I created this altered image from an image I found on Pixabay.com by deysanz. I added special effects and text (my own words) and watermarked the image with the url of this site using the free version of graphic editing software at picmonkey.com.
For too many decades I saved things from long ago, we do it not because the object brought me pleasure but out of a sense of obligation to ancestors that cared enough to preserve the item.
Largely because I am an info nerd and love to study how meaning is generated, it finally dawned on me that I can enjoy the thought of the item when the item is not present.
A thing that is quite similar to the actual thing that creates pleasurable thought can stand in for that thing. I may no longer have the chair in which my mother, grandmother, and even her mother, sat in with their books and learned to read, but I can find one similar to it because it was from a Sears catalog in the 1890s and not a particularly rare item.
The thoughts of my own readings in that chair, and the idea of connection to reading across generations and to matrilineal ancestors I never met, are what make me smile.
The map may not be the territory, but it can remind us of the territory, and that does not even begin to look at how a map is another level of territory in and of itself.
We can tell stories that bring long gone things and times to life for others in a vivid fashion. Sometimes the idea of a thing is more important than the actual item.
Aloneness and Memory
BEING AND BELONGING
I am alone.
I always have been alone.
This aloneness is different.
Ultimately it is the state we all are in all of the time. Consciousness is isolated inside our biological bodies. I have friends who would argue that our core essence can travel beyond our bodies, but for most people, this is not how the world is viewed.
All of my siblings, my four brothers, are dead. My parents are dead. The person I considered a best friend when I was young, and such considerations were more important than anything else in the world, died when she was 21.
I try not to dwell on these facts, but I probably think about this sort of thing more than most people. I try not to bemoan my situation, as I did not lose my family in a single violent event. They are all gone none-the-less.
I am not sure what the word for this state of being is. I have a marriage and a child. Both are in their mid-20s. I am not without family or love. But the family of my birth is gone. Orphan implies that I lost my parents when I was a child. So that is not the right word to describe my state of being and it does not address the lack of siblings. If I speak of the family of my birth it sounds like I was adopted. And I was not adopted. But my natal family is gone.
SYNCRONICITY
There are times I feel as though I am not alone in the universe and that the presence of the universe itself is with me. The feeling comes from where synchronicity bubbles up and nudges at me. Such an event happened last evening.
As I wrote the above words about being alone last evening, I decided to mend some fences and build a stile to access the separate fields of inquiry where my husband and I spend our time. He likes to go to the movies. I saw that a film, Mr Holmes, I thought we would both want to watch, enjoy might be too upbeat a term, was showing at a local Indy cinema, The Loft.
I knew little of the film other than having heard it was quite good, and that I wanted to see Ian McKellan portray a non-wizardly character. It was excellent, thought-producing, and, to me, relevant.
Synchronicity seemed to dance through my brain as I watched the film develop the very interplay of ideas that I had begun writing about earlier in the day: aging and how the process elucidates the existential aloneness which intensifies through time as peers, and those we know, disappear.
CONSTRUCTING MEMORY
The past exists only in memories and when there is no one who shares your memories, how can an event be validated? Holmes, age 93, grappled with senility and the forgetting of the details of the case from decades ago that apparently so shook his belief in his own abilities that he retired from detective work.
Ultimately understanding that facts, while essential to material stories, are nothing without interpretation. The interpretations we choose to share with others often have more significance than any complete inventory of facts.
Two of my own brothers, the two who passed away this past year, both suffered from dementia or senility. I have thought a great deal about what they knew and chose to share or not and literally take to the grave with them. The metaphor of wasps of who attack and live on versus bees that give all for the colony in Mr. Holmes gave me a new frame for contemplating my brothers’ actions and my own.
CONSTRUCTING MEANING
This timeless existential pondering of communication and community coexists with the loneness that is the essential state of being. Self-sacrifice for the good of the community theme entwines the characters through the apiary sub-plot and I cannot help but think of how material concerns, facts, isolated one brother who suffered greatly, and how another brother who was most concerned with love was happy.
Infinite permutations of the Mr. Holmes story exist in life, but I am content to irrationally take comfort from the synchronicity of choosing to see this film as I began to write about losing my last sibling during a visit to the city and region of the midwest in which he lived. Does this logically mean anything? But it has meaning for me.
Recursive Images of Memory
I’m working on a memoir, so I live much of my life in the act of looking backward. And boy is my neck tired. Bah-dah-bum. Sorry, couldn’t resist.
Seriously though, I do accumulate a bit of tension from living in this state. My childhood before grammar school was fine, a bit isolated, a bit atypical for the late 1950s and early 1960s, but basically a bucolic time. But I spend a lot of time, effort and energy going back over my school days and early adulthood previous to try to understand why one thing was successful and another thing led to personal catastrophe. Decisions, chains of events, character traits, and family patterns all figure into the analysis I am doing in order to write about a difficult topic, successful and failed methods of coping, and how reframing differs from revisionist history.
When, in a Facebook Blogging Group to which I belong, Beth announced “retrospect” as the topic for group blogging this week I immediately began comparing what it is to engage in retrospect as opposed to what it is to reminisce, or to reflect.
