On my commute this morning, I came across a description in the September 7 New Yorker that is a fair description of my blogging. It's Jane Kramer on the late, long essay "On Vanity" by Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592)1:It is a meditation on dying and, at the same time, on writing—or, you could say, on writing oneself to life in the face of death, on getting "lost" in words and in "the gait of poetry, all jumps and tumblings" and in the kind of space where "my pen and my mind both go a-roaming." ("My mind does not always move straight ahead but backwards too," he says. "I distrust my present thoughts hardly less than my past ones and my second or third thoughts hardly less than my first.") And it draws pretty much the whole cast of characters from his library into the conversation....The phrase "writing oneself to life" echoed a phrase I'd used a few days previously in an email to Joe:
If my mind isn't sparking, I feel dead. If it sparks a bit, I imagine that I'm alive. My first year working for IBM...I kept myself alive only by reading, reading, reading....The flint of my mind is sparked by being struck by one stone or another of what I read, and my blog posts tend to be the kindling that the spark has set ablaze.
Is it ironic that so many of my posts, produced as "writing myself to life," allude to or squarely confront my death? Only if it was ironic that Montaigne's "meditation on dying" was at the same time (to Kramer) a way of keeping himself alive in the face of death.
Previously unnoticed juxtaposition
It just struck me, the juxtaposition of my blog profile's "about me" quote from Emily Dickinson:I'm Nobody! Who are you?and the final stanza of Wallace Steven's poem "The Snow Man," which I quoted yesterday:
Are you—Nobody—too?
For the listener, who listens in the snow,The size and age (and average temperature) of the universe, the brevity of our lives, and the finality of death do have a way of emphasizing our nothingness.
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
______________
- "Me, Myself, and I," by Jane Kramer, in the Literary Lives column, p. 39 of the September 7 New Yorker.
My friend Ken wrote:
ReplyDeleteMorris, are you saying that through your imagination you will yourself to live? Seems a tad circular, but then what isn't?
No, Ken, hardly that. I'm surprised that you seemed to interpret my post as having anything at all to do with willing. Could you tell me what evidence or indication of that you saw?
Note that "alive" and "dead" are being used metaphorically. Biologically alive people can be lively and exhilarated (feel alive) or depressed or melancholy (feel as though they're dead—assuming they know what that's like!). I've always felt most alive when my mind "sparks": when I see connections among things that aren't generally or to most people obvious. Reading and writing have always been for me a tonic for seeing connections.
I like the play Kramer makes in "writing oneself to life [in the face of death]"; the idiom is "to [verb] oneself to death."
Ken responded, in his inimitable way:
ReplyDeleteMorris, let's begin with Newton's First Law of Motion. I think it applies to emotions as well as to objects. Unfortunately, Sir Isaac didn't realize it.
If we accept the premise that writing is a sufficiently "unbalanced force" that can change the emotion of feeling dead into the emotion of feeling alive, we should ask what gives rise to the writing. Is it autonomic, like breathing or perspiring or pumping blood, or is a deliberate conscious act? I think it's probably the latter, an act of will. That's why I concluded that you were willing yourself to feel alive.
Now that some time has passed, I look at your post differently. If you're wired at all like me, it isn't the writing that makes your mind come alive — it's novelty. When you read a novel idea or just luckily come upon it in your thoughts, the pleasure in the novelty is the "unbalanced force." The writing comes afterward. You write because you want to understand the novelty in it's [sic] depth, connections, and consequences. You know that writing is a tool that gives precision to knowledge. As you write, other novelties are likely to arise, and so the exploration continues. In no time at all, I imagine that you feel quite alive.
And I replied:
Delightful disquisition, my dear Ken. You are a jewel, and I am delighted to have you in my life, even if far away and infrequent. Good on you!
And my friend Keith wrote:
ReplyDeleteAn interesting commentary, Sir. Those of us who examine ourselves and our lives regularly have such thoughts on a frequent schedule. At least, I do. I have felt my mortality, my onrushing end, and my exultation at existing since I first began my self perusal many decades ago. I think I began in my mid teens, but I'm sure I was digging into my life by my early twenties. Yes, one's mortality plays a major role in living an examined life. It brings one to life, gives impetus to Living, and continually whispers in our ear, "Live this moment well for the next moment might not come." Ain't it a shame that we seldom listen until we think we are nearing the end.
But, who are we [to] think that the end might be near? I am not so feeble-minded as the many members of my extended family who think the prophesied end days are at hand. I shall not wait in anticipation for someone else's idea to come to fruition. I will live! And, yes, the next moment shall come. Whether I am here to witness it or not. That's no longer my worry, if it ever were. I'm too busy living to worry about not living.
So, Dear Friend, write yourself to life. Write us all to life. No, that's not an existential statement. Such musings as your blog post give life to us all who read it and apply it.