huge. And we’re talking here about very nearly gargantuan. There is at least one reason I can cite directly for this, and this is the fact that last weekend, while wandering around in the ocean at the Boryeong Mud Festival in South Korea, a large wave smacked me in the face and in my idiocy I hadn’t taken my glasses off. Well, these things happen.
It should probably be pointed out, here, that I have terrible eyesight. To be technical, my eyes are something like a -8.00—whatever that means. All I know for sure is that without assistance, I literally cannot see one foot in front of my face. Well, the first task was naturally to rectify this whole “inability to see” situation that I had managed to get myself into, and, let me tell you, there was a note of the frantic at first when I remembered that glasses can oftentimes take a little while to get sorted out… days in fact. My last pair, with its Transitions ability, super scratch-resistant coating, and high density lens material had taken a week to construct. As I said to my friend: “They were just super-sweet glasses, man.”
“And now your super-sweet glasses are in the ocean in South Korea.”
Touché, salesman.
At any rate, I then remembered that my life revolves around reading, writing, and teaching. These are three things for which sight is pretty necessary, and tears were almost starting to well up at the thought that I wouldn’t be able to read a book for a week, but the brain does magical things when it’s pushed: contacts. Duh. Optical shops always keep a steady supply of contacts on hand, and it’s as easy as going to one and telling them my prescription (this is a handy little number to memorize by the way).
To make a long story short, we succeeded in finding me some contacts.
I haven’t worn contacts in a while (somewhere between five and ten years—which is pretty significant considering my age), and when I put in these contacts, everything looked enormous. I had a copy of a collection of Martin Heidegger’s works with me, and as I looked at it, I could’ve sworn it wasn’t that big when I had put it into my bag. I looked at my hands, and my friend said, “Oh, don’t even look at the mitts… they might scare you.” And, indeed, they were abnormally large. My shoes, my thighs, my backpack, and my feet had all taken on this extraordinarily massive aspect. Not that this ought to be unusual, because I AM a big man, but, at the same time, this was messing with my mind. When I got home, I looked at my little 13” Macbook, and I could’ve sworn it was just as big as my friends 19” whatever it is.
At first, I thought this was simply some kind of optical illusion involving the proximity of the lens to the eye, and, indeed, this is probably the "being" definition, but what of the "nothingness" definition? Does that question even have a place here?
You see, I am leaving my current situation in Korea very soon. I have done a lot of research. I have almost finished writing a book. And my life is taking on an air of mounting madness. There is madness all around me. My best Korean friend is leaving. His wife and daughter are AWOL. The other Korean teacher at my school is leaving. I get the very distinct feeling of rats leaving a sinking ship. After all this time and all this research and all these happenings and all these adventures I have had: it seems like everything is so significant. Combine that with my belief in the fact that every moment in our life is so significant, and everything being so seemingly huge is probably not too far off the mark, eh? We’re dealing here with the world of my existence being huge (through the miracle of optics) and the world of my reality being huge (through the madness of a life lived in an almost pure spontaneity). What does it all mean?
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
It Is Possible to Say
too much. The thunder outside my window just said plenty. As a matter of fact it startled me. This is why almost every major eastern religion is very big on silence. The other day I made a note to myself that silence is always pregnant. What I mean to say by this is that silence is always, always, always in the state of “about to give birth to sound.” Sound is created out of silence.
This is striking, though, for a number of reasons. Silence is never possible, or, at least, it isn’t sustainable. The only place, technically, that silence can ever occur is inside a vacuum, and human beings cannot survive there. And yet, it is the goal precisely because it is unattainable. Would the sound of gently falling rain (and all that white noise in general) be so soothing if it weren’t for the fact that most of the time there weren’t those sounds? Doubtful, mon cher, very doubtful.
It works the same way in communication and words and language. This is where the beauty of poetry derives its nature from, and why wordiness can be boring. Poetry is the art of saying as much as possible in as little space as possible. That definition might garner some arguers, but I’d stand by it. Even if you take the great epic poems like The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Divine Comedy, Beowulf, Paradise Lost, and just about any other, the space that these things are covering is truly beyond comprehension.
The terseness of William Carlos Williams, is perhaps a good juxtaposition:
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.
