For any regular readers of this thread, you’ll be familiar with my tendency to wax philosophical. Yet as last week’s post demonstrated to me, with no abashed chiding (yes, that means freely chiding) from my dear root writing llama Charles, there is an appetite for me to share what glimpses I can into the life of a quadriplegic body.
Let me see if I might weave these things together with a little more skill, remaining true to my north star of longing, while maintaining some fidelity to the material realities of life in this body here and now.
The Path Less Trodden, is less so for the footfalls of my life. I’ve had no traditional engagement with “higher education,” and even the earlier years of conventional schooling tended towards the unconventional structures and applications of that. Subsequently, my record shows little that could be recognizable as process of “formal career.” So just where might we stand to make this material life a little more visible to the casual layman’s untrained eye?
In the early days of encouragement from Charles, much reference was made to the diaries of Samuel Pepys, in particular for their gross simplicity. The writing was not to be of some high ideal, but rather to tell in plain and simple terms our human story, so often taken for granted, and so easy to miss in the searching of our modern world. (Correction, of course Charles was pointing not to “our human story,” but to that of Kabir.)
For some time I was able to adhere to this prescription, to some degree, and only after a thorough kneading by Charles to expel an army of adjectives which always seemed to find their way onto the page, cluttering an otherwise laminar flow of imagery.
It has been, and perhaps has been increasingly so, my inclination to reflect philosophically on those material circumstances, actions, and experiences. This proclivity comes through in my writing, and as each moment of engagement lies as a seed of ever expanding layers of context, there is rarely any shortage of mirrored surface upon which to report.
In the morning, when I wake, I am confined to bed until such time as another caring soul arrives to physically lift this 105 pound frame from mattress to wheeled throne. This lifting is not a direct action, and generally comes only after an hour or more of tending to the stiffness and other hygienic concerns of the immobilized body.
In the absence of this company I’m not entirely stilled. By voice I can request a few actions from the bed frame itself. I can sit upright. If, as is often the case, I experience some congestion from the evening’s rest, I can raise just my feet and let the body hydraulics expectorate the discomfort. I can reach with my knuckle the on/off switch of a little space heater for acute heat treatment to ease the nervous anxiety of the paralyzed body. And of course the ever present smart phone hangs dutifully on its magnetic mount just within reach for music, audiobooks, or more acute distractions of email, calendar, or whether reports.
The view from my bedroom windows has its own, somewhat inert, charm. From bed, I can see the upper reaches of the 8 inch boards of the six-foot dogeared fence that bounds our property from the next. A few feet beyond that, the vertical grain of the fence is contrasted by the horizontal appearance of the four-inch red-brown longitudinal siding of the house next door. This basic geometry makes up most of the view from my bed in the daylight hours. In one window, I can partially see the roofline and sky, a corner of the adjacent house where spiders take advantage of the passing wire and angle to weave their web, and ravens periodically drop in to eat the spiders.
Often when stirring awake I find myself easily drawn to distraction. With no organic shapes moving about outside the window, my mind is easily attracted to the bright lights of the little digital screen. Sometimes, however, I manage to quell that Pavlovian activity and allow myself instead to simply rest in awareness. In these moments, my gaze can drink in the simple elements of the multiuse altar at the foot of the bed and, occasionally through the doorway, across the living room, and out the front window, the movement of trees down the block and in the canyon. This latter apparition comes through panes likely a century old, and thus the already mystical movement of wind in leaves ripples further through that slow surface of running glass.
There is a certain pace that comes from living in a paralyzed body. Patience is implicit in the exercise. Whether for a glass of water, acceptable conditions to venture out, or just the possibility of necessary care, waiting is often compelled in the adventure. In this wake, the mind finds its way generally either to resting in the stillness (my preferred) of unfolding majesty, or reflection on the textures of life (the more common.)
Recently, in these moments of passive activity and among other things, I’ve been enjoying the audiobook of American Prometheus. For whatever reason, I have always had some fascination (perhaps haven’t we all) with the brilliant mind, often seeing myself reflected in the protagonist of the story. With the subject of this book, Oppenheimer, this has been very much the case. Though I don’t propose to insinuate myself to those heights of cognitive formidability, I also don’t shy away from aspirations towards that quality of lucid awareness.
