In beginning something of this magnitude (with similar aspirations I'm sure to tens of thousands of other bloggers) I could sit and stew over each word; hoping against hope to write something of profound influence. Or, as I'm doing, I could write whatever comes to mind and dedicate myself to quickly posting more titles, pushing this one further and further into the blog ether.
At the end of the day I don't expect anything of earth-shattering consequence to appear on this blog, at least anytime soon. As was explained to me in one of the many "books about writing books" I've read, there are three classes of writers in the world (1) those who can't write; or who can't write anything that isn't painful for someone to read (2) the truly gifted great writers; or those who create true and lasting art - I could name names, but I think we all know who I'm talking about - and (3) most of the rest of us. Those of us in the sprawling bourgeois of writers can improve our writing by reading and practicing our craft, but we can never achieve Tolstoyian or Steinbeckian spark of Zeus much the way very few human beings master the art of the three-quarter facelock bulldog maneuver (also known as the Cutter) reserved only for the most professional of professional wrestlers - here again I could name names, but won't.
I'm here to share my thoughts about life, using my life as a template. It's the only template I have. I had planned to name this blog "Synecdoche" which in Greek (which I won't pretend to speak) is spelled synekdoche and means "simultaneous understanding." It's a figure of speech for a part of something representing the whole or the whole of something representing its part. We use it all the time, but don't realize it. Saying "faces in a crowd" really means "people in a crowd", but the synecdoche "faces" makes the statement more cryptic and poetic. Why am I sharing this?
I first came across the word in the title of a movie by Charlie Kaufman called Synecdoche New York. Note: I've never seen this movie. The movie stars Philip Seymour Hoffman as a theatre director who receives a MacArthur Fellowship and tries to develop his magnum opus in a giant warehouse in Manhattan's theatre district. His play is a celebration of the mundane world of New York, trying to approximate real life down to its most intricate details. Over time he constructs a miniature version of the city in the warehouse and pushes harder and harder for this synecdoche to become reality. The moral of the story: you can't get there. Your synecdoche can never become the real thing. There is no true microcosm. No synecdoche that hits the nail squarely on the head. Life is too complex and too often "you just had to be there."
But we try, and that's fine. Our poetry, movies, music and blogs are good efforts that can be didactic and, at worst, entertaining. But these are not the real thing. These are supermarket samples of true experience. The best advice from this blogger: if you like the fish sticks, buy a box and microwave them yourself at home.
I love the following quote from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (which I will likely talk much more about in future posts). I grew to love the book long before I ever read it. I was blessed to have a Mormon mission companion who kept most of its concepts well organized in his head (true A-list Intellectual) and shared them with me as we walked from place to place.
The main character, on a motorcycle with his son, notes:
"All the time we are aware of millions of things around us - these changing shapes, these burning hills, the sound of the engine, the feel of the throttle, each rock and weed and fence post and piece of debris beside the road - aware of these things, but not really conscious of them unless there is something unusual or unless they reflect something we are predisposed to see. We could not possibly be conscious of these things and remember all of them because our mind would be so full of useless details we would be unable to think. From this awareness we must select, and what we select and call consciousness is never the same as the awareness because the process of selection mutates it. We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world.
Once we have the handful of sand, the world of which we are conscious, a process of discrimination goes to work on it. We divide the sand into parts. This and that. Here and there. Black and white. Now and then. The discrimination is the division of the conscious universe into parts."
This is blogging in its purest form; trying to make some sense of our handfuls of sand - our consciousness. Like Wallace Stevens trying to understand thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird. But what is beautiful and amazing (although never a complete depiction of the reality, only a synecdoche) is the diversity of view. No two people have ever scooped an identical hand of sand. Each handful is different, each grain is different and how we chop up, segment and play with the sand is also different.
So as impossible as it may be for us to fully share our consciousness with the world, those who do deserve an A for effort. And that's why I'm here - I'm making an effort.
