Boulder-Tinker

This is my Tinker Creek - it's the Boulder River (facing upstream, so as not to foul the view), on a little piece of land in the Absaroka Mountains, which have been and always will be, my own little piece of paradise. I've been thinking about this place for most of Dillard's book, because I come here every year to spend as much time as possible, and even at the end of six days in a place I've been countless times, it never feels like enough. There is always more to see - and I wonder what I would really see if I was there for a whole year, laying in the grass in my aspen grove or pressing my face as close to the frigid water as possible to look at the little organisms this place teems with. Dillard has really made me think about how I view things, from the walk I take to school everyday to the button I've kept in my pocket like a worry stone for however many years. I'm reminded slightly of Uptaught - in the way he asks his students to write about that one object (I think it was one side of a penny?) for an hour. I feel Dillard unconsciously asking me to really examine what's happening around me so closely, from the little bugs in the potting soil to the way the birds come back after winter. In a way, it seems almost disgraceful that I haven't been doing these things.

This is my cousin Emily. I think she was in fifth grade when I took this picture, which makes her a seventh grader now (junior high, that dangerous age). There's a line from my recent reading that I can't get out of my head, and it's this: "When we lose our innocence - when we start feeling the weight of the atmosphere and learn that there's death in the pot - we take leave of our senses. Only children can hear the song of the male mouse. Only children keep their eyes open" (Dillard, 91). For some reason, I started thinking about Emily, and how as the youngest, she's the only one left of us that still wants to go lay in the wildflowers with me, or who is absolutely delighted to go pick wild raspberries along the road (even if it's been a dry year and we're hard pressed to find any). It's been our tradition since I was in fifth and before that - go to the wildflowers. She still has her eyes "open" to these little things - things that all the others don't want to do. The thing is - so do I. And I'm almost a decade older than her. So if only children still keep their eyes open - does that still make me a child? I struggle so much with this concept - I'm the age of the "adult" in
society. I should be grown up. But does my appreciation of these childlike things...lessen that idea? I'm not sure how to say any of this - but if giving up my appreciation of the smaller things makes me an adult, I don't know that I want to be one.

Pilgrim

"But everywhere I look I see fire; that which isn't flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames." (Dillard, 11)

I've been well and truly hooked. I was from the first paragraph, when bloody paw prints became roses on her chest late at night. Her language is so incredibly well-crafted, poetic, that so far this read has actually been just that - a read, one to curl up with in my chair. Not because it's a book that was assigned for class, but because there is something about the way she strings together her words that speaks to me. And I think that might be because I love poetry - as I read this, I swear you could take anyone of her paragraphs and turn it into a poem. Such as this passage:

"I saw color patches for weeks after I read this wonderful book. It was late summer; the peaches were ripe in the valley orchards. When I woke in the morning, color patches wrapped round my eyes, intricately, leaving not one unfilled spot. All day long I walked among the shifting color-patches that parted before me like the Red Sea and closed again in silence, transfigured, wherever I looked back." (Dillard, 31)

And then I do this:

"I saw color patches for weeks after
I read this wonderful book. It was late
summer; the peaches were ripe in the valley
orchards. When I woke in the morning, color
patches wrapped round my eyes, intricately,
leaving not one unfilled spot. All day long
I walked among the shifting color-patches
that parted before me like the Red Sea
and closed again in silence, transfigured,
wherever I looked back."

Annie Dillard, in almost perfect iambic (with the exception of two lines, I think) pentameter. I guess I'm interested in what it is that supposedly makes certain language or certain prose "poetic" - what "poetic" language does Annie Dillard have that other authors, let's take Metphors for instance, may not necessarily have? Or more importantly, how does form change the way we look at things?

I remember Doug saying something earlier this year about how he wouldn't necessarily know a good poem from a bad poem - but isn't it a matter of perspective, of how we decide to look at things? If we can recognize that the above passage by Dillard is beautiful, poetic writing, while in prose, what makes us less sure about it in pentameter (if we indeed have a hard time with poetry)? It makes me think about that question we've been thinking about - about whether or not there is a difference between "writing" and "creative writing" - and I wonder if, given what I'm thinking about as I'm reading this book, it's about how you approach something. I wonder how much easier Metaphors would have been for me to read if I'd gone into reading not thinking that the subject matter was way over my head, that I wouldn't be able to ever understand or discuss it "intelligently." How would I have felt about it if it had been presented to me in a different form?

