A Whole

You have to know someone really well to describe them. Everything else is lists. You only see the shape of a hand, hairs growing alone, the tiny point of an ear, you only see these things on a person you care for. You can only see these things with love. And moreover, it is only with love that you can put them together, only love that can make a whole from the parts, only love that can build a person from a pinky, a hair, an ear.

The Creepiest, Most Chill-Inducing Paragraph Ever

Recently I've been obsessing about this paragraph; I think it's completely brilliant. I've read this thing ten or fifteen times, and I still get chills:

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone. -- the first paragraph of The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson (1959)

I think the chills usually come at "not sane" and "walked alone." The idea of a house being insane is....I am unable to pick an adjective. There's just something about it that is deeply unsettling, yet makes perfect sense. We all feel the energy of a place, whether it's good, bad, calming, exciting, or frightening. If places have these various feelings about them, they seem to be almost alive. I think what Shirley Jackson has done in her novel (which is amazing and you should read it if you haven't yet done so) is take that energy that a place can have and treat it as a living entity, one that is never seen but is constantly felt.

Anyway, that's my mini literary analysis. I've taken a break from finishing a gigantic essay for my literature course (not, unfortunately, on The Haunting of Hill House) and I was apparently unable to turn it off.

Ropes

If you reach the end of your rope, how do you keep climbing? Are you forced to stop? Or do you ask someone above you to throw down a new one?

Who is stealing my free will? Will they return it, please?

So, according to science, we have no free will. According to religion (sometimes) (sort of) we do. Do I have to pick a team? Can I pick neither?

See Radio Lab "Beyond Time" episode. Briefly, someone did an experiment wherein they asked people to wiggle their finger whenever they chose, and monitored their brian activity. They looked at two things: the decision (on the higher thought processes) to wiggle the finger, and the 'getting ready' or preparation to wiggle. Instead of seeing what you'd expect: first the decision, then the preparation, they saw the opposite: first the preparation, then the "decision." And they were like a second apart. So the people were preparing to wiggle, and THEN rationalizing it. And of course, the question becomes, WHO made the actual decision to wiggle the finger. Some part of the brain? God? Random forces of the universe? This freaks me out a little. Oh, and yeah, this wasn't so brief....

The Most Romantic Bit of Neuroscience

This weekend I've been doing too much origami and listening to Radio Lab, a wonderful radio show which has a free podcast on iTunes. The show is similar to This American Life: they start with a theme and try to come at it from multiple angles with different stories, except where This American Life is people-focused, Radio Lab is very thought-focused. The shows are more or less science-related, but they almost always take the science further, into the realm of philosophy. Shows I've listened to so far include “Sleep,” “Stress,” “Time,” “Zoos,” “Placebo,” “Who Am I?”(this was about the riddle of the self), and “Memory and Forgetting.”

(This way of dealing with a question or a theme, attacking it from many very different angles and points of view, it really strikes a chord in my brain. It just makes so much more sense to my way of thinking than formal arguments or theses or really any kind of certain conclusion. More on this later, and the subject of over-analysis, if I ever finish my conference paper.)

The last one contained the story of a man with such an extreme case of amnesia that he literally can't remember anything for more than a few moments. He will insist that he “has never seen anyone here,” and that he has not been conscious until this moment. But from moment to moment he can remember his feelings for his wife. He doesn't always even remember her name, but he always remembers her, always wants her to be with him. He'll call her and beg her to come visit him, and then call again fifteen minutes later, with no memory of the first call, and again an hour later, and she will listen to message after message when she arrives home from visiting him that day. This whole story was heartbreaking and beautiful. There's something else: the only things he remembers at all are his wife...and his music. He directed a famous choir before this happened to him (I believe he had an aneurism). He remembers how to read music and how to sing, and how to conduct his choir. Whether it is the structure or the rhythm or the emotion, whatever it is, he can remember music. He can be aware for an entire piece, and be completely, totally himself.

