was the function of the ancient labyrinth. The walker's navigational purposes were directed at the abstract, establishing a closer connection to God... his controlled disorder a tool for spiritual and transformative purposes. 12th century Christian mystics intended these meanderings to be a symbolic pilgrimage which encapsulated exile, estrangement, and return into one journey... a journey perhaps similar to Christ's expulsion into the desert and his ultimate return -- all the while two perspectives coaxing him... Satan's temptations close to his face obscuring all else, and God's broad and limitless vista opening to him when he peered above.

In such a meditative labyrinth, the journey mentally untangles as the path tangles. But how does the labyrinth function metaphorically... and in our modern world?

The writer perhaps most associated with labyrinths is the South American author Jorge Luis Borges. Fascinated by "paradoxes, metaphysical games, and infinite progressions and regressions," (Robert Philmus, "Wells and Borges and the Labyrinths of Time," Science Fiction Studies, vol. 1, no. 4 (Autumn, 1974), p. 239) his labyrinths are infinite and centerless... and they are self-referential, taking us on a journey whose "logical consequence of the tendency of baroque self-consciousness towards self-irony -- is self-betrayal." (Philmus, p. 240) Hegelian universal history cedes to and is lost within the labyrinths of time and returns one to oneself, but with more questions and less reassurance.

In "The Garden of Forking Paths," infinity is pondered indirectly by the main character through thoughts of his ancestor who died without finishing an immense and complicated novel and an equally immense and complicated labyrinth. Escaping from dangerous circumstances, this man winds up at the home of a friend who tells him he has solved both of the puzzles of the other's grandfather. As it turns out, the labyrinths are one and the same:

"'A labyrinth of symbols,' he corrected me. 'An invisible labyrinth of time. I, an English barbarian, have somehow been chosen to unveil the diaphanous mystery. Now, more than a hundred years after the fact, the precise details are irrecoverable, but it is not difficult to surmise what happened. Ts'ui Pen must at one point have remarked, 'I shall retire to write a book,' and at another point, 'I shall retire to construct a labyrinth.' Everyone pictured two projects; it occurred to no one that book and labyrinth were one and the same.'" (Jorge Luis Borges, "The Garden of Forking Paths," in Collected Fictions (New York: Penguin, 1998), p. 124)

Like Plato's cave, Borges understands our human experience to be an irresolvable one in which we interpret the shadows as real forms, in which the labyrinth of our lives is the labyrinth of consciousness and existence, in which we end up where we started in a parallel to Hofstader's 'strange loop': movement up or down through a complex system always putting one back from whence he started. Thereby, strange loops are self-referential, paradoxical, and create an impossibility of ever knowing what the boundaries are between dream and reality, self and other, time and memory, the navigable and the unfathomable. And what even is the labyrinth itself? Is it the physical journey? The vision from above? The loss of self and linearity to the simultaneity of time? Our consciousness and psychological well-being? Our orientation in the world? Culture? Society? Hypertext? Ourselves?

M.C. Escher, Relativity

M.C. Escher, Drawing Hands

For Borges, the labyrinth was not of the genre of 'magical realism' under which he is often categorized but replicated and delved into our reality itself.

There'll never be a door. You're inside
and the keep encompasses the world
and has neither obverse nor reverse
nor circling nor secret center.

(Borges, "Labyrinth," In Praise of Darkness 39)

Like the paradoxes of Walter Benjamin, Borges' labyrinths loop the trapped wandered back to himself, lifting him out of the labyrinth and simultaneously suggesting the labyrinthine quality of life.

A man sets himself the task of making a plan of the universe. After many years, he fills a whole space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fish, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and people. On the threshold of death, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines has traced the likeness of his own face. (Borges, El hacedor, 1960)

In her article on Borges, labyrinths, hypertext, and cyberspace, Veel suggests that there may be a redemptive power in this ambiguity, in our "refusal of closure of the rhizome." (Veel, 155) The etymology of the word, labyrinth, takes us back to Crete where it can be translated at "place of the double axe." Always, the labyrinth had this sense of duality. It is perhaps overcoming the duality that brings us to redemption. In writing about the Borges' story, "Death and the Compass," George McMurray has commented: "Their antithetical natures [become] inverted mirror images...[a blurring of character and reality that implicates] the concept of the eternal return."

The labyrinth in Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth is both real and fantastical... just like Ofelia's human experience... her escapism and her redemption. Is the underworld real or not? Does it even matter? Is it a choice between accepting Ofelia's fantasies versus Fascist brutal realities? Or do they overlap and co-exist? Hands are eyes. A child is all powerful. Death is rebirth. Escape is return. "Who are you?" "Me? I've had so many names. Old names that only the wind and the trees can pronounce. I am the mountain, the forest, and the earth."

Ofelia entering the labyrinthine underworld

Perhaps we are lost in the labyrinth of a city like Venice. We walk and return to where we began. But in the process we are changed. Perhaps we are lost in a labyrinth of suffering. We seek and answers forever elude us. But we find more profound questions. Perhaps we are lost in paradox and can find at least some salvation in the awareness of that paradox. Our disenchantment with duality becomes the only journey. Such was Benjamin's prediction for our inevitable course:

The task of future epistemology is to find for knowledge the sphere of total neutrality in regard to the concepts of both subject and object; in other words, it is to discover the autonomous, innate sphere of knowledge in which this concept in no way continues to designate the relation between two metaphysical entities. (Walter Benjamin)

The paradox sustains us. The labyrinth petrifies and calms and turns to us with the lines of our own face, our own memory, history, and future, our perpetual loss and return. His end is our beginning. Your confusion is my understanding.

