I have always felt torn between the need for something exciting and dangerous, for a sense of greater purpose and momentous importance, and a desire for quiet and insignificance except what I make of events for myself. Walking alone some time in my own primordial past, the phrase “only myself to please” came on me as much out of a sense of being alone and regretting the lack of someone else to share the experience as a satisfaction of not having that social burden.
This same conflict happens every time I write or even think about something to write. I used to ask, What is a suitable subject for poetry? Very earnestly, I might add. Must every movie have a chase to cut to? Isn’t it enough to have a solid impression on which that moment can fix and then move away from with further responses and associations from other moments we have known?
Similar feelings arise all over the place in our lives, that sense of guilt or defiance we feel when avoiding work or another obligation not entirely our own in order to do something else, a break for a smoke or a snack, or for research out of a random recollection and concomitant curiosity. We feel we are stealing from the larger purpose and plot action which will lead to the inevitable chase and meaningful denouement. But at some point we realize with mixed feelings as with every other understanding there is no such thing, no finality, no climax or resolution. It is more a continual works of days.
We may make our evolving understanding into something else, a kind of consolation, that the journey itself is the goal and may yet open suddenly on that momentous act or result from all of those stolen moments. Not to get sidetracked with why that happens and what it suggests about the limits of certain thinking, let’s focus on what got us here.
I have been reading Karl Ove Knausgaard for no good reason. It would be interesting to say when I finish it something grandiose will occur. I’ll be sacrificed in the first rocket to the sun, or I’ll turn into a pumpkin and a pair of glass slippers only King Arthur on his return from Avalon can wear. Even when I read Inadvertent a while ago I knew nothing particularly great would come from reading more. I started reading the Seasons books. These seemed something I could take on in spare moments and have proved so.
As with those moments themselves, whether as part of an obligation to others or with only myself to please, the short pieces lend themselves to a participatory practice of what they themselves share. That’s a convoluted way of saying I read them and find myself in this guy’s moments and his responses to them, and it is easy enough that I then have my own responses and associations. In Autumn, the pieces are short enough to allow the reader his her own space for reflection. They may not have been designed so but at least for me provide a launch point for my own remembrance and responses.
Although I could choose any of them, the one that grabbed me of the several I read this morning was about losing teeth as a child. Cutting to the chase because even this time is short, I saw the beginnings of acquisitiveness and even hoarding in what happens when a child loses a tooth. Culturally, in the ritual of putting the tooth under the pillow for the tooth fairy, with the expectation of money being left in return, I can see the beginning of so many irrational and sentimental ideas and institutions.
None of that is in Karl’s short piece. He is focused on the contrast of the tooth’s hardness and apparent permanence with the soft and changing qualities of what children eat and our flesh. He misses in those musings bones and the hardness of feelings, and although I did not, I could let him take the things where and how he wanted to. His writing allowed me to have my own thoughts also. I was able to recall saving my own lost teeth. I am not certain I do not still have them, holding on for years to something no longer needed even as a point of recollection. I hope I do not have them tucked away in a disintegrating box wrapped in yellowing gauze. But I also reflect on all the other things I do have, how I came by them, the difficulty I have had in letting them go, concern for things that will remain after I myself have gone, and finally letting even those feelings go.
Like many who read this I have seen enough persons pass away and leave behind their accumulated things for me to have gained, what, perspective about my own? I have participated in yard sales and estate sales, and sorted through the belongings and papers of loved ones, faced my feelings for the departed both strange and dear, while reflecting on my own condition.
Having seen this happen successively with others, getting rid of things now while I can has become easier. I am less attached than ever even to the most intimate of books, personal letters, doo-dads no one else will ever understand from the history of my spare forays away from any search for greater meaning. And yet as I look around I am still a bit saddened, looking at these next to worthless things that meant more in other moments. I break through the hard surface of obligation of a broader and far reaching understanding to the private moments, most of which no thing holds but like the accumulated stuff will soon gain obscurity and then fall out of context completely.
For the child it may or may not be a significant question whether to save the lost tooth or move on without a second thought. I certainly don’t miss my lost baby teeth. I am more concerned about preserving the ones I have, for all the good that may do me! But for children today the experiences and lessons of childhood will stay with them as they have with me. They will be shaped by what was once a part of them, something formed mysteriously and, even after the process becomes known, that knowledge another thing they acquire, will continue to shape them in other ways.
Long after the teeth and quiet moments of tea and toast, the race against deadlines and failure to achieve goals, the questions, answers and reflections persist, even if we are not part of it. Someone is walking somewhere without me. We may never meet, but in some ways we have already met. We know something of each other and share even the moments on our walks alone without the intention or obligation to please anyone but ourselves.
With this swirl of responses like winged victory descends the test that proves our humanity, the temptation to extract from these moments the meaning we long for in other moments, perhaps even the very next. You may well retort, What, by such narrow means? At the end of any exercise, a walk or a meal, even if only a snack, we can find satisfaction in the moment, hungry the next with so much more on which to feast.
December 21, 2020 – photo from 2019
I Dwell In Possibility 