What I Have Lived For (H)

Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a great ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.

I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy–ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness–that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what–at last–I have found.

With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.

Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate this evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.

This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me.

–Bertrand Russell

 

h/t Eli

Addendum 2: On Writing (H)

Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest external horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.

As they become known and accepted to ourselves, our feelings, and the honest exploration of them, become sanctuaries and fortresses and spawning grounds for the most radical and daring of ideas, the house of difference so necessary to change and the conceptualization of any meaningful action. Right now, I could name at least ten ideas I would have once found intolerable or incomprehensible and frightening, except as they came after dreams and poems. This is not idle fantasy, but the true meaning of “it feels right to me.” We can train ourselves to respect our feelings, and to discipline (transpose) them into a language that matches those feelings so they can be shared. And where that language does not yet exist, it is our poetry which helps to fashion it. Poetry is not only dream or vision, it is the skeleton architecture of our lives.

–Audre Lorde, from “Poetry is Not a Luxury“

Addendum 2: Working With Your Mind/ Notes on Enlightenment (H)

Another conversation with Pab, worth remembering:

I was thinking today about something that was left out when we were talking about what enlightenment is. Any version of enlightenment I’d be interested in has to include willingness to experience passionate emotion. I remember my shrink telling me a couple years ago about watching a video of the Dalai Lama (who doesn’t claim to be enlightened, but is probably more enlightened than your average person). She described how someone in the audience he was speaking to raised her hand and asked some things about the status of girls and women in Buddhism, pointing out some sexist bullshit. (As you know Pab, Buddhism isn’t after patriarchy yet.) And the Dalai Lama listened, and then burst into tears. He cried for a minute or two, and then his face cleared, and he addressed what she said, talking about the need for change.

Maybe it’s like this thing you  and I talked about a couple years ago – I think you worded it, invincibility through rapid healing rather than through invulnerability.

Over the last couple years, I keep coming back to this line of thought about how any version of enlightenment I’d want is about how to be human well, not how to “transcend” humanity. It’s about being free in the world, not of it; free in emotion, not of it. It has to include, I think, the ability to surrender to intense emotion, not to struggle against it but to let it come through you, and to respect it as a source of knowledge, energy, motivation, and change. The ability to both be changed  by the world (maybe this is the “love” part of Freud’s definition of mental health as “to love and to work”), and to change the world (maybe the “work” part? Or maybe I have these reversed?).

So the goal, with pain, isn’t after all to be free of it, but in it–to feel it, to let it move through you and change you, to respond to it. Not to hide, not to push away, as always to respond rather than react. Interesting to notice the past couple years as I gain more facility with, how much more quickly my emotions resolve when I am willing to be with them and to let them be, and, I think, how much less pain harms me (generally speaking).

There is also the question of when to sit with pain versus when to do something about pain (as in, try to process it faster or let it go, rather than being there while it runs its course); when, as it were, “Pain tells you get your finger OUT the fucking fire”. My working idea is, if the pain is harming you, if it is disabling you from doing what you need to do in daily life for longer than your life reasonably allows, if the pain is frozen, then that kind of conscious effort might be useful.

I feel like these things I’ve been sorting out for the past couple years around how to handle emotion are obvious to the rest of the world. Or even have been obvious to me for a long time when dealing with other people. Simultaneously it feels like I’m figuring this out early, and I’m grateful for it.

 

And his response:

My current understanding of what “enlightenment” means is easy enough to get at.  We all know what “self-awareness” is like?  Now identify as the awareness.

…

Okay, more details.  You know that “you” are sitting at the desk, and reading, and having thoughts and reactions to what you are reading, and …

And some part of “you” knows all this.  Some part of you knows what you are thinking and feeling and doing etc.  So start being that part.

It happens by degrees.  One day you notice that you always think the same stupid thought about your body, and maybe you can practice changing that.  Later you realize that this can be applied all over the place, make new habits, suffer a little less from stress.  Then one starts to notice that even the adaptations are thoughts and responses to stimuli.

Then eventually the awareness recognizes that the whole thing is one huge process, that the “internal” changes to the self and the “external” stimuli are all really just a creative unfolding, and the awareness just happens to be a part of all of it.  The awareness is human, and tied to the particular body and self, but it sees that way the self and the environment are a constant give and take, and that as the self loses it’s fear of being changed by new experience or information, the whole process becomes much more fluid.

