A thought:
Beliefs are the long-term crystallization of feelings. It is dangerous to allow our actions to be based impulsively on moment-to-moment feelings, but at the same time, we want our actions to be in harmony with our emotions. By basing our actions on beliefs, they are rooted in the more stable tendencies of our emotions, allowing for harmony within ourselves, but avoiding the dangers of rash action.
I like works that combine concrete recorded sounds (like a car backfiring, or the scraping of shoes against a gravel path) with melodic, harmonic, traditionally “musical” sounds. The first is grounded in reality, while the second is grounded in… something else.
They seem to access different kinds of meaning. The everyday sounds inevitably trace their meaning back to concrete places, events, activities, people; the musical sounds, on the other hand, make their meaning out of shared cultural patterns of musical expression.
These two types of meaning are “linearly independent”, which is to say that they act in different dimensions from one another. This way, together, they can make something multi-dimensional.
When you buy a plant as a couple, there may be a tendency to interpret the well-being of the plant as symbolically representational of the health of the relationship. Unless you are a master horticulturalist, this is to be strongly avoided.
During high school I used to attend a wonderful, inclusive (and super-liberal) church, and I often find myself recalling one thing or another from the services that remains lodged in my mind. Today, some words percolated into my awareness which were often spoken during the pastoral prayer:
“… and we give thanks for our relationships, even those that are broken…”
I had been thinking, when these words popped into my mind, that there is something really beautiful about brokenness. We spend so much time trying to make things work, and work better, that when things break we are stopped short in our tracks. In a good way.
I think that somewhere in all our striving — if you excavate a little — is the idea of “perfect”. The ideal sits there, unconsciously becoming the standard against which all of our efforts, achievements, possessions are measured. And too often the result is dissatisfaction, and an inability to see and appreciate what we have.
But broken is so far from perfect that it can no longer even strive to be perfect. Perfect becomes a laughable impossibility (which, of course, it may have been all along). And in that lack of striving whatever is broken can just be, simply and beautifully, what it is.
(Buddhists sometimes talk about the suchness of things, their essential nature. When something breaks, all is laid bare, and that suchness can express itself.)
This is why sometimes it is good to break, because it can give us an opportunity to stop trying to conform to expectations (ours and others’), and simply acknowledge ourselves as we are. I know that, in my life, the periods of most brokenness have been followed by periods of most growth and happiness. When a person lets down his or her armor, and cries, there is a deep honesty there that is precious.
Mind you, I don’t think we need to be broken to be honest, to be simply ourselves. But I think that brokenness has a lot to teach us.
It seems that, for everyone, the language of their profession tends to permeate their way of seeing the world.
I guess one of my “linguistic” influences is physics, because I realized today that I often visualize myself as a pendulum. When I am unsettled, overwhelmed, troubled, I watch myself swing back and forth, my emotions yo-yo-ing, my thoughts oscillating from one interpretation to another. (Apparently it’s a pendulum in multiple dimensions.)
The important thing, though, is that the system is damped, that the pendulum will eventually — and you can count on this — come to rest. That is, so long as you don’t drive it further. I’ve come to realize that my job, when I feel myself bouncing around like a pinball inside of my skin, is to get out of the way, to allow the natural damping of the system to take effect. Sometimes it feels like, when the pendulum is swinging to the right, you need to pull hard to the left, or vice-versa; but the truth is, this tends to just stir things up. The best approach seems to be to simply allow the pendulum to come to rest on its own*.
It’s very Buddhist, actually.
The classic text talks about the two arrows: The Buddha asks his disciples, “If you are struck by an arrow, does it hurt?” One of them says yes, it does. “And if you are struck by a second arrow,” the Buddha continues, “is that not even more painful?” The audience once again agrees, beginning to hope that this teaching is not going involve audience participation. “Well,” explains the Buddha, “the first arrow is the inevitable suffering that you will encounter simply by being alive. But the second arrow — this arrow is optional. It is the compounding of our suffering that results from our unhealthy preoccupation and engagement with it.”
So I guess I’m not being all that original.
… but I do enjoy my image.
My housemates and I have a couple magnetic poetry sets that we play with on our refrigerator, and a while back I created a poem which I rather like:
“Your beauty is wanting of another
who could
laugh like you joke
watch like you listen
make like you believe
A mellifluous love”
A misunderstanding, like a broken bone, should be set straight as soon as possible (while perspectives are still fluid), if it is to heal properly.
Otherwise, while the raw pain eventually subsides, it hardens, misshapen. Once this has happened, only by breaking it open again can it be reset and fully restored.
…and this, of course, is a rather risky operation.
