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A living body is not a fixed thing but a flowing event, like a flame or a whirlpool: the shape alone is stable, for the substance is a stream of energy going in at one end and out at the other. We are particular and temporarily identifiable wiggles in a stream that enters us in the form of light, heat, air, water, milk, bread, fruit, beer, beef Stroganoff, caviar, and paté de foie gras. It goes out as gas and excrement–and also as semen, babies, talk, politics, commerce, war, poetry, music, and philosophy.
–Alan Watts, Does It Matter?
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Showing posts with label philosophy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label philosophy. Show all posts
Sunday, November 11, 2007
Saturday, November 10, 2007
Life Should have a Soundtrack Godammit
6
Did you ever have the feeling that something you're experiencing is missing the soundtrack? I guess nowadays we would say audio file, but the idea is the same. Imagine watching a movie with dialogue but no music. Lawrence of Arabia would be about a blue-eyed, tunic-wearing, train-blower-upper rather than the sweeping David vs. Goliath epic that it is. Movie directors add music to give an emotional tone to the story they're telling. The muscial score imparts an emotional unity to the different scenes and helps in bringing it to its end. Even without music, good actors and a good director can provoke emotion, as in theater, but not with the same intensity. I really don't know what it is about music that makes it able to evoke emotions so easily and unify the input of our senses. At times I think about my life, the past and present and everything I've done and I would love to feel the wholeness or unity of it just as one feels the arrangement of notes in a symphony.
This reminds me of a story by Borges (I don't recall the title) in which the narrator speaks metaphorically of all the steps that one has taken in his life, here and there, up and down, and when we look back on it all we see only a confusion of tracks. He says that although we are unable to perceive order in this chaos of events and decisions, from a divine point of view the arrangement of all these steps makes up an intelligeible whole. All the steps are interrelated and impart a unified intelligible sense. Well, maybe God (the big music director in the sky) gets the drift but I don't! I want to feel it! I can reflect on this totality in terms of the goals I have set for myself and see that those goals have been accomplished, but its not the same, its not sufficient.
I think this sensation has a lot to do with what Kundera talks about in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. The main character, Tomas, experiences his being as incredibly light. Everything he does, all the decisions he's made in his life, are the result of his freedom. Among the innumerable ways that his life could have played out, he made a series of decisions that made it play out just as it has. What led him to make these decisions was not something eternal, transcendent, fixed, canonical, or heavy, but rather something based only on the whim of his will. Thus he feels his life as insignificant, as light, as not tied down to anything that could give it the sensation of heaviness. This is how I feel. Although I've had much pleasure, achievement, friends, etc in my life until now, I cannot, like Tomas, avoid the sensation of its lightness. It is this that is unbearable.
In some way I'm looking for heaviness. Many find something like it in religion. I think of my grandmother. For her, her whole life has meaning and sense because it all fits snugly within the confines of the Catholic faith. Everything she's done runs noiselessly along the doctrinal tracks of the cristian Weltanschaaung. For some reason this makes me think of sleeping under the wonderful heaviness of two or three homemade quilts. Sleeping without anything covering you at all is very uncomfortable, at least for me. But where is one to find these quilts? Just pick a religion and say you believe? I know I'm too skeptical or sophisticated for that. Maybe turn myself into a Nietzschean übermensch? Easier said than done. What I'm hoping is that love will do the trick, really falling truly and deeply in love, like the angel in Wings of Desire that falls finally from his heavenly perch into the messy but blissful heaviness of the Earth below.
5
Did you ever have the feeling that something you're experiencing is missing the soundtrack? I guess nowadays we would say audio file, but the idea is the same. Imagine watching a movie with dialogue but no music. Lawrence of Arabia would be about a blue-eyed, tunic-wearing, train-blower-upper rather than the sweeping David vs. Goliath epic that it is. Movie directors add music to give an emotional tone to the story they're telling. The muscial score imparts an emotional unity to the different scenes and helps in bringing it to its end. Even without music, good actors and a good director can provoke emotion, as in theater, but not with the same intensity. I really don't know what it is about music that makes it able to evoke emotions so easily and unify the input of our senses. At times I think about my life, the past and present and everything I've done and I would love to feel the wholeness or unity of it just as one feels the arrangement of notes in a symphony.
This reminds me of a story by Borges (I don't recall the title) in which the narrator speaks metaphorically of all the steps that one has taken in his life, here and there, up and down, and when we look back on it all we see only a confusion of tracks. He says that although we are unable to perceive order in this chaos of events and decisions, from a divine point of view the arrangement of all these steps makes up an intelligeible whole. All the steps are interrelated and impart a unified intelligible sense. Well, maybe God (the big music director in the sky) gets the drift but I don't! I want to feel it! I can reflect on this totality in terms of the goals I have set for myself and see that those goals have been accomplished, but its not the same, its not sufficient.
