The Autumn Rain

Enough sea for the soul

2009-12-15T13:35:00.003-08:00

Circumspect

2009-12-13T22:08:00.001-08:00

Tonight I am precarious, or tilting precariously, or relishing the precariousness of this grand adventure we call life. This afternoon I sent hope winging out, speeding along electronic lines to be printed and set in stacks of paper, to be reviewed and judged, and then to either bring me an olive branch or not. Cautious person that I am, I smile and wave, and then I tuck plans B and C in a place where I won't forget them. Because it would be a shame to have nothing to hold if that hope doesn't come through.

This is a lonely adventure. In the end, the person it most affects is me, and that makes a difference, I think, to the feeling of community.

Lonely, I said, but not alone. Not really. Ask the people I've pestered over the last few months for letters and a critical eye (again and again and again); ask the people who have said "this is exciting!," or the one who said, "I can share in rejection, too;" they'll tell you. Lonely, maybe, but not for a second really alone.

Merry Christmas, Adorno (and other reflections on the season)

2009-12-13T21:15:00.000-08:00

I wanted to know if Adorno bought Christmas presents--a question inspired by the overwhelming displays of mass-produced merchandise in mall windows and on billboards. For the most part, I like shopping--especially shopping of the Christmas variety--, but sometimes the overabundance of it all disheartens me. I leave feeling unhappier, smaller, and less of a person than when I began; more often, I find myself stumbling in the morass of choice.

That I am an indecisive person is an understatement, and, though misery loves company, I think this is one vice that I would be better off bearing alone. Unfortunately, there is more than enough indecisiveness to go around. We live in a culture of choice. Strung out on possibility, we loiter on the doorstep of commitment, unwilling to make decisions, content in the worst way to remain outside. We are glutted with options, and the more we have, the harder it is to act:

Pink or red? Cherry or vanilla or orchid? Plaid or printed or solid or striped? Silver or gold? I have to choose what for free?

I'm not saying that choice is bad (I prefer pink to red, cherry to orchid or vanilla; plaid and printed are both necessities; gold, yes, but also silver; and free is cool), but I do think that maybe a few lessons in how to handle choice could be valuable.

Four years ago, I remember being frustrated with resumes. I felt that it was decidedly unfair to those of us who "really loved" knowledge that leadership and activities seemed to count for more than good grades (no matter how hard we worked for them.) I'm wondering now if maybe the higher-ups were on to something: buried beneath the intoxicating variety of modern American life is the simple fact that choice really isn't enough. Just as valuable as the ability to see our choices is the ability to make them, to both have and do.

***

The real question, of course, is what any of this has to do with Adorno, but you'll have to figure that out for yourself. I couldn't decide.

Happiness

2009-12-10T09:49:00.000-08:00

by Raymond Carver

So early it's still almost dark out.
I'm near the window with coffee,
and the usual early morning stuff
that passes for thought.

When I see the boy and his friend
walking up the road
to deliver the newspaper.

They wear caps and sweaters,
and one boy has a bag over his shoulder.
They are so happy
they aren't saying anything, these boys.

I think if they could, they would take
each other's arm.
It's early in the morning,
and they are doing this thing together.

They come on, slowly.
The sky is taking on light,
though the moon still hangs pale over the water.

Such beauty that for a minute
death and ambition, even love,
doesn't enter into this.

Happiness. It comes on
unexpectedly. And goes beyond, really,
any early morning talk about it.

(HT: Gnuegend Gnade)
______________

Today, happiness is sleeping in late, a Christmas shopping trip planned with one of my favorite people, one last writing center session to polish my personal statement for the University of Chicago.

Happy Thursday!

Something about mystery

2009-12-09T13:54:00.000-08:00

I am concerned with mystery. In these first weeks of Advent, the world is pregnant with expectation; fecundity reigns; the questions, as it turn out, proliferate.

The title of the book, Madeleine L'Engle's The Irrational Season, should have warned me, but I am oblivious to warnings sometimes. She mentions the man presumptuous enough to think he can know everything. She says that we know better than that, and I am worried, not because I believe I'll ever know everything, but because I want to believe that everything can be known.