The thing is this: when in the midst of silence, I and I alone pull out the meaning. What does Williams mean by that “so much depends upon” business anyway? It doesn’t really matter what he meant by it. His silence on the meaning is the license to subjectify. Or what is the real significance of Homer’s Catologue of Ships in The Iliad. Art is a thing thinging. Silence is nothingness nothing.
(Sometimes I get playful with the language, and I’m well aware of my excesses in this department.)
I want to know what it is possible to NOT say, and the more I experiment, the more I come to find that you can NOT say almost more than you can say. This is art. What is a painting but a two-dimensional representation of something else? Ah, but it means. What does it mean? Barely matters. It’s not saying anything technically. And yet it is by its simple presence. Just like me. Just like you. We are all things thinging.
I’m working on brevity these days. Stopping the word flow just when it’s necessary. Otherwise I wind up waking up to way too much watered-down matter. It is the rainy season in Korea, and I suppose you CAN have too much of a good thing, but, so far, the falling rain saying things to me hasn’t yet grown old.
This is striking, though, for a number of reasons. Silence is never possible, or, at least, it isn’t sustainable. The only place, technically, that silence can ever occur is inside a vacuum, and human beings cannot survive there. And yet, it is the goal precisely because it is unattainable. Would the sound of gently falling rain (and all that white noise in general) be so soothing if it weren’t for the fact that most of the time there weren’t those sounds? Doubtful, mon cher, very doubtful.
It works the same way in communication and words and language. This is where the beauty of poetry derives its nature from, and why wordiness can be boring. Poetry is the art of saying as much as possible in as little space as possible. That definition might garner some arguers, but I’d stand by it. Even if you take the great epic poems like The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Divine Comedy, Beowulf, Paradise Lost, and just about any other, the space that these things are covering is truly beyond comprehension.
The terseness of William Carlos Williams, is perhaps a good juxtaposition:
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.
The thing is this: when in the midst of silence, I and I alone pull out the meaning. What does Williams mean by that “so much depends upon” business anyway? It doesn’t really matter what he meant by it. His silence on the meaning is the license to subjectify. Or what is the real significance of Homer’s Catologue of Ships in The Iliad. Art is a thing thinging. Silence is nothingness nothing.
(Sometimes I get playful with the language, and I’m well aware of my excesses in this department.)
I want to know what it is possible to NOT say, and the more I experiment, the more I come to find that you can NOT say almost more than you can say. This is art. What is a painting but a two-dimensional representation of something else? Ah, but it means. What does it mean? Barely matters. It’s not saying anything technically. And yet it is by its simple presence. Just like me. Just like you. We are all things thinging.
I’m working on brevity these days. Stopping the word flow just when it’s necessary. Otherwise I wind up waking up to way too much watered-down matter. It is the rainy season in Korea, and I suppose you CAN have too much of a good thing, but, so far, the falling rain saying things to me hasn’t yet grown old.
Thursday, July 9, 2009
A Few Notes from My Reality
Today I went for a run, and I decided that instead of heading in the direction I normally head in, I’d go the opposite way and run it in the other direction. The spirit of adventure will always lead to discovery, and I discovered that the opposite direction to what I had been going was at least a third again more difficult than my traditional route. It is important to know that I live about halfway up what would probably be most appropriately described as a foothill, the first part of my run is always downhill, and it concludes with running uphill. Normally I head east first, turn to the north, make a left and head west, and finish it off with a southwardly sprint the last fifty or a hundred meters up to my apartment. It turns out that the “westward ho!” portion of my run—which is the longest uphill portion of my traditional run—is the shortest portion of what I think is about three 3k (let’s call it 1). So, today, I ran 1k downhill, then proceeded to run for almost 2k uphill. I learned something. I learned that sometimes, when you choose a different path, it might wind up being more difficult; however, you’ll never know unless you take it.
This has been something of a theme for my reality. I have a tendency to find paths and wander down them fully understanding that there is a possibility it might be more difficult, but, simultaneously, finding it very difficult to care. Shying away from difficulty has never been my style. My style, as a matter of fact, would probably be best characterized as somewhat reckless, but only to a point.
