On calm days I walk the woods. Suddenly, out of the corner of my eye I sense a flickering green flame— A fern leaf ticking like a metronome set at “Allegro”. Full of rhythm and joy, the leaf refuses to quitas I stare at it.
None of the neighbors near this nimble Peter Pan move. Even the marooned beech leaves hold their breath and play dead. Usually they do not hesitate to make a spectacle of themselves, castanets in the final act of a Zarzuela.
One solitary frond of the fern sways back and forth, a solo carried by the faint forrestbreath, performing its dance, its fifteen irrepressible seconds of fame.
As I was looking for a book about the early church fathers it struck me that the notion of multidimensionality and parallel universes might be akin to something submerged in our mind during sleep.
When I dream I have a sense of movie screens gently fluttering, each with a plot different from that of its neighbor. This impression of unrelated but synchronous events is sometimes also present, and more affectingly so, in the no-man’s-land between asleep and awake. In that state, just before stepping out from dream-land, my brain seems to accept events that my wake mind rejects. Is the awake brain censoring and throwing out stuff to avoid intellectual log-jamming?
Poignant as these bits of the dreamworld can be, one hardly ever remembers detail or theme. Mostly it is visual clips or soundbites and unless deliberate effort is given to remember, rapid erasure from the mind will ensue. Often, all that remains is wispy and akin to the negative molecular imprint in water, suggested to be the “active principle” in homeopathy.
If these, often rich and possibly enriching intellectual stimuli can reach us only when the brain’s gate-keeper is off-duty, what else are we missing?
Why read Thomas Mann? He is dry and convoluted and often spends three pages on what could be conveyed to the reader in three succinct paragraphs. Still, it is a most rewarding experience to trek through the densely printed pages. Despite the longish Germanic syntax including the multiple interposed sentences, a committed reader floats as if airborne through page after page, richly rewarded by the effort.
Reading Mann is akin to wine tasting. The sommelier describes the quality of color, nose, mouth feel, palate et cetera . At times you find the tannins a bit heavy or the floral notes too exuberant, but the experience overall is most definitely worthwhile. Similarly, content, emotion, metaphors and all the other facets of literature make you willing to accept and enjoy the travail involved to assemble the hologram that Mann conjures for you.
One does not read him to get a blueprint or explanation of concepts (although you get plenty of that too), but for the sheer joy of walking with him through the landscape of his mind and consciousness. And he takes you to places that seem foreign and familiar at the same time, places of sustained deja-vu interwoven with the unexpected.
Mann’s correspondence must be equally interesting if you subscribe to the tenet that, “there are no actors,” and consequently that neither “are there any authors”. The latter incorporate life and experiences into art in the exact manner of their thespian kindred. The richness of ideas and characters culled from an author’s past finds its place and purpose in the literature, an apotheosis or a curse of sorts.
When my Labradoodle Zoé and I set out on the day’s first walk we always begin by rehearsing a scene from a generic gunslinger movie cum obligatory staring contest.
At this early hour Zoé is very reluctant to walk anywhere, maybe still sleepy but more likely, it is a game she deliberately plays to assert herself in our Canine versus Man relationship, now going on 16 years.
Expecting her to follow, I start walking down the cul-de-sac where we live . Both of us walk slowly. When, after a short distance, I look back over my shoulder to check on her progress she is standing in the middle of the road, completely still as if she knew in advance of my intent to turn around and spy on her. Looking at me with a deadpan gaze she says, teeth clenched: “I am not taking another step, this is it!”. After this radical manifesto I do a few encouraging gestures, knowing full well the futility of this effort, before I turn around and continue walking . Three or four times this tableau repeats itself: I turn, she simultaneously freezes, channeling the Marx Brothers mirror scene. Every time with a blank stare and still as a salt pillar. The pantomime of turn-and-freeze continues until we reach the top of the road. Magically, once heading downhill, Zoé’s hostile stare begins to mellow with each performance and eventually she picks up her trot and gradually lets her demonstrative powerplay fade. Finally, by the time we reach the woods she has fully embraced her habitual role and is once again the dog going for a stroll with the dog owner…. At least for now. As she passes me to lead us on the rest of the walk she throws a quick sideways glance saying: “You think you won don’t you? Wrong! I could have done this all day, I just felt sorry for you”.