The hours that hold the figure and the form
Have run their course within the house of dream

To convince is to conquer without conception.

If a person very close to us is dying, there is something in the months to come that we dimly apprehend -- much as we should have like to share it with him -- could only happen though his absence. We greet him at the last in a language that he no longer understands.

(Walter Benjamin, "One-Way Street," 1928)

Freud's Moravia (allegedly) or infiltration of my own subconscious

Tomorrow is Sigmund Freud's birthday... his 155th. Rather than being cliché and focusing tomorrow's theme on Freud (when, in fact, our modern world is probably over-saturated with his influence), I thought it might be interesting to consider Freud's birthplace... Moravia, Austria.

Moravian herald since 1292, chequered eagle

Freud was born in Freidberg, Moravia. Now part of the Czech Republic, Freidberg (and Moravia) were once part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In fact, it was not until Freud was 62 that Moravia became a part of Czechoslovakia and finally, in 1993, as part of the Czech Republic.

Like many Eastern European regions, this swatch of land has been well traversed. The Celts ceded the region to Germanic tribes early in the 1st century B.C. Slavic peoples came into the region 600 years or so later and the land passed back and forth between Slavic and Germanic principalities, kingdoms, influences, and invaders. Great Moravia was established by the Slavs in 9th century. This empire covered the following large part of Europe.

Apparently, though we call these people Slavs, there is no consistency between their culture, language, or politics and modern Slavic nations. During the years 883-894 A.D., Moravia annexed Bohemia, with Bohemia finally pulling away to successfully establish its independence in 895.

It is an odd fact to think that the so-very Austrian Freud was perhaps actually Czech, anciently Slav, and even more anciently Celtic.

Further, perhaps this closeness of Moravia with Bohemia is more significant than mere proximity. Freidberg is considered part of southern Bohemian region of the current Czech Republic.

Saint Bartholomew Church, in market town of Frymburk (Freidberg)

And while Bohemia may be a region, it is perhaps better known as the unconventional lifestyle that artists (or Williamsburg residents) lead, or the type of clothing that celebrates free love, a wandering spirit, adventure, and the "appearance" of voluntary poverty.

Nicole Ritchie in her own ad campaign for House of Harlow, a boho chic line selling at shopbop.com... current Boho style does NOT come cheap...

The term evolved when Romani people (a.k.a. gypsies) arrived in France and lived as outsiders. They were called Bohemians as it was assumed that they had come from the aforementioned region. It was rather a pejorative term at first, despite our modern usage, and the life of a genuine Bohemian was most likely quite difficult and often unpleasant.

William Bouguereau, The Bohemian, 1890

The modern romanticized and coddled version

It was through art that the Bohemian and his alternate lifestyle were ultimately romanticized and reimagined -- through Puccini's La Boheme, Henri Murger's short story collection Scenes of Bohemian Life, and ultimately even Broadway musicals such as "Rent" (with its famous number, "La vie Boheme.") And nowadays, the phrase has made a complete 180 from its origins so that there are "Bobos" (David Brook's term for bourgeouis bohemians). To be bohemian is cool, counter- and sub-culture, avant-garde, post-Beat, hipster, post-modern, zen, and epitomized in events like Burning Man.

We came, we saw, we burned the man.

So, how can we circle around back to Freud? It's his birthday for gosh sakes!! Well, Freud himself was a sort of bohemian... in the outcast sense. Like any innovative agitator, his theories were not comfortably incorporated into Viennese and Austrian (and worldwide) society... at first... until they were. Freud now exists as so much a part of our very own subconscious, the subconscious of which he made us so aware in the first place. He sits as a ''founding father" to our modern way of thinking and being -- along with other luminaries such as Einstein, Marx, and Darwin. I often talk to my students, when we read Romeo and Juliet, about how Mercutio was a proto-Freudian... believing that dreams reflected inner anxieties and instincts and dark desires rather than falling in line with the rest of his era in believing that they possessed predictive abilities.

"This is that very Mab
That plats the manes of horses in the night
And bakes the elflocks in foul sluttish hairs,
Which once untangled much misfortune bodes.
This is the hag, when maids lie on their backs,
That presses them and learns them first to bear,
Making them women of good carriage.
This is she!" (Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Act 1, scene i)

Freud's concept of the unconscious

Freud's view of truth and reality so dominates and infiltrates our way of thinking and being that it is perhaps difficult to disentangle ourselves enough to recognize the influence. Dr. John Cash (I know! the other man in black...) of the University of Melbourne in Australia speaks of how Freud devised of an internal division within each of us, a split between desire and authority. Not only did Freud develop theories of the mind, theories of repressed conflicts, theories of how we dream and how we act, but he "explored how groups, institutions and cultures mark themselves upon the psyche and how, as human subjects, we relate to such social demands. Freud developed the complex account we have of both human subjectivity and human connectedness -- of our being a self with others; and the internal division and discontent that such a cultural achievement, such a self-civilizing project involves." (Dr. Cash, 2009)

You see! Freud does insidiously infiltrate the modern world and our modern selves and minds! I had intended for this entire blog entry to delve into the interesting and unusual history of Moravia and where do I end up? Back with Freud... myself always internally divided, always subconsciously motivated... just like the rest of you.