There is an idea in neuroscience (and this is the most romantic thing I've heard in a long time) that there is a deeper, older part of our brain where we store the most important memories. Our memories of pain, and love, and maybe (this is all me), our memories of our music. Our own particular art. Those things that come to us without our conscious minds, that become as natural as breathing. And I have to wonder if this is where our deepest self resides, where the fundamental things that make up each of us are kept safe.

Yes, I'm feeling a bit romantic today. So sue me.

On an unrelated note:

It's hot and humid here, still, at three-thirty a.m. and a thunderstorm has come and gone. A couple hours ago there were dozens of people outside playing slip-and-slide on the lawn in the rain. They were wearing bathing-suits and boxers and underwear and bras, and, in the case of one guy I nearly ran into in my hallway, a leotard. I was only out there briefly before security broke it up, but there was something elementally beautiful about all the rain-soaked, grass-covered college students. I really dislike heat (although I love thunderstorms) but it does sometimes seem to bring people together in simple, joyful ways.

All this is to say that I didn't get much homework done this weekend.

Check out Radio Lab here: http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/

or go to iTunes and search for "Radio Lab" podcast. I also whole-heartedly recommend the podcasts of "This American Life" and "The Moth" (this one is true stories told by the people they happened to, without notes, in front of an audience).

PS I am in no way a scientist. I merely hear things and go off on my own crazy tangents.

Writer's block should have a much nastier name. Something more like malaria, epilepsy, typhoid, chlamydia. Seriously, it sucks.

PS Today, I learned how to spell chlamydia. So has my day so far been completely wasted?

He who laughs, lasts.

--Mary Poole

It's on the wall.

The Meaning of Random

There's a wall in my room covered with writing.

My desk at school lives underneath my lofted bed, in what I like to call my cave. It is home to an oddball collection of objects, photographs, and cards, including, but certainly not limited to: a teapot; a pair of devil horns; one woman's shoe containing (among other things) a fork, a clove of garlic, and an origami T-Rex head; what I can only describe as geometric magnets; twenty-odd pebbles found on the edge of the Pacific; a string of origami doves; a plastic geoduck (if you are from the East Coast, you will have to look this up); a crude music-box-without-a-box that plays “Here Comes the Sun”; and what I was told is some kind of traditional Japanese knot signifying long life.

Next to this...uh...collection is an exposed bit of wall that was once displeasingly white. I solved this problem by (of course) taping a whole lot of white printer paper to the wall, making sure the pieces were tilted at odd angles, overlapping in some places and leaving bits of the wall exposed. The wall was still white, but now it was blank page. (Let me tell you: writing on walls is one of the great overlooked pleasures in life.) This became my wall of quotes.

Whenever I read or hear a quote that grabs hold of my brain and twists it a bit, it goes on the wall. I try to keep it to quotes related to writing or life in general (these two subjects are almost the same as far as I'm concerned) but there are no ridged rules. Essentially, if I like it, it goes on the wall.

Recently I've started to see this wall as part of a deeper pattern in my thinking. I spend a lot of my time collecting things I love and surrounding myself with them. Objects, quotes, fictional characters, real characters. I take pleasure in the act of collecting, and in the random beauty of odd objects. It's as if randomness is a goal in and of itself. In my mind, randomness is beautiful and beauty is random.

These baby barnacles of thought were all swimming aimlessly around my mind looking for something to latch onto, when I happened to watch an episode of the BBC Sci-Fi series “Torchwood” titled “Random Shoes.” The episode centers on the ghost of a normal, kind of pathetic guy, who is simply trying to figure out what has happened to him. The only real clues are a few pictures of random shoes on his phone. I won't bore you with the details, but he eventually finds out how he's died and “moves on” to wherever he's going (don't ask me, I'm not dead). The thing that caught my attention was his closing voice-over:

“Life is full of near misses and absolute hits, of great love and small disasters. It's banana milkshakes and loft insulation and random shoes. It's dead ordinary and truly, truly amazing. What you've got to do is realize it's all here, now, so breathe deep and swallow it whole. Because take it from me—life just whizzes by and then all of a sudden it's—“

And that's it. The end of the episode.