And yet, they tell me, the unknown is powerful. There is beauty, they add, in mystery; in the end, it is a sign of our cosmic insufficiency that we have to admit we know only that we don't know.

I balk at this. I return L'Engle's book to the library; I begin formulating questions and subdivisions of questions: I want to know the degrees of mystery: why and how and how much. I ask, pettily, for some token--something physical on which I can place my hands, something small enough to wrap my mind around, something that will make me feel confident in my small self and the stabs we are all making in the dark.

What I get is beauty and power. Crystalline edges of light, the piercing shards of a sunset, undeserved love: physical things rendered intangible, and intangible things rendered physical by the sheer wonder of the unknown.

Umberto Eco "On Some Functions of Literature"

2009-12-09T07:38:00.000-08:00

[I am not] idealistic enough to believe that literature can offer relief to the vast number of people who lack basic food and medicine. But I would like to make one point: the wretches who roam around aimlessly in gangs and kill people by throwing stones from a highway bridge or setting fire to a child--whoever these people are--turn out this way not because they have been corrupted by computer "new speak" (they don't even have access to a computer) but rather because they are excluded from the universe of literature and from those places where, through education and discussion, they might be reached by a glimmer from the world of values that stems from and sends us back again to books. (p. 4)

Things the universe didn't owe me (but that I've been given anyhow)

2009-12-07T07:36:00.000-08:00

Sharply chill air
15-minute finals in Ancient Greek
The tops of brick buildings and the edges of leaves rimmed in a frosty, golden morning glow
Philosophy of Art take-home finals that turn out to be more interesting than expected
Coldplay
The Weepies
Madeleine L'Engle
Books of poetry, fiction, and philosophy ordered through the library for Winter Break: justice, feminism, the 1919 Spanish influenza epidemic, university life
Perfect and almost-perfect sentences
Encouraging words from student writers: "You saved my life this term;" "This is the first time I've had fun at the Writing Center;" "Thank you;" "Thanks"

***********

Happiness (fortune-born, rationally-secured)

2009-12-04T17:00:00.000-08:00

The second stage in the classic model of creativity is the "incubation stage." An idea or difficulty presents itself to the person and then subsequently slips out of the person's consciousness before reappearing in a new form or in the context of new possibilities during the "moment of insight." We don't really know what goes on in the mind during the incubation stage: some say we stop thinking about the idea altogether, others claim that we are unconsciously mulling it over, both sides admit that this stage of the creative process is important.

I am nearing the end of fall term. A paper and a take-home final still need to be written, there are three finals to study for, and the first set of graduate school application deadlines is looming in the near future.

But today is Friday. The plan was to write unceasingly; mostly, I thought a lot, rearranged some words, worked up a new thesis statement, wrote a new outline. I slept, too. Now, a few hours away from an evening full of activities, I am trying to decide whether it would be wise to commit the problems of the day to my unconscious and let them have a night to resolve themselves.

I am leaning towards yes, but at this stage of the game, the question has less to do with creative efficacy than it does with the demands of deadlines. Can I afford the time?

Fine Art Friday

2009-12-04T12:20:00.001-08:00

René Magritte

2009-12-04T07:51:00.001-08:00

December light

2009-12-01T21:11:00.000-08:00

It is afternoon, the sleepy-time of these winter days when a lulling darkness begins to lap at the air and my mind is heavy with the past hours of work. This is not, I repeat, the most productive slice of my day, but I had promised that I would meet her, and so here I am.

This draft, we decide, is better; her face glows. But today I know it's none of my doing. I have to apologize, in fact, for confusing the last draft with a bad explanation of a key term. "I'm glad," I say, "that you got things sorted out in spite of me."

She touches me lightly on the shoulder, still smiling. She says it's alright. We're in this together, she says. Learning together.

***

Tonight, in the still of this first December night, I struggle through my own writing project. I am starting with a blank page because the old one was too confused, too cluttered with bad explanations of crucial terms. I am frustrated because I want to mean what I say and then say it well, but the words dodge and shift, syntax confounds, and it's just. not. there.