Then you either start selling yourself as some kind of guru, or you just go about your business noticing that it’s not so much that things stopped bothering you, as that it doesn’t bother you that things bother you.

Or, in short:  Yeah.  What you said.

Addendum: On Writing (H)

From Gloria Anzaldúa:

Why am I compelled to write? Because the writing saves me from this complacency I fear. Because I have no choice. Because I must keep the spirit of my revolt and myself alive. Because the world I create in the writing compensates for what the real world does not give me. By writing I put order in the world, give it a handle so I can grasp it.

Awakenings (H)

(From January)

O used to warn me about my reading; he had this idea that I was swapping “book knowledge” for lived experience, as if academic or intellectual understanding opposes realization. For me, it lays the groundwork for realization.

This past year or so has been a series of awakenings. I began educating myself about feminism with the help of Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Judith Herman, Alice Walker, and Jean Baker Miller, and started realizing  that my experiences–all the anxiety and self-torture over appearance and weight, issues with self-worth, damaging sexual and romantic relationships with men–had to do with things beyond solely my own family history and my own particular wounds and pecularities. I started to become conscious of the ways our culture drives the physical, psychological and social assault of girls and women. The second-wave slogan, “The personal is political” clicked into place. This is, for example, why so many Western feminists use the term “rape culture”–to indicate that, despite media depictions, sexual assault isn’t something committed solely or primarily at the hands of a few mad men, but a global pandemic, committed mostly by men, many of whom we otherwise consider good friends, partners, parents, or even ::cough:: activists. It is neither an accidental nor a sign of men’s innate “animal nature” that most perpetrators are male, and most victims are female. That our culture–and almost every major culture on earth–most often dismisses, makes light of, excuses, laughs about, or even condones boy’s and men’s violence against girls and women is not (just) an individual problem; this is a social and structural problem.

And I’ve started educating myself about race with the help of bell, Audre, and Cornel West. I am very much at the beginning of this process of awakening, but it is already changing the way I see. I’m noticing how people of color are disappeared in popular media. And the way, when they are shown, it is so often in troubling stereotypical roles. That there is a demand for assimilation to dominant white language, appearance, values to achieve class mobility. I am starting to see white supremacist domination everywhere. I am trying to be aware of, and disrupt, the way my white privilege has acted as blinders, and pull those blinders off. I am becoming accountable.

At my request, Max got me an intro book on socialism. I’m only about 30 pages in, and already my world is shifting in Dali-like ways.  After a couple conversations with people who each said “[capitalism] is working well enough”, I realized: people who say it was working well enough probably always mean it is working well enough for them. This is obvious in retrospect, but it jolted me. Christmas seemed grotesque, decadent in the literal sense–causing death and decay, ripeness turning to rot. I have been thinking the last couple days about how poverty and the poor are disappeared in America. This happens in the literal sense of cities bussing out their homeless populations, but also in the sense of how much news is about celebrity (rich conventionally beautiful, mostly white men and women) and famous/powerful people (mostly rich white men). How news is never neutral, because there is always the choice about what to report on, what we consider important or newsworthy.

One important change needing its own post is that these awakenings compel me to learn to see differently. New awareness about sexist and racist oppression have lead me to retrain my aesthetics–I can’t and won’t subscribe to notions of beauty that are white-washed and misogynistic.  When I say I can’t, I mean it both turns my stomach and agitates my mind. When I say I won’t I mean that I am attempting  integrity–literally, wholeness–and I cannot do that without social justice awareness and action.

These awakenings make the world make more sense in ways, but they are scary because I feel farther and farther from most people. And because I don’t know what to do. I know that changes in conciousness must be linked to work towards changing harmful social, political, and economic structures, but I don’t know what I can do with my limited time, money, emotional stamina, intellectual ability. Anyone have a hand book for the part-time activist?

Integrity (H)

I am an emotional creature. I love that I do not take things lightly. everything is intense to me. The way I walk in the street, the way my mama wakes me up, the way it is unbearable when I lose, the way I hear bad news. I am an emotional creature, I am connected to everything and everyone, I was born like that. Don’t you say all negative that it’s only only a teenage thing or it’s only because I’m a girl. These feeings make me better, they make me present, they make me ready, they make me strong…

This is not extreme, it’s a girl thing, what we would all be if the big door inside of us few open. Don’t tell me not to cry, to calm it down, not to be so extreme, to be reasonable… You don’t tell the atlantic ocean to behave. I am emotional creature, why would you want to shut me down or turn me off? I am your remaining memory. I can take you back. Nothing’s been diluted, nothing’s leaked out.

