Hazard

In one of the first encounters Nicholas has with Conchis in John Fowles' The Magus, Nicholas realizes that Conchis is saying and doing things that he does not expect Nicholas to believe. He is confused by the scenario he finds himself in and tells Conchis, "I'd enjoy it all more if I knew what it meant" (189). Conchis finds this amusing and says he himself doesn't know what it means, to which Nicholas replies, "Why me?" Conchis, in turn, says, "There is only one answer to your question...Why everything is, including you, including me, and all the gods, is a matter of hazard. Nothing else. Pure hazard."

A few more quotes from the novel:
"The world began in hazard and will end in it."
"There is no plan. All is hazard. And the only thing that will preserve us is ourselves."

Let's start with the etymology of hazard, which means "chance or luck." Conchis is then saying that the world and each of us in it is entirely a matter of chance. We are nothing more than the result of atoms falling into place at random. My initial reaction to this was to say, "No- we make things happen in our lives. We sculpt who we are; we are all paintings composed of particular brush strokes and purposeful colors." But then I realized; I am wrong.

Everything I am is a result of the experiences I have had. And I have no control over what has happened to me. I remember my 9th grade speech teacher once saying, "You cannot control what happens to you, but you can control how you react." When I first heard it I did not fully understand it (although I of course thought I did). I took it to explain the big obviously-out-of-our-control things: natural disasters, deaths, etc. But when thinking of it now, in regards to Conchis' words, I realize it applies to everything: the hobbies I have, the clothes I wear, the people in my life. All of it is nothing more than a matter of chance.

I walk around thinking I have made myself into the person I am today, but really I have done nothing more than react to what has been presented to me; "There is no plan. All is hazard. And the only thing that will preserve us is ourselves." I am not responsible for the life I have, only for the perspective I have. And even then, I only hold partial ownership because I could not have formed that way of viewing things without the experiences (over which I have no control) that I have encountered. I am so very little my own.

We are not paintings composed of particular brush strokes and purposeful colors; we are the image you can almost see when you tilt your head looking into a grouping of clouds. We are a matter of hazard. And this should not be taken in a negative manner, but in quite a positive one. Being a matter of hazard allows us so much potential for change. Our limits extend beyond those that we, in all of our human futility, are restricted to and reach as far as the eye can see. Every collision between atoms provides another image for us to react to and therefore another opportunity for development.

These thoughts crawled around in my head as I was walking from campus to my car today. As per usual I had my headphones in and was listening to my iPod. The song ended and as I clicked the screen on to select a new song I thought of The Magus and how "Every answer is a form of death." In a way, my choosing to select a specific song kills the opportunity for surprise; it is an answer of sorts and since it could not bring anything new into my life, what possible motive do I have for choosing the song? I went instead to all of my songs and selected the "shuffle" option. When, seconds later, a song popped on that made me think "Wow I haven't heard this is forever, this makes me think of the angst-filled poetry I used to write years ago" I was rewarded. How long would it have taken me to think back to those angsty poems if I hadn't heard that song? Would I ever have thought of them in depth like that again?

Who knows. Maybe I would have been brought back to that memory by something else only hours later. Maybe days. Or years. No one can be sure; it is all a matter of hazard.

Fishing Line in the Oven

Largely due to our class' reading Annie Dillard's For the Time Being, the topic of death has been thrown around quite a bit lately. However, I am confident this topic would be coming up even if we were reading works that did not mention death at all, being as it is a topic of human fixation. An E.M. Foster quote referenced in Dillard's book sums up the reason for this quite nicely,

"We move between two darknesses. The two entities who might enlighten us, the babe and the corpse, cannot do so."

 We are fixated on the concept of death because it is a mystery to us and therefore scary. As humans we like to pretend to be in control; we plan and organize our lives in an attempt to convince ourselves that we have the power and ability to make those things happen. When something out of our plan happens we say, "Oh well- we can't control everything" when really we accept that we cannot control anything. But death... death is the most alluding thing of all because we know so little about it that we don't even know how to pretend to control it.

Some people approach it with faith- taking religious dogmas for fact and believing in a beautiful afterlife or reincarnation. Others say there is nothing, just a hole in the ground and that is that. But the thing both of these groups have in common is their ability to be influenced by death- whatever it may be.

I must say, I had always dreaded death. I was raised in a Catholic household and grew up believing there were three options for me once I died: heaven, purgatory, or hell. And which place I would be sent to depended on my actions in this life. I have always had a vigor for life and my "bucket list" is about 30 versts long, so I clung to the notion of an afterlife furiously. However, I recently had an experience that completely affirmed my belief; I died.

