39: In Defense of Moments

 

The destination eludes me, and I cannot remember anything about which airport I had boarded at. I also cannot remember the year, the purpose of the trip or the events surrounding the flight. All I remember is that it was an afternoon flight heading from the east to the west and that I was in an aisle seat. We rose up above flat sheets of clouds that had gloomed our departure and entered into a race against the setting sun. We were hopelessly outmatched by the celestial angles and the torque of our raceway, but it provided one of the most singular sunsets that I have ever witnessed.

 

As I am wont to do, I jumbled words around in my head attempting to praise the beauty and the artist who painted this serenely soul-scorching scene and in a haphazard twist of clumsy luck and a smattering of AP lit experience, I composed what I am convinced is my most heartfelt and eloquent poem. I proceeded to immediately forget it.

 

There wasn’t a napkin on my lap and, as I had not entered any version of a career yet, the pen that predominates my shirt pocket these days had yet to become a staple of my wardrobe. I’m fairly certain that my phone was dead and, as my wife can attest, my overall ability to remember any given sequence of words (or numbers, I’ve found) is on par with a racoon having a stroke. All of the words I had composed fell out of the back of my head and probably puddled somewhere between the cheap faux leather of the seat and my beltline.

 

There have been countless attempts to re-create that prose since then, all failed and all more frustrating than fruitful. For the longest time, the main emotion that I linked to that experience was one of irritation and a sensation of lost treasure. My mind wanders back to that flight and does everything in its limited power to piece together specific light fragments hitting the jut of a cloud back and hoping that the mental image strikes the flint of my forgotten sonnet.

 

            As is my bent, this fixation turned to reflection. Realization flitted in fitful spurts and eventually seeped in the groundwater of my perception of this tendency to attach specific and regretful sentiment to the images, the expressions, the explosion of color and sound and emotion that I had failed to capture. This could be in any medium, whether I had not swung the pen mightily enough to regale a reader with the majesty of a mountaintop or If I had not painted a friends face with a camera, lit by healthy firelight as they listened to a story and laughed. Small things and large things that I had let pass me by without a concrete memento began to pile up in my remorse cabinet, which was overflowing with the vexation of a life not documented and fixated in its proper place.

 

            It is most likely not a stretch to say that many feel similarly in this regard. Life is a precious gift from God and there is almost a pressure to prove to ourselves and those around us that we are appreciating it with accordant zest. The motive has the capacity to be pure and lining up with the original intent of creation to be a window through which we see the creative beauty of God. It can often and easily be remade into our own self-sycophantic abyss that both consumes itself and feeds itself. My motives in wanting to remember a key anthem that was inspired by nature could not be completely extricated from my desire to share it with others and the subsequent praise received for my wordsmithery. Many pictures I’ve taken are less about the subject in the lens and more about showcasing the skill or perceived unique personal nature of the idiot holding the camera. My aim in capturing a moment has transitioned from glorifying the scene/person/moment and more about becoming a captor of a thing of beauty. The words I wield can treacherously become shackles to bind the moment to my whimsy and personal gain, the portrait I paint (with light or liquid or other) can easily become a cell for the subject within.

 

            Qualification: I do not denounce the act of marking time and moments with man-made tools, language being one of them. There is much to be said for the act of sharing and remembering the times and places and people who have impacted our lives greatly, and in its right place, the art of remembering can be beautiful and wholesome. The best way that I can describe my thought is to steal someone else’s. Pervasive commercialism aside, the movie “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” carries the essence of my thought best.  When the character of Sean O’Connell has the opportunity to snap an exquisitely rare photo of an elusive snow leopard, he disregards the camera and addresses the protagonist. “If I like a moment, I mean; me, personally… I don’t like to have the distraction of the camera. I just want to stay in it. Right there… Right here.”  In a similar vein, we can see what the book of Ecclesiastes has to say of it in chapter 3, vs 11 “He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end. I perceived that there is nothing better for them than to be joyful and to do good as long as they live.”

 

            I am letting that sunset go. The memory of it will be a happy one from now on. I will stop grasping for ties and mental hooks that may give me a handhold on the words I strung together in that moment and simply remember the glow blushing off the upturned clouds. Everything is beautiful in its time; and if my hubris and self-made sharing empire obstruct the intrinsic beauty of the thing I intend to capture, then it must be my duty to dismantle my empire and only use my words and my lens as a mode to remember, not to take ownership of it.

 

 

 

38: The Great Grey

 

There is no real question in my mind about why I am thinking in terms of grey. Right now I am looking out my February-stained window and all that meets me is grey. Sky is flatter and more boring than ashes in it's monochrome yet cold blandness. The trees have forgotten how to speak any language and are left contorted and embarrassed in their nakedness. The slowed and bloated (and aptly named) Tar river sloths past its banks after having gorged on too many rainstorms up in the Appalachian foothills out west. 

My street is littered with both wet and withered leaves, color leached from their veins. My walls have soaked in the outside sulk and are dripping in sullen shadows. My metaphors lay in a puddle on the floor, though that might just be remnants of a tipped cup of coffee. It is fairly tough to tell at this point and everything muddles together as I start to count on my fingers to determine which day of the week it is. 

Huh, even my shirt is grey. I didn't plan that. 

Plus Im fairly sure that i'm using the wrong spelling for grey, or maybe its just the British version. Grey vs Gray: The worlds most limp-wristed dispute.

