musings

“The spirit is that in us which participates. It moves alone, like air or fire, and it moves with the body, lifting the body’s earth and water into gesture and connection, into love.”

– Mark Doty, Cold Dark Deep and Absolutely Clear

This is what I am talking about in the post below. By so obsessively recording memories, even as I live them, I am not somehow not fully participating in them. I am curating, not experiencing. My spirit doesn’t participate very often. There are people (very few, and they know who they are) with whom it does, and certain experiences (with those people), but it is rare. Mostly I am slightly removed, a step away.

Maybe this is not a failing, though, but simply a way of being in the world. When my spirit is really engaged it can feel so raw as to be on the verge of painful. Maybe my role as photographer, my instinctive way of being slightly outside all the time, is just a way of mediating a self that, when fully present, is powerful and porous. I am grateful to those who shepherd that part of me out into the open, who inspire me to such presence. But maybe I just can’t live that way all the time. And maybe there is nothing wrong with that.

I’ve been thinking about presence lately, consciousness, the deep desire to more fully inhabit the hours of my own life. This has engendered some interesting questions in the comments and on other peoples’ blogs. Clearly there’s a nerve here, a seam of emotion and anxiety that is common to many people. Some of the dialog has really framed my thinking.

For example: Kristen asked, provocatively, “Is it possible that being mindful of the need to be present is in fact a manner of being present?” And I’ve been thinking about that. And then Aidan shared her similarly thoughtful question, “I can’t figure out whether we bloggers – by trying to memorialize the tiny details – are bowing to the present moment too often missed OR whether by documenting every existential twist and turn, we are missing it even more.”

I am turning both of these questions over in my head, letting them fall slowly from side to side, examining their edges. I don’t have answers yet, but it does bring to mind one aspect of my history and personality that I think wrestles with this debate. I am the photographer. I have always been the one who takes the pictures.

From all the way back at Princeton, I took the pictures. Every weekend I’d take my old-school boxy camera out to Prospect Street, and the next morning I’d take a roll of 24 or 36 pictures to CVS. Everybody would be annoyed at me, “Oh, God, not more pictures, Lindsey!” and then within days I’d be fielding requests for my negatives or reprints (oh, technology of the olden days!).

I am that person now, still. Of course there are no negatives anymore, but I still take the pictures. An event is not really real until I’ve uploaded the pictures onto my favorite photo site. There are a couple of ways this role, this identity as Recorder of Events, has rippled through my life.

The first is pretty obvious: there aren’t very many pictures of me. This is, I think, by subconscious design. By taking the pictures I don’t have to be in them.

The second is more complex. I suspect my relentless pursuit of a record of my life is further manifestation of my desperate effort to be present. If I record it, it’s real, right? Becca wrote about her memories of her childhood, and her confusion between actual memories and memories of pictures she has seen over and over again in old albums. This is something I’ve talked about before too – am I remembering that excursion in Paris to buy a Christmas tree, or the picture of Hilary and I standing there, smiling with our scarves and hats on, snow-dusted pine trees behind us? I don’t know.

So, in a weird way, if I create the pictures I feel I am assuring the memories. I am sure this is somehow driving me. Photographs were a big part of my childhood: my father has always (and still does) created careful photo albums, captions written in fountain pen under ever picture. I do this too (though I confess I’ve slid downhill to ballpoint). I get mocked a lot for still printing out 4×6 prints of my favorite pictures and putting them into old-fashioned albums.

Of course, though, being the photographer also removes me from my life. I am always off to the side a little, framing pictures and organizing groups of people into smiling, arms-around-each-other portraits. I am not quite ever actually AT the party, but rather floating above it, observing. I have this feeling in my life a lot. And on the rare occasions that I didn’t have film (old days) or my battery was not charged (new days) I have definitely, though I’m loath to admit it, felt relieved by the absence of obligation to take pictures.

So, somehow, in my obsession with recording every detail, in my unwitting assumption of the role of official photographer, I have actually made myself less present. In some ways. I don’t know that it’s entirely that clear-cut. But definitely it functions that way some of the time. Maybe the answer is for me to put down the camera more of the time. To let go of my need to assure a permanent record and just trust that my memory will be sturdy enough.

