I was up by 5 am but stayed in bed until the alarm went off and then a little longer. I wasn't going to have to do any dishes this morning. The cleanup was all on Judy and Paulette.
I planned to do a short walk, but then I discovered this string. I first noticed it when I saw it lying on the ground next to a fence. I wondered if it was a downed electric wire, but then I saw it was clearly a string, just a plain piece of cotton string. I followed it up the hill. It crossed the fence on the property at the corner and went through the tree. At first, I thought that was the end. It was dark, but I saw the light-colored string coming out from the other side of that tree. Now, I had to follow it to its end. It went down the hill, crossed Hiolani, and finally came to an end halfway down the block.
Now I had to find the other end. After I came back to the point where I first noticed the string, I saw that it crossed Nehiwa at one point and kept going. The endpoint was beyond my driveway, where I had started out that morning. I found it tied to a low palm tree across the street from my neighbor.
When I got to Bikram, I called Jazzy to tell her about the string. I thought it would be fun for her four-year-old son, Leon, to follow it. Sometime around 11 am, she was in my driveway calling to me. I put on a pair of pants and went to see if I could find the string. It was totally gone. It was clear that someone had wound it up again. I wondered if it had been the people who had put the string down or someone who was picking up litter. Either way, it was gone.
I read Chapter 3 from the book I was writing and did some writing on the blog. I alphabetized two more shelves of books and found one. I counted up the number of books left on the list: nineteen. Maddening exercise, finding those books.
After the vacation is over, I will contact the librarian at the Josephinum Seminary, where Mike worked, to ask if they want to go through the list and pick out some books. I read some of In the Dreamhouse. I was up to the point where she described a scene from one of the Starship shows, I believe it was Galactica, where some sadistic torturer captures one of the good guys and hooks him up with some contraption to force him to writhe.
The torturer only asked one question: "How many lights do you see?" The victim answered honestly, "Four." The torturer pressed the button and said, "There are five. "The torturer offers this man a life of ease and leisure versus a life of pain and agony. He only had to answer one question, "How many lights do you see?" Despite all the pain the man had already suffered and will suffer as a result of his answer, he said, "Four."
When he is rescued and speaks to his debriefer, he tells him the choice he was faced with. He tells him that while he answered, "Four," he was beginning to see five. It reminds me why I developed the reading method I have; it anchors people in their own perceptions instead of others' dictates.
_____-____-_____
Musings;
The story of the torturer rings familiar. I think it does for everyone. There are so many ways that we are forced to abandon our own perceptions for some common point of view. It's an odd and universal conflict.
So many complain that their point of view is not respected, and no one makes an effort to understand it. The relief we feel when we find someone who sees things and – us- the way we see things and ourselves—the comfort from being part of a group where the definition of reality coincides with our own.
But we need both, don't we? There are commonly agreed upon 'realities' that have been created long before our births. The young see the world with fresh eyes. They still see where there are four lights versus five. And yes, they are tortured if they don't see things how their cultural group sees them. They are told they don't belong.
If each child had to invent a new set of rules, or if every culture had to revise the rules in response to each child, we would all be in trouble. We're getting pretty close to that state of being. Change happens daily in our lives now. Systems change. It causes confusion, disorientation. There are many crying to reestablish the old rules. Most of those complaining the loudest are the most culturally conservative. What makes our era different from other periods is the rate of change.
Language is one of the agreed-upon systems. Obviously, we wouldn't want each child to start from scratch, invent a language, and battle with each other child about what that language should sound like. But yes, language changes. Language is nothing more than a cultural convention. It is not God-given; it is parent-given.
If you think the idea of each child creating their own language is bizarre, look up twinglish, at least that's what I heard it called many years ago. But now, that term refers to something else entirely. For example, the process of two people, twins, making up a unique language that is incomprehensible to others is called cryptophasia. Yes, these children can make up an entirely new language, not just a word or expression here and there, but a whole new vocabulary and syntactical structure that only they can understand. There is a two-way pull: toward the culturally given versus toward our own personal perception, which is always individual by definition.
I have written about my mother, who saw all differences of opinion as disrespect for her. She wasn't particularly culturally conservative; her fears were more primitive. She was an amazingly functional woman, given her problems. But my experience with her taught me a lot about the human condition. I had to learn to hold on to my own perceptions while finding my way in the cultural setting I was born into. I survived. I hope all do.
I think the big problem is we don't offer guaranteed belonging anymore. When we started out as a species, belonging was a survival issue. We needed to belong, and we needed others to belong as well. The trade-off paid off. It is harder to find a group with clearly defined boundaries and boundaries that we can clearly see. There has never been unconditional belonging; the limits were just more clearly defined. Everyone knew if you crossed a certain line, you were out.
Do I want to go back to that original state? No way. I couldn't do well in such a clearly bounded culture. With my questioning mind, I'd be dead in a nanosecond. I can live with fuzzy boundaries. I have learned to navigate, find the way the water flows, and follow it while maintaining my purpose and direction in life. I'm considered cool these days. I think when I was younger, I was just plain annoying. I wasn't very comfortable in my own skin then, either. I would say I found myself pretty irritating to live with too.
No comments:
Post a Comment