Okay, so I didn't heart-stops-beating-face-turns-blue die, but I certainly thought I did. I was at my friend's house "opening the doors in my head" when suddenly I was pulled into a vivid action sequence; I had walked into my house and flipped on the lights to see two men in front of me. They were dressed in black and looked as shocked to see me as I was to see them. Before I could take another step or form a word with my mouth, the man nearest to me raised a gun level with my head and pulled the trigger.

The first thing I saw was his eyes; they switched from shocked to determined in an instant. And in that same instant I saw the bullet spiral out of the pistol's barrel and come towards me. I felt it pierce my skull and sink into my brain tissue. I felt my body go rigid in fear and then limp as I was hit. I felt my lungs deflate and my knees give out as I slowly crumpled to the floor, and at the same time I felt myself - very much "alive" - move towards something else. Something that I had never seen before but that, upon looking directly at it, I realized had always been there: like a door I had never opened in a house I had lived in my whole life. And I moved towards that, knowing that it would be pleasant and warm and forever; the "afterlife."

Now, though this "experience" was entirely in my mind, it stuck with me. Only a few days later I was rafting, got thrown out, pulled under, and caught in a tangle of roots under the water. I struggled to swim against the strong current, but it pushed me into a web of roots that I could not escape. I thought to myself, "so this is it.. this is how I am going to die." And as I felt myself weaken, I felt that same presence as before. There was the door. Right there. And I would be okay in there; it would be painless and pleasant and warm. There was nothing to fear. And as I realized that I realized that I might as well keep living then. For what should I be afraid of in life if I know that at the end I have this place I will certainly arrive at, and it is not painful or scary at all?? The answer: nothing. Right then an arm wrapped around me and I was pulled to the surface; my friend had jumped out after me and saved me.

The conclusion I have then come to is that death is not painful. Life is. We create all these rules and boundaries and behavioral modes to follow, and we force ourselves to do things we don't want to do. We get high-stress jobs to make more money so that we can acquire things that will make us more likable to the people around us. We measure success in terms of dollar bills. We wash our clothes after each individual use. And what for? What are we saying? Or NOT saying?

What would you do if you had nothing to fear?

I've been having a lot of dreams about the end of the world lately. And in last night's version it was ending due to nuclear warfare. My family and I ran into the mountains to survive off the land. All was going well and we suddenly discovered a cabin equipped with an oven. For some reason, I had my fly rod in the kitchen and was casting while my mother made up dinner. She opened the oven door right as I released my line and it fell onto the door. I pulled it in as fast as I could, but the leader had melted entirely; my line was rendered useless. I held my worthless rod in my hands and cried; I had been using it as the main means of our survival and there was no way I could get replacement leader. It was the end. Death was imminent. And I was afraid.

I woke from this dream upset, but as I thought it over in my mind I realized how silly it was: dying because I cast my fishing line on the oven. I also realized how silly another thing was: death. It is the one thing we can be sure will happen in life, so for all of our desire for control and plans, death should be the most comforting concept of all. Tis but a tangle of melted leader.

Honesty

It startled me to read, in Northrop Frye's The Secular Scripture,

"The improbable, desiring, erotic, and violent world of romance reminds us that we are not awake when we have abolished the dream world: we are awake only when we have absorbed it again" (61)

When I first read this - this provocative statement Frye uses to close chapter 2 of his book - I was pulled straight from the humdrum of reading to reread it multiple times. We are awake only when we have absorbed [the dream world] again.  This echos a thought I have had many times before: that our mind, when in a dream state, it at its freest and therefore most raw and honest state. This is what it boils down to: honesty.

The worst thing a human can feel is helplessness. Whether it be physically (being held at gun point), mentally (suffering from anxiety, depression, etc), or abstract (not knowing what to do with one's life or the like), helplessness is debilitating and strips a person of their confidence, dependence, and pride. However, it is only by being honest with ourselves about our limitations and abilities that we can make realistic goals and thereby take realistic steps towards achieving them which keeps us from feeling helpless.

It is also honesty which brings us to have a truthful perception of ourselves. Today in class Jonah said he wondered what it would be like if we introduced ourselves to others by saying things like, "Hello my name is Jonah and I need constant words of affirmation from girls I like to boost my ego." The response from Dr. Sexson was, "And do you all remember how we introduced ourselves at the beginning of this class?" Of course we did; we introduced ourselves by saying our name and a dream we had experienced. And because our dream state is so raw and unfettered, the two methods of introduction (Jonah's and Dr. Sexson's) really are one and the same.

George Santayana states, "Sanity is madness put to good uses; waking life is a dream controlled." I felt a smile on my face the instant I heard this quote in class today. Not because of any prior connection to it, but because I agree with it so completely. To be sane we must accept that we are all a little mad; we must be honest with ourselves about our true thoughts, desires, and inclinations. We must accept that what keeps us writing the same stories about romance is that we crave the improbable and erotic and violent. And until we allow ourselves to be honest and raw, we will not wake.