I have been thinking about Gwen Bell’s piece about entrepreneurship and melancholy. It is simply beautiful writing, declarative and brave, poetic without being overwrought. And I love Gwen’s candor about her own childhood, about the melancholy that she “cannot outrun.” Most of what this post has me thinking about, though, is what I alluded to in my comment:

Thank you for writing so beautifully of the way that having some deep-rooted sadness in your soul doesn’t have to exclude the possibility of great happiness.

Yes. I am so familiar with the sadness of the soul, what Gwen describes as an “undercurrent of sadness.” Yet I find her post incredibly hopeful. It gives me that fullness in my chest that is both the uplifting of inspiration and the grounding of deep truth. Yes. I thought of a Lorrie Moore passage from Who Will Run the Frog Hospital: “Still, something deeply sad had been born buried in me, stirring occasionally inside like a creature moving in sleep.”

I have such a creature inside of me, and the image of it stirring in sleep is wonderfully apt. So I can absolutely understand the general sadness that Gwen talks about, the dogged darkness that cannot be shaken off because it’s a part of every cell of your body. But I am so charmed and moved to hear her assertion – which rings so many familiar bells for me – that “happiness can be cultivated in an environment of the acceptance of sadness.” I have known this instinctively for a long time but have never been able to put it into such lucid words.

I would go further, though. I believe that having an orientation towards melancholy might actually allow a person to experience even more joy. I don’t know if this is about capacity or about contrast. If the former, it is as Kahlil Gibran (I know, he is super trite, hackneyed, and cliched, but isn’t there some ringing truth in this?) says: “The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.”

This might be it. If one is capable of great sadness, does it not make sense that one would also be able to experience tremendous joy? This makes sense to me. Doesn’t a predisposition to deep feeling apply both to light and to dark?

But it could also be that by knowing darkness, we are better able to appreciate lightness. It could be as simple as that. Maybe in the braiding of happy and sad, the happy becomes more vivid. Maybe we inhabit the joy, when it comes, more fully, knowing that our melancholy will inevitably return.

I’m not sure I know which of these it is, or even that it matters. What I know is that I am newly convinced, thanks to Gwen’s thoughtful piece, that a propensity towards melancholy not only need not obscure the ability to feel joy, but might actually enable it. This is a visceral and muscular truth, one that defines my life experience. Thank you, Gwen, for helping guide me to it.

I went to yoga last night. It was a short and not very challenging class, but it felt good. Again, I had that feeling of recognition, the sense that my body knows the language of asana on a cellular level. The reason I went today is that on Wednesday afternoons there is a children’s class at the same time as the adult class. Grace has been wanting to try yoga “for real” (at a studio, I guess, instead of school, or home?), so we went. And she loved it. That was great.

In class I couldn’t stop thinking about drishti. Drishti is the focal point upon which you rest your gaze as you move through the poses. I started practicing yoga (11 years ago!) in a studio where I looked at a white wall during the class. I always learned to pick out a little scar on the wall, a nail hole or other mark, to focus on. This has always helped me balance and, in turn, gets me as close as I’m going to get to a meditative state. I think this is part of why I’ve never much liked Bikram. I can’t stand the mirror. I like the asana sequence, I like the heat, but I simply cannot bear watching myself. For me that is the opposite of what I want in a yoga class.

As I held warrior two last night, looking at the backward “a” in the word “thanks” decalled onto the window in the front of the room, I thought about the way drishti is just another form of the spotting that I learned in ballet as a child. I had a brief and undistinguished ballet career, followed by a similarly mediocre experiment with gymnastics (that culminated in, at sailing camp, a fall during a gymnastics meet, a broken arm, two full compound fractures of the bones, both sticking out of the skin … not pretty).

I didn’t stick with either ballet or gymnastics, but the metaphor of the practice of spotting stuck with me. This is, as you probably know, the way you turn your head very quickly while pirouetting, returning again and again to the same single gaze point in front of you. This helps keep you from getting dizzy and, again, helps you keep your balance.

There is enormous value in having a still point to rest our gaze. A focal point – whether it is a steady person or a clear sense of purpose – serves to settle us into our lives. I think I, maybe more than most, need this. Maybe this is because I spin more than most, who knows. I was reminded yesterday of how powerfully we each need to have something immovable in our lives, something we believe in absolutely. This thing helps us keep our balance as we pirouette through our days. This thing helps us as we hold poses in the moments of our life, aching and threatening to fall off of our precarious perch. We all need this sure and steady thing to anchor us in those moments when we feel unstable, feel the ground beneath us uneven.