I love this defense of emotion. I love that she reminds us that to have integrity–literally, to be whole–includes being open to emotion and intuition, and respecting them as important sources of information. She also reminds us that empathy is the basis of felt ethical responsibility, the motivation for this responsibility. Most major religious traditions talk about this, i.e. the Judeo-Christian “golden rule”. Eve (Ensler) says:

I love, hear me, I love that I can feel the feelings inside you, even if they stop my life, even if they break my heart, even if they take me off track, they make me responsible.

To the extent that women may be, in certain circumstances, more “ethical” or less violent than men, I think it has to do with the way boys are trained to murder their emotional selves (this is good preparation for being a soldier) and girls are allowed to keep (more of) theirs.

“The Man” (I)

Don’t worry, all my darlings: Hope may be busy with grad school applications (favorite recent text: “Can I use the term intellectual masturbation in an application essay?”), but in the last week I spent 12 hours on buses and burned through 400 pages of reading, and have returned with a good half-dozen topics buzzing in my brain.

You shall not want for content, Nonzero readers.

I start today’s talk about race and class with an anecdote:

In my AmeriCorps service year, we AC’s are expected to partake in Justice Talks, where we all meet at Providence College with people from other AmeriCorps teams and get into groups with largely strangers, and we talk about justice and politics pursuant to the work that we do. By weird coincidence, a woman who used to be a fellow resident artist at AS220, Linda, was in my group, and so was a man named Chris, who apparently lived with Linda at AS220 for a while before I moved in.

(For the context here, both Chris and Linda are black, and Chris grew up in a low-income neighborhood.)

On the first day someone stated that poverty was a state of mind, and that all it takes to get someone out of poverty is a teacher offering a different state of mind.

I countered that it’s not sensible to say that people stay poor because that’s what they know. While it is partially true, that there are ways of functioning in poverty that are so different from the ways of functioning in the middle or wealthy classes that it makes navigating them very very difficult, it’s also true that there aren’t good paying jobs in the ghetto. It’s also true that people don’t open businesses in the ghetto (opening businesses in an area without much money is not good business acumen). It’s also true that someone who wants to open a business is less likely to get a business loan from a bank if they’re from the ghetto, or if they’re a racial minority.

(There’s that famous story Steve Jobs tells, where he went to several banks looking to get a loan to start Apple, and no one would give him a loan. And he realized banks don’t want to give money to a young man with long hair and casual attire, so he cut his hair and got a suit. And soon got a loan with the exact same business plan. Now magnify that story by the fact that many (white, middle class) bankers may not be able to put their finger on why certain (black, lower class) people looking for loans just don’t seem like safe bets and you start to understand why many poor people stay poor.)

But Chris countered by saying “money is an excuse.” And he explained how he lived in the ghetto in a poor family, but he decided he wanted a better life, worked two low-pay jobs for years (I feel like one of them was 7-11, but don’t quote me on it) until he could afford to buy a house for him and his daughter in a better neighborhood. Not having money didn’t hold him back, and he thinks that anyone who says being poor means they have to stay poor is making excuses for being lazy, blaming “The Man.”

I didn’t want to respond right away – I feel incredibly awkward talking, as a middle class white man, to a black man of lower class background about what it means to be black and poor (and I was having a shitty day). Also I tend to sit on ideas and digest them instead of coming back with quick responses. If I’d responded I probably would have said something about how many more advantaged middle class people have, how many middle class white people go to college with no idea what they want to do with their lives and often don’t even use their college degree for anything, but they go because it’s expected of them. A person in a poor community doesn’t have much visibility of people who’ve gone to college (and they have a high visibility of people who’ve dropped out of high school). Going to college is simply part of the plan for middle class people in a way that it isn’t for the lower class, and your expectations are colored by your class’s expectations of you.

Frankly, I felt he was echoing that argument that racists often make that poor black people could be middle class if they wanted to, but they’re lazy.

Editing this week’s episode of Kink On Tap (“The Smart, Sexy Netcast For The Kinkily-Inclined,” which I do post-production editing on; episode 60, should be live by tomorrow), the guest Thomas Millar finally used some phraseology that helped me put my finger on what I wanted to say.