Today, I managed to get one quarter of the way through memorizing Pablo Neruda’s “Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair,” and all I keep thinking is that the more I dive into these poems and wrap my head around them, the deeper my understanding becomes. Only the other day did the realization that this work was doing more than it claimed to do cross the threshold of my mind. It is mapping the arc of a relationship. The first poem is like love at first sight: body of woman, white hills, white thighs, you look like a world lying in surrender. Over the course of the next nineteen poems, the passion transforms itself into something else, until, by the twentieth poem, when he knows it’s over, he writes: tonight I can write the saddest lines—all of which is followed (after the "official" ending of the relationship) by the "Song of Despair." Now, I am an English major by trade, and I probably should’ve picked that up long before this, but I had never actually sat down read them all through before. I used to just open it up to whatever I felt like and read it because they were all so beautiful, but now that I understand his project, I read it with new eyes.
The eventual failure of all romantic concepts of love is ever-present in the work, and that is the reason for despair. The other day, I was talking to my Korean co-teacher and she said that she married her husband fifteen years ago and it was great. They loved each other and it was incredible. Now, after fifteen years, two children, and the effects of time there is no love left. Those were her exact words: “there is no love left… only duty.” That is what becomes of love. It turns into habit and duty. It is my job to be with this person. Romance and passion will always, always fade. It is our lot to deal with this reality.
Habit has been an interesting topic of conversation lately. Tonight, during the course of teaching my adult students how to speak English, I gave them the topic: tell me three bad habits you have and three ways to change or stop them. I gave them mine to begin with: forgetfulness, going, and not listening to doctor’s directions. As to the first one, my methods for changing or stopping it were: practice (like my memorization of Neruda’s book), mnemonic devices, and playing memory games (which is a little like practice, but not quite AS focused). To stop going would be very difficult for me. I find myself every day, as I mentioned, wandering down new paths, but I gave them these three methods to attempt a change: watch more TV (I have what would best be described as a near-passionate-hatred for the thing because people get into the habit of watching too much of it and they have to be there for their shows or whatever… I don’t understand it), sleep more (I have a tendency to sleep for six to eight hours no matter what or when—even if I’ve had a heavy night of “socializing” the night before and all logic would point to sleeping forever… I’ll be up in six hours and doing work), and (as my student suggested) get married. As for listening to doctor’s advice: get married (the same student suggested it), almost die more frequently (that’d sort me out), and have children (for obvious reasons). What is really interesting to me is that when it was their turn, they could give me their bad habits, but they all said that it was impossible to break them. That was almost the saddest thing I’d ever heard. When a revolution of the mind and body is not possible, is there life? Or, are you just living out of habit? The thought actually terrified me: the life lived purely out of habit.
I recently committed Facebook suicide. For those who’ve been in a coma for the last 5 years, Facebook is an “online social networking utility” that allows you to stay connected to all your friends, all over the world, simply by joining and finding them. From personal experience, it is a pretty incredible thing. I have lived in some fairly out of the way places and done some fairly out-of-the-way things, and it was always nice to log in to Facebook and find my friends and see what they were up to. Through a friend I found out that I couldn’t quit Facebook (and their are political reasons that we won't go into right now). This always rubs me the wrong way—like when I was running an overnight crew for a big company and it seemed as if I couldn’t quit… until I did. Tell me I can’t do something, and I’m at least going to attempt to do it, right? It has more to do with the challenge than anything else.
Anyway, the fact that you can only “de-activate” your account (like pushing pause) but never quit the thing aside, there was also the curiosity that started to well up in me about what life would be like without Facebook. I have been on Facebook since my university days in 2004 when the thing was brand new. When I mentioned on my Facebook account that I was quitting, I got one response that said, “That’s just stupid. I don’t believe you.” Some people can’t imagine their world without Facebook. I CAN imagine it, and I wanted to see what life would be like without it. It’s been a week now, and I’ve noticed a serious lack of clutter in my email inbox (they send you notifications about almost anything unless you do the work of requesting them not to), about an hour of my day back every day, a day less cluttered with sifting through people's ridiculous "status updates," and a feeling of freedom that I think I had been missing. It’s too easy is the problem. Nobody wants to do the work that’s required for actually maintaining a friendship relationship. But if you’re up for it… send me an email: elijtaylor@gmail.com. Or, better yet, send me an actual address and I'll write you a letter.
This has been something of a theme for my reality. I have a tendency to find paths and wander down them fully understanding that there is a possibility it might be more difficult, but, simultaneously, finding it very difficult to care. Shying away from difficulty has never been my style. My style, as a matter of fact, would probably be best characterized as somewhat reckless, but only to a point.