The bark of the ash and the cap of the morel display patterns with similar features. Like the lovers in Hemingway’s posthumous novel “The Garden of Eden” they strive to become one through appearance.
The ash and the morel have an understanding. Actually, more than an understanding, rather they are pining, not for the Fjords but for each other.
The voluptuous German noun “Sehnsucht” tangibly conveys the feeling between the tree and the mushroom. It means seeking to fulfill a longing caused by a passion unrealized. They can never become one and yet they are united by subterraneously clasped mycelia and mycorrhiza from the fungus and the tree respectively. A clandestine affair you might say.
Not unlike the sudden unexplained and spontaneous attraction between strangers at separate tables in a room. They know not the reason for the mutual sympathy and yet return, hoping to solve the mystery. An emotion of solitude tempered by intimacy as eyes reach across the room. A subliminal nod and a veiled smile, in silent recognition.
The steady pace and regular tapping of feet during a brisk walk is the mantra guaranteed to remedy tangled thoughts and stubborn problems.
At the midpoint of my path, walking Zoe my dog it came to me in a flash: What we hold dear and think of as personal in our mind may not die with us. It will remain after our physical death because we, homo sapiens have an inner life similar to that of most other members of our tribe. Death does not erase our mental persona, it persists within the Family of Man because we, as a species, are more similar than different. Our perception of sweet and sour, bitter and salty is the same irrespective of race or creed, just as feeling safe and being loved is necessary for us all. By extension, feelings and thoughts dear to one of us are rooted equally in our peers.
It is tempting to see a kinship between the first law of thermodynamics and the realm of the mind: Energy is finite and indestructible and thoughts and feelings certainly represent quantifiable energy( as current brain research has shown). Consequently, nothing is lost in transfer of thoughts and feelings. The net result is a transformation.
The question then arises: Can you transform bad to good energy?… Again, adhering to thermodynamics: One type of energy can most certainly be converted into another: Kinetic to potential energy, electric to thermal, water to electric energy etc etc.
Keeping that in mind as a principle offers hope. Transforming loss to gain, evil to good, hate to love!
The ramifications are countless and most promising .
Hemingway said when asked about his method in writing: ” Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.”
First time I read that interview I had to do a double take, and then another because to my surprise I knew it…… Not being a writer or artist, I too had experienced that precise feeling of some achievement of mine being clearly above my usual best. Like the pole vaulter who looks incredulously at the bar he cleared effortlessly despite expectation of the opposite.
I am sure that Ernest Hemingway and I and the pole vaulter are not the only people who now and then surprise themselves with an achievement beyond the expected.
There is a myth that humans only use ten percent of the brain’s potential. One of the people credited with “the 10 percent myth” is William James, the psychologist (brother to Henry, the writer). He is quoted saying that our brain is merely idling at 10 percent of its true capacity. He did so in a paper from 1907. Hemingway, nine years old at the time was most certainly not aware of Dr. James’ paper.
The theory that humans use only 10 percent of their brain’s capacity is still alive and well despite being considered folklore by Science because imaging studies have debunked it as myth. With the aid of sophisticated brain imaging intellectual activity has been shown quantitatively involving the brain in a pan-global pattern and not just focally. Interesting basic science but hardly proof of what we are capable of. A little like trying to describe the taste of an apple by measuring the sugar content.
Accounting for the interplay of skill, intellect and inspiration (not considering the plethora of other components that fuel any performance) is beyond the scope of 3D multicolor mapping by functional PET scan, MRI and other signals that light up a monitor in a laboratory. Maybe those imaging studies are only 10 percent of the explanation of the 10% Myth (to paraphrase Bernard Sanders)!
