1 A moment just so
". . . most of us take for granted [what] can be abolished with an incomprehensible rapidity."*
This about memory calls to mind the news I got yesterday, on June 17, 2009. But it is not the memory now of the substance of yesterday's news or memory per se of which I write, but the now fact that H- faces the greatest challenges in his life, not the least and first of which is staying alive. His condition must be, in spite of my limited knowledge of the facts, other worldly, painful, and deeply disturbing--for him and his closest.
My hope as I write is that there are angels present in whatever guise bearing comfort and gifts to help him and those who love him and those he loves, now and forever.
A life without what it once had "also poses the problem of how anything that permeates our lives so deeply can be lost so irrevocably."
H's accident marks the beginning of something for him and us that we cannot know in fullness and cannot change--that his accident happened. Although each moment is just so--each cannot be taken back, and some we cannot forget.
May angels attend us as we proceed, and God embrace us all with an understanding that so often eludes us when some things happen with incomprehensible rapidity and change everything forever.
2 It came to pass
An e-mail informed me that H dove into shallow water. He now cannot move or speak. He is 18 years old.
3 No other excuse
Such are my thoughts and prayers today, and I realize again in an other worldly, painful, and always deeply disturbing way that I cannot share with anyone even the news or the memories of my life, in this case about H. (Explanations irrelevant.) Nor can I help.
I do not make this mistake: _H's accident is not about me_. However, the fact of my knowledge of what has happened is, and pushes me selfishly onward to release the angst and anguish.
I know again that I am alone, distant in time and space from those I love, and those I have loved in different and special ways. In the face of what so wonderfully was and sometimes tragically or regrettably came to be, judgments I openly own, the silence of writing (for no audience) is best and my only hope, my only consolation.
I need to express and discover me, my humanity, my compassion, my limitations, and to open myself to that ineffable other I know silently attends. Writing is one road I take. Get it out. I have no choice or other excuse.
(I am no pettifogger. I won't pontificate about _we_, or try to be the teacher of others' lessons. I will hold secret the otherwise readily accessible and the ironies and I-told-you-so's I sense in what I observe around me. I will not speculate about intentions or assume machinations. I have no need to talk more, or recall for anyone the lessons I tried to teach my students and would have tried to teach those closest now gone. In the beginning as in the end, I alone. I control and affect nothing--if truth be told again, to re-mind me.)
"Grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console, to be understood as to understand, to be loved as to love."
This is the only answer, the only matter.
4 Anti-thesis
The synthesis of these understandings--the externalizations that have been this project called noematics--is in the making. Memory figures largely in the enterprise and in each piece, either directly if written in the first person or indirectly if written in the third.
Except for op-ed scratchings, there has been a curious absence, with minor exceptions, of the second person. It is not surprising in that the first piece I decided to include was for no audience. The blog nee "depository" was not even open for comment or Web-search result at the outset.
There has been no overarching theme of "This is for intersubjective understanding, have at it." That would be the second person. And yet, that "Read me!" is at the heart of writing as speech, isn't it? Isn't a text's presence an invitation to consume and comprehend? Or it just is, presencing if not inviting. An is at hand.
If it is not, then the sound I could in your ear or in your head is just for me, self expression and expression of self. But where does either of these get me? Get you? Why? Why take up these spaces?
It is not to dabble in a pseudo- or would-be discipline of noematics. Great thinkers and writers deserve that space and our attention and have amply attempted to explicate.
It is not for truth, beauty, goodness. These do not come from soul journeys of the support cast. What is required always is ascent to what is true, beautiful, good that we need to make them so, right?
I told myself that the only matter was love, understanding, consolation--compassion. And that is and can only be one person's expression-in-action. If it is only expression that can materially and non-materially be as in a spoken word, then so be it. If a different kind of expression, then so be that.
Compassion offered resides then in silence, perhaps for eternity, the eternity in the moment and in the succession of moments that we recall as we proceed down the years. These eternal moments are sacred in our lives. Rapid changes to the everyday remind us of this. And memories serve us also in this way.
And so it has come to pass that the synthesis continues on its paths, and nothing changes. We are lovers and teachers and parents and associates still, in hope, in love, in understanding, and in the apparent absence of these things.
Let me hear your voice. Hear mine. We have nothing else. We have no excuse. Let nothing and everything permeate our lives in sound and silence, deeply and loud so that we cannot be lost irrevocably.
5 Denouement
I received another e-mail saying it was a mistake that I was among those informed about H.
Which memory shall I now forget? Which noema externa shall I attend to? Which truth be told?
Precisely! A noema need not have any correlate in physical reality. Echo Husserl. Echo Heidigger: care brings into awareness our dasein, a being conscious of and concerned about its beingness.
6 The re-minding of this
A feeling and an idea bothered me. I sat at the computer not knowing what to do about these. Soon I was writing what you see here above, and about two hours of so-called work produced an almost final copy. I had little self-consciousness of the tools I was using in making the text--a book, an electronic dictionary, a text processor.