The discussion this week was about the BDSM community. The host, Maymay, was talking about the ways that his particular experiences with the BDSM scene was dissatisfying for him, because there was a certain model for submissive men that he didn’t fit and had trouble finding partners that would let him submit in the ways he prefers, rather than the way subs usually function in the scene. When criticizing the scene for this, he said he repeatedly got the explanation, “well you aren’t trying hard enough.” Maymay compared this to telling women that if they can’t find jobs that pay women as well as they pay men, they aren’t trying hard enough, because those jobs are “out there.”

Thomas came back by talking about the difference between an individual solution and a societal solution to these problems.

Ah, thanks! That’s what I was looking for!

When you have a societal or subcultural problem, it is possible to overcome it with individual initiative. This is flatly unfair; it is unfair that certain kinds of subs get incredible preference in the BDSM scene, it is unfair that men to this day get better pay than women, and it is unfair that poor minorities have to work much harder for the same lifestyle that white people with money are born into. But if that is the society you’ve been handed, the only way to persevere as an individual is with a lot of hard work and initiative. That is what Chris did, and by no means to I want to belittle it. I admire it greatly; he’s worked a lot harder than I have to try to have a life similar to mine circa 2000.

Individuals can better their situation with hard work, but that’s exactly what “The Man” will tell you when he equates poverty with laziness. “Poor people are poor because they don’t want to work hard.”

But the reality is that not everyone can rise out of poverty the way Chris did. For every poor person to get out of the ghetto by working two minimum wage jobs, there’d have to be twice as many jobs as people. The view that any individual in a disadvantage subculture can change their status with elbow grease doesn’t allow for the possibility of the entire subculture changing. It presumes that there will always be a lower class, and yet blames the entire class for their poverty.

These are things that require a societal fix (and are reinforced by the society in place already), and that can’t come about from any individual, only from collective effort. I think it was the most important thing I learned in AmeriCorps: that I’m not working to help this or that kid, I’m trying to make the lives of all kids in poverty better. A success story for an individual in poverty is to move out of the ghetto.

A success story for a society of poverty is to elevate the ghetto into a neighborhood.

Changes Pt. 3: The Balance Of Averages (I)

I’ve posted about Jill Bolte Taylor before (I’ll spare you and myself the embedded video and just link you to her TED talk), so imagine my satisfaction when I heard her again on this week’s new Radiolab episode, Words.

Jill is the neuroscientist who studied strokes firsthand when a blood vessel burst in her left brain hemisphere and, among myriad other complications, completely silenced her speech centers. Her guest appearance on Radiolab expands on this silence, beyond what was touched upon in her TED talk. (I haven’t made it through her book My Stroke Of Insight, but what I read just seemed to be a wordier version of the TED talk, adding a lot of verbiage but not, seemingly, adding content.) Earlier in the episode, Jad and Robert had explored how speech, it appears, is what creates complex thought. It is language’s ability to connect disparate words that allows us to start connecting disparate thoughts. I won’t go into all the details at present (you should probably listen to the episode), but the progression of thoughts is fascinating.

Without her left brain, Jill could not talk. And she could not think in any sophisticated way. Without the left brain, there is no past or future. The left and right brains make up, for us, the temporal and the eternal, the everything and I. Without the left, there is no self, and no time but the present. The left brain creates the delineation between one’s self and one’s surroundings. This is one of the things that is often shut out by intoxicants, especially hallucinogens. This is why people on mushrooms sit on the beach and become the sand, the surf, and the sunset.

Pure silence. You know, not that little voice that, you know, you wake up in the morning and the first thing your brain says “oh man the sun is shining.” Well imagine you that don’t hear that voice saying “man the sun is shining,” you just experience the sun and the shining.

In the episode, Robert Krulwich describes it as “the absence of reflection of any kind.”

Jad Abumrad: Did you have… thoughts?
Jill Bolte Taylor: …I had joy.

This is that time, living purely in the moment, where the sense of wonder Carl and Michael Pollan spoke of is all-consuming. Every sunrise is the first you’ve ever seen. A state of constant amazement. Perhaps this is what people seek when they take drugs, but in a pure strain I’m not sure anyone would chase quite so far down the rabbit hole. Constant amazement.

