2024-04-09
Entry tags:
No one has a coherent response to the eclipse
they talk about shared joy as if--
you know, when I was young I believed that everyone was similar inside. I thought we shared the same feelings, maybe in different proportions. Through writing and intensity I could evoke feelings I'd experienced in other people.
as I got older I got confused. People would look at me and say, I wish I could live that way. At first I said, why can't you? and they would cite responsibilities. Within a couple years their lives would change, they'd take a few more risks, go after that thing they really wanted, and lose touch.
later I learned to say, you know there are consequences for me too.
People always felt understood but I never did. I was always doing the understanding.
there's a new test for theory of mind. You look at pictures of just people's eyes and choose one of four emotion words. The score is on speed and accuracy.
maybe that's the problem. somehow humans believe you can understand someone from their eyes. the score is based on speed and accuracy. there's no value on listening slowly, misunderstanding, listening again, and having the worldview seep in with all its sorrow and alien joy.
every choice is a knife, slicing off a set of possibilities as it hones and shapes another. do you know every choice is a knife? how many choices do you have left before there's nothing? i think you have more than me, but I think too you feel a scarcity there. they call it a crisis when you realize you can't be anything you thought about, that the knife has shaved away things you might someday want.
maybe it's just that your life is a crisis when you bother to think about it. i know often you don't. it's something that happens, pulling you along blindfolded.
i also don't hone my life as much any more, don't shape it as much, don't carve off slivers of choice. maybe now i'm trying to glue fallen pieces back on. but for me that, too, is a choice. i live in the fog of the present now, no longer perched on a hill with the past and future spread out around me. it takes too much of me to guide the knife and so i let it fall where it would. six trips upstairs to get things i forgot before work this morning, one after another, how can i remember the consequences of something a year in the past, a year in the future?
funny how now that there's no shadow of forgetting across part of my past my story can feel whole. i used to have a line before which i couldn't remember. now i can't remember at all and i can't predict, i can just be. somehow in the be-ing i have both gained and lost my entire self at once.
and so i am enlightened. but.
how many million people pilgrimaged to see the sun go out? to see it come back again? but in the dust under the spruce trees, in the dry stems of dead pines along the highways, in the brown leaves of all the salal and in the shedding branches of cedars, in each drop of water not fallen, in the air currents buckling and breaking that are even reported and drawn in your human news, in the loam under your feet if you ever walk on soil that is made of things dead and gone that knew a world you never knew, in the pictures of fish from a century ago, in the falter of frogsong, in the slow failing of dykes and the people twitching into stillness on sidewalks unobserved, in the shower stations on the sidewalks and the bubbles of methane from boreal lakes, in the retreat of the glaciers and in the words we write online the sun is always going out. it is always going out and it is going out fast and spectacular in an enormous spectacle and omen.
and every time a green leaf opens through frost damage, every time an egg improbably cracks as the tiny creature within wriggles into being, every time someone opens their door to a stranger, every time the lake ice shatters in spring and re-ices in fall, every time a tree pushes through a sidewalk and every time the vast machinery of humanity organizes to fill a pothole, in the way a touch can calm a heartbeat and draw a smile, in the way every baby and seedling and work of art made by our hands and piece of advice on gardening is different, in the way ravens clothe the cities where once passenger pigeons flew over fields, in the way burns flight bright green the next spring and spill over with mushrooms, how cottonwood and birch seeds flood through the air and rats and pigeons turn garbage into life and diversity and green plants on the rooftops the sun is always coming out again. it is always coming out, quietly, with a clangour impossible to miss when you touch the ground, hugely, vibrantly, creatively. the sun is always coming out again.
and the sun doesn't care if we're here to see it when it comes and goes. we care. we travel-- you travel in huge numbers to be reminded. you care, for a second, somehow, and then it is once again subsumed in your daily life which is, nevertheless, made of the whole clatter and symphony and chaos of the sun always going dark and always coming back again. your whole life! the salmon are the sun. the desert flowers are the sun. an ear of corn is the sun. mud in the cracks of the sidewalk is the sun.
when i was young i believed everyone was similar inside. i believed in shared sorrow. i worked to learn people's sorrows so they wouldn't be alone in them. i was still alone.
and there is so much shared pleasure in the world - touch, taste, the sound and rhythm of music and conversations, even looking together at something beautiful. that's pleasure and it can be shared.
but the sun is always going dark and always coming back out, not a parlour trick but drums and cymbals and the whole ground shaking and also the smallest whisper and motion of light striking a chromophore. i don't know how there can't be shared joy in that but somehow i am always standing alone.
when i was young i believed everyone was similar inside. if i could just reach them--
they test for theory of mind with a picture of eyes and a four-answer multiple choice question about emotion.
when i was young--
but maybe now I no longer believe anyone has an inside.
you know, when I was young I believed that everyone was similar inside. I thought we shared the same feelings, maybe in different proportions. Through writing and intensity I could evoke feelings I'd experienced in other people.
as I got older I got confused. People would look at me and say, I wish I could live that way. At first I said, why can't you? and they would cite responsibilities. Within a couple years their lives would change, they'd take a few more risks, go after that thing they really wanted, and lose touch.
later I learned to say, you know there are consequences for me too.