***

I wish I could bottle the moment and bring it to work with me.

I've said this before, haven't I?

But I think it's important to say--not too often, of course, but deliberately: it's a hard business, this business of word-smithing; we confuse ourselves, or are ourselves confused; we're wrong a lot of the time; we have to start over.

But then we come back, re-open, re-think, and maybe this time something clicks into place.

Our faces glow.

Along the same lines

2009-12-01T06:48:00.000-08:00

There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations--these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit--immortal horrors or everlasting splendours. This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn: We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously--no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption. And our charity must be a real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner--no mere tolerance, or indulgence which parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment. Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbour is the holiest object presented to your senses. If he is your Christian neighbour he is holy in almost the same way, for in him also Christ vere latitat--the glorifier and the glorified, Glory Himself, is truly hidden.
— C.S. Lewis (The Weight of Glory)

(HT: The thoughtful author of Semicolon)

November Harvest

2009-11-28T22:26:00.001-08:00

The Term of intrinsic value

2009-11-27T07:16:00.000-08:00

I am in the middle of a several weeks' long debate with one of my classmates. He says that some people are worth more than others, and that instrumental value is the measure of that worth; I'm arguing the opposite: people are valuable just because they're people, not because they happen to be quantum physicists instead of gas station attendants.

Our argument was brought up during a lunchtime conversation, and someone said, "Well, of course Allison would believe in intrinsic value. She's too nice to believe anything else." And I cringed, not because I don't appreciate the compliment (I'll take compliments any time!) but because the comment implied a sort of preciousness on the part of anyone who takes intrinsic value seriously. It implied that having this kind of faith in humanity is naive and ill-advised, that if I would only crawl out from under my rock, I would change my mind.

I won't change my mind. Intrinsic value isn't fluffy--at least not the way I see it. Respect people for who they are (and not just what), and I start running out of excuses for all kinds of selfish behavior. Actions I thought didn't matter suddenly (rightly!) appear spiteful or petty or unkind. My interactions with others are molded by the realization that I'm dealing with individual persons, after all, and there's more here than what I'm seeing, even if, at the moment, all I can see is the recalcitrant face on the other side of the counter or the window or the table or the classroom.

As with so many other things, Madeleine L'Engle says this better than I do. I found A Circle of Quiet sitting unattended on a counter top yesterday and picked it up, hoping to while away a few hours. Somehow, I found in her words ideas for two philosophy papers I'm working on and an affirmation of everything I have been expressing so poorly in my arguments over the last few weeks.

In one of the early chapters of the book, L'Engle writes about her serendipitous experience as a choir director at a village church. She didn't believe in God (that much she had made quite clear to the young pastor of the church), but she loved good music and

I wanted the choir to be good. I wanted us to sing good music, and to be a success. . . . If the choir was to be a success, the obvious first thing to do was to ease out some of the problem voices.

I couldn't do it. I don't know why, but something told me that every single person in that choir was more important than the music. 'But the music is going to be terrible,' I wailed to this invisible voice. 'That doesn't matter. That's not the reason for this choir.' I didn't ask what was, but struggled along. The extraordinary, lovely thing was that the music got to be pretty good, far better, I am now convinced, than it would have been if I'd put the music first and the people second. (pp. 35-36)

People (as people!) first; music--projects, abilities, and, yes, people as things second. This will not condemn us to economic, intellectual, or instrumental(!) failure. I promise. And I guarantee, too, that we'll all be just a little bit wiser and a lot happier because of it.

Wisdom and happiness. We're not naive to want those things, are we?

Giving thanks

2009-11-26T10:26:00.001-08:00

Where will I be a year from today? For ten terms now, I have been caught in the theme and variation of university life, and as this tenth term winds to an end, it's hard to believe that there's something else waiting just around the corner. There are days when I'm overwhelmed by the unknown; today, however, I'm just grateful to be here.

I'm grateful for a gentle rain drifting down from soft gray clouds, for woodsmoke and the scarred bark of pines.

