I did some writing today, but not as much as I would have liked, and wanted to quit. I decided that rather than fight it, I would go with the flow, so to speak, and see not what I wanted to make myself do, but what I wanted to do. It's a dangerous route, I know, because it's so easy to use it as an excuse to do avoid doing what needs to be done. To do nothing. But maybe that was what I wanted to do. As I walked into the garage, to go drive out and do an unnecessary errand, I for some reason thought about an iron wedge that I have out there, for the purpose of splitting wood. I hadn't used it in years and part of my errand was to buy some firewood for the fireplace. I remembered I had some wood out back that I had kept piled up but never used, and decided to split some wood and see how it worked. I did, the wood split wonderfully, and it's burning nicely as I write. I thought about how I had spent the last hour, and recalled something about Jung, how when he got blocked once he set about playing with stone, gathering rocks and building with them, until he was able to get past it. I googled that idea, and found that he had written about it in his autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections. I remembered I had the book, buried in my collection, and I found it after some searching. It had a bookmark in it, an old airline tickt stub, marking that section of the book. (That's a nice bit of synchronicity, this swirl of Jung and my old library, but that's a different issue). As Jung writes, first, he asked himself, "what is your myth-the myth by which you live?" And he found no answer but an irresistible urge to gather and build with stones, as he had when a child. "I was on the way to discovering my own myth. For the building game was only a beginning. It released a stream of fantasies which I later carefully wrote down." My point is not that I am or ever will be the visionary Jung was, but that I have reached a point in my life at which I have no choice left but to look within, and see what is really there, and hope that I can fashion some sort of meaning from it. Splitting wood was what I wanted to do, even though it has no "real" value in the world, but doing so inspired this blog entry, so that's something.
Back when I reported for work in an office on a daily basis, I developed a deserved reputation as one who despised emoticons. My co-workers never used them with me, save to kid or irritate me. I still have that attitude. And yes, I well precede the millennial generation, but I don't think this is simply an old man rant. I bring this up because every site I visit, include this one, has ample examples of them. The reason I dislike them is that they strike me as cheap communication, a way to try and amplify a communication instead of writing it in a way that stands on its own. I understand the rationale for them in emails, on a limited basis -- because of the risk of having a facetious or half-facetious message taken as hostile, a little smiley-face or winking emoticon serves as insurance. But for any other purpose, careful writing should suffice. The emoticons just strike me as too "cutesy." If anyone is planning to respond to this with a slew of emoticons, please resist the temptation. It's been done before, and was not funny the first time.
This morning I was thinking about my father, and came across a very old book of mine, a paperback given me by my father, C.G. Jung's Synchronicity. Dad never cared much about Jung, so far as I know, but he gave it to me because he knew I was interested in him. I hadn't read it in years. In the book Jung makes a strong, if ultimately unscientific argument that there is often an acausal relationship between two events, that is, meaningful coincidences. His most vivid example -- which, perhaps in an example today, is the only detail I remember of his argument, and it was to that page the book opened, even though it was not in any way creased to that page -- is that of his work with a woman who he found very difficult to reach. She was telling him of a dream she had involving an golden scarab from Egypt; as she spoke Jung heard a tapping at his window, opened it, and a scarab beetle flew in. He caught it in his hand, and showed it to her -- "Is this what you mean?" Her subsequent astonishment, he said, broke through her intellectual posturing and made it possible for him to treat her. That's his telling of course, and he was sort of the John Lennon of those days of psychiatry, a creative genius sometimes given to selective memory. But I know I have experienced such things in my life, and as I get older I am more and more willing to give solid credibility to the idea that existence is far more than our apparent world. That's ironic in a way, because in my youth I dabbled in such things as the I Ching, and it seemed to work, but more as posturing I think than as reality; I abandoned it in the face of real-life crisis. But back to synchronicity. One example for me was when I was sitting outside in the trees beside a building at my university. I was meditating, and as I sat there the name "Balthazar" came into my consciousness I walked back into the building and saw a poster announcing the impending arrival of a yoga master with that name. Not much came of it, I attended a couple classes with him, but never followed through. But still . . . .