To envy this state recalls to my mind Robert Burns’ To A Mouse, which we all ate in high school before reading Of Mice And Men, where Burns says the mouse is blessed because it only knows the present, not fearing the future and forgetting the past. Pollan quotes Nietzsche’s assessment of animals’ bliss:

“They do not know what is meant by yesterday or today, they leap about, eat, rest, digest, leap about again, and so from morn til night and from day to day, fettered to the moment and it’s pleasure or displeasure, and thus neither melancholy nor bored…”

“A human being may well ask an animal: ‘Why do you not speak to me of your happiness but only stand and gaze at me?’ The animal would like to answer, and say, ‘The reason is I always forget what I was going to say’ – but then he forgot this answer too, and stayed silent.”

-as quoted in The Botany Of Desire, p. 163

If this is a bliss, it is a speechless one. It is an unaware bliss, one that doesn’t know anything but bliss, does not know this is bliss. It is one that cannot be shared because it is silent, and because there would be nothing to say about it.

I’d venture that we live in a very left-brained society. Pollan makes the argument several times, though not in so many words. Both Christianity and capitalism are systems that dominate this country (and much of the world), and spend much time fixating on the future (capitalism on the better tomorrow, Christianity on the next life). We don’t, as the cliché goes, “stop and smell the roses.” Not just because we’re too busy, but because we’re too familiar. We pass that rosebush every day. It hasn’t changed. How can we look at it in any new way?

I’d put money on the idea that one of the pulls towards drugs is an attempt to balance this out. To muffle the left brain and spend some time in the present, and in the quiet. Hopping towards the right.

Do we find balance this way? If we spend, say, 75% of our waking time in the left brain, then, on occasion, 90% into the right for a few hours. Is a balance of averages balance at all? Silence from the left can bring wonder, but can it bring wisdom?

I’ve sat in these thoughts since yesterday, and I would say this of my asceticism: what I want is to use the fullness of my brain in a moment. I want, without chemical assistance, to feel a moment in the present, and feel its passing. This is what I’m always working at. If wisdom is to embrace the miracle of the fleeting moment, I would have to feel the present, and be aware of how it flits from the future to the past, in and out of existence. To be of both minds at once. (Women are apparently better at this than men.)

It will not be an all-consuming wonder, and there are times and places for that. The times when I have felt that kind of wonder, when I’ve sobbed at the beauty of just the sky above me, have been times of transition. Change makes the viewer different, makes the skin rawer. The world burned with beauty the first time I had (proper) sex with my partner, following almost two years of uninvited celibacy (and one awkward exchange we’d shared the week before). The world also lit up when I was suffering from losses before leaving California; maybe the world obligingly became beautiful because I needed it to be. They say pain and pleasure make you feel more alive. I think they make you more awake, more present. Whatever, they make you different.

Jill’s animal bliss is a bliss without change. It is a simple bliss; with the speech centers silent there are no complex thoughts, no complex emotions. As Jad and Robert ask, can you think about time if you don’t have a word for it? Can you think about thinking? About language? The sophisticated wonders, of discovery, of falling in love, are absent. I wish it wasn’t so goddamn difficult. Change is never easy, nobody wants it. It’s no shortcut to wonder; this is the long way. And it’s often a crapshoot if you’re going to find wonder via joy or pain (or at all).

But it’s a wonder we can share. So I’d like to keep evolving.

Changes, Pt. 2: The Sense Of Wonder (I)

Science is still one of my chief joys. The popularization of science that Isaac Asimov did so well — the communication not just of the findings but of the methods of science — seems to me as natural as breathing. After all, when you’re in love, you want to tell the world. The idea that scientists shouldn’t talk about their science to the public seems to me bizarre.

-Carl Sagan, Wonder And Skepticism

Michael Pollan’s book The Botany Of Desire is, as he phrases it, “a plant’s-eye view of the world.” In it he studies the relationships humans have with plants, from food to flowers, the way we’ve tamed them in our gardens and, at the same time, become agents for the plants, become a kind of sophisticated bee ensuring the plant’s perpetuation and evolution.

Yesterday I read the chapter on marijuana.

I’ve always been skeptical of intoxicants, marijuana perhaps more than most because it was so popular in my hometown. I’ve never smoked it, I’ve sipped only a small amount of alcohol in my life, and even gave up caffeine several years ago. Intoxicants have always seemed a cheap shortcut to the wonder Carl talks about, the wonder I felt was a scientific wonder, the wonder of falling in love. The stickler in me feels that wonder should be earned, that I’d rather read something revelatory or fall in love than smoke marijuana. Though, interestingly, Carl smoked marijuana almost daily.