I'm grateful for the university only a hop, skip, and a jump away from my home on the hill, for good friends, kind supervisors, and professors who strive for excellence in teaching and learning. I am more convinced than ever that the things we do and say impact the people around us.

I'm grateful for words; like actions, they can shape our lives. This term I have been blessed by a steady rain of syllabic kindness, by text messages, emails, handwritten notes, and conversations that have encouraged me to stay the course even as I struggle with the growing pains of uncertainty.

I'm grateful for music: for the perfect blend of melody, harmony, and rhythm on bleary-eyed mornings when even coffee can't stave off my weariness.

I'm grateful for light and laughter. Oregon does not always boast fair weather during the winter months, but when the sky does choose to show itself, the bright blue and the shards of November light are a reminder that there is peace in the midst of madness. And the sudden moments of humor--wry and witty--that spark through grim days can make even the darkest clouds bearable.

I'm grateful for love. I'm grateful that I have brothers and sisters who encourage and tolerate my (admittedly peculiar) enthusiasms, cousins and friends who empathize with my worries about the future, and parents who respect the path I have chosen to walk.

I'm grateful because when I asked my dad where I would be a year from today, he said, "Here, of course. You'll be home."

2009-11-14T11:39:00.000-08:00

The Fox and the Child, directed by Luc Jaquet ("The March of the Penguins"), was a refreshing end to a hectic week. Kate Winslet narrates this thoughtful tale of a child's friendship with a red fox who lives in the wilderness surrounding her home somewhere in the heart of rural France. We liked the film for its cinematography (dazzling shots of wildlife and nature); but the narration was good, too, and so was the music. The only person who had anything critical to say about the film was our resident nature-lover: "That girl should have KNOWN the fox didn't belong to her," she told us, indignantly. "It was a WILD fox." So, yes, there was that; but it ended well, I thought, and there was redemption, even for the child who should have known better.

For a sensible but kind review of the film, you might try the one that came out in the Times Online last year. It begins: "If this were a breakfast cereal, it would be a bowl of muesli with fresh fruit, topped with glistening honey." I can't help but agree.

Really alright

2009-11-14T09:11:00.000-08:00

"It's raining," I said as we looked out the window together after class.

"Where?" he demanded. "I don't see rain."

I tried to point it out to him: fine mist and sullen drizzle drifting down over tired leaves, the slick puddles stretched across the tennis courts, the heavy weight of the clouds pressing down on us. But, "Not so much," he said. "It is what you make of it, you just have to do a little reinterpreting."

I wasn't having any of it. Reinterpreting on a worn-out Thursday afternoon? Too much work, probably not worth the effort. "I'm going home," I said, "I'm just going home."

So I walked back to my car, and there was wind and a little rain, and I was cold and wet and miserable. I felt bad, too, because he had only been trying to cheer me up, after all, and I hadn't been very considerate of those attempts: gray day gone grayer, I thought.

But grayer days happen sometimes (trust me, I've had a lot of them lately), and I know that, eventually, they disappear into sleep and sweet nights and the gentle breaking of a new day.

"I'm sorry," I texted my friend. "And you know what?

"The rain is really alright."

Tuesday morning

2009-11-03T06:52:00.000-08:00

After a week of gray skies, the clouds have suddenly lifted to reveal streaks of light: the dusty rose and salmon of an early morning, the bold glow of a full moon on a November evening, the sharp crackle of blue stretched above bright leaves in the afternoon. October is my favorite month of the year, and at the beginning of the week, I was mourning its passing. Couldn't it be all October, all the time? I wanted to know.

It can't, of course. But the sudden luminosity of the air is a comfort today. November has its own charms.

Did you see that moon?

2009-10-24T22:03:00.001-07:00

There is a hum of contentment here. We are all busy about our own things, happy in our interests and passions, in the comings and goings of our individual, overlapping lives.

