.
One reads about defining moments in a life. Those experiential sparks that start us down that path that will become our life. I suppose, if I worked at it, I could create a narrative that would read that way. But it would be an artificial construction. Perhaps a long enough time with an excellent therapist might lead to a moment where she would declare, “There, don’t you see? That was the moment! That was the existential spark that leads to now! And here are the issues we should address.” And, in the name of Fostering Harmony, I would produce my insurance card, say “Thank you!” and head off down the road into another quantum branching that led elsewhere. Because I really don’t see it that way at all.
Mind you, I have nothing against the idea of a defining moment in a life. My objection is with the notion that there is just that one. The clouds part, a rainbow arches overhead, and the path to wealth, fame, a Pulitzer or a Nobel prize is suddenly clear. Cue the orchestra. Finish the curtain call. Bring up the house lights. Strike the set. Head for the cast party. Call it a life.
If that is how it is supposed to work, I have done something wrong, or the awards committee lost my address. Rather, I am becoming more convinced that our lives are shaped by plural moments of significant connections; individuals and events that do bump us down one of the variety of quantum worlds that we share with the shifting cast of characters who define our shared reality. Which, in part, explains the words of that great philosopher Yogi Berra who once opined “Deja vu all over again!”
But seriously, while I simply cannot point to any single time or event that “cast the die” in my life, I can easily point to multiple individuals and events that, either as “one-time” or “first-time” experiences or as continuing relationships, initiate or maintain significant influences over my worldview. Therapists love parental models, and probably with good cause. My father was a university professor and my mother was among the most gentle people I have ever known. One need not spend a few hundred dollars an hour on a couch of questionable quality to discover the importance of those connections in my life.
More interesting to me are those connections that are less obvious but perhaps of equal influence in my journey through life. And this might be a good place to point out - particularly in these mediated days of CV19 - that influential connections can be fictional and/or historical as well as real-live-sharing-your-space people. For example, I can trace a series of fictional anthropomorphized critters whose gentle presence has always been important in my life. Beginning with Thornton Burgess’s Tales of Mother West Wind, and Peter Cottentail, through Kenneth Grahame’s Wind in the Willows, and of course A.A. Milne’s Winnie The Pooh, these very human animals bounced along beside me for much longer than I would have easily admitted to my more sophisticated peers who were already flirting with Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys.
More important, naturally, then and now, are the connections we maintain with experiences that we share with real live people. These connections are scattered throughout our lives and it is the ways in which they influence and inform each other that creates the richness and beauty of our existence. Let us look at a couple of relevant examples from material science. Yeah, I love it when I get to pull “relevant examples” from fields in which I have no training!
Consider glass blowing. I love glass art. But even more than the shimmering perfection of lead crystal, I am captured by the constructions of Dale Chihuly and others that feature swirls of colors blending like a frozen sunset or field of tulips. Those blended swirls of color are created, I understand, by a series of “gathers” wherein the artist repeatedly inserts the piece being created into the furnace and “gathers” multiple layers of glass of different colors onto the tube and blows and spins the piece out into the psychedelic constructs for which the art form is renowned. No single gather, no single experience or connection, can duplicate the depth and complexity of multiple gathers. [Editor’s aside: In the course of writing this post I came across a sort of tangentially related beautiful YouTube video that I simply must post https://youtu.be/PeMGRMwarKI.]
Or consider the katana, the Japanese samurai sword. Or actually any finely crafted sword or knife. None of them are created by hammering a single thickness of steel into the shape of a blade. To simplify the process terribly, you keep folding the steel into layers that you reheat, reforge, and hammer together to create a sort of steel Big Mac - 2 all beef paddies, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles onions on a sesame seed bun in steel - compressed over and over to create a blade of exceptional strength, flexibility and beauty.
Life is a lot like that. No one moment, no one experience, no one person or relationship is “all there is.” As Peggy Lee sang back in 1969, “If that’s all there is . . .Let’s keep dancing. Break out the booze.” But fortunately, as I just said, that is never all there is. There is always another existential “gather“ in the glass sculpture of our lives, another fold and reforge to give our living, evolving, katana greater strength, flexibility and beauty.
Thinking about the multiple layers created by the many experiences and connections in our lives makes me wonder about the possibility of existential wormholes. Quantum mechanics often raises the notion of physical wormholes in the universe, places where the universe folds back upon itself in a way that makes it possible to - in one small step for man (and woman) - sort of instantaneously slip across vast reaches of space and time, leaving the limiting notion of the speed of light tattered in our wake. Well, can we do the same thing in the multilayered construction of our existential experience? And is that the real nature of dreaming? Do those sometimes rather real, mundane even, nocturnal narratives spring from the same space as their frenetic, almost psychotic, hallucinatory cousins? And is that incubating space the folded, multi-gathered realm created by our ever evolving life experiences? I just finished my almost daily walk while listening to the Pandora channel “Hits of the 50s, 60s, and 70s” Oh my! What faces, places and memory traces inhabit that space. And can we wander around in that space via “dreamholes”? And then can we draw, paint, sing, compose, sculpt, choreograph, our memories of those voyages? Whew. Maybe. There are, after all, “more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
.
No comments:
Post a Comment