lost in translation, mired in misunderstanding

"Director: [in Japanese] Mr. Bob-san, you are relaxing in your study. On the table is a bottle of Suntory whiskey. Got it? Look slowly, with feeling, at the camera, and say it gently -- say it as if you were speaking to an old friend. Just like Bogie in Casablanca, 'Here's looking at you, kid!' -- Suntory time.
Translator: Umm. He want you to turn, look in camera. OK?
Bob: That's all he said?
Translator: Yes. Turn to camera.
Bob: All right. Does he want me to turn from the right, or turn from the left?
Translator: [to director, in Japanese] Uh, umm. He's ready now. He just wants to know if he's supposed to turn from the left or turn from the right when the camera rolls. What should I tell him?
Director: [in Japanese] What difference does it make! Makes no difference! Don't have time for that! Got it, Bob-san? Just psych yourself up, and quick! Look straight at the camera. At the camera. And slowly. With passion. Straight at the camera. And in your eyes there's... passion. Got it?
Translator: [to Bob] Right side. And with intensity. OK?
Bob: Is that everything? It seemed like he said quite a bit more than that.
Director: [to Bob, in Japanese] Listen, listen. This isn't just about the whiskey. Understand? Imagine you're talking to an old friend. Gently. The emotions bubble up from the bottom of your heart. And don't forget, psych yourself up!
Translator: Like an old friend. And, into the camera.
Bob: OK
Director: [in Japanese] Got it? You love whiskey. It's Suntory time. OK?
Bob: OK.
Director: OK?
Bob: [nods]
Director: [to crew] OK!"

It's Suntory time! Lost in Translation brings up the challenges of communication, the self-discovery we can find in foreign places and strangers, the way that so much of what we try to say is lost in the process of saying it. The scene above presents the obvious surface level of miscommunication existing in language and cultural barriers. There is a beautiful parallel echo to the above scene in the following -- a scene in which Bob (Bill Murray) speaks to his wife, Lydia, on the phone, time and space merely two among so many disconnections between the pair.

"Lydia: [over the phone] Is this a bad time?
Bob: [pauses] No, it's always a good time.
Lydia: The burgundy carpet is out of stock: it's going to take twelve weeks. Did you like any of the other colors?
Bob: Whatever you like... I'm just completely lost.
Lydia: It's just carpet.
Bob: That's not what I'm talking about.
Lydia: What are you talking about?
Bob: I don't know. I just want to... get healthy. I would like to start taking better care of myself. I'd like to start eating healthier -- I don't want all that pasta. I would like to start eating like Japanese food.
Lydia: [icily] Well, why don't you just stay there and you can have it every day?
Bob: [biting his tongue] How are the kids doing?
Lydia: They're fine. They miss their father. [pause] Do I need to worry about you, Bob?
Bob: Only if you want to."


This time the translation isn't from language to language, but person to person... and so much still remains lost... and perhaps more poignantly so than the Suntory scene, its comic counterpart. For all of the times that we communicate effectively, how many more times do we miscommunicate? I did a quick search on a well-known scholarly database for 'misunderstanding'. What came hurtling back at me was over 3,400 articles about all of our confusions, wrong ideas, misinterpretations, misjudgments, and delusions. Apparently what we misunderstand is massive. We misunderstand literature, history, other cultures, scientific theories, economics, markets, politics, interpretation of these topics... the past, the present, the future, meaning itself. Misunderstanding is not just a loss; it is a failure. It involves taking something in the wrong sense, ofttimes unknowingly. We misunderstand so much and so often that we may even lose sight of where we started. In an article about the misinterpretations of economic behavior, Donald Katzner suggests as much in titling his paper, "What are the questions?" (Katzer, "What Are the Questions?" Journal of Post Keynesian Economics, vol. 25, no. 1 (Autumn, 2002), pp. 51-68)

What are the questions? Trying to identify the questions is a fundamentally important endeavor. We need to be able to communicate with each other. "No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine" wrote John Donne in the 17th century. But if we are not even on the same page to begin with, how can we successfully share space on the 'Continent'? What if I don't even know what continent you are on?

The problem isn't just in the question... or the words. Communication is not just verbal, "but also [works through] gestures, attitudes, acts, facial expressions, even by silent listening... interrelationships are profoundly influenced by the fact that words may say one thing while the total communication may be something entirely different." (Lester Kirkendall & Curtis Avery, "Ethics and Interpersonal Relationships," The Coordinator, vol. 3, no. 6 (Mar, 1955), p. 5) Conversely, miscommunication can be nonverbal as well: the head turning away, the eyes poised resolutely downward, the face icy and blank...

It seems that clear and direct communication would be the most natural thing in the world. However, it is quite the opposite. People need to work at communicating with each other. They need to learn strategies and look for cues. It is hard work! It requires that you care about investing in that other person because, otherwise, why bother? Communication requires empathy and being able to 'see clearly'... being able to match up your perspective with another's self-evaluation or vice versa. In a marriage, aspects of effective communication include: "understanding... accuracy... perceptual competence... and predictive empathy. [These terms] have been used interchangeably to represent the extent to which one individual's estimate of another actually resembles the latter's self-assessment." (Julie Indvik & Mary Anne Fitzpatrick, "If You Could Read My Mind, Love...," Understanding and Misunderstanding in the Marital Dyad," Family Relations, vol. 31, no. 1 (Jan, 1982), p. 43) Because we can't read each other's minds, we need to consciously learn how to listen, how to translate, how to speak new languages even; we need to possess genuine intentions to get as far within the other person as possible. This sort of understanding can only be motivated by true respect and deep love.