Once, when we were planning yet another move, we sat in the parking lot at Bel Air. I said, "Dad, we're pretty mobile people, all of us here in America, but especially us here in this car. We have to say goodbye a lot." Painfully didactic, even in my mid-teens, I explained how I saw it: "We say goodbye a lot, but we don't have to say goodbye to each other, right? We bring us with us, always together. Like 'flittenloops,'" I said, coining a word. "We're rings with wings: we bump into other people sometimes, and other times we leave, flitting off to the next best thing. But the loop itself, well, that doesn't change. It has integrity, self-sufficiency."

I haven't always been as grateful for this unbroken circle as perhaps I should have. But then there are Saturdays that remind me: this is really where it's at. Right here. Where home and heart are bound together with graciousness, humor, and the willingness to care.

This is why Oregon

2009-10-23T20:17:00.000-07:00

Across the heavy, sweet scent of red wine in plastic cups and over the ticking of found-object clocks they read to us. We are a small crowd in folding chairs; they, two finite voices grasping at the broken wholeness of the world, speaking of rain and sex and cancer with wryness, love. "The words are better heard out loud," I said later. But I like them in my head, too. Because voice or not, there is a tenderness here that makes me feel at home.

I was born here. Or I moved here only a few years ago. But we all belong in this fertile valley with its fish and fields--its friendliness.

Just a gathering in an art gallery on a drippy Thursday evening, here to hear. Our tastes are alternately divergent and overlapping, but I think it safe to say that we share at least one thing: an appreciation for the streets we walk and a thankfulness for the familiar outlines of the everyday. Oregon is our Promised Land, the blessing we grew up with, a choice we made.

On Meeting Sylvia, After Reading Her Journals

2009-10-23T08:31:00.000-07:00

There was anger in that sudden rush of words:
Red ink pouring over dumb page
To rage against the intolerable turning of the wheel
Beneath which you were broken, battered, crushed.

I watched speechless:
Blank face playing field for your emotions,
Empty heart too full to hold it all,
Like wax--impressed by desire, drama, tragedy.

There is a weight to all this desperation:
Hot irons flattening creases in the soul
To press thoughts growing round and bulging out,
To stop, mold, remake when really wrinkles are better.

Communal jigsaw on the third floor

2009-10-22T06:39:00.000-07:00

The staff in charge of archives and exhibits have scattered puzzle pieces across a table in the foyer at the top of the stairs. The signboard reads, "Communal jigsaw," and people have paid attention to it. Over the past four weeks, and in the intervals between my treks up and down those stairs, the puzzle has grown, the pieces have melded, blotches of color blend together and take on significant form. No one ever works at it for very long, but somehow, between hours spent studying for exams or stressing about the problems of the universe, progress has been made.

A few weeks ago, someone told me, "You were more honest today than you've ever been. Not," she hastened to add, "that you lie as a matter of course. But just that you actually told me, for the first time, what you're really thinking."

I have, I suppose, a reputation for reserve. When I said goodbye to my coworkers at my first job before moving to Oregon, one of them said, "Look at her! You can tell she has English blood in her--so calm and reserved." That is, not especially emotional, at least not in public.

Let's just say that communal puzzles don't tempt me much. Their publicness--the way they unfold and develop in plain view--scares me a little and makes me feel vulnerable. I am convinced that I will be happier if I simply walk on by: if you don't make an effort to put the pieces together, then you can't fail at the attempt, right?

But my conviction is crumbling. I might be wrong about this puzzle-thing, I guess. The communal jigsaw might be an acquired taste, but that certainly doesn't make it a less worthy or desirable one. I am more than willing to admit that the process of matching shapes and sorting colors finds its justification when conducted in public contexts: personal pursuits are more significant when we are willing to work on them with others, and if we are willing to admit that perhaps our individual visions can be enriched by the contributions of the person piecing things together beside us.

That doesn't mean it's easy to leave our quiet puzzle corners behind (or even that we ought to completely forsake those private goals). It's just to say that this morning I walked past a table on the third floor, and I thought that at least attempting a contribution to the work in progress was probably more honest and beautiful than refusing to stop and try.