Retrospect is a simple looking backward, it has no judgment implicit within it. Hindsight looks back over errors, reminiscing looks back with rose-colored glasses. And any remembering changes the memory that was a perception in the first place. It really does. I am not sure reflection involving the past can really exist. Any recollection adds a current lens to the event, no perception just mirrors an event. I’ve listened to lectures by brilliant neuroscientists about how memories are made, lost, retrieved, and re-visioned. Heisenberg abounds. And in my professional training I began to understand, though I will never fully understand, that every perception is a negotiated product. Memory is a perception of the biological, electrochemical, and neurophysiological etching, folds and pathways that past experience created in our brains and central nervous system. It is recursive.
So am I remembering real events? Yes. As much as any person can. But because memories change through time, I rely on patterns more than individual events. I am also lucky in that I am very visual and remember through images. It is called eidetic memory. While I don’t have a photographic memory in the way most people think of it, I do, apparently, make use of fairly high levels of eidetic imagery. And I am also lucky that I have been a writer most of my life. I have written so many poems, journal entries, letters, essays, articles, papers and more that most of the time, if I want to double check the validity of a memory, I often have something I have written from five, ten, or twenty years ago that touches on the event, so I have some means of comparison. Written records are one of the most amazing things we humans have ever created. I think I should print out my blog posts. I have print copies of everything else.
But now I’m wondering how retrospection relates to introspection and to circumspection? Oh geesh, it never ends… because it is recursive.
Two Days Ago I Didn't Have A Clue
That is, the day before yesterday I didn’t have a clue as to how I was going to prepare whatever I was going to prepare to present as my business at a women’s business owner’s luncheon today. While I’ve been preparing to launch my business for a very long time, I have been serious about it for only a few weeks, over the course of 2012. Much of my effort has been on developing a routine, getting software I need set up on equipment I need, rearranging my web presence, and reconfiguring a couple other elements of my life to support this venture. What I had not done was create display materials, a portfolio, or materials I could distribute.
Sometimes I just have to set not only deadlines, but exterior events which integrate with the deadlines, in order to get me to kick it in to high gear and produce whatever it is that needs to be created or done.
I have been freaking out a bit because time is flying and the drop dead, deadline that I’ve given myself for having all my marketing materials, media kits, and online sites integrated in a complimentary and consistent manner was BlogHer 12. I will arrive in NYC on Aug 1, so I had been thinking that July 31st was the drop dead date. But then a few days ago, I realized that I needed to have everything ready a couple weeks earlier than that because of family events that are going to keep me busy 24/7 from mid-July on. So I realized I was going to have to amp up my production schedule if I was going to be ready to go in a month.
So, what did I do? Last week I decided I would attend a Meet Up of “Women Who Successfully Work for Themselves.” The June meeting was today and it was a member/attendee round robin in which every person who attended had a few minutes to present her business.
I thought I would have the weekend to prepare for today’s meeting. Wrong. The whole weekend revolved around politics for me. I had hair and nails appointments scheduled on Saturday during the day so I would be presentable for several upcoming events. Then Saturday night was the political fundraiser with Al Franken for Richard Carmona’s Senate campaign. And I wrote it up after the event.
I had not planned on writing another well developed political piece on Sunday, but things began clicking for me and I realized several connections I had been thinking about had ripened, so to speak, and if I didn’t pick the fruit at the right time, the ideas would rot. I spent most of the the day before yesterday writing about the flip between “states” that I believe to be in motion for later in the year when the back and forth pivot that happens in systems, in this case, the American political system, will actually happen. The conservative trajectory that has been in play for several decades seems to have stretched as far as it can, and over-reached a maintainable course, so that the snap back to a progressive trajectory seems to be in the works.
I spent Sunday threading the needle and finishing the seams between events, people, and places that defined some of the landmark elements in this political cycle that are intricately tied to the State of Arizona that seem to signal a sort of fin de siecle to a process that traces back to Barry Goldwater and probably beyond him.
Sometimes it is difficult to remember exactly what happened when, but when distinct events frame a moment of clarity, it is relatively easy to remember what happened when.
So even though everything kept pushing required business preparations back into the work week, yesterday I did major revisions to this blog’s appearance in order to have the load time decrease and be friendly to mobile devices. That left all my materials creation to be done this a.m. for a late a.m. meeting. But you know what. I designed two marketing brochures that I will also be able to use as web pages, then I designed my new business cards, and started laying out a postcard mailer, and created a label to use for QR codes and business card updates, and then I finally started my product list and designed my first sale flier.
I think I will remember these past few days as a glommed together whirl of activity.
The Merry, Merry Month of May
May is my birth month. I’m sure that is why I have such a positive association with it. Birthdays were major for me as a kid. It was better than Christmas as far as gifts after I was 4 or so. It seemed to come out of the blue when I was very little, unlike Christmas that had a major lead-up and so much anticipation that there couldn’t help but be a let down when it finally arrived. Birthdays were a surprise. My special day seemed to come out of the blue until I learned to read the signs that it was approaching.
Spring! Not rainy, chilly spring, but warm, bright spring and blossoms galore signaled my approaching birthday! Spring that was filled with tulips, Lilacs, bright and light green leaves led directly and almost imperceptibly into Summer. Summer equaled the end of school. I knew about that even before I went to school because summer, as I conceptualized it, began right around my birthday, and summer was when my brothers were home. Big brothers to bug. Yippee!!! I loved my brothers. They were my world.
So I am planning on having a great month and building upon all those good memories and association. Let’s see if I can have all my personally oriented posts be truly positive ones this month!