Amie

Earlier today I was looking through a CD full of poems and essays I wrote during high school when I came across one poem entitled, "Life." I wrote it about two and a half years ago, and I ardently wish that I embodied now what I wrote about then. While I read, it saddened me to realize how many Zuleikas have claimed my affections and treasures. At the time I wrote that poem, I believed that the things within me were, like the wealth at the Duke’s disposal, "manifold and tremendous" (57). In my youth I saw the beauty of living. In my coming of age, I have been too blind to appreciate its splendor. In all the time I have wasted on distractions, I’ve offered up my own respective riches to suitors who did not reciprocate my loyalties. In many ways similar to the Duke’s forfeiting his life, I have squandered some of the splendor of living.

At the same time that I mount my pulpit to preach against petty wanderings and experimentation, though, I cannot discredit the experience I have gained, and the richness of the distractions I’ve encountered. In my earlier years, I was so enamored with my life goals and the certainty with which I felt I would achieve them that I paid no attention to other opportunities. I scoffed at the fools who wasted their time with the trivialities of high school. Dances? Idiocy! Football games? Barbaric distraction from the concrete and weighty matters of life. Children, I thought, are starving in Africa. Souls and hearts and minds are wasting away everywhere, and we’re too busy fussing about the latest blockbuster to care. I knew, once he broke up with me, that my quarterback boyfriend was living in the same futility of the masses all around me. I was the only one who perceived the urgency of living. I, like the Duke, was "too much concerned with [my] own perfection ever to think of admiring any one" or anything else but whatever I deemed worthy of attention or time (29). In living my Purpose Driven Life (as the best-seller is called), I missed the point entirely. My efforts to make the world better, to leave a worthy and lasting legacy, only crippled me. I could no more accomplish my "noble" goals than I could bring myself to appreciate the fun of a spontaneous picnic and small-talk.

That is why, though I will label Zuleika a "distraction," I refuse to paint her in a discreditable hue. Before Zuleika, the Duke had never allowed his heart to become enmeshed with another’s. Previous to the great quandary that forced him to reach outside his own existence and into the life of another human being, the Duke was content with his life and his goals. He was impressive, responsible, and – worst of all – sufficient. The Duke’s encounter with Zuleika was, I dare say, a good thing. It was the extreme to which he allowed the amorous feelings to control him that became his downfall.

In declaring his love for Zuleika, the Duke exclaims, "My heart is no tablet of mere wax, from which an instant’s heat can dissolve whatever impress it may bear, leaving it blank and soft for another impress, and another, and another. My heart is a bright hard gem … Came Cupid, with one of his arrow-points for graver, and what he cut on the gem’s surface can never be effaced. There, deeply and forever, your image is intagliated. No years, nor fires, nor cataclysm of total Nature, can efface from that great gem your image." (55) I believe that there is more than a kernel of truth in the Duke’s statement, and more than a small victory evidenced in his words. The paths we walk in life are never forgotten by the heart. This is why our attempts to compartmentalize and sort the different qualities and experiences of living are so futile: we too quickly forget the "simultaneous presence" of all things, as our first reading assignment pointed out (862). It seems to me that a distraction is a dangerous, marvelous, fiery thing; dangerous because it can so easily woo the intrepid sojourner away from his rightful destination, marvelous because it can endow the distracted with ideas and experiences valuable on the road he was not prepared to walk, and fiery because it is consuming, volatile, and fearsome. "Femme fatale" though she may be, deadly distraction that she did become, Zuleika reminds me that sometimes a "distraction" is right and necessary, because sometimes it takes the unexpected to create the change we didn’t know was needed (Anthology 317).

Lately I’ve found myself treading in the cloudy, grey, undefined area of moderation (which drives me crazy because it’s uncertain). I understand the importance of a goal-oriented life. There is a safety in the certainty of a To Do list, and a peace that accompanies the knowledge that I’m accomplishing something. But I’ve come to believe that life cannot be lived out systematically, and that the aggregate, messy wholeness of living far supersedes the simplicity of accomplishing tasks. I’m left then, to figure out how the words in my poem apply to me now:

Here in the stillness, thoughts can finally pass through my mind, and I understand them – they’re not just cluttering up inside my head, as they usually do. It feels so good to "[wander] from the studious walls," to be still (The Scholar-Gipsy, 469). Air’s never felt more perfect on my skin, I think. Almost feels like nature’s breath upon me. "In this huge world, which roars hard by," I remember snippets of today’s reading. "In my helpless cradle I / Was breathed on by the rural Pan" (Kensington Gardens, 458.21,23,24). The Biology ponds become my Kensington Gardens.

