Gray Days

This is one of my favorite times of year around here. It’s gray. I would prefer that my mind were clearer; I wish I could think of better things to say than just reporting the state of my research. I’ve been reading a lot, but I haven’t been writing. It feels like I’m just getting sucked inside.

But I sort of like the feeling. It’s like there is a kernel of something that has always been there. It is like a survival instinct. As my body has gotten weaker, there’s nothing like a little depression to remind you that your mind can be strong if it needs to be. At least that seems to be under control. Now if I could only get it to focus amid these waves and clouds of gray.

There are streaks of it at my temples now. My hair seems to be holding its length, though it is thinner at the front. I can remember when I was younger that it seemed like I could hear it grow when I was laying down quiet at night. Short hair just never lasted on me; it seemed like there was a constant flight of all these dead cells from the center of my brain. I began to think that my hair grew so fast because I thought too much. Perhaps its settled down now, and is just getting bleached from the same old things that keep running through my head.

I need to get back to reading and writing. When I look at the gray skies outside, it seems like that might be possible soon. But I’ve got to jump the track from those same old feelings, the feelings of quiet sadness and the fear of the tasks at hand. “It’s just work—the most important thing is work,” as Lou Reed says.

In Media Res

It’s amazing how much writing stuff for school can cut into your writing time. I really miss just prattling on about whatever.

I’ve read around five books, twenty or thirty articles, etc., in the past two weeks. I now need to write around 750 words for every book, and 500 for every article to satisfy one professor. I’ve already done more than he asked me to do for the entire semester, but I think the stuff is fascinating (journalism history).

Then there are the theory-heavy things that I’ve been mulling over for months. I need to write the other stuff out so that I can get back to that. I live forever in the feeling that I’m just on the edge of something, around the corner will be a real breakthrough�

That’s life, I guess.

I developed a theory the other day that life is just like watching movies on television. You seldom start at the beginning—you’re almost always launched into the middle of something where you have to look for clues to figure out what is going on. Who knows where it really starts—maybe, if you’re lucky, you get to figure out how some things end. But you never know, really, what is actually going on.

All you can do is watch what you can see at the moment, for as long as you can, trying to enjoy it somehow.

Everything is always a work in progress.

Remiss

Apologies for being remiss with my blog. I’ve been reading intensely, and recovering from moving. There are a lot of thoughts that won’t ever find their way here just now.

I suppose it had to do with seeing my father’s tombstone. It also had to do with a lack of high speed access. But I just haven’t been able to read anything outside of my project, or think about much of anything very clearly in the last week. It’s amazing how attitudes can get to you.

I haven’t been depressed, but most of the people around me have. It’s a weird sort of cycle. When others are depressed, one almost feels guilty for feeling okay. I’m not really sure about the whole grief-thing myself. I just think about what my father would do in similar situations.

He’d usually just get quiet. You could see the wheels turn in his head, but he’d never tell you what they were. The wheels would stop when something needed to be done. He’d just do it, and then when it was over he’d get quiet again. This method doesn’t suit me as well. I’m a lot louder than my father was.

If there is something on my mind, I say it. Unless there aren’t any words. Lately, there just haven’t been any words.

But I’m fine—except for the guilt over feeling fine.

I Hate Moving

I hurt in places I never thought I had muscles that could hurt. Somehow, in the past eight years I think I have tripled the sheer tonnage of stuff I own. Books are heavy. I purchased three new four-by-seven foot bookcases, and still I don’t seem to have enough space to file them all.

Once upon a time, my record collection (around 2,000 LPs) was the biggest problem. Now, the book collection exceeds that by a factor of four, at least in terms of sheer tonnage. The sad thing is that I really don’t own much of anything that is inessential (at least to me). No knickknacks, no furniture to speak of other than things that are easily disassembled— just media that contains lots of information and the hardware required to take advantage of it.

My hands have swollen to twice their normal size, which makes it difficult to type. The terrible thing is that I only had to move a few hundred feet. I just moved to a more palatial cave in which to hide myself. The extra room was needed to accommodate a new essential thing—a girlfriend, which makes life much less depressing.

When I stop aching, I’m sure I’ll be much happier about the change. Overall, life is much better than it has been in a long time.

Labor Days

There will be a brief pause in the action for labor. I’m moving this weekend and will be without high speed access for around two weeks. It will really suck to go back to dial-up. But, in the meantime, enjoy a few more photographs from the books of Willis J. Abbot. In case you missed the previous postings from Panama, I have created a special category just for these gems from 1910-1920.

I’ll be back soon, albeit at a somewhat diminished capacity.

Responsibilities

I forgot to call my mother yesterday for the first time since my father died. This bothers me. Since my father isn’t there, my mother really needs someone to talk to every day. The feeling of responsibility rests pretty hard. After talking to her today, I opened up my Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats and revisited Responsibilites, particularly “The Grey Rock”.

‘Come out and dig for a dead man,
Who’s burrowing somewhere in the ground,
And mock him to his face and then
Hollo him on with horse and hound,
For he is the worst of all dead men.’ (32-36)

The dead man in Yeats’s poem is Brian Boru, and his was a legacy of womanizing and war. These lines reminded me of my mother’s impulse to remember all the things that my father wouldn’t let her do during their marriage; though my mother never mocked my father, I wonder about that impulse to remember just how human that those who are gone really were. That means remembering the bad with the good. No one’s memory can be left unscarred, otherwise it is purely myth. Yeats is specifically concerned with the warrior myth. I wonder how long that can last.