To put Vermont behind me and spend the darkest New England months in Italy! To escape the unholy trinity of snow, sleet and freezing rain, to not fear for life and limb, and to walk anywhere without crampons on your shoes, that would be worth the money and even the discomfort of transatlantic air travel.
Visiting towns below the radar of international tourism is delightful. Although winter months in Umbria can be brisk and wet, the climate is still several orders of magnitude better than that of New England! It is sweater and windbreaker conditions but offers great walking of both city and country scapes. And , of course, it is Italy with real Italians and real Italian food!
Central Umbria is studded with hill towns characterized by steep passages and streets where old men and women struggle up and down, yoked with overstuffed plastic bags ..…a Via Dolorosa, at least once a day. Not shouldering the Cross, but laden with “pane, prosciutto and aqua minerale”.
Even the smallest hilltown has more than a few churches and they all harbour frescoes. Many worthy of sustained admiration, some less so, but all demand more than a fleeting glance from you. The motifs range from naive to profound and the execution is masterful. No wonder this richness of church art, we are, after all, in the epicenter of European civilization of the late middle ages and the renaissance . The best fresco masters of the period were courted by town fathers and clerics eager to make theirs the most beautiful church of the region.
The backdrop for the biblical themes always reflect, not the Holy Land, but the local verdant geography. As if the painter has merely glanced out the window or maybe climbed the campanile to get a better view of the stage behind the Holy Family.
Most of these churches have easy opening hours and no admission fee, but you may have to drop a couple of Euros in the box to turn on the light. Five minute limit to avoid undue fading of the pigment in the plaster protected for nearly a millennium. Thus flipping the light on and off evokes the sense of a peep show although there is nothing tawdry about the the object of your interest. The time restraint also adds a little urgency and gravitas to the moment, a committed concentration to fully take in the specter in front of you, before the light disappears. Wonderful things are everywhere when you widen your view and deepen your focus.
In prehistoric man foraging was an act driven by the instinct for survival. At one point it is likely that he gained understanding (by selective evolution pressure/individual experience) of the concept of unpredictability and out of this newfound concern for the future would begin to gather, hunt and grow more than he and the tribe had done the previous year. In other words, hoarding because of fear of the unexpected. Is this greed?….. Maybe, but it was necessary for survival of paleolithic man, woman and child.
Is greed in modern man driven by unnecessarily upregulated or even redundant genes? Should it be considered to remove or downregulate such a gene when scientifically possible? Or is greed the evil fairy godmother of prudence in man today? Is it good ? Or is greed the harbinger of mayhem and misery?….. Not really a fair question, is it?
Paleo diet might be the right fit for our digestive well-being, but over millenia genetic selection affected the common good adversely by maintaining and upregulating, no longer beneficial, sociopathic behavioral genes for hoarding and greed. The daily parade in the media of paleolithic men flaunting their stuff is a testament to this. No longer for the common good, but at the expense of it.
I walk in cemeteries, not by choice but mostly because of their convenient walkability. I like to read and admire the klein-kunst of the sandstone epitaphs. The imagery is naive and moving. The inscriptions and quotes terse but in a manner of frugal humility that shames a twenty-first century observer. The many infant and children’s tombstones laconically state the exact age in years, months and days. As you read each successive number the tragedy is tapped into your perception akin to the clank of the stone hammer hitting the chisel…. 1 month, 17 days….1 year, 2 months, 4 days. etc. etc
The rectangular depression in front of older tombstones evokes my late mother’s point favoring cremation. Implicit in her preference for reduction of bodily mass by fire was her horror of decomposition, rot and insect metamorphosis.
From the first time a sunken grave site was pointed out to me I sensed the abyssmal dilemma of abrupt autodafe or slow entropic seepage ?….Both horrifying.
Tough choice! Unfortunately we, as all beings are stuck with the leftovers when life seizes. Lights out!…..No more gestures, sound or thoughts, but the remains remain where the spirit left us. The rest is silence but has form and mass and has to be dealt with.