Ironic that perspective is part of what Dillard is going for in Pilgrim. It's about how we look at things. And so I relate to this passage quite a lot: "But I don't see what the specialist sees, and so I cut myself off, not only from the total picture, but from various forms of happiness" (Dillard, 18).

Metaphors and "truth"

“Here our theory differs radically from standard theories of meaning. The standard theories assume that it is possible to give an account of truth in itself, free of human understanding, and that the theory of meaning will be based on such a theory of truth. We see no possibility for any such program to work and think that the only answer is to base both the theory of meaning and the theory of truth on a theory of understanding” (Lakoff and Johnson, 184).

And just when I thought Zen had completely cracked my head open, Metaphors gives me part three. I always get so apprehensive when the notion of truth comes into play in the conversation, the way I did last semester after spending time in History of Rhetoric and Composition talking about Plato/Aristotle/all of the others who spent time musing and thinking they could can wrap truth into a neat little bundle. The idea of capital T “Truth” isn’t possible for me; there are too many different notions of “good” relative to all individuals, as well as different perceptions of what we would consider “evil” (hello “killing puppies” situation). So, I agree with Lakoff and Johnson – that truth is based on understanding, and that every person’s understanding is anywhere from slightly to incredibly different (even within certain circles who follow the same thing, like religious groups or school departments) than everyone else’s. Truth is relative, based on understanding – okay, I think I’ve got that..?

I googled “true” just out of curiosity to see what different definitions I might get for it. The first one that came up was “in accordance with fact or reality.” Another, “being in accordance with the actual state or conditions; conforming to reality or fact; not false.” Another, “not false; based on facts and not imagined or invented.” Fact, reality, imagined, or invented. If we were to take these definitions at their word, does that mean fact and reality are also relative to each individual (I’m leaving science out of this equation)? But then that makes perfect sense – it’s something I’ve recognized for a while. It’s why creationists and evolutionists will never agree, and why some religions will never settle on who gets to say they know the way to god with a capital “D.” (Funny, the emphasis we place on capitalization.) You can’t place fact on emotions, and yet the phrase “true love” is such a common one. 

Does that mean then that we can’t use the word “truth” in the way we think we can? It’s a construction, one that we have our own constructions of based on our own lives. Does that mean it’s easier to look at it as a theory then, as Lakoff and Johnson suggest it is? I agree with the book’s suggestion I quoted above, but I’ve never thought about truth as a theory. And I’m still not sure how to do that. 

I wonder who first attached meaning to that word – origins are such a funny thing.

Metaphors pt. 2

Every single day, I have this exact conversation at least sixty times over:

"Hello!" *Happy smile
"Hey." *No eye contact, fumbling for wallet.
"How're you doing today?"
"Good. How're you?"
"Oh, not too bad."

Literally - working at the bookstore doesn't leave a lot of room for unique, friendly conversation when there's a line of college students in a hurry to buy Fritos and get to their next class. It's funny - in high school, I took two years of French, and when we learned greetings, it went something like this:

"Salut!"
"Salut! Ça va?"
"Ça va."

And for some reason I always thought it was silly that you would answer a question with the same phrase, and it wasn't until I entered the customer service force a bit after that that I realized it was literally the same thing I was doing over and over again at work in my own language. Now, if they actually deign to ask me how I'm doing, I like to throw in a word like "splendiferous" instead of "good"or something odd like that. It's amazing what the usage of one different word will do in the flow of a monotonous, but culturally deemed necessity for polite conversation.

I'm not sure what this has to do with a lot of what I read, but I couldn't stop thinking about it in the ARGUMENT IS WAR/the structure of conversations section (there was also a bit with French in it - the difference between "avec" and "with" - and I just reread that last sentence, container and with!) that involves going through a "set of initial conditions" (Lakhoff and Johnson, 78). But I kept thinking about how each customer has control of that conversation I have everyday, not only because of our "the customer is always right" policy that any service job I've ever worked has, but because they are there on their own agenda, and not mine. You become invisible behind a service desk, almost - I'd say a solid 85 percent of the time. But it's so funny how a sudden shift in conversation can occur because of a single word. At the use of an unfamiliar word, I go from being a non-entity behind the counter to being someone on the same level as the customers themselves - they look up, smile, and make eye contact. It such a little thing - but I find it fascinating.