The strict post-modernist will tell you that the 'author' is dead... along with God and metanarrative and linearity and truth. Yet, it seems rather ridiculous a proclamation when it seems we are all still trying to be the author of our lives, our relationships, of meaning and understanding. It seems so passive to have to become the listener, the one who understands rather than the one who creates the meaning. And could we truly understand if we were to fulfill the post-modernist's desire and to separate meaning from intention, text from context, discourse from author? Foucault tells us it would be easy to "imagine a culture where discourse would circulate without any need for an author. Discourses, whatever their status, form, or value, and regardless of our manner of handling them, would unfold in a pervasive anonymity. No longer the tiresome repetitions:

'Who is the real author?'
'Have we proof of his authenticity and originality?'
'What has he revealed of his most profound self in his language?'

New questions will be heard:

'What are the modes of existence of this discourse?'
'Where does it come from; how is it circulated; who controls it?'
'What placements are determined for possible subjects?'
'Who can fulfill these diverse functions of the subject?'

Behind all these questions we would hear little more than the murmur of indifference:
'What matter who's speaking?'" (Michel Foucault, "What is An Author?" in Chandra Mukerji & Michael Schudson (eds.), Rethinking Popular Culture: Contemporary Perspectives in Cultural Studies (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1991), p. 462)

Are these really tiresome questions? Is the murmur of indifference reassuring for us in its anonymity? Sometimes, it is true, a stranger seems to have a better ability to understand than the ones that know and love us best. In "As We Know," John Ashberry evokes that moment of connection between strangers, of their ability to put aside a need to grasp and "examine" and resolve the "whole" all at once... and in the simple notion of looking honestly at a moment... in the simple turning to face another in pure openness, true understanding can be had:

The light that was shadowed then
Was seen to be our lives,
Everything about us that love might wish to examine,
Then put away for a certain length of time, until
The whole is to be reviewed, and we turned
Toward each other, to each other.

Ashberry's eloquent repetition of 'each other' counters Foucault's suggestion that the repetition is tiresome. Yes, the author matters. The author is human. The author has a 'profound self.' The author has a voice. And that voice cannot just cry out into the forest, wondering if it hears him when he leaves, just as he wonders if its fallen trunks make any noise when the woods are full of emptiness and silence.

Richard Sennett implicates the many misunderstandings that arise when people look at abstract art, especially that which began to be produced "in the 1950s, beginning with Robert Rauschenberg and Jean Dubuffet, something radical began to happen to paintings: they no longer were meant to be seen vertically, the surface of the painting confronting the eye, but horizontally, and thus at a more oblique angle to the human viewer in an upright posture. Steinberg calls these 'flat-bed' paintings. 'They no more depend... on a head-to-toe correspondence with human posture than a newspaper does..." (Richard Sennett, The Conscience of the Eye (New York: Norton, 1990), pp. 223-4) In this case, misunderstanding runs rampant because we are looking at something sideways, trying to 'read' its text through the wrong context. We have the wrong confrontation, the wrong correspondence. The Other remains completely foreign and forever impenetrable. We must first become strange to ourselves, and then return to look again at the Other... in an attempt to truly understand.

Understanding involves just this sort of "estrangement and return... It is assumed based on an underlying commonality uniting Self and Other... [and misunderstanding can be overcome when the Self becomes] aware of the individuality of the 'Thou' and take[s] account of his uniqueness..." (William Rasch, "Injecting Noise into the System: Hermeneutics and the Necessity of Misunderstanding, SubStance, vol. 21, no. 1, Issue 67 (1992), p. 61) Must difference be 'extinguished' in order to understand? Or is it possible to engage in an 'elusive dance' that recognizes the Other's fundamental strangeness but also sees the Self embedded within the Other?

How can we hear each other amidst the noise, amidst the words that become too many and too complicated and thereby overwhelm comprehension? How can we preserve the self and nonetheless still protect the other? How can we understand when each seems to be in a different conversation, on a different continent, in separate worlds? Lydia and Bob seem to want to connect... or rather, reconnect. Her desire to include him in household decisions may arise from a desire to place him centrally in the home from which he is currently estranged -- both physically and otherwise. His desire to involve her in recognizing his need to evolve is coming from an equally good place -- he is attempting to share his growth... and perhaps even asking, indirectly, for help in the process. But one conversation fights with the other like opposing magnets. They speak directly and yet in code... and no one seems aware of the other's starting point. They are estranged, but not returning, perhaps not knowing where to return to. They peer at each other sideways, everything 'lost in translation.'

We live in "a world of Others -- a world in the image of the Other who wishes to remain other. In this world of Others, disagreement or misunderstanding does not arrive as an aberration against a background of understanding, to be excluded by both participants of a dialogue. Rather, it is thrown up by the Other as a protective screen..." (Rasch, pp. 62-63) Therein, misunderstanding may be sometimes be conscious, a shield against losing oneself in the otherness of the complete dissonance of our noisy world.

Misunderstanding comes not from an inability to replicate another's message but perhaps from an unwillingness to dive into the scary sea of ambiguity. When speaking, a 'sender' gives a particular message... yes... but he also chooses not to give a million other messages. Understanding requires recognizing this choice as much as it does grasping the attitude with which the sender sends his particular message. All of this is quite uncertain. A speaker speaks with a voice underlain by the need for interpretation...and this interpretation, made across the space of otherness, will always remain unreliable, uncertain, unstable. Misunderstanding and understanding then rest on the same instability. Perhaps it is not how we interpret, but how we receive that matters the most.