The main thrust of putting any of this down onto black and white is to try to delineate and put margins to why I have been feeling so dissipated. I'm not going to share this one because it is much more about my process in capturing and taking meditative stock of my current mental and spiritual state than it is about entertaining or provoking thought or whatever self-aggrandizing motivation could be tagged onto previous entries. If someone happens to run across it for whatever reason and scrapes some personal insight off of its untidy floor, then they can benefit or increase in confusion at their own risk or reward. This one is for me. 

A majority of my life feels hemmed in by a thick and bloodless fog. Mind is addled by a continuous circuit of task to plan to task to outcome to task to error to task to solution to task to task again that limits itself almost entirely to fingertip motions and monotonous and pyrrhic victories over unimportant and ultimately crumbling hills. I'm sure that part of this stems from the nature of hospital work. Every person who I will "heal" or have a hand in "healing" will eventually run out of ability to be mended and will be subjected to worms and dirt. The sole aspect that puts its finger in the dike of overwhelming cynicism and deep sorrow is that each day that the person in the hospital bed is taking their own breaths is a day that can redeem their souls from the pitiable and horrible fate of being their own wildly inept and hideously foolish gods and return the throne of their lives to the rightful King; or at very least to stop eating themselves to death. 

All things considered, I still cannot blame my current emotional/spiritual state that is best compared to cold and unsalted grits on the population of humans coming into my workspace anymore than I can blame it on the odd influx of cockroaches into our kitchen in recent days. I'm sure that it is a factor and it would be fairly stupid of me to dismiss it, but if I hang my hat on it as the root diagnosis for the malaise i'm mucking around in then I would be blandly lying to myself and very aware of the fact. 

Without any froofy wordplay, the issue is that I have forgotten my margins. Forgotten or failed to retrace them on a regular basis. My personhood has osmosed out into the aether and mingled with it to the point where neither have their own distinct existence. Annihilation at its meh-est. I sat in a cheap armchair too close to the abyss, we melded and now neither of us have eyes to stare at each other through. Melodramatic: Minus 2 points off my blog scorecard. 

It is eerily near the portrait that Lewis paints in "The Great Divorce" where the wisps of human souls who have chosen their own solitary and foggy gray hell are suddenly forced to interact with the starkly self-embued grass of heaven. The souls are so lost in terms of their own purpose and meaning and source that they have forgotten their weight and their realness so that when they step on grass that is in concert with its source and self and purpose and meaning, the grass pierces through the feet of the ghastly souls because it meets no margin to interact with. Each blade of grass is so itself that it needs to interact with something of similar self-embodied substance to bend and be walked upon. As per usual, Lewis rapidly elevates an iron-toed boot into my crotch and forces me to look at myself without my spiritual make-up on. 

I have forgotten who I am because I have neglected to root in the source of the one who made me. My substance has softened into the gray around me because I turned my face away from the God who holds my only true name written on a white stone in his hand. I have refused the artists chisel with apathetic gestures of self-sufficiency and have attempted to slap sloppy, soggy clay on the statue of myself in attempts to finish what God started because "I know what I need". 

"Who has made mans mouth? Who makes him mute, or deaf, or seeing, or blind? Is it not I, The Lord?" Exodus 4:11

"For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother's womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well." Psalm 139: 13-14.

"Or who shut in the sea with doors when it burst out from the womb, when I made clouds its garment and thick darkness its swaddling band, and prescribed limits for it and set bars and doors, and said, 'This far shall you come, and no farther, and here shall your proud waves be stayed'?" Job 38: 8-11

Delineation. Margins. Shape and substance and form and everything that defies that nebulous abolition of man into mist come from God and his careful and fierce carving of our lines, his searing forge giving shape to our metal, his sharp-tipped pen inking our personhood on paper. He abhors the lukewarm and the osmosed man I have drifted towards being and demands that my skin be drastically hotter than the surrounding fog so that I will starkly contrast the dim grey that surrounds my every day life. 

William Ernest Henley hoarsely shouted "I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul." Before I get too far ahead of myself, I would make sure to point out that there is no ill will towards Henley. I do believe that we all have impetus in how we conduct our lives and that our responses to hardships are our duty and task. We should take hold of the helm and not be tossed every which way by the storms or life, but the main issue I take with this poem is that a quick google search shows that he was born on August 23, 1849 and died on July 11, 1903. The self proclaimed master of his Fate fell out of a railway carriage which caused his tuberculosis to flare up which ultimately killed him. Similarly, I suspect that he had next to no influence over his birth (due to my having little to no perspective over the supernatural realm, I refrained from speaking with certainty.) 

He may have had an undaunted spirit during his 53 years on earth and his personhood was impressive enough to influence Robert Louis Stevenson to fashion his infamous character of Long John Silver in Henleys likeness, but it is difficult to switch my brain off from a very specific "The Office" reference in this scenario. That being when the office crew takes a booze cruise and the captain of the boat gets sick of Dwight and shows him to a fake steering wheel which Dwight enthusiastically grips onto and begins deluding himself into thinking that he is steering the boat. We all know who is actually steering the boat, Dwight/Ernest. Lets stop pretending. 

This could quickly de-rail into a discussion about free will versus predestination and I definitely feel that i've already digressed further from my original point than I should have, so this is where I will end. 

To sum up. God is God and I am not. I am God's son and He authors my character. My self-ness is rooted in his God-ness. My Man-hood stems from his God-hood and I praise him for that solid, weighty, circumscribed fact.