Alcove with a view

2009-10-19T17:53:00.001-07:00

Study in Autumn from the third floor of Hamersly

Monday

2009-10-19T09:39:00.000-07:00

The weekend is over. All the donuts are gone and new homework assignments are tapping insistently on the door. Nothing new here; but that's the beauty of this season, isn't it? I told my family yesterday, "This is what I love about fall: it's here every year, and I'm still excited to see it."

I began my day today with two reflections on life and happiness.

The first talks about the connection between monotony and contentment (HT: Sriram):

In its essence life is monotonous. Happiness therefore depends on a reasonably thorough adaptation to life’s monotony. By making ourselves monotonous, we make ourselves equal to life. Thus we live to the full. And living to the full is to be happy.

The second reflection, equally important, is about riding out the in between times:

Years ago I heard a message about suffering and how at times we have to wait before we will have a song to sing. That message was by Jill Briscoe who happens to be friends with my dear friend Steph (whom I haven't met yet, but I hold her dear to my heart nonetheless.) She heard the same wisdom from her friend in this way: Oh, Steph. This is just the Selah before your next Psalm. Don't miss this or you won't know the next song. The Selah. That is where I am living right now. In that space between the praises.

So this is where Monday finds me: living monotony contentedly, just doing the next thing (ad infinitum), ready for praise or Selah-space--whatever happens to be coming my way next.

Flavor of a Saturday

2009-10-17T23:09:00.000-07:00

A long day, intermittently gray and rainy, punctured by a morning thunderstorm, lulled into evening by a sweet wind and clearing skies. I spent the early hours of the day reading through The New Yorker. Piping hot homemade donuts and freshly ground coffee were grace notes to a series of engaging articles. My favorites? The ones about football, children's literature, and publishing, of course!

In "Offensive Play," Malcolm Gladwell develops a fascinating comparison between football and dogfighting:

At the core of the C.T.E. research is a critical question: is the kind of injury being uncovered by McKee and Omalu incidental to the game of football or inherent in it? Part of what makes dogfighting so repulsive is the understanding that violence and injury cannot be removed from the sport. It’s a feature of the sport that dogs almost always get hurt. Something like stock-car racing, by contrast, is dangerous, but not unavoidably so. . . . So what is football? Is it dogfighting or is it stock-car racing?

"The Defiant Ones" is an astute review of contemporary children's read-alouds:

Anxious parents—the midnight Googlers who repeatedly seek advice from experts—learn that there are many things they must never do to their willful young child: spank, scold, bestow frequent praise, criticize, plead, withhold affection, take away toys, “model” angry emotions, intimidate, bargain, nag. Increasingly, nearly all forms of discipline appear morally suspect.

The publishing article is, unfortunately, not linkable, and I don't have my hard copy at hand, but suffice it to say that I am disillusioned with Alloy and its packaged plots.

And lest I forget, there was this whimsical, yet insightful commentary on the "Nobel Surprise":

If President Obama really had to get a gift postmarked Scandinavia this month, he would probably, on the whole, have preferred the Olympics. At least at the Olympics the judges wait till after the race to give you the gold medal. They don’t force it on you while you’re still waiting for the bus to take you to the stadium. They don’t give it to you in anticipation of possible future feats of glory, like a signing bonus or an athletic scholarship. They don’t award it as a form of gentle encouragement, like a parent calling “Good job!” to a toddler who’s made it to the top rung of the monkey bars. It’s not a plastic, made-in-China “participation” trophy handed out to everyone in the class as part of a program to boost self-esteem. It’s not a door prize or a goody bag or a bowl of V.I.P. fruit courtesy of the hotel management. It’s not a gold star. It’s a gold medal.
We can take it as a sign of what a lucky fellow our President is that winning the Nobel Peace Prize has been widely counted a bad break for him.

When I wasn't reading The New Yorker, I was rereading parts of the Consolation of Philosophy, pondering the implications of doing and having one's own in Plato's Republic, and celebrating a sister's 11th birthday. She's the only person I know who requests a bag of birdseed and then, upon opening it, hugs it like it's packaged in diamonds. Then again, as my brother said this evening, "We're not geeks. We're just enthusiasts."

Happy end-of-Saturday!