But I wonder where does the loss go? For all that I do not know about understanding another human being, I do know that misunderstanding becomes physical. It tightens the gut. It tears up the eyes. It tightens the throat and shortens the breath. It tears at your insides as if that very otherness, the extreme aloneness and isolation is the one and only condition of being in the world. And thus perhaps our attempts to understand... they matter. They matter, even if we do not understand. They matter even if we only listen and still walk away with so much uncertainty. They matter because we have been present, because we have shown our desire to connect, because we have put our arms around the one we love and reassured her that her feelings and thoughts and desires matter to us... because it is in understanding that lies the 'origin of things.'

"On the Origins of Things" (Troy Jollimore)

Everyone knows that the moon started out
as a renegade fragment of the sun, a solar
flare that fled hellish furnace
and congealed into a flat frozen pond suspended
between the planets. But did you know
that anger began as music, played
too often and too loudly by drunken performers
at weddings and garden parties? Or that turtles
evolved from knuckles, ice from tears, and darkness
from misunderstanding? As for the dominant
thesis regarding the origin of love, I
abstain from comment, nor will I allow
myself to address the idea that dance
began as a kiss, that happiness was
an accident import from Spain, that the ancient
game of jump-the-fire gave rise
to politics. But I will confess
that I began as an astronomer -- a liking
for bright flashes, vast distances, unreachable things,
a hand stretched always toward the furthest limit --
and that my longing for you has not taken me
very far from that original desire
to inscribe a comet's orbit around the walls
of our city, to gently stroke the surface of the stars.

Misunderstanding leaves us in the dark. Understanding, without complete success, is that hand across the 'vast distance' writing traceless circles tenderly amongst ancient and forever star-light... around each other, to each other.

survey the illusions in the rear-view mirror

ESPN's David Newton took it upon himself to imagine what a NASCAR draft would look like. Topping off the list was the moderately-talented, but supremely attractive Danica Patrick, of whom Newton commented: "Like Cam Newton on the NFL side, she may not be the most talented, but when you combine talent with marketability she'd be hard to pass on at No. 1."

Danica may have set multiple records of 'firsts' for a woman driver... she may have maneuvered successfully between the racing, advertising, and marketing realms, but she is not the first motorina to take the world by storm.  That distinction belongs to Dorothy Levitt. Born in 1882, Levitt was the first woman ever to compete in a motor race-- the 1903 Southport Speed Trial. Interestingly, this was the same year that the motoriste Madame du Gast found great success (and greater humanity) in the Paris Madrid Race. Ultimately placing 45th, she would have secured a much higher finish if she hadn't stopped to aid a seriously injured English driver. But back to Miss Levitt and her most un-feminine femininity. In his book, Fast Ladies: Female Racing Drivers from 1888 to 1970, Jean François Bouzanquet describes Levitt's "discovery":

Selwyn Edge, Director of the Napier Car Company and famous racing driver... spotted Miss Dorothy Levitt amongst his staff, a beautiful secretary with long legs and eyes like pools. In a bid to promote his cars... Edge decided that she should take part in a race, though first he had to teach her to drive. She surpassed his expectations... and proved such a good driver that she was taken on by De Dion for a major publicity stunt. At the Hereford Thousand Miles Trial in 1904, Dorothy posed before members of the press, delighted by her uncommonly glamorous racing outfit, holding a snappy Pomeranian dog that barked ferociously at all the other competitors...

Levitt was more than just a pretty face. She was a speedboat driver (in addition to race cars), an aviator, a journalist, and an activist -- especially as a proponent of the woman's 'right to motor' -- and she was also an innovator. In her book (compiled from a series of articles written for the British Daily Graphic), The Woman and the Car: A Chatty Little Handbook For All Women Who Motor or Who Want to Motor, Levitt devised the idea of the rear-view mirror, albeit with a different primary purpose:

The mirror should be fairly large to be really useful and it is better to have one with a handle. Just before starting take the glass out of the little drawer and put it into the little flap pocket of the car. You will find it useful to have handy, not only for personal use, but to occasionally hold up to see what is behind you.

Miss Levitt was full of bravura, adventurousness, and spunk. In fact, she is reported to have been rather cheeky as well. A mere three months after winning her class at the 1903 race, Levitt was stopped for speeding at a "terrific pace" and summoned to court. Never bothering to appear personally, she was quoted as having commented to the police officer who pulled her over that she had a desire to run down all police officers and, specifically in his case, she wished she had flattened him into the poorly paved British road grit. As this was still the same year in which the Motor Cars Act passed in Britain, finally raising the speed limit from four miles per hour to twenty, it was possible Ms. Levitt was driving at the unheard of speed of twenty-one mph!! (Make mental note that sprinter Maurice Greene has run on his bipedal wheels at the speed of around 26 mph.) In the words of Clark W. Griswold, "Eat my road grit, liver lips!"