(For anyone wondering, I do believe all drugs should be legal. Being a teetotaler ≠ being a prohibitionist.)

But Pollan points out that, biochemically, the high of discovery and the high of marijuana are identical: THC is similar enough to the brain’s own cannabinoid chemical, anandamide, that it fits like a key in the lock of certain receptors in the brain. Pollan writes of the discovery of the cannabinoid network:

The cannabinoid receptors [researcher Allyn] Howlett found showed up in vast numbers all over the brain (as well as in the immune and reproductive systems), though they were clustered in regions responsible for the mental processes marijuana is known to alter: the hippocampus (memory), the basal ganglia (movement), and the amygdala (emotions).

-The Botany Of Desire, p. 153

So Pollan becomes curious as to what (again, biochemically) it means to be “high.” His interview subjects were tight-lipped on the subject (one scientist responded “we don’t yet understand consciousness scientifically, how can we hope to understand changes in consciousness scientifically?” (Pollan, p. 158)). But they did all agree, as poets and youth have all agreed, that the effect it is having on the hippocampus is to disrupt your short-term memory.

Yet the scientists said that the THC in cannabis is only mimicking the actions of the brain’s own cannabinoids. What a curious thing this is for a brain to do, to manufacture a chemical that interferes with its own ability to make memories – and not just memories of pain, either. So I e-mailed Raphael Mechoulam[, one of the scientists interviewed,] to ask him why he thought the brain might secrete a chemical that has such an undesirable effect.

Don’t be so sure that forgetting is undesirable, he suggested. “Do you really want to remember all the faces you saw on the New York City subway this morning?”

-The Botany Of Desire, p. 159-160

The realization here is that the brain needs a mechanism for dumping excess information. For instance, the average American apparently sees over 3000 advertisement images daily. And familiarity breeds not always contempt, but often boredom, creates the mundane, the dull, the endlessly droning repetition of daily life.

The sense of wonder comes from newness, or from seeing something familiar afresh. To do the latter you’d have to strip away that familiarity, to let yourself forget what you know about sniffing this daisy or blowing away these dandelion seeds to once again pay attention, to be in the moment.

What THC does is flood the cannabinoid network with the key to that lock, making your hippocampus quite forgetful.

This is no small thing. Indeed, I would venture that, more than any other single quality, it is the relentless moment-by-moment forgetting, this draining of the pool of sense impression almost as quickly as it fills, that gives the experience of consciousness under marijuana its peculiar texture. It helps account for the sharpening of the sensory perceptions, for the aura of profundity in which cannabis bathes the most ordinary insights, and, perhaps most important of all, for the sense that time has slowed or even stopped. For it is only by forgetting that we ever really drop the thread of time and approach the experience of living in the present moment, so elusive in ordinary hours. And the wonder of that experience, perhaps more than any other, seems to be at the very heart of the human desire to change consciousness, whether by means of drugs or any other technique.

-The Botany Of Desire, p. 162

The experience of being high (I’m taking this on hearsay, but the hearsay is very loud on this subject) is to make grand the mundane. Pollan quotes David Lenson’s book On Drugs: “[on marijuana, a] cup ‘looks like’ the Platonic Idea of a cup, a landscape looks like a landscape painting, a hamburger stands for all the trillions of hamburgers ever served, and so forth.” (Pollan, p. 147) Pollan describes this as “open[ing] a door onto a world of archetypal forms”. (ibid.)

Wisdom, Straub said, is finding wonder in the everyday. To know that everything is a miracle. And it is reductive to say that marijuana is nothing more than a shortcut to wonder (stretching it to say a shortcut to wisdom). It gives the user a chemical boost larger than closing one’s eyes and taking a deep breath is likely to do. When we seek wonder of the semi-transcendental level, we can’t simply fall in love at whim. If I were to, after 26 ascetic years, choose to smoke (or eat) some marijuana, I’d fear it being a mundane act. I’d seek out the specific variety bred for the kind of high I’d be interested in. I’d take it into the woods with someone special and share the experience, chasing solitude, attempting to do nothing but experience the high. Make it a modern-day spirit quest, with far lesser expectations.