[Writing was an all-absorbing labor of love and I was aware of the time and my surroundings most of the time. I held in my mind the feelings and idea and started out by chance reading a book on memory. Within the first pages of my reading I had my opening with which to structure and approach what I said. What I wanted to say was not clear or specific. I knew that there were things around each, the emotion and the idea, but how it should come out or what the point was or was to be, I did not know. I have been wrestling with some other ideas lately, and these too began to come out as I began to write. So the piece was not all about one or two things that first brought me to the act of writing, although the act could be seen as beginning before my fingers put letters together. Organization suggested itself almost from the beginning and got its current form during and after the text had been drafted the first time. And because I wanted to precisely convey what I really thought and felt, the writing was challenging. I used the dictionary to make sure I was getting it right, sometimes to find the right word. Editing and writing went hand in hand versus one after the other. A kind of self-editing writing process. I knew in the background that someone might be (future) reading the text and so was somewhat cautious about being too direct or too vague. Although honest, I took some care not to offend by what I wrote. The text led to some admissions of personal values and "wisdom" that I had a hard time justifying including, since in the main the text was about and for another. But the text worked its way toward something about my larger themes and so saved me from personal admissions or possibly hurtful expressions, although this was not a hard struggle. I felt honest and positive and not uncharitable. I recalled reactions I included specific to the inciting events and then I generalized as a philosopher-teacher, but I was uncomfortable with that perspective, and so the text had to take up that additional theme. I did consider many things to express, but the writing was a combination of directed-by-me and intention and a kind of frcnvey [sic] flowing or rambling just to let out what was inside. So the piece had a mixture of first and third. I avoided a you [second person] except where the text content addressed that matter. Energy and no fatigue characterized how I completed the task, but it was not felt as a task. But I also checked the number of words, by section and totally to see if I was saying enough, enough being measured by the number of words, which to me now sounds strange. This description of what happened is being written by touch typing with my eyes closed. The piece above was done wholly awake, eyes open, no meditative or contemplative attitude. Allusions enriched the text, although I am not sure anyone is able to see where they are. They were not intended to be recognized and were mostly for my own fullness of description. This piece was mostly for me, although in a strange and academic way it started out as a post to this blog where H's mother could read it. I am afraid that aspect of the text is now in question. I am not sure any of this is good for reading other than as a part of the noematics project. Some sentences and short paragraphs got written and upon careful examination were deleted because they did not seem to be in the main of what I as writer think I wanted to say or that the directions the piece was taking. I was very conscious of me/I throughout. And I wanted to separate the first from the third person. I wanted to describe, but in doing so I could not avoid the _I_ because what I was describing was inside of me. I also tried to avoid the third person; I wasn't feeling like an author or teacher as much as. . . . The process of writing was a kind of alternating between two or three questions, although they did not echo as such in my head as words. I just went from one to the next and back as a kind of process. 1. What do I want to say? My answer was writing, writing, writing. 2. Have I said it? My answer was keeping my place in the flow of things, reading above and sometimes below what I had just written. 3. What's next? And then I would think about what I wanted to talk about next. Writing is kind of like slow talking, although sometimes it comes so fast it is hard to capture it all. Most often I do catch it all. The pace is felt as slow and methodical and deliberate. But gobs of time pass, and often I have little to show; other times a lot. It is hard to say except it feels like progress always. Very few breaks--I take really no breaks once I start. Writer's block never happens when I am in it. And seldom do I have nothing to write about. The difficulty is choosing among the many ways of expressing, and which ideas are the best to marshal in support or in illustration of what I am trying to say. There is always a consciousness of what I want to say, if not always stated in a thesis or point. Often the full reasons for the writing come towards the end, when things get wrapped up. But this piece seems to be without wrap-up. It is more of reverent care and a question or questions in the face of what to say. I am also trying to nail down how best to respond to an other or others and to settle my own disturbed equilibrium about some people I once was close to. I guess if I had to summarize what it is like for me when I write, I can say that it is fully engaging and deeply satisfying, most of the time, and it is a deeply conscious state without very much reflection of what it is I am doing, like now. I just do it and employ all my faculties of feeling and thinking to get it, whatever it is, just right. And then it comes to a stopping point, a sense of completion of what to say if not how it is said. Often I fiddle and edit with a text till I can let it go. This piece got fiddled with for five days before its end-point. All my faculties . . . ]
6 Grasping for that sense of an ending
Sometimes the strangest holds a partial truth. A fact. A sentiment. A reflection. An offshoot, or bracketed item not an integral part of the whole, or an idea stimulated by what was said or not said.
. . . To restate the beginning, realizing that we are still there: We take for granted what we overlook or misjudge, and thus all of that is abolished with incomprehensible rapidity. Lost treasures, or perhaps gold dust in some sand we cannot pick out but we see clearly, brilliantly there. Our loss, unless we take the time to look carefully, consider, try to express even the inexpressible. Such projects are never clean, never entirely coherent. Sometimes all we find is pyrite. But why take the chance? We do overlook important things. It is the condition of finitude.
An accident, memory, moments, writing, compassion, realities suddenly taken away--among other themes--haunt me. May they cease to cause recurrent dilemmas, occasional nightmares, and all-too-frequent waking moments full of fear of what does happen, and dread in the face of what could.
No, not clean at all.
Part 2
Lest you, dear reader, think these clumps but scattered detris of little moment or logic, let me recap.
First there is a subject which touched me and brought me to write--the motive and energy behind calling up words and ordering them. The degree to which that subject should concern me was tempered, and thus what began as respectful, thoughtful, heart-felt concern turned into reflections on the necessity of writing vis a vis expression for sanity's sake--and for discovery--and the nature of the writing processes themselves that produced this seemingly incoherent stream. The justification of including all of this in this noematics project became clear, either to preserve whatever small part may be of value that had been said, or to figure as an early sketch of what might be called the phenomenology of writing, or the experience of writing.
And if I cannot find that someone else has done it, better than my first attempt above, I will give it a serious shot.
To be continued.
_____
* Casey, E. Remembering: A Phenomenological Study. 1987. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