The turn of the century brought numerous innovations in the motoring world as roads improved, technology rapidly proliferated, and the need for mobility increased. Nonetheless, as with all change, the automotive cosmos seemed to many a 'brave new world' for which we were not ready... most especially women. They were seen as being too dainty and lacking the physical strength needed to crank the starter handle and perform demanding (or perhaps demeaning) roadside tasks like changing a tire. Further, their presumed inbred vanity was assessed to be an overwhelming hurdle. The 'sport' of driving was to require "unflattering googles, utilitarian apparel, and complexion-spoiling conditions. Lady Jeune warned women motorists in her tome Dress for Motoring that they 'must relinquish the hope of keeping their soft peach-like bloom' for 'appearances must be sacrificed if motor-driving is to be thoroughly enjoyed.'" (Jennifer Shepherd, "The British Press and Turn-of-the-Century Developments in the Motoring Movement, Victorian Periodicals Review, vol. 38, no. 4 (Winter, 2005), p. 384)

Apparently, Levitt and Patrick didn't get the memo. While Levitt's first interest was not scanning the rearward traffic in anticipation of agilely and expeditiously changing lanes to get ahead of the rusting VW bus parked obnoxiously and obliviously in the left lane, she was clever enough to conceive of an automotive enhancement that we now consider standard... and to do so ten years ahead of its manufacturing debut.

The first instance of a mounted rear-view mirror was on Ray Harroun's Marmon Wasp at the first Indy 500 in 1911. Allegedly, he had gotten the idea -- not from Ms. Levitt -- but from seeing just such a mirror on a horse-drawn carriage in his hometown of Spartansburg, Pennsylvania. Giddee yup!!

His use of this newfangled device caused quite a bit of controversy. He had significantly reduced the weight and streamlined the overall body of his vehicle by foregoing the inclusion of a 'riding mechanic' which was the common practice at the time. Rear-view mirrors, thereby were able to make race cars more wieldy and indeed sleeker, sensuality and cars forever after becoming married.

The rear-view mirror proliferates. There are rear-view mirrors on all cars, some now even with rear-view cameras. There are secondary rear-view mirrors for parents to monitor the behavior of their little backseat drivers-in-training. Cyclists, especially urban commuters, often attach a small rear-view mirror to their helmets. As we race along the information superhighway, there are rear-view mirrors as well -- many laptops come with eyes in the back of the head -- rear-view mirrors conceived with the objective of preventing the discovery of sensitive information... or to protect the user from lurking snitchy co-workers who stand at the ready willing to report any and all 'unauthorized' computer use at work.

The rear-view mirror functions metaphorically as well. "We look at the present through a rear-view mirror," announced media theorist Marshall McLuhan. "We march backwards into the future." In a 1968 interview with Norman Mailer, McLuhan expanded upon his anxious retrogressive perspective:

"Every age creates as an Utopian image a nostalgic rear-view mirror image of itself, which puts it thoroughly out of touch with the present. The present is the enemy. The present is... only faced in any generation by the artist. The artist is prepared to study the present as his material because it is the area of challenge to the whole sensory life, and therefore it is anti-Utopian; it is a world of anti-values. And the artist who comes into contact with the present produces an avant-garde image that is terrifying to his contemporaries."

So much for the advantage of what we see in the rear-view mirror. Watching the backwards film of our lives, we find ourselves unable to confront what is ahead on the road. Baudrillard, not surprisingly, agreed with McLuhan about how we move when we drive. For him, the sport and now necessity of 'motoring' was "a spectacular form of amnesia. Everything to be discovered, everything to be obliterated." In our amnesia concerning the past, we may uncanily possess a "nostalgia for the future" (Baudrillard) brought about through the hyperreality of American life which is often closer to fiction than reality, yet is uninhabitable because we cannot imagine it prior to its existence; rather "the apocalyptic forms of banality... the hyperreality of life... anticipate imagination by giving it the form of reality" (Baudrillard) -- a reality which transcends the imaginary and leaves us with this strange sort of time reversal, a nostalgia for the future. What appears in the rear-view mirror is not real, is hyperreal, and anticipates ourselves all at the same time. The vision we see, the rearward gaze of our unfocused eyes, is holographic "in that it has the coherent light of laser, the homogeneity of the single elements scanned by the same beams. From the visual and plastic viewpoints too: things seem to be made of a more unreal substance; they seem to turn and move in a void as if by a special lighting effect, a find membrane you pass through without noticing it... The hologram is akin to the world of phantasy. It is a three-dimensional dream and you can enter it as you would a dream." (Jean Baudrillard, America, trans. Chris Tucker (London: Verso, 1986), pp. 29-30)

And so, in White Noise, DeLillo imagines a similar and fragmenting holographic perspective of ourselves. For "if these people could see us through a telescope we might look like we were two feet two inches tall and it might be raining yesterday instead of today." (Don DeLillo, White Noise)

Keep your eyes on the road. Watch carefully in the rear-view mirror. Beware the holographic fantasy. Try to see what others are not seeing in their somnambulistic amnesia. Pick out the road signs that march towards the future, rather than the insidious commercials that lead us to sentimentalize a non-existent past... or present... reflected over your head in the rear-view mirror.

find your way home again

A traveler moves across an unknown wilderness. His day has been long and its endlessness still stretches before him like the unfolding day-and-night landscape. He carries the weight of essential possessions and threadbare isolation on his back. He is alone, unknown, sketching his trail silently in a remote land where he finds himself far from home, further from himself.