But I wonder if I’m not too set in my ways to change. Though change is another path to wonder, and maybe it’s not a stretch to say wisdom as well.

.

_{(That was technically the end of my thought, but here’s a coda: perhaps another part of me that distrusts marijuana is the disgrunted democratic socialist part. Pollan mentions that capitalism, with it’s emphasis on working hard today for a better tomorrow, suppresses marijuana because it clashes with the drug’s push towards living in the moment. But to me, marijuana seems the purest form of capitalism. I can see the ad campaign, even: “Does looking at the stars at night fill you with wonder? We’ll sell you that feeling in the daytime for $10 a dime bag.”)}

Changes Pt. 1: Brevity (I)

Even eternity, it seems, is brief.

-Peter Straub, On Morality And Change, afterward to Sandman: Brief Lives by Neil Gaiman

Yesterday was telling me about memory. That’s how I’d describe it, at least, if I believed in mysticism. Whatever interest I followed told me about memory and forgetting, our curious bicameral brains, and the sense of wonder. The three, it seemed, are pretty well linked. I would assume what happened is that I latched onto the idea and and began weeding it out of everything I read and heard. Or else it’s all coincidental. I found these in reading Neil Gaiman’s Sandman (and distilled in Peter Straub’s afterward), in Michael Pollan’s The Botany Of Desire, and in listening to Radiolab. I’ll talk about all three by and by. I also ate many cookies yesterday, apropos of nothing.

Brief Lives, the 7th volume of Sandman (which I am reading in the bookstore in my free time), is all about beginnings, endings, changes, and Death.

In this volume, a lawyer named Bernie Capax, formerly an acquaintance of both the Marquis de Sade and Sigmund Freud, is killed by a collapsing brick wall moments after savoring the memory of the particular and distinctive way mammoths smelled. When he finally understands that he has, after all this time, come to the end of his life, he turns in search of approbation to the attractive, black-clad, slightly punky and slightly slovenly figure before him, one of Gaiman’s most inspired notions being that Death looks something like the young Chrissie Hynde. I did okay, didn’t I? he asks. Fifteen thousand years – that’s not so bad. As ever, Death is sensible, matter-of-fact, and frank, and replies: Bernie, old man, you just got the ordinary deal – you got a lifetime.

So every life, being no more or less than a lifetime, is brief; every life, being brief, is equal. Attorney Bernie’s last words are the disappointed protest “Not yet…,” are a wail of disappointment. What is a brief duration (and any duration is brief) is to be embraced, valued, reluctantly surrendered. Only the mad and the stupid throw their lives away.

-Peter Straub, ibid.

In another, earlier story in the series, Death and the series’ protagonist, Dream, agree to let a 14th century man named Hob live for as long as he wants to, seemingly out of curiosity. He and Dream meet in the same place every hundred years to see what Hob has learned about life, and whether he’d like another hundred years. At one meeting he is wildly successful, and a later one he is destitute and miserable, but he always re-ups for another century on earth. Near the end of the story, 600 years have passed, and he still can’t imagine he’ll ever choose death. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Even in an endless future, I feel the present would still mean the most to me. Outliving everything… I hope it would make the present more precious, knowing better than anyone how absolute and inexorable an endings is. But at the same time, doesn’t familiarity render everything common? What Hob’s story questions is whether wisdom is found in eternity.

Wisdom is a matter of recognizing that nothing stands still, that everything is hurtling toward its own conclusion. Wisdom is the celebration and the memorialization of the temporal. (So wisdom consists of the ability to observe, “This is a beautiful day.”) [...] Of course, the truth is that no one likes change. People in hell not only refuse to leave it, they invite you in, too. Even people who have blasted the other lives that touched their own blasted lives proudly declare in old age that they would not change a thing – all that cursing and screaming was their life, by God, and it is not possible to imagine any other. Change introduces unpredictability, uncertainty, a universe of disorder. Right before an amoeba splits in two, it says to itself, uh uh, no way, I ain’t gonna do that, nope.

-Peter Straub, ibid.

If in a thousand years you have seen everything twice or more, the only thing that can change anymore is you. If the observed does not change, the observer might. Though I’m not sure the world truly stays the same, but perhaps, given enough time, we’d see the margins within which it changes, just how far it is likely to go in any given direction. Maybe that’s where the wisdom comes from. Maybe it comes from testing your own margins.

And maybe it comes, trite as it always sounds, from the tiny moments, when held.