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Learning about character

A friend of mine surprised me last night. I know him about as well as I know anyone, though I don’t see him that often – he doesn’t see anyone that often. I know his interests, I know how he behaves when he’s upset, I know how he’s most comfortable and I know his own particular way of undermining himself. I am familiar with a range of motions and postures and it’s easy to pose him in my mind to match whatever position in whatever diorama I want to fit him in. But I didn’t expect to see what I saw and it makes me wonder what I have learned about him at all. Learning as a concept has been tying me in knots recently, and I get lost trying to think about what makes up character as well.

We biked up to visit him with a bucket of compost from our apartment, we’ve been helping make mulch for the garden. It started to rain, so we decided to wait out the weather instead of going to the movie we had planned to see, and sat, watching the rain, making fun of his cats, one of whom has a skin condition and no tail, listening to his screeching, irritable bird. And then when he told me about the reading he had been doing, how he had given up on music which had previously taken up all his time, hadn’t played at all for two months, and had been instead reading and researching 9/11, the Rothschilds, the Jesuits, secret plans for a North American Union and world domination put in motion and sustained by a shady cartel of business interests that came closer to their goal year by year, working steadily and single-mindedly since at least 1871, I was surprised and alarmed.

We talked about it, I gave my point of view. It is striking to compare two nearby moments in the flow of our conversation. Just a few minutes before, we had been talking about his wife’s family, he had been painting a vivid picture of her sister and brother, the new used-car business her brother and her sister’s husband had gone in on together, the feeling of their home life. It was sane, reasoned, funny and wise all at once, in the typical way he talks about life, and moving from that subject to how he spent his time while his wife was away with them, we lifted up the cover of that strange world that I didn’t expect.

Now there’s something about learning things like this. The initial surprise fades, in a deliberate way. I reasoned: he’s not crazy. If he believed his cousin or his brother-in-law was behind a large, secret conspiracy, that would be crazy. This isn’t so crazy, it’s just a lapse. The events he is trying to understand are large, and difficult to comprehend, and made more obscure because of the various interests trying to keep lights on one or another aspects, while others are keeping other parts hidden, all motivated differently and with different goals in mind. The failure is that he applies his steady, penetrating focus on certain events, facts and statements and interprets them in themselves, looking for hidden meanings in them, instead of placing them in a wider context where he can bring his accurate sense of people and realities to bear. Then he also doesn’t interact with people or information sources that would challenge the conclusions he has come to, and so they get more and more firmly rooted and then they become foundation for further reasoning.

The key to fixing these thoughts would be to return to him a perspective where the agents who are carrying out these plans are human beings just like the ones he knows, making mistakes sometimes and getting lucky other times, living from moment to moment most of the time just like everyone else, and managing to accomplish only a small fraction of what they plan, and planning in reference largely to themselves, their friends, and their ideals. This move attaches the new knowledge to an existing picture while making the minimum of modification to that picture. It resembles a time in my life when money was tight, and I spent time and energy collecting bottles for return from coworkers, doing online data entry for a penny an item, and otherwise behaving disproportionately. Naturally he understands my incredulity and he has his own explanation for why I don’t accept what he told me.

But in a way that is uninteresting, and even rings a little false. Let me try the following point of view: I don’t want to explain what I have learned and join it to a seamless picture, to turn it into just part of his larger character. There’s something truer in my failure to anticipate this development in him, and that is exactly what the reformed picture leaves out. Isn’t it where the reality comes in, isn’t that the untouchable source of knowledge, isn’t the confusion I experienced something like the dazzle from seeing the truth, and the reasoning following on that, isn’t that like blinking away the afterimage? That’s the thought in the back of my head that is daring me to try it. Learning isn’t learning, is what this point of view wants to say. Learning is the attempt to minimize surprise and discomfort following on a piece of true learning, which is fundamentally not cumulative or additive and can only be repeated confrontations which teach nothing but respect, that ordinary life and maturation require you to cover over.

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New habits bear easy

I have started up a couple new habits recently. It makes me have to do things a little more deliberately, because I am still having to choose to do them instead of doing them automatically. But it’s important to keep changing habits, or at least it has become habitual, to me. There is something about a habit that shapes the time it is found in, or that flows through it. And old habits which I resurrect seem to bring with them a little bit of the former time, like a flavor of the atmosphere that you didn’t necessarily feel at the time. Like when you are away from home long enough that you notice how it smells on your return.