It is just when all natural light begins to vanish, when the fog of night cloaks him once again and all too comfortably so, that he sees a faint light. It is a light enclosed by shelter and walls, a light that filters through to the outside, a light that "watches in the secret heart of night." (Emmuré by Rimbaud) He feels a great release, a sense of the intimacy in the vast, a relief that this light "is the symbol of prolonged waiting... Through its light alone, the house becomes human. It sees like a man. It is an eye open to night." (Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958), pp. 34-35)

Where am I? Where do I belong? Home is not a particular place; it is a construction. We make home -- literally or in our minds -- and along with the space we recall as being so home-like, the shelter with the light always on, home includes "a significant affiliation of self with place, producing a sense of belonging -- of feeling at home in one place, out of place in another. Such self-interpretation and affiliation frequently incorporates multiple locales, ranging in scale from rooms and dwelling places to neighborhoods, communities, and even regions. (Lee Cuba & David Hummon, "Constructing a Sense of Home: Place Affiliation and Migration across the Life Cycle," Sociological Forum, vol. 8, no. 4 (Dec, 1993), pg. 549)

Phenomenologically, or subjectively, home becomes a sacred place. A place infused with 'insidedness' wherein the rest of the world feels 'outside' or physically, spatially, and temporally foreign. When immigrants move away from their homelands, they find a need to recreate the inside within the new outside -- to remake that sense of belonging. Sometimes, they create neighborhood spaces within cities, congregating together with other expatriates in Chinatown or Little Italy. Other times, they recreate home through words, through narratives and stories of 'back home' that become "the means by which we gradually impart meaning to the events of our lives." (Maxine Greene, "Multiculturalism, Community, and the Arts," in Anne Dyson & Celia Genishi (eds.), The Need for Story (Urbana: NCTE, 1994), pg. 14) By speaking enough, the words become strata, strong enough to hold us, to secure us comfortably, to protect us 'at home' regardless of where we may physically be.

Each and every time I have left home and been away for an extended time, I have found myself thinking more about home than I ever did when I was there. The connections feel more tenuous. The distance seems impossibly immeasurable, even though it has just been crossed physically. The phone calls are full of the weight of distance, expanding rather than reducing space. The voices of those from home come through disembodied and all feels ungrounded. This is the experience of exile, an experience that perhaps situates home most firmly. For someone like Doris Lessing, "the concept of 'home' is always bound up with its other, exile." (Susan Watkins, "Remembering Home: Nation and Identity in the Recent Writings of Doris Lessing," Feminist Review, no. 85, Political Hystories (2007), pg. 101) Often this concept of home, in its remembrance, situates itself around the kitchen table. Memories cloud, eyes weepy from chopping onions, the smell of pie baking or turkey roasting, the floral perfume of musty aunts wafting across the visions of what feels most home-like.

Home comforts, and homelessness aches "like a bruise on one's heart... a cursed country one has climbed out of and left behind for ever, but visible, not hidden..." (Doris Lessing, African Laughter (London: Flamingo, 1993), pg. 305) Do memories of home enhance the 'truth' of its insidedness, of our belonging? Or do they, rather, create new fictions in which we reside and find a place only through this new story, our bruises self-inflicted?

Our primary home is our body. Perhaps that is why we are bruised at the pain of exile. Home literally is where the heart is. For Goethe's Werther, it is just such heartbreak that destroys the possibility of him ever being home again. His unrequited love for Lotte, the impossibility of their relationship, and yet his forever devotion to his beloved -- all leave him only with emptiness at her absence. In a letter to his friend Wilhelm, he writes: "I have so much in me, and the feeling of her absorbs it all; I have so much, and without her it all comes to nothing." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther (New York: Vintage Books, 1971), pg. 113)

Homesickness and heartbreak exist inside of him as "the source of all my misery is hidden in myself, as was formerly the source of all my happiness. Am I not the same who not long ago was intoxicated by the abundance of his emotions, and who stepped into a paradise wherever he went, with a heart ready longingly to embrace the whole world? And now this heart is dead, and thrills of delight radiate from it no longer; my eyes are dry, and my feelings, no longer refreshed by the relief of tears, contract my brow into anxious furrows. I suffer terribly because I have lost what was the one delight of my life -- the holy, animating power that helped me to create worlds around me..." (114) Without his true love, deprived of his soulmate, he cries out in pain until he can produce no more tears... until he can feel no more. The locus of his most heartfelt feelings being gone, Werther cannot find his home... and ultimately, heartsick and homeless, cannot find a reason to live. In final desperation, he calls out to her... but only through another letter to Wilhelm in which his voice and love for Lotte will remain unheard by the necessary recipient: "Lotte! Lotte! -- And this is the end! My mind is in a daze; for a week I have not been able to concentrate, my eyes are full of tears. I feel nowhere at home... I have no wish; I make no demand. It would be better for me to leave." (Goethe, 135)

Home requires a coming or a going. It is fitting that in his inability to express the ineffable, that in the impossibility of ever finding the right words to say how much he loves Lotte, Werther speaks through others -- Wilhelm, the silent echoes of the woods, and Ossian's poetry. In his "Songs of Selma," the night star is called forth, like a light, like a lover, like a home:

Star of descending night! fair is they light in the west! thou that liftest thy unshorn head from they cloud: thy steps are stately on they hill. What dost thou behold in the plain?

Home descends upon us with its light. It provides the steps at the end of the journey. It can see beyond where we are, outwards towards the plain. In the same poem, another forlorn lover, Colma screams out into the night:

It is night, I am alone, forlorn on the hill of storms. The wind is heard on the mountain. The torrent pours down the rock. No hut receives me from the rain; forlorn on the hill of winds!

Love-lost, there is no lighted window. There is no shelter from the storm. There is no place of belonging. Perhaps home is love. Perhaps exile is separation from the ones whom we love most dearly.

