But Wait, There's More!
Or, There's A Hundred Solutions To This Problem.
(I am never quite sure how much I believe most of the things I believe.)
-Michael Robbins1
Years ago, in an angkot2, I forget what the conversation was about, but I was traveling with a fellow Volunteer towards, I think, someone else’s school. I often characterize my tenure in the Peace Corps as a bucolic boredom, but this is highly misleading, perhaps intentionally so. Much of it was spent traveling, much of it was spent in a state of profound uncertainty. Whatever it may have been it wasn’t boring.
This is all tangential. Which is to say that it’s essential. We were sitting, waiting to arrive, talking about, I think, mutual acquaintances, their various trials and tribulations, ourselves. The sea, the coast of East Java were passing by. I fancy somewhere, there were gulls squawking. Circle of brown. Circle of blue.3 I may have performed a caricatured version of myself to illustrate how I thought others perceived me. I may have then performed a caricatured version of myself to illustrate how I perceived me.
She was very, almost theatrically quiet, for all of about ten seconds. Then she said something that has stayed with me, clearly: “You spend more time thinking about how you think about things than thinking.”
A preoccupation with the process of thought itself, the formation of ideas, has arguably taken up a massive amount of time to no one’s obvious benefit.
Each of us has experienced a process of cognition, in which both the object of criticism (the thought we think about) and the subject (the thinking about the thought) are altered, all the while experiencing themselves factually as single entities.4 This happens all the time, it’s happening right now. As I thought about that ride along the coast, about the person I used to know, the thought flutters and shimmers like a stream along a mountain slope. Not even the memory, which has been ripped to shreds by the years, but the thought I have of that conversation, about what it used to mean to me, about what it means to me right now is constantly shifting as I float down the mountain. The mountain, I guess, is life.
This happens as an individual and it happens collectively, on a scale so large it can be difficult to perceive, and, as you may surmise, constantly. Some people get grand and call it Civilization or Culture, which are really just the titles we give to the stories we tell ourselves about how we got to wherever we are, usually molded by whatever the exigencies of the moment may be to whosoever happens to be in a position to tell the story.
Recently, in London (was it Paddington? was there a light drizzling rain?) I stumbled upon a statue of a national hero, I won’t say where or who, but under his name they had two inscriptions ‘Invincible ________ National Hero’ and ‘Defender of Western Civilization’, which is hilarious if you know anything about the individual in question. ‘Invincible’ simply isn’t true (he died of malaria while in retreat), though ‘National Hero’ is more than plausible, if very retroactive. ‘Defender of Western Civilization’ is so broad as to say nothing.
You can defend something, of course, maybe standing in line, for instance, but ‘Western Civilization’…. Few people in the ‘West’ would know who the man was, (where is this West anyways?) and I have difficulty believing that he, at any point, viewed his struggle as for something that might be referred to as 'Western’ or ‘Civilization’ (What’s up and down in space?). I don’t really know what those words mean, in conjunction, though I think I’m aware of what people used to think it meant in some parts of the world, at some times.
Leaf-Sound
rain again and again and
the paper bag gets
wet the books
stay on the right side
of dry
this once
something pines for something
else
isn’t that always how
it goes?
Wolfram Eilenberger, Time of the Magicians