One of the reflections that this has tickled forward has to do with the construct of the theoretical physicist.
Many years (more than half a lifetime) ago I found myself contemplating the possibility of enrolling in a college education. In the process I postulated in what recognized field I might apply my attentions. In true Gemini fashion I settled on narrowing my focus to just five majors. These were a mix of science and the arts, and physics was prominent among them. I simply couldn’t imagine a proper consideration of life without better peering through the lens of apparent “reality.”
For reasons, this course did not come to pass and my wanderings through life’s pathways remained in the wilderness of conventional society. Which leads me to the gesture I made earlier to that tickled attention. As I have wandered the lush and marvelous (yes Charles, adjectives ;-) pathways of this wild world, my mind has been set upon the crucible of inquiry — how best from moment to moment to meet this mad arising?
Of course this is the implicit inquiry within which we all live everyday, but then again so too do we all navigate physics with the very same frequency and degree of attention. Thanks to a popular television show I have a much enriched appreciation for the distinctions between the theoretical and the experimental physicist as formal domains of study and application in the world today.
Theory and practical application, experimentation, and revision; the story of our lives. Yet I have always been compelled to search a little more insistently than many behind the curtains of this great drama. For decades now I have mused and wondered that the implicit education of following a path through the fractal shapes of illumination and shadow. In many cases this has been something of an intrepid inquiry, as culture is generally not well equipped to embrace the divergent. At other times, however through the course of this generation X character arc, I have wondered what unique skill may be under cultivation in service to the emergent realities of our transformative time.
There are many ways the case can be made, but it stands clear to me (and many others) that we live now in a time between worlds. The human population has ballooned fourfold over the last century, largely through the “successes” of a particular predominant worldview. Simultaneous to creating that rapid expansion, we have also seen the rush of boundaries to those achievements.
So much inquiry into our human identity has been the domain of the spiritual and religious adherents, and for many centuries now those professions have been relegated to a certain implicitly of presence. While the “professionals” in these domains, remain generally and widely respected, there is also a certain settle affect of these being secondary while we await some coming salvation from the gods of science and technology.
So what is this struggle to which I referred above, this balancing between culling some story of truth from the moments of experience…
Gazing from the office window this late Sunday morning, the neighbor that I’ve never met is hustling back and forth from the car with armloads of belongings, a multi-day moveout effort. Curtis Mayfield echoes through the house, “Get down!” Zack pops in to the office with some fresh ground cinnamon for the coffee, sublime.
We’ve started a collection of flower blossoms that Zack collects well on walks for errands in the neighborhood, the blooms sit on my desk, drying into strange and colorful organic shapes. This morning, rainbow spectral light cast from the prison in the window reflecting the near noonday sun streets across these blossom lending an air of magic to the effect.
And then tipping inward,…
The blue sky, white flowering tree, green shrubbery groundcover with yellow flowers standing tall above purple, breeze and bustle counterpoint to the interior felt sensation of a subtle physical spasticity anxious constriction that is such a familiar accompaniment in this body. And one more step… How do I feel about that, if I look? Color and light can lift the spirit. Bodily tension adds turbulence to that flow.
All of a sudden I’m reflecting, how do I feel about that? Do I overlook it? Am I distracted by it now? Do I hold some philosophical orientation to this common companion? What are the natural attractors of my attention in this regard, if I look closely at this personal experience, does it tell me anything about others, about life through time, or nature in general?
“This being human is a guesthouse…” Quotes the poet. Each moment of reflection, Theoretical Humanism in action. Each moment of engagement, Experimental Humanism in action. How do we tease these out; physics brought us the bomb, can Humanics bring us peace?
Thank you for sharing your exceptional Point of View. It's a glimpse into your world as seen bed as you wind through the glimpses of sky to dance in the greater wonder of it all. A person we both know and love has often said, "Kabir keeps our feet firmly nailed to the sky". In this piece I feel like I'm skating through the demensions (not in the least nailed). 8-)
I like this activity of your daily views - literally. Let's have some more?