When we yearn, do we yearn backwards? When we think of home, we look over our shoulder... behind us... for something missing, for something that seems to have once existed in our past. Home is as temporal as it is physical. In his lyric novel, Angle of Repose, Wallace Stegner's Lyman Ward explains this sense of home scientifically, as his engineer son might. This phrase, angle of repose is not just technical to him, and he recognizes how his grandmother was "alert to the figurative possibilities of words [and could thereby]... see the phrase as descriptive of human as well as detrital rest. As you said, it was too good for mere dirt; you tried to apply it to your own wandering and uneasy life. It is the angle I am aiming for myself, and I don't mean the rigid angle at which I rest in this chair... Was the quiet I always found in you really repose?" (Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose (New York: Penguin, 1971), pg. 24)

And Lyman finds another apt analogy with the physical laws of the universe as they apply to human affairs in the Doppler Effect:

The sound of anything coming at you -- a train, say, or the future -- has a higher pitch than the sound of the same thing going away. It you have perfect pitch and a head for mathematics you can compute the speed of the object by the interval between its arriving and departing sounds. I have neither perfect pitch nor a head for mathematics, and anyway who wants to compute the speed of history? Like all falling bodies, it constantly accelerates... You yearned backward a good part of your life, and that produced another sort of Doppler Effect. Even while you paid attention to what you must do today and tomorrow, you heard the receding sound of what you had relinquished. (Stegner, 25)

In his own search for home, in his attempts to understand himself and his own life in a broader context, Lyman must understand the difference in the disturbances produced by a single drop in the pond... the differences between what he sees and any other observer sees... the upward shift in frequency as the disturbance approaches... and the apparent downward shift (or descending pitch) as it recedes... as home approaches and recedes... and amidst all of this movement, where can one find that angle of repose?

"Another day in this carnival of souls
Another night's sands end as quickly as it goes
The memories are shadows, ink on the page
And I can't seem to find my way home" ("Far From Home," Five Finger Death Punch)

So how can we find our way home? When home has receded into the depths of shadowy memory, when it resides in the misunderstood distance between those we love and never really knew, when it is lost somewhere in the heart of a lover whom we can never reach again? And the road home never seems straight:

But ere the circle homeward lies
Far, far must it remove (A. E. Housman)

...and further away we are led as we journey in an endless circularity. We so yearn to be back home again. It is an ancient and forever longing. Odysseus suffered war and loss and temptation for twenty years in his attempt to return home. And so may the rest of us search and journey. May we be so brave. May we seek and seek and maybe understand. May we create and recreate the meaning, the protectiveness, the warmth and soulful settling that home provides. The road may be 'meandering' and 'manifestly inconclusive' as the poet Scott Cairns suggests... but let us wander that road... until we find our way home. And let us not wind up there alone.

the greatest gifts

What is the best gift you have ever given? received?

Given: I try to be creative and personal with gifts. But, by far the best gift I ever gave to someone was for a very close friend of mine's birthday... which is only a few days separated from Christmas. This meant I had to give something double the goodness. He being an adept sailor, lover of boats, and all-around water person... and me being a painter (though very novice...), I decided to paint him a series of sailboat paintings. Each painting had a unique color scheme and thereby a sort of personality. Altogether, there were two cool-family paintings and two warm-family paintings.

No, they are not anything earth-shattering or especially innovative. Nonetheless, this friend's reaction upon receiving the paintings was one of being overwhelmed... I think in a good way. I had the paintings all lined up against the wall and I brought him over with his eyes closed. When he opened his eyes, he just kept repeating 'wow' over and over again... and finally had to sit down and just take it all in. He thanked me multiple times until finally I told him, "You don't understand. You have given me the gift. Making these paintings was an experience that brought pure happiness and peace of mind to me. I should be thanking you." I meant it.

Received: Up until recently, I would have said detailed feedback on my poetry. I write poetry and enjoy sharing it with people with whom I become close. Often, even these people that care the most about me just read it quickly and tell me it is 'really interesting' or that 'I'm not really good with poetry' or a broad and vague 'it's good!'

I once dated someone and as we grew closer, I gave him some of my poems. He didn't mention them for a couple days. Finally, when I was pretty sure they had gotten lost in some pile on his desk, he brought them up. His thoughts, comments, and insights were incredibly specific. He had sat down and read the poems multiple times. Further, he had made notes of which things had touched him the most and why, of what metaphors brought him around to other associations, of where he struggled the most to understand, of what parts were the most powerfully and directly emotional. I was dumbstruck... and incredibly touched. For someone to take the time like that proved to me the depths to which that person cared about who I was, how I thought, and what was inside of me.

I mentioned at the beginning of this 'best received' section that this would have been my response until recently. My greatest gift now consists of the following: The man I have been dating gave me a card for a special day in my life. On this card were written words that spoke to me beyond anything I can express. I do not intend to reproduce the intimate details of that message here -- those are words and emotions that are meant to stay between only us. However, I will say that the seemingly simplest gift...the gift of expression... of saying what you want to say... of letting someone in on what is inside of you... is the greatest gift I can ever think of receiving. I will never receive a more touching, more moving, more meaningful gift than this card. It is imprinted on my heart for the rest of my days. And this gift, as Lao-Tzu suggests, gives me courage.

"Where there is great love, there will always be miracles." - Willa Cather
"There is no remedy for love but to love more." - Henry David Thoreau
"To love someone deeply gives you strength. Being loved by someone deeply gives you courage." - Lao-Tzu
"Love is life. And if you miss love, you miss life." - Leo Buscaglia