What am I writing when I write?
I am trying to curve words round the impressions that have arisen in me. Whether the stream of talking going on in my head, or rising memories, scenes, moments, awakened by something in my present, or the positions I am taking towards something in the world driven by the engulfing emotion I might be feeling just now. Of course, all of these circle and swirl in me like the Gulf of Corryvreckan.
And I thought the thought just now. As inner talking ran through the conversation with C yesterday. About empires and corporations. That an empire or a corporation only grows and dominates, succeeds, if it can force an idea on a sufficiently large part of the world for long enough to subject the world to its shape. And once that idea starts to lose traction then the entity is doomed, as each will be, to decline and decay.
And this too is the model for all our personal endeavours for good and otherwise. We imagine, project and with a gentle or aggressive force shape the world to our imaginations.
The distinction of order and chaos is a characteristic of thought, not of what is there. Things appear to us as ordered when we project an ordering perception onto them. This is left hemisphere meaning-making, everything is actually, just as it is. Looking up at the skies we see constellations only because we see constellations – the order is held in how we see them, not in the distant entities themselves.
Life comes in fragments.
Last night low cumulus clouds moved hurriedly across the sky at dusk. Entralled by this drama of the evening skies, for a moment I pitied those seduced by the intense but empty drama of their TV screens. I recalled something I wrote many years ago in the small courtyard of a long-gone family house in the Languedoc. A similar procession of huge clouds was moving across a windswept sky. It seemed their movement was purposeful, important and urgent – that they were all hurrying to some great Council of Clouds. A rare gathering of wise and powerful clouds from across the land summonsed to make weighty decisions on some crucial matter that would affect us all.
This moment opened two bubbling-up fragments.
Maybe a helpful way to name our experience of the world is to pay attention to presence. Rather than beings or things. It would be silly to consider a cloud a being. However I experience them with a palpable sense of presence – a felt sense of them “showing up” in my own awareness in a way that is not captured by considering a cloud an inanimate object. On my walks on Lewes Railway Land I would often pause near four very distinct Sycamore trees. Yes they are four trees, but my strongest impression of them is always as a single presence. For me this becomes a super helpful way of experiencing the world – escaping the cognitive restriction of the whole and the parts.
And my second fragment. My second bubbling up. Is that to radically slow down the arrival of a memory is to notice that there is at least a two-step experience going on. First, the image/moment arises into awareness (or maybe not even into awareness!) as pure recollection. Then we attach a story to the image which triggers the emotion we experience. My memory of the Languedoc Cloud Council arises – it is just pure re-presentation of image and thought. However, as it arises for me again, context floods in. The house in the Languedoc was a holiday home in a life that has now gone. I connect it to stories of another time that brings sadness, regret and other emotions.
There are no happy memories or sad memories in the way that they are stored in us. The meaning, and hence the emotion of them, is attached to them in the moment of consciousness.
It’s a whole other subject, but this is just how we experience events that are occuring in the present moment. We experience things right now through the narrative that we give them as they show up in our day.
Photo by Sawyer Bengtson on Unsplash