Today, I managed to get one quarter of the way through memorizing Pablo Neruda’s “Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair,” and all I keep thinking is that the more I dive into these poems and wrap my head around them, the deeper my understanding becomes. Only the other day did the realization that this work was doing more than it claimed to do cross the threshold of my mind. It is mapping the arc of a relationship. The first poem is like love at first sight: body of woman, white hills, white thighs, you look like a world lying in surrender. Over the course of the next nineteen poems, the passion transforms itself into something else, until, by the twentieth poem, when he knows it’s over, he writes: tonight I can write the saddest lines—all of which is followed (after the "official" ending of the relationship) by the "Song of Despair." Now, I am an English major by trade, and I probably should’ve picked that up long before this, but I had never actually sat down read them all through before. I used to just open it up to whatever I felt like and read it because they were all so beautiful, but now that I understand his project, I read it with new eyes.
The eventual failure of all romantic concepts of love is ever-present in the work, and that is the reason for despair. The other day, I was talking to my Korean co-teacher and she said that she married her husband fifteen years ago and it was great. They loved each other and it was incredible. Now, after fifteen years, two children, and the effects of time there is no love left. Those were her exact words: “there is no love left… only duty.” That is what becomes of love. It turns into habit and duty. It is my job to be with this person. Romance and passion will always, always fade. It is our lot to deal with this reality.
Habit has been an interesting topic of conversation lately. Tonight, during the course of teaching my adult students how to speak English, I gave them the topic: tell me three bad habits you have and three ways to change or stop them. I gave them mine to begin with: forgetfulness, going, and not listening to doctor’s directions. As to the first one, my methods for changing or stopping it were: practice (like my memorization of Neruda’s book), mnemonic devices, and playing memory games (which is a little like practice, but not quite AS focused). To stop going would be very difficult for me. I find myself every day, as I mentioned, wandering down new paths, but I gave them these three methods to attempt a change: watch more TV (I have what would best be described as a near-passionate-hatred for the thing because people get into the habit of watching too much of it and they have to be there for their shows or whatever… I don’t understand it), sleep more (I have a tendency to sleep for six to eight hours no matter what or when—even if I’ve had a heavy night of “socializing” the night before and all logic would point to sleeping forever… I’ll be up in six hours and doing work), and (as my student suggested) get married. As for listening to doctor’s advice: get married (the same student suggested it), almost die more frequently (that’d sort me out), and have children (for obvious reasons). What is really interesting to me is that when it was their turn, they could give me their bad habits, but they all said that it was impossible to break them. That was almost the saddest thing I’d ever heard. When a revolution of the mind and body is not possible, is there life? Or, are you just living out of habit? The thought actually terrified me: the life lived purely out of habit.
I recently committed Facebook suicide. For those who’ve been in a coma for the last 5 years, Facebook is an “online social networking utility” that allows you to stay connected to all your friends, all over the world, simply by joining and finding them. From personal experience, it is a pretty incredible thing. I have lived in some fairly out of the way places and done some fairly out-of-the-way things, and it was always nice to log in to Facebook and find my friends and see what they were up to. Through a friend I found out that I couldn’t quit Facebook (and their are political reasons that we won't go into right now). This always rubs me the wrong way—like when I was running an overnight crew for a big company and it seemed as if I couldn’t quit… until I did. Tell me I can’t do something, and I’m at least going to attempt to do it, right? It has more to do with the challenge than anything else.
Anyway, the fact that you can only “de-activate” your account (like pushing pause) but never quit the thing aside, there was also the curiosity that started to well up in me about what life would be like without Facebook. I have been on Facebook since my university days in 2004 when the thing was brand new. When I mentioned on my Facebook account that I was quitting, I got one response that said, “That’s just stupid. I don’t believe you.” Some people can’t imagine their world without Facebook. I CAN imagine it, and I wanted to see what life would be like without it. It’s been a week now, and I’ve noticed a serious lack of clutter in my email inbox (they send you notifications about almost anything unless you do the work of requesting them not to), about an hour of my day back every day, a day less cluttered with sifting through people's ridiculous "status updates," and a feeling of freedom that I think I had been missing. It’s too easy is the problem. Nobody wants to do the work that’s required for actually maintaining a friendship relationship. But if you’re up for it… send me an email: elijtaylor@gmail.com. Or, better yet, send me an actual address and I'll write you a letter.
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