"But a spark still burned so I saved the life . . .." I decided to start a fire today, the second of the season. Impatient as usual, I tried to make it burn before it was ready, resulting in a lot of newspaper ash and a bit of frustration. After several efforts, I got it going, and now it's contentedly crackling away. Exactly what I wanted. It will of course reach its point of maximum heat and flame, then slowly die away. As they all do. As we all do. I find myself thinking of an old friend, old in the sense of getting a bit long in the tooth as I am, but also old as in mostly former. We were so close for so long, but for reasons I think I know but am not sure, we are no longer in any but the most irregular contact. But in our younger days we were almost literally inseparable, like brothers except perhaps closer, because we chose each other. Camping, mountain-climbing, innumerable hikes and bike rides, best men at each other's weddings (twice for me) and there for each other's firstborns, both daughters. One affectation my friend -- let's call him Mark for that is his name -- had was/is to start a fire with only one match. I recall watching him so carefully assemble a campfire, light the match and place it just so, and blow and coax the embers into flame. I teased him about it, but secretly I envied both the determination and the demonstrated ability. So many fires we shared. How many times I marveled at how wonderful a true friendship could be. But like fires, all relationships run their course. Perhaps there is still a spark, perhaps I can someday fan that into at least a brief flame. But I honestly don't think so. The thing about this mortality we call life, is that we come from mystery, we leave to mystery, and we do both alone. Only in the interim do we find companionship, and when we do, we should treasure it. It is a gift, not a given.
From the outside writing seems like a relatively simple and straightforward task. Think about something, marshal those thoughts and capture them with words. I believe any writer will tell you it's more than that. In my experience, the words are the final step. I write them and delete them and change them to match some inner cadence, which ultimately satisfies myself and seems to be pleasing to others. That's good, but something else needs to happen first. I need to hear an inner voice, some mysterious inner me who wants to speak in its/his own voice. That became clear to me recently in my latest responses to a series of writers' prompts on another site -- 500 words each week on a specific topic. In my response to one I placed myself into the scene and tried to modify myself to make my story sensible. The resulting speaker -- as yet unnamed -- seemed to intrigue a number of people, who wanted to know more about him. Me too. He came to me from nowhere, but (not trying to sound deluded) seems to be a real personality trying to get onto paper/pixels. I kept that person for the next two prompts and learned more about him each time. My adult daughter, one who loves the character, compared my technique with him to automatic writing. And it sort of is, not a trance but rather falling into the flow, and channeling what I would call an inner archetype. The closest I can come to a parallel observation is watching a musician when he or she goes beyond the mechanics of the notes and almost vanishes into the music. I've never done this before, but then I've never made a fulltime commitment to writing. I wonder if this is how other writers feel. And for that matter, how i've managed to miss out on it for so long.
A couple years back we acquired a lovebird, courtesy of my youngest daughter. Noisy, obnoxious, pushy and bites. And the lovebird is worse. Okay, bad joke. Anyway, every morning she or I would empty his food dish and throw the leftover debris outside for the wild birds to pick over. One morning I noticed a wild rabbit -- a cottontail -- coming to the door as we tossed stuff, and we began to give her some food on a regular basis. I say her because she was obviously nursing. We named her "Lady." I soon bought some rabbit treat and put it out every morning in which she showed up. Soon a second, smaller, rabbit showed up, too. He was more willing to trust us, but he had to be very careful because if he intruded on her space, she would snap at him and run him off. Daughter named him Juniper for some reason I never really understood. It got to be a daily routine, kind of like Mutt and Jeff, those squabbles. Some days I would be sitting in the screened back porch when one would wander by. I'd say something, and the rabbit would stand on his or her hind legs, seeking the voice. A fascinating intersection of domestic and wild. As summer ended, so did the visits. Mostly. Once in awhile he comes by -- I can tell it's Junie because he comes right up -- Lady would always circle cautiously. He's gotten big. I know that the life of a cottontail is "short, brutish, and nasty" because they are prey food, fair game for almost anything from a cat to a coyote. I like to think our backyard is a sanctuary of sorts, fenced, with some rabbit-sized patches of ground cover,. Some days the two of them showed up and just hung about. One day I saw Lady sprawled out in the summer sun. If you read up on rabbits, you'd see that they only sprawl like that when they feel secure. I took that as an honor. But the fact is that hawks can and have swooped down or settled in one of the trees, watching. I understand that the average lifespan of a cottontail is 18 months. No doubt Lady has already succumbed. I wonder how long Junie will survive. But I've learned to take that as a fact of life, his tenuous grip on life, and also a reminder that we are all this far from extinction. That's why I found it so rewarding to see him show up today, perched at the rim of the porch light beam. I rattled the food jar and he came running, his fur matted from the cold November rain. Bigger than ever, and so damned uncomplaining. I wish I could face life like that.