People always felt understood but I never did. I was always doing the understanding.
there's a new test for theory of mind. You look at pictures of just people's eyes and choose one of four emotion words. The score is on speed and accuracy.
maybe that's the problem. somehow humans believe you can understand someone from their eyes. the score is based on speed and accuracy. there's no value on listening slowly, misunderstanding, listening again, and having the worldview seep in with all its sorrow and alien joy.
every choice is a knife, slicing off a set of possibilities as it hones and shapes another. do you know every choice is a knife? how many choices do you have left before there's nothing? i think you have more than me, but I think too you feel a scarcity there. they call it a crisis when you realize you can't be anything you thought about, that the knife has shaved away things you might someday want.
maybe it's just that your life is a crisis when you bother to think about it. i know often you don't. it's something that happens, pulling you along blindfolded.
i also don't hone my life as much any more, don't shape it as much, don't carve off slivers of choice. maybe now i'm trying to glue fallen pieces back on. but for me that, too, is a choice. i live in the fog of the present now, no longer perched on a hill with the past and future spread out around me. it takes too much of me to guide the knife and so i let it fall where it would. six trips upstairs to get things i forgot before work this morning, one after another, how can i remember the consequences of something a year in the past, a year in the future?
funny how now that there's no shadow of forgetting across part of my past my story can feel whole. i used to have a line before which i couldn't remember. now i can't remember at all and i can't predict, i can just be. somehow in the be-ing i have both gained and lost my entire self at once.
and so i am enlightened. but.
how many million people pilgrimaged to see the sun go out? to see it come back again? but in the dust under the spruce trees, in the dry stems of dead pines along the highways, in the brown leaves of all the salal and in the shedding branches of cedars, in each drop of water not fallen, in the air currents buckling and breaking that are even reported and drawn in your human news, in the loam under your feet if you ever walk on soil that is made of things dead and gone that knew a world you never knew, in the pictures of fish from a century ago, in the falter of frogsong, in the slow failing of dykes and the people twitching into stillness on sidewalks unobserved, in the shower stations on the sidewalks and the bubbles of methane from boreal lakes, in the retreat of the glaciers and in the words we write online the sun is always going out. it is always going out and it is going out fast and spectacular in an enormous spectacle and omen.
and every time a green leaf opens through frost damage, every time an egg improbably cracks as the tiny creature within wriggles into being, every time someone opens their door to a stranger, every time the lake ice shatters in spring and re-ices in fall, every time a tree pushes through a sidewalk and every time the vast machinery of humanity organizes to fill a pothole, in the way a touch can calm a heartbeat and draw a smile, in the way every baby and seedling and work of art made by our hands and piece of advice on gardening is different, in the way ravens clothe the cities where once passenger pigeons flew over fields, in the way burns flight bright green the next spring and spill over with mushrooms, how cottonwood and birch seeds flood through the air and rats and pigeons turn garbage into life and diversity and green plants on the rooftops the sun is always coming out again. it is always coming out, quietly, with a clangour impossible to miss when you touch the ground, hugely, vibrantly, creatively. the sun is always coming out again.
and the sun doesn't care if we're here to see it when it comes and goes. we care. we travel-- you travel in huge numbers to be reminded. you care, for a second, somehow, and then it is once again subsumed in your daily life which is, nevertheless, made of the whole clatter and symphony and chaos of the sun always going dark and always coming back again. your whole life! the salmon are the sun. the desert flowers are the sun. an ear of corn is the sun. mud in the cracks of the sidewalk is the sun.
when i was young i believed everyone was similar inside. i believed in shared sorrow. i worked to learn people's sorrows so they wouldn't be alone in them. i was still alone.
and there is so much shared pleasure in the world - touch, taste, the sound and rhythm of music and conversations, even looking together at something beautiful. that's pleasure and it can be shared.
but the sun is always going dark and always coming back out, not a parlour trick but drums and cymbals and the whole ground shaking and also the smallest whisper and motion of light striking a chromophore. i don't know how there can't be shared joy in that but somehow i am always standing alone.
when i was young i believed everyone was similar inside. if i could just reach them--
they test for theory of mind with a picture of eyes and a four-answer multiple choice question about emotion.
when i was young--
but maybe now I no longer believe anyone has an inside.