So I thought, exactly. Life for me is random shoes. They may not always be the right size, and there may not always be two of them, and you may not always know why they're there, or whose they are, but they're still beautiful, and sure as hell still interesting.

I think this love of the random is related to my atheism. Existence may be random, but it's all the more beautiful for it. I've never felt the need for some deeper meaning or purpose in life; life is its own purpose, its own meaning. So, to end this post (and start a frightening pattern of taking my wisdom from TV) I'd like to leave you with the words of Joss Whedon, king of fantasy nerds everywhere:

“Well, I guess I kinda worked it out. If there's no great glorious end to all this, if nothing we do matters...then all that matters is what we do. 'Cause that's all there is. What we do. Now. Today. I fought for so long, for redemption, for a reward, and finally just to beat the other guy, but I never got it. All I wanna do is help. I wanna help because I don't think people should suffer as they do. Because, if there's no bigger meaning, then the smallest act of kindness is the greatest thing in the world.”

What This Is

So here I am, a wannabe writer, starting a blog. Here I am, 6:31 in the morning, staring at a computer screen, clueless about blogging, nary an idea about what I'll write, even a little uncertain why I'm writing it. So I'll start with what I love, and what I know.

I love words. I love the way they feel in your mouth, the way they ring in your ears and echo through your mind. The way they travel continents and centuries to speak to you, dance a jig before your eyes, and fade away again in the space of a minute. The way they appear painstakingly on a computer screen, letter by letter, forming, dissipating, and forming again, searching for the perfect combination. I love words for themselves, but I love them even more for their purpose. Language exists for one reason: to communicate. To connect with another human being and share something of yourself. From the moment I learned how to talk I have had an overwhelming need to communicate as much as possible to the people around me. This has sometimes (often) gone a bit too far, in the sense of annoying the hell out of people, notably my mother. But, annoying or not, the urge to share has been a guiding force in my life.

The other thing I love is stories. All types. Anything with vivid characters and a world that's not here. I doubt I have to explain this. Anyone who's ever picked up a book, flipped on the television or (gasp) actually left the house to see a movie knows the freedom of escaping your reality for a while. I'm reasonably sure it's a universal urge. And I have that one in spades as well.

[Side note: I just realized how weird that expression is. I assume it refers to cards? Aren't there just as many spades as, say, hearts? Okay, I just looked it up and it has something to do with spades being the highest ranking suit in bridge. Also, it's possible the word spade is somehow racist. Huh. Aren't words fascinating?]

So that's what I love. Here's what I know: I want to write. Nothing would make me happier than tricking someone into paying me for this. (Well, it's possible something could make me happier, but it would probably involve famous actors and very little clothing.)

This blog will ultimately be about writing. Reasons to write, ways of writing, experiments with words. The search for common threads, an encompassing idea of writing that I can relate to in three dimensions. In the process I will over-share with the universe, and possibly some actual humans.

As with most things I have encountered in nineteen years of life, there will probably be more questions than answers.


A note about the magic cephalopod:

The title of this blog is a reference to Lynda Barry's magnificently odd book What It Is. Barry, a Witch of the Wise and the Weird, instructs writers to “follow the magic cephalopod.” What is the magic cephalopod? Well, that's really up to you. I suppose the cephalopod is a sort of muse. For me, it is the bringer of all things creative, beautiful, and inexplicable. It jumps into existence at two a.m. and squishes around on my desk, holding out words, sentences, images. It speaks its wisdom and vanishes. The cephalopod can visit anybody, but a writer tries to chase it back into its world. This is no easy task, because it has not run away: it has disappeared. There is no trail to follow. There is only a glazed eye in a mirror, a tentacle glimpsed through branches, a small squelch as you're falling asleep. This is the magic cephalopod.