[Image: “What a Chick Feels Before Hatching,” by Becca Peterson. Found it on Flickr; used here under a Creative Commons license.]
From whiskey river (but just excerpted here):
Your original, fundamental position is prior to consciousness. This “prior to consciousness” identity that you are cannot be named at all. From this unnameable, non-conceptual source, which is your original, innate nature, arises the sense of conscious presence. This is also the sense of being, the experience that “I am,” or the bare fact of knowing that you are. This is the first appearance or experience upon your original state. Within this consciousness state emerges the mind, the body and the entire world of appearances. Little can be said about your original state because it is clearly beyond all concepts and even prior to consciousness. Some pointers that have been used are: non-conceptual awareness, awareness unaware of itself, pure being (beyond being and non-being), the absolute, the unmanifest, noumenon, cognizing emptiness, no thing — to name only a few.
This non-conceptual awareness or being is what you are. It is pure non-duality or unicity in which both subject and object are merged. Just as the sun does not know light because it is light, so you do not know your original nature (as an object) because you are that. It is forever beyond the grasp of concepts and subject-object knowledge. Yet it is entirely evident and inescapable as that in you (which is you) that allows you to say with utter certitude “I am” and “I know that I am.” Even when those words subside, you are. Even when the consciousness that knows those words subsides, you are. Consciousness is the light of creation. But you, as the unnameable source, are the primordial awareness, being or no thing (call it what you will) in which consciousness comes and goes.
(John Wheeler [source (in somewhat different words)])
…and:
The present rearranges the past. We never tell the story whole because a life isn’t a story; it’s a whole Milky Way of events and we are forever picking out constellations from it to fit who and where we are.
(Rebecca Solnit [source])
Like the quotations above? All credit, then, to the anonymous (and unknown to me) whiskey river blogger — who shared them this past week, and who has been inspiring me for over ten years. Below, some relevant (?) discoveries of my own, along the same lines. (More info here.)
Not from whiskey river:
First Things
Sometimes the days just won’t move no matter
what you try. First things, you say in the Spring
as you plant the brown rows, but the first thing
you see is they just won’t come. The batter
stands interminably in the fresh sun,
tapping his yellow bat on the white plate.
Ball one.Strike one.Ball two.Strike two.At this rate
we’ll all be dead before the first home run.One night you hear on the phone, “Old Critchly’s dead,”
and now it seems to bluster when it rings
and the boys saySirwhen you walk to town.
Tommy Critchly! what, what was that he said—
I feel so good I swear to God it stings—
and you call to the moon,Slow down,slow down.
(Daniel J. Langton [source])
…and:
Fabergé’s Egg
Switzerland, 1920
Dear Friend, “Called away” from my country,
I square the egg and put it in a letter
that all may read, gilding each word a little
so that touched, it yields to a secret
stirring, a small gold bird on a spring
suddenly appearing to sing a small song
of regret, elation, that overspills all private
bounds, although you ask, as I do, what now
do we sing to, sing for? Before the Great War,
I made a diamond-studded coach three inches high
with rock crystal windows and platinum wheels
to ceremoniously convey a speechless egg to Court.
All for a bored Czarina! My version of history
fantastic and revolutionary as I reduced the scale
to the hand-held dimensions of a fairy tale,
hiding tiny Imperial portraits and cameos
in eggs of pearl and bone. Little bonbons, caskets!
The old riddle of the chicken and the egg
is answered thus: in the Belle Epoque
of the imagination, the egg came first, containing,
as it does, both history and uncertainty, my excesses
inducing unrest among those too hungry to see
the bitter joke of an egg one cannot eat.
Oblique oddity, an egg is the most beautiful of all
beautiful forms, a box without corners
in which anything can be contained, anything
except Time, that old jeweler who laughed
when he set me ticking. Here, among the clocks
and watches of a country precisely ordered
and dying, I am not sorry, I do not apologize.
Three times I kiss you in memory
of that first Easter, that first white rising,
and send this message as if it could save you:
Even the present is dead. We must live now
in the future. Yours, Fabergé.