 

 

Connecting the Dots

Today in class, while talking once more about the idea of "quality," a question came up concerning the connecting of dots. Is a teacher good if they connect all the dots? Or do you get more out of the class if they leave it to you - the student - to find the connections. My answer to this question? Neither. Or both. Somewhere in the middle, or perhaps on a parallel plane, because it is not so much to do with how many dots are connected but rather in what manner they are connected.

Most classes are conducted in a a very narrow zone. If the lesson for the day is on Shakespeare, then the class must revolve around only that. But not only is the orbit constricted to that one planet, it is also made to stick as close to it as possible.

The teacher conducting the class certainly thinks that this will give a better view of the topic/"planet." And in some ways it does; it forces the observer to see certain details and intricacies of the topic. However, this manner of looking at things is more restricting than helpful.

When we allow our minds to "wander" (a word that has become increasingly distasteful to use in the academic environment), we see more connections and gain a better understanding of the topic. Take, for example, our Tracings class. In the classroom anything is fair game. If one of our minds is brought from a discussion on Shakespeare to pizza, we let it happen and we are consistently rewarded for this practice. Our minds are so much more complex and aware than we are aware of (hence the term subconscious), and for our thoughts to suddenly turn to pizza, as in the example, we must trust that there is a reason: some thread of connection that brought us there.

This trust in our initial reactions is the key aspect to improvisational acting. When learning how to become a better improv actor, the main focus is that you learn to go with whatever first comes to your mind. You may see that first thought and think, "Hmm.. I could come up with something funnier" and try to do so, but the most successful of improv actors are consistently those who go with their initial thought. Why is this? It's because of the same reasons stated above! We may not consciously realize why we made that connection or why we would want to say those words, but if it was the first thing to come to mind there is certainly some reason why.

Humans hold the title of the most evolved of animals. However, part of our evolution has pushed us to suppress our instinctual reactions in favor of more thought out ones. We see this in the examples I stated above as well as in studies done in testing (the results show that on questions in which students do not know the answer, those who go with their first guess do much better than those who go with their second/third/etc guess for the answer) that our mind is smarter, persay, than we give it credit for. Go with your gut. Go on tangents. Get "off-topic." Because in the end, everything is connected in one way or another and therefore nothing is off-topic. Zooming out and exploring ideas that seem to have no connection with the topic at all will only lead to a better, fuller understanding of it. It's hard to see the image a puzzle makes if you are looking at it under a microscope.

We Are All Electrons

I may be an English major, but throughout today's class (particularly when we were discussing Brady's brilliant and beautifully written essay on circles) the image that resounded in my mind was that of an atom: particularly how the electrons behave in regards to the atom. You see, all the talk about circles and how they are everywhere in literature and make up everything in life in general (sound like we could be talking about atoms yet?) led our class to discuss how we felt about this- this merry-go-round we cannot step off of. Here people began to favor the phrase "the terror of the circle." And not without reason.

It is absolutely frightening to think that we are all stuck on some circular track- destined to repeat the same things ad infinitum. It makes a person think, "Am I doomed to make the same mistakes? Am I going to have to live through that horror again and again?" However, I have come to a different conclusion. One that fits my experiences better; we are not stuck on the same track like some toy train, but rather we travel between concentric circles like electrons jumping through energy levels.

In my life, I have experienced things in cycles. Sometimes even to the point of realizing it and knowing what is coming next. However, I have felt myself break free of those cycles too. I have known what it is like to gain a different perspective so that I can look at a certain event but be far enough away to not be immersed in it any longer and to not have it as even a possibility on my horizon. And this new vantage point, in my electron model, would be me entering a new energy level and viewing the previous one from there.

In this way, it does not seem so scary to be traveling in cycles. We are not doomed to make the same mistakes and we are not going to have to live through the same things over and over again. All we must do to ensure that is enter another "energy level." Electrons do this by getting into what scientists call an "excited" state. For us it is not any different - gain a new perspective or have a new experience or just make up our minds to be different than we were last time! Get passionate and adamant about it damnit!  We are not stuck unless we allow ourselves to be. Any entrapment is of our own making, or at least of our own allowance.

On the Question of Quality...

" 'Quality,' or 'value,' as described by Pirsig, cannot be defined because it empirically precedes any intellectual construction of it, namely due to the fact that quality (as Pirsig explicitly defines it) exists always as a perceptual experience before it is ever thought of descriptively or academically" - Wikipedia

Pirsig's thoughts ring like an echo through my head as I read of his thoughts on quality. Not because I have read about Pirsig's ideas before, but because I remember once reading (although I have displaced the title and author of the article) about how objectivity is impossible for humans since we first react on an emotional level. Being as any fair system of ranking requires objectivity, how could we ever possibly rank things according to their "quality"? 