It’s an accidental time capsule, like a picture of the pile of library books I had out at one time, or an old recipe file, there’s an atmosphere that comes with that. The ghost of a life that you used to live, ghosts being distortions in the air. I remember the carpet that I fell asleep on one night up late working on a short story I was writing, I was in the habit of walking every evening twenty minutes to work on it and not leave until I had met a certain word goal. I think I was seventeen, I was working late, I thought I would lie down and take a rest, and when I woke up I had a spotted red area on my cheek, but the carpet I was on had waves on it. I remember that result seemed unlikely. It’s a whiff of the past in the present. The feeling was alienating and it remains a little strange.

New habits create their own atmosphere as they become habitual, before which they are just an event or an act like any other. The newest one I added yesterday, it’s really an annex to my current writing habits. I write at different parts of the day in twenty minute or 250 word chunks, and the things I am working on are all at different stages and mean different things to me, so I am running the same emotional obstacle course day after day. It makes a backbone to hang my different days on. Every day I write as fast as I can for twenty minutes first thing in the morning in my journal, I focus on one word after seven am, I am working through a shameful period in a memoir of a friend and figuring out what I learned from it, and I have serious doubts about where my pre-lunch short story is going but I manage to eke out another block of words every day. All these go together to make up the stable pattern that underlies the varied texture of this time. I wonder what of the stuff around me now would return in ghostly form if I was to bring a part of this pattern back, later in life.

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Questions

I’m thinking of starting blogging again. There’s been something missing in my life, and it might just be the instant gratification of instant publication. But I’m not sure that splagkhna currently has quite the right look. So I’d like to ask a question to the floor. What do you think about how it looks, how usable is it? Anything that bothers you, what do you like, what should change, what shouldn’t?

Should I add a blog on the sidebar, with links and shorter posts? There are currently only two posts on the front page – does that work, or should I go to a longer, list-type format? Is it easy to find the archives if you want them? Should I keep the categories, or ditch them? Is it easy to read? Is it easy to see when there is a continuation of the post to read on click-through? How about the color scheme, okay to read?

I think I was very happy writing a blog before, and I’m really kind of puzzled about why I stopped. It didn’t stop being fun to actually write it, but I began to feel very bad every time I considered writing on it and when I thought about what I had written. It felt like shame. I wanted to scrub all the evidence of my entire existence on the internet, which is what I more or less did. What I don’t understand is what I thought there was ashamed of.

But I’ve gotten a handle on a lot of the problems I was having that might have made me have those feelings, and hopefully they won’t carry over, although they had become so familiar in the past. At any rate, thanks for reading, both now and previously. Writing is the only thing I have ever really wanted to do, and it’s been too long since I let myself enjoy doing it, and life’s too short to put off doing what you like to do.

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Message in a bottle

Listening to the radio the other day I heard a program (sort of) about the 1977 Voyager spacecraft, launched into space with a golden record and other goodies; the hosts of the show talked to several moderately well-known people and asked what they would include. Philip Glass, for instance, would include Bach and Tuvan throat-singing (details unspecified); Neil Gaiman would include the The Wizard of Oz, among other things. Several of the folks interviewed included things it would be difficult to include on a gold record: mandarin oranges in syrup, or an entire meal at Chez Panisse.

Naturally, this got me thinking: if I were involved on the generous but foolhardy project of assembling some sort of representative selection of life on earth, what would I include? This is the sort of thing I think about while bicycling, and so the first things that popped into my mind were: the sound of bicycle wheels on pavement in all the seasons of the year; the feeling of one gets after narrowly avoiding collision with an automobile; the smell of the air on a cold, clear autumn day leaves in a slurry on the road.

Then my mind wandered: the feeling of going home to people who care for you; the desire for and receipt of the first cup of coffee in the morning; the feeling of being warm in bed on a day when you have nothing in particular planned and nowhere in particular to go; the smell of books; a very soft blanket; imagining one has done something well but not being quite sure; warming up after frostbite; the shell of a cicada; the curl of a pea-plant on a string; the smell of soil in the sunshine; water.

The more I thought about it, the less I could think of things to leave out. Even things not commonly thought of during such exercises seemed impossible to omit: quarries – chewing gum – car exhaust. Finally I reached the point (some five blocks from home on my bicycle) that really the only appropriate thing would be to wrap up the entire planet – the entire solar system – very carefully and wait.

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Stray thoughts

I used to think: faces are like characters, or they match them. It might seem that people don’t look like who they are, but you think that because you haven’t understood yet what they look like. I also used to think (and I’ll still say it, if I’m feeling pressured) that people aren’t who they are: because people are only what they aren’t yet (they shine brighter where they’re living on their own boundaries, where they’re claiming new territory) or what they haven’t been for some time (long enough for that part to be calcified, solidified enough to see). Now I would say, I’m like this: I bear in mind the relation between my appearance and my actions, and I try to keep a counterpoint between them; and I don’t like to show who I am, but who I might still be, and who I comfortably am not.