(Elizabeth Spires [source])
…and:
[Two girls] asked him please to take a snapshot of them while they were playing ball among the waves. He consented, but since in the meanwhile he had worked out a theory in opposition to snapshots, he dutifully expressed it to the two friends:“What drives you two girls to cut from the mobile continuum of your day these temporal slices, the thickness of a second? Tossing the ball back and forth, you are living in the present, but the moment the scansion of the frames is insinuated between your acts it is no longer the pleasure of the game that motivated you but, rather, that of seeing yourselves again in the future, of rediscovering yourselves in twenty years’ time, on a piece of yellowed cardboard (yellowed emotionally, even if modern printing procedures will preserve it unchanged). The taste for the spontaneous, natural, lifelike snapshot kills spontaneity, drives away the present. Photographed reality immediately takes on a nostalgic character, of joy fled on the wings of time, a commemorative quality, even if the picture was taken the day before yesterday. And the life that you live in order to photograph it is already, at the outset, a commemoration of itself. To believe that the snapshot is more true than the posed portrait is a prejudice.”
(Italo Calvino [source])
Froog says
I am pleased to find such an elegant condemnation from Calvino of the absurdity of the ‘selfie’. I have almost never taken a picture with myself in it anywhere (except, occasionally, as a joke, partially, distantly, obscurely in a reflection). And I have never, ever taken one of those standard tourist shots where you stand in front of a famous landmark (to prove to your friends that you really have been there). I always liked to think – though this was surely a vanity – that some quality of the photographs I’d taken would reveal itself to people who really knew me, and would thus serve as proof that I had visited the place portrayed even though I was not visible in the scene.
I did use to find it rather touching, though, that people would so trustingly hand a camera over to a total stranger to take one of these pictures. The ‘selfie-stick’ is putting an end to that.
I suddenly recalled (ah, the way my mind works!) that the excellent – truly disturbing – Dutch psychological thriller ‘The Vanishing’ was adapted from a novel called ‘The Golden Egg’ (it’s an image from a dream discussed at the beginning of the film, which finds a sinister parallel in the appalling climax).
John says
I think that observation is very subtle — about a photograph’s being OF the photographer even when the photographer isn’t IN it. It’s not necessarily true of all photographs, of course. (And I suspect that many selfies are expressions of what others want, or are imagined to want, rather than of what the photographer him- or herself wants… as through photographers don’t trust their own instincts.) But just as with writing, once one has taken enough photos, one develops a signature “look” which (I bet) suggests almost no one else’s finger on the shutter.
I first saw the Dutch version of The Vanishing in a theater, in 1991 or ’92. Scared the bejabbers out of me. (I’d watch it again, no problem, but have never been tempted to see the US remake.) Your mentioning the film sent me on a search for a screenplay transcription; found one, here… but it’s a bit consternating because it doesn’t include any of the speakers’ names!
Froog says
Hm, that is a very weird way of presenting a script, isn’t it? I suspect that someone painstakingly transcribed it – perhaps from audio only? – but wasn’t sure of the character names. That’s actually the kind of thing I’d deal with quite a lot in China – educational publishers trying to generate material for listening practice scripts by copying (but not usually very accurately!) any native English source they could get their hands on.
The remake is spectacularly awful. Even Jeff Bridges and Kiefer Sutherland are bad in it. The original director agreed to do it, purely for the money, I assume; he was just embarrassedly going through the motions.
And Hollywood requires a ‘happy ending’, with an utterly implausible last-minute rescue trope grafted on, which negates the whole point of the original story. The Dutch ending is the most chilling I’ve ever seen, a devastating use of point-of-view.
John says
Not that Hollywood needs my endorsement, but some directors have gotten a little better about the happy-ending syndrome.
I actually noticed this trend by way of The Missus’s responses to certain films. She believes in general that once a film (or novel, etc.) has built up an audience’s investment in a character, the audience “deserves” a satisfactory outcome for that character. One of her (our) favorite examples of a film’s failing a protagonist is the 2007 film of Stephen King’s The Mist. The novella ends on an ambiguous note — we don’t know WHAT happens, ultimately — but the filmmakers opted for a gleefully downbeat ending.
(King apparently approved the change, but that doesn’t mean much; he seems to have very bad judgment when he gets involved with Hollywood. His Cell underwent an almost identical metamorphosis to the screen — ambiguous book climax, and a bad, bad film ending. OTOH, that film worked on almost no levels at all — even Cusack couldn’t save it, which says something.)