Yet that jumps too far ahead. That is, we should first establish what quality is before we worry about trying to rank it. And I am going to do this by asking the question: what do all humans want/need? Of course we could look at Maslow's hierarchy of needs to answer this, but I'm going to refer back to something I've stated in previous entries; we need to connect. To each other, to the world around us, to something and maybe even to everything. Therefore, what we perceive as a good, quality work must be something that satisfies this desire.

Being as I am a student studying to be a teacher, I would like to examine this idea from a classroom perspective.

Think of your favorite teacher. What made them your favorite? Did they reach out to you personally (connecting person to person)? Did they have a good classroom atmosphere (connection in community)? Were they effective in getting you to remember the material (forming connections in your mind)? The fact of the matter is that what one student perceives as great instruction could be perceived as utter horse shit from another; it is an entirely subjective experience based on the perspective of the individual. In this way- teaching can not be ranked by quality. 

But what about the horrible teachers we know we have all had? What about the classes wherein we feel completely out of the circuit and don't seem to learn anything? What could be said about those teachers? Well, coming back to the idea of connection, I would say those teachers did not know how to connect (to the information, to the students, to whatever) very well. But just because 90% of the class felt that the teacher was doing a bad job, that 1 kid that felt the teacher was doing well is the only proof needed to say that the teacher possesses quality in his/her methods. That teacher may connect to a much smaller degree than your favorite teacher, but they are connecting all the same.

The conclusion that I am then lead to is that quality, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.

Displaced Fairytale

Trevor jingled the keys as he unlocked the door to the little Chicago flat.  It had become routine since the time, only days after he’d moved in, when he had come home from work and thrown open the door to see his brother, Cale, going at it with his wife on the couch. Unsure of what to do then he’d tried to shut the door and go back into the hallway, but they had already seen him. “Oh man Trev I’m sorry,” Cale had rushed as his wife, Jenny, covered herself with a throw pillow, “I am just not used to having to worry about someone walking in.”

            “Yeah yeah it’s okay. It’s your house after all,” Trevor struggled to make eye contact with his brother. He had always been the bashful one. Cale had put his pants back on and walked over to where Trevor stood- still in the doorway. He placed a hand on his older brother’s shoulder, “Hey- it’s your house too now man. Don’t you think otherwise.”

            Trevor had been happily living alone in a small house in the suburbs of Chicago until 3 months before when a tornado had swept through and demolished the house entirely. Having just reached the point of feeling financially stable enough to do so, he had just bought a brand new vehicle: a shiny blue Toyota Tacoma. While happy with this purchase, it made it impossible for him to invest in new housing.

The boys’ parents, long time travel-enthusiasts, did not have a permanent residence and were in Spain at the time of the natural disaster anyway, which made them a no-go for living arrangements. Trevor had another brother Jonathan, the oldest of the boys, but he had assumed the role of first born too seriously which had left Trevor and Cale regarding him as more of a parental figure than a sibling. They had never been close. So the only logical option was for Trevor to move in with Cale and Jenny – newlyweds who, though gracious hosts, he could see would rather spend their time at home alone.

However, the three of them adjusted to life together and after a few more weeks had passed they were in a comfortable routine. Cale and Jenny worked 8-4 at their jobs while Trevor worked 9-5. This slight difference in schedules allowed for their mornings to be spent separately and that paired with Trevor’s tendency to spend as much time as possible outside the flat made it so that it never felt too crowded.

On a cold Monday morning in February, 5 months after Trevor had moved in, he went through his typical morning routine: coffee, shower, breakfast, go to work. Not liking how the water condensed so thickly in the little bathroom, Trevor would open the window. However, on this particular morning he started breakfast before his shower then realized, as he was drying off, that he’d left the stove on. He hurriedly threw on some clothes and rushed to turn the burner off. He sniffed the air around him: a slight smell of gas, but not bad. Everything would be okay. He left for work.

Trevor worked as a project manager for a company that made paper. He was looking over a design proposal for a new machine in one of the mills he monitored when his phone began to ring. “Trevor Hodgekins,” was his curt greeting.

“He Trev, it’s Cale,” there was a long pause, “I have some bad news. The window in the bathroom was left open today and the water pipes run right above it and they froze and burst. Our apartment is flooded.”

Trevor sat shocked in silence. He’d left that window open. He had been welcomed into their home and had then proceeded to destroy it. “Cale,” he began, desperation in his voice, “I –”

“Hey don’t say anything Trevor. It’s okay. We will get the repairs done and everything will be alright, okay? I’m not calling to point fingers, just to spread the word. It’s okay though I talked to Jonathan; we’re all going to stay with him for the time being.”

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