I never had any real interest in or understanding of politics until this last year or so. My attitude was pretty arrogant: that’s for small minds. My thinking has turned a little (I see a different scene); the push came from two sides. Through interest in Russia, to Russian history, to interest in Central Asia and Mongolia and their history, I came to be interested in Turkey, and started to learn about its history, and then its politics. (Copy-editing on a Turkish newspaper three years ago did not get me to be interested, so now I view that time as wasted. It may not have been.) Turkey was distant enough, modern enough (hadn’t been a country for a full century), and small enough (but still big enough to be interesting) that I could be interested in its politics without affecting my view of myself. So I started reading about it, learning about it, seeing more and more in it. (I had been interested in anthropology and sociology before, but only to the extent that they seemed to show a hidden social world parallel to or an atmosphere or secret structure determining the interactions I saw while being completely another thing; not understanding them, but replacing them.)

That’s one side. Another: I’ve never, before the past few years, wanted something from a group of people that I couldn’t get and couldn’t make myself not want. (That makes me young in mind, I know. Or soft in skull.) At work, I want money and responsibility; I can’t get it as fast as I want; it’s taught me a great deal about power to try to get it. The power structure lit up, once I failed to bend it. The one band that snapped out of my hand set a quiver through the whole web, and I saw it. That’s stream number two. Following current politics, I think I see a little the forces moving behind the scene: the dwarves changing the scenery while the light show on stage distracts the audience, their hunched bodies coming too close and bulging out the curtain as they scurry out of sight. (That simile’s off: I can read motivations better, conscious motivations and intentions.)

Why did the world have to wait so long for graphic novels? We’ve had woodcuts, not to mention illuminated texts, for centuries. What was missing? Speaking of illuminated manuscripts, printing is so cheap, why are so few books decorated? (I should probably be thankful that illustrations are kept to the cover. Especially the Penguins. Can you imagine smudgy John Singer Sargent reproductions once every ten pages? But then, all I want is curlicue initial letters, and maybe an occasional angel or golem in the margins. Would that really be so hard? I’m sure I could find a few thousand in my old high school notebooks, I’d sell them cheap!)

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Sketch of character

If I’m going to write I’d better do it. (It’s easier to steer a moving ship.) I might make a series: people I have known. Character sketches. I’ve never liked the idea of writing about people. It seems somehow disrespectful. People are large, and mostly invisible. How can I claim to know them well enough to represent them? They could always come back at me and deny my representation: I’m not like that at all. And then I’m exposed, as arrogant and deceitful.

I don’t think that fear is grounded. (It’s a cover [attached only at some edges, with thread – the wind picks up, it billows out, you can see beneath it].) I don’t mind writing about: my state of mind, which is complex and which I’m constantly misrepresenting (except of course I’m in collusion there); what people do, actions being just as complicated as the actors, and just as misrepresentable; or books, which ditto with a multiplier effect.

They say one way to defeat a fear is to confront it. That’s the source of this idea. I thought I might coordinate it with my poor premature project, the book about my travels, such as they are. The happy suggestion was to write short, separable pieces about people I have known. (To be added later: stuff that happened.) Toss them out onto the graph paper. Let them define a field between them. Then try to navigate within that field. One’s in the works. (Really, I need to use this blog for something.) Feel free to comment on them as they come. (You should always feel free to comment, unless you are spam.)

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Levelling

And so, it was at Puerto Rico that I first made contact with the United States; for the first time I breathed in the smell of warm car paint and wintergreen … those two olfactory poles between which stretches the whole range of American comfort, from cars to lavatories, by way of radio sets, sweets and toothpaste … The accidents of travel often produce ambiguities such as these. Because I spent my first weeks on United States soil in Puerto Rico, I was in future to find America in Spain. Just as, several years later, through visiting my first English universtiy with a campus surrounded by Neo-Gothic buildings at Dacca in Western Bengal, I now look upon Oxford as a kind of India that has succeeded in controlling the mud, the mildew and the ever-encoroaching vegetation.

What strikes me more and more now as I am rereading this book is how many different ways it finds to reflect its facets on each other. I’m not sure where to find the point of origin of any of its themes. Or are they themes, like melodies in a piece of music, subject to repetition, variation, and inversion? – or are they more like the instruments, themselves invariant, producing the infinite variety of melody? Should I say that the way the scents of America are strung along a single line with conceptual endpoints is a feature of the author’s psychology? Or is it more suitable to say that the world and human nature are like that, which is why his mind reflects it? Or does it have something to do with the specific portrait the book is painting: of a world aranged in the rigid graphs of an order of concepts, where the concepts are made of fluid perceptions that merge and separate like a kaleidoscope with colored water-droplets for beads; the way his memories and experiences merge into and are shaped by his analysis and later understanding.