I have kept my faith, though faith was tried,
To that rock-born, rock-wandering foot,
And the world’s altered since you died,
And I am in no good repute
With the loud host before the sea,
That think sword strokes were better meant
Than lover’s music—let that be,
So that the wandering foot’s content. (124-131)

I added a new link to The Princess Grace Irish Library in Monaco. The database (PGIL-EIRData) is awesome.

My grandfather was one of the original dust bowl migrants in the 1930s. I didn’t know that until recently, when my mother showed me this photograph and we started talking about him. Evidently, my father went to California for the first time when he was fourteen (which would have been 1939). Jess had been there for a while, looking for work.

I never really knew him. My father didn’t get along with him (I’ll leave it at that).

Spooky Impulses

I remember that I used to like to sort pictures when I was a teenager. I can’t remember any of the classification schemes I used then, but I remember that I had massive piles of pictures cut from magazines, primarily of girls, that I would evaluate and sort out, trying to put similar pictures together. I tended to sort things by mood though, as I recall.

I had no idea how early that impulse began. When visiting my mother yesterday, I was confronted by incontrovertible evidence that from an early age I was an amateur lexicographer.

Just before I left, mom dug out a “Dictionary of American Slang” that I created with a friend when I was eleven or twelve years old. It was a collaborative project with my friend John Pipkin. The sources noted were “movies, TV, books, and conversations.” It included several drug and alcohol slang terms, and had a section of illustrations cut and pasted from magazines with nominal captions.

My girlfriend took one look at it and said:

It’s a map of your whole life!

One of these days I’ll have to borrow the thing and scan it. It really is a wonder, replete with embarrassing typos.

Happy

Every Wednesday for around the last ten years, my mother and father picked up my cousin Kathy from the nursing home she’s lived in since her adopted mother died. They took her to lunch, to give her a break from the nursing home food and give her a chance to people-watch. Kathy has Downs syndrome, and also suffered from spinal meningitis as a child. She was never expected to live past thirty. She is 53 now.

Since my father died, I’ve been trying to maintain the same routine. Kathy can’t really speak (or at least, none of us really understand her language). She can, however, brighten your day in a way that is just immeasurable. Kathy is blessed with a sort of happiness that I don’t think many people can imagine. She waves and says hi to everyone she meets in her own special way to everyone, and seems so genuinely happy. It’s almost disconcerting sometimes, because she will look at you for a long time, and then begin to laugh. You know she’s really happy when you hear that laugh.

Kathy likes pictures. She tears them out of magazines and keeps them in photo albums. For some reason, she likes pictures of athletes, and dark-skinned men the best. She arranges and rearranges her pictures until they are so tattered and torn that they have to be replaced, tearing away little scraps to get just the parts she wants. When you point a camera at her, she immediately thinks that it is serious business and clams up to look serious. It took a while to really capture her smile. I’m not sure why, unless it’s because most of the faces she sees in pictures aren’t smiling.

It is impossible to be in a bad mood around Kathy. It will make me sad when I won’t be able to visit her as frequently, due to the pressures of school. Kathy always reminds me how precious life is, and how good it is to be alive.

When I fell

Trauma is a strange thing. Sometimes, a hurt is so intense that you lose consciousness. It happened to me a few years ago. I have no memory of the event, only its aftermath. I’ve written about it before, but I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately. There was no image, no central theme, no hard nugget of truth to dig out from the experience.

What I remember most is the process—a constant rationalization of where I was and the distance between that place, and the place I wanted to be. My mind raced forward, fading in and out of black. There was only a present, trapped beyond the circumstance that left me there. There did not seem to be any sort of originary thought.

C.S. Peirce proposed that an individual thought has no meaning, and that each thought descends genealogically from previous thoughts. Meaning is generated only in the relation of thoughts, not from individual thoughts themselves. However, to search for that first thought is, in Peirce’s view, a mistake. He disavowed intuition, or any sort of innate idea. All thought stems from sensual stimuli, taking on a life of its own in an endless process of interpretation.

Peirce used the mental image of an inverted pyramid, suspended in a void, dangling above an ocean. Consciousness is that upside down pyramid, which dips itself in the sea of sensual impressions. At each point of contact a line is formed—and that line is a thought. From each individual contact, a person cannot discern the pyramid; but from the series of lines drawn upon it, one can discern relations. An important corollary, explored elsewhere by Peirce, is that to be alive is to have the ability to make mistakes—to misapprehend relations—to be wrong. To feel and create relationships to be alive; and yet, in trauma, feelings and relationships become vague and distant.

I don’t think I thought of dying. I don’t think I thought of wanting to live. I only thought of how much I just didn’t want to be where I was, face down on dirty asphalt. There are few specifics to recount. What I remember about the experience isn’t the pain—it is the will. My will just refused to let go. I wasn’t going to just lay there, waiting for someone to discover me. But my consciousness wouldn’t cooperate fully. It came and went, repeatedly, for hours. Consciousness left me each moment I began to feel.

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