Over
the last two years, Google data recorded 7536 views of CwHD. Most of
those views
lasted less than a minute which makes for a poor bounce rate. A
bounce rate is the percentage of visits in which a person leaves a
website from the landing page without browsing any further. No
matter. Words and language are, like the complicated business of
driving a vehicle, taken for granted by most people. Boring, in fact.
Unless reckless. Or intoxicated. Or both.
I
find this odd.
Odd,
too, is the way many people go through life. Just browsing is what
many seem to be doing, living without intention or direction. Or
living impetuously. No doubt Google could put numbers on this
generalization. For example, currently the population of the planet
is 7.7 billion. The World Population Clock web page keeps ticking
over with births and deaths. To the minute, 50,287 people have died
today. 121, 276 have been born. 30% of the people on the planet are
just trying to survive. They are not bored. Or impulsive. Dire
straits focuses one's attention rather acutely.
In
Walden, Henry David Thoreau wrote that "...the
mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation..." And that
desperation might well be humdrum or horrific. For example, according
to the Center For Disease Control website, over a billion people
worldwide are without clean water or proper sanitation which leads
directly or otherwise to the deaths of a million children each year.
Bored with your job, are you? Having a midlife crisis? Credit cards
maxed out, are they. Alas.
Webb
Chiles is an intrepid fellow who has circumnavigated the globe six
times. He has made these voyages, for the most part, alone. The
greater part of one voyage was done in a small, open boat. Mr Chiles
has insisted on living an epic life, as he puts it, traveling to the
extremities of experience and then reporting back. He is rarely ever
feckless or foolhardy. He is, in a word, a seaman. He is, as well, a
wordsmith, a fellow who takes language seriously. He has written
several books and maintains his own web log. Generally, he has little
tolerance for the dreary, humdrum, often intolerable life ashore. He
prefers the open sea and solitude.
Mr
Chiles no doubt concurs with Thoreau, and so chooses to live his life
with a fierce intention to be heroic. Though I, too, vote with
Thoreau and Chiles, my point of view is slightly different. The
distinction between us is but a hair's breadth, yet it is
significant.
When
Henry David went to Walden Pond, the small lake and its surrounding
forest were wilderness. Now it is just a short drive from Boston; but
in 1845 it was something of an epic trek. During the two years, two
months, that he lived there, Thoreau began to write Walden, a
classic of American literature. He wrote:
I
went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front
only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what
it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not
lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear;
nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite
necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life,
to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was
not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a
corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be
mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and
publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it
by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next
excursion.
Living
deep requires intention and focus. Consciousness is not spontaneous,
not instinctive, not autonomic. We must put some effort into our
consciousness for it to function as we think consciousness does.
Philosopher Dan Dennett in his TED Talk (2009), 'The Illusion of
Consciousness', likens it to a conjuring trick. He points out that at
any given moment our attention is focused entirely on a point the
size of our thumb nail at arm's length. The background and foreground
are filled in by our brains. Think pixels. Or dots of paint from an
impressionist's brush. Our brain (or some combination of the 37
trillion cells comprising the human body) creates the bulk of the
image. We really do not see what we are seeing. Or smelling. Or
hearing.
To
be conscious, then, is not something to take for granted. Webb
Chiles' desire to suck the marrow out of life led him to the sea.
The impression given by the words he writes is that nothing less
would do. So too with Thoreau. To put all that is not life to rout,
it seems, requires a challenging environment. The high mountains
might qualify, or the deserts of the world. Wildness. Little else.
Certainly not Levittown.
My
take is that Levittown would do just fine. Seclusion is a state of
mind. If each moment of anyone's life is considered to be an epic
occurrence, just where you are becomes irrelevant. And, as I have
written before, we create those moments ourselves, that bit of
reality. How is this done? I am fond of this quote from the
philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein: The world we see is the words we
use. The world we create comes from the various and multitudinous
synapses in the recesses of our brains, and the subsequent verbiage
we use to describe what we create. Presto change-o: Reality. And
Consciousness. Or Consciousness, then Reality. No matter.
As
far as publishing one's experience to the world goes, that reporting
back business, one can undertake the task or not. Certainly it seems
to be true that the writer's job (or painter or musician or name your
art) is to create work that reports back from wherever their fancy
finds them. Warhol painted soup cans. Beethoven wrote symphonies.
Wildness need not be part of the program.
Singer
songwriter John Prine, an old geezer like Mr Chiles and myself, wrote
a lyric that went: ... strangers had forced him to live in
his head ...(from the song
'Donald and Lydia', album John Prine, 1971).
We all live in our heads. Each of us does so uniquely. What one
usually finds is that strangers have forced us out
of our heads; and we become lost in a gray and threatening world, a
place of confusion and dread.
Open
ocean is a fine arena to regain one's perspective. Mountains and
deserts, too. But a walk in the park might be all one needs. Or
simply a quiet corner of the house. Solitude and simplicity are often
necessary for introspection, but not requisite. Trees and trilliums
would do. Cats and dogs. The one proviso I would add is this: Always
remember what the Dormouse said. (Read the book, listen to the song:
you decide.)
photo by gv simoni
* * *
NOTES:
Find
"Donald and Lydia", John Prine (1971) here:
Find
the Dormouse in : ALICE IN WONDERLAND,
Lewis Carroll [Random House, 1946]. p.134, and elsewhere.
Find
'White Rabbit' (Grace Slick, 1966) sung by Gillian Welch and Dave
Rawlings at
Find
quote from Walden in
essay by Elizabeth Witherall (and Elizabeth Dubrulle) in their essay
on Walden (web page:
The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau). Depending on your edition of the
book, the quote is on p90.
No comments:
Post a Comment