I think this sensation has a lot to do with what Kundera talks about in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. The main character, Tomas, experiences his being as incredibly light. Everything he does, all the decisions he's made in his life, are the result of his freedom. Among the innumerable ways that his life could have played out, he made a series of decisions that made it play out just as it has. What led him to make these decisions was not something eternal, transcendent, fixed, canonical, or heavy, but rather something based only on the whim of his will. Thus he feels his life as insignificant, as light, as not tied down to anything that could give it the sensation of heaviness. This is how I feel. Although I've had much pleasure, achievement, friends, etc in my life until now, I cannot, like Tomas, avoid the sensation of its lightness. It is this that is unbearable.
In some way I'm looking for heaviness. Many find something like it in religion. I think of my grandmother. For her, her whole life has meaning and sense because it all fits snugly within the confines of the Catholic faith. Everything she's done runs noiselessly along the doctrinal tracks of the cristian Weltanschaaung. For some reason this makes me think of sleeping under the wonderful heaviness of two or three homemade quilts. Sleeping without anything covering you at all is very uncomfortable, at least for me. But where is one to find these quilts? Just pick a religion and say you believe? I know I'm too skeptical or sophisticated for that. Maybe turn myself into a Nietzschean übermensch? Easier said than done. What I'm hoping is that love will do the trick, really falling truly and deeply in love, like the angel in Wings of Desire that falls finally from his heavenly perch into the messy but blissful heaviness of the Earth below.
5
Monday, November 5, 2007
The Grammar of Love
6
I have a friend from Spain who's extremely punctilious about Spanish grammar. She lives here in Mexico and I've actually seen her wince when she hears something said incorrectly (just as an Englishman may wince when hearing an Americanism). She'll say, "No, its not said like that, rather . . ." Apparently she makes these comments for my benefit so that as a foreigner I learn to speak correctly. But I tell her that language is a living phenomenon, it changes and evolves depending on context and use. The point of language is communication, I tell her, so if you understand variant uses then there is no pragmatic difference between your Spanish and Mexican Spanish. But she still insists that the Spaniards have it right. Ok, whatever.
Now on the one hand this is an attitude that is easily revealed to be chauvinistic and elitist, and thus easily refuted. On the other hand, I began to think about grammatical tolerance as a metaphor for love and fidelity. I hope to express this idea in a poem but I still haven't figured out how. For the time being I'll express it here more prosaically. The points of comparison in the poem would be "linguistic communication:love" and "grammatical tolerance:infidelity". We can tolerate variations in the grammar of a language without the latter ceasing to function. We continue to communicate. The question is if, in the same sense, we can tolerate change in the grammar of love. What happens when one violates the strict rules of the dynamic of a relationship? What happens when one is no longer faithful to these rules? Can a couple tolerate infidelity and continue loving just as in language we tolerate changes in grammar without thereby ceasing to communicate? How much can we tolerate? At what point do we stop understanding the other? At what point does the grammar of love, if pushed far enough, begin to dissolve into a cacophony of isolated emotions?
5
I have a friend from Spain who's extremely punctilious about Spanish grammar. She lives here in Mexico and I've actually seen her wince when she hears something said incorrectly (just as an Englishman may wince when hearing an Americanism). She'll say, "No, its not said like that, rather . . ." Apparently she makes these comments for my benefit so that as a foreigner I learn to speak correctly. But I tell her that language is a living phenomenon, it changes and evolves depending on context and use. The point of language is communication, I tell her, so if you understand variant uses then there is no pragmatic difference between your Spanish and Mexican Spanish. But she still insists that the Spaniards have it right. Ok, whatever.
Now on the one hand this is an attitude that is easily revealed to be chauvinistic and elitist, and thus easily refuted. On the other hand, I began to think about grammatical tolerance as a metaphor for love and fidelity. I hope to express this idea in a poem but I still haven't figured out how. For the time being I'll express it here more prosaically. The points of comparison in the poem would be "linguistic communication:love" and "grammatical tolerance:infidelity". We can tolerate variations in the grammar of a language without the latter ceasing to function. We continue to communicate. The question is if, in the same sense, we can tolerate change in the grammar of love. What happens when one violates the strict rules of the dynamic of a relationship? What happens when one is no longer faithful to these rules? Can a couple tolerate infidelity and continue loving just as in language we tolerate changes in grammar without thereby ceasing to communicate? How much can we tolerate? At what point do we stop understanding the other? At what point does the grammar of love, if pushed far enough, begin to dissolve into a cacophony of isolated emotions?
5
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