October 11, 2013
The rain pelts down outside my window. I get my pipe well lit and settle down. It’s a good day to remember. To recall. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about seeing, about waking up from the narrow prison of the self. Author Bonnie Friedman presents a lucid case for remembering via writing.
“I write to make things real. Otherwise oblivion devours my days. One’s whole life can pass in peripheral vision. We sense something in there, but don’t know how to turn. Or we turn and the thing turns just as fast. The notebook coaxes from the rim of consciousness some of the figures that lurk in the curtains, that linger behind the milk-glazed night sky which, in the city, admits no stars. A wall of light hides the ancient shapes.”
“The notebook is a vessel for transformation. Jewish mystics used to believe that the world presents innumerable smashed pieces of vessels with divine light clinging to them. It is each individual’s responsibility to rescue the captive sparks. Notebook keepers have their own particular method of collecting the shards, trying to uncage the shimmer.”
“The discipline of the notebook teaches attention to life, which itself is a doorway. What your own eye is drawn to, the emblems that haunt your pages, the dreams that won’t let you forget them, the gold that your finger attracts–no need to know in advance what these omens signify. There are no bits of the mind’s string too small to carry meaning. Unknown neighbors step near, tapping on paper walls, trying to show you unexpected passageways out of the sealed-shut vessel of the self.”
Perhaps that’s what drove James Boswell to so closely chronicle his time spent with Samuel Johnson. Thursday nights around the fire, I feel the ancient shapes looming behind the night, unmoving. I write to uncover the shards with the divine light clinging to them, because I can sense their presence. To uncage the shimmer. To remember what it means to be human, to see the world through another’s eyes. To wake up to some small glimpse of the ancient shapes and what they signify. I once wrote that during nights around the fire, I tap into what seems like a deep “rightness.” I chronicle to remember. To become more human.
We read five poems tonight, perhaps a record. One stands out in my mind, one that begs to be memorized, one that is worth reading for the single line that burst out of it and hovered, lambent, before my mind. “Every day, do something that doesn’t compute” (Wendell Berry, Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front). In this, I recognize a deep wisdom. Clyde Kilby, founder of the Wade Center, wrote twelve short paragraphs which he entitled A Means to Mental Health. Similarly to Berry, he stated: “I shall open my eyes and ears. Once every day I shall simply stare at a tree, a flower, a cloud, or a person. I shall not then be concerned at all to ask what they are but simply be glad that they are. I shall joyfully allow them the mystery of Lewis calls their “divine, magical, terrifying and ecstatic” existence.
We’re still enjoying the last weeks of mild weather, but the advance guard of winter has sent its scouts far and wide and they whisper on the night air of the cold to come, and drive the brittle leaves through the dark and slowly undressing neighborhoods. Never mind. We’ll be ready to meet it. To discover what truths it can tells us. To lean in close to the fire and feel the warmth of companionship and brotherhood.