Should I sit down here in the dirt? I might get my clothes dirty. But what’s a little dirt? You haven’t just sat for weeks. So, I sit. The pond is nice, but something seems a little odd about a man-made wildlife area. Neatly stacked stones create an artificial waterfall, with the water mechanically pumped through the pond. How like me to get a fifteen-minute respite from the "rat race," then waste it thinking about why it’s not perfect. I determine to work past my need to be opinionated about everything.

Now is the first time in so long that I feel the freedom to think! At home I feel guilty about not doing the homework I’ve been procrastinating. Now, my mind can wander. I look around the pond.

Lily pads! I never even saw those yesterday while I was studying here! It’s funny how things go unnoticed when we’re too busy with our tasks. I catch sight of some withering bushes, exhausted by the summer’s scorching heat. In the shade of the trees, no grass grows. Even under our care in this well-maintained garden, plants die. We can’t force them to live.

On the other side of the pond, Professor Bump kneels, zooming his camera in. How odd it feels to have someone take my picture here by the pond! It feels so awkward to be watched or noticed here – I no longer blend in with the thousands on the street. Here, I am alone; I am vulnerable. A lone leaf floats by, pulled by the current created by the pump and the waterfall. It catches on a clump of rotting leaves, and it stops. All leaves are dead, separated from the tree, I think. All humans are cut from the womb and weaned… are we dead? What makes us alive? We carry life within us. But who of us "possessest an immortal lot" (The Scholar-Gypsy, 23)? Who is "exempt from age" (The Scholar-Gypsy, 23)? The thoughts echo in my head until another bounces in. This park is a small bit of nature, stuck here between brick buildings, FedEx trucks, and thousands of separate agendas. Could this cultivated park ever become wild? If we stopped mowing and pruning and testing the pH balance of the water, surely something magical could happen. But the plants could also just wilt and die. The park is groomed wilderness. It is nature conceived in civilization. Which conceived me – the tame or the wild? Does man need civility? Does he need wilderness? Or both? What are we lacking?

So many questions! I often grow tired of wondering. Sometimes it feels as if that’s all I ever do, and I rarely get the answers for which I search. I’m reminded of a line in Elie Weisel’s autobiographical account of his experiences as a concentration camp survivor, Night: "Man raises himself toward God by the questions he asks Him. Man questions God and God answers … That is the true dialogue … I pray to the God within me that He will give me the strength to ask Him the right questions."

For a long time, I wondered what the point was in asking anything of "God," and how I would ever expect to find any answers at all. Then I realized that the only way to get an answer is to ask a question. My time at the biology ponds reminds me how much I want to find answers for my questions, how badly I want the endurance to search for light that will illumine my life. I want the closing stanza of Thyrsis to describe my journey:

Journal #8: My Sense of Place

The movie Garden State, currently showing at Dobie Theater, profoundly impacted me. Perhaps it was the inward journey taken by the film’s main character, Andrew Largeman. Perhaps it was the film’s exhortation to embrace life for what it is, despite the pain, despite the fear. But one scene so well articulated something that I’ve thought about for years that I literally wondered if the script writers had read my journal. The following dialogue takes place between Andrew Largeman, a twenty-five year-old waiter/struggling actor, recently bereaved of his mother, and his new girlfriend Sam:

Andrew Largeman: You know that point in your life when you realize that the house that you grew up in isn't really your home anymore? All of a sudden even though you have some place where you can put your stuff that idea of home is gone.
Sam: I still feel at home in my house.
Andrew Largeman: You'll see when you move out it just sort of happens one day one day and it's just gone. And you can never get it back. It's like you get homesick for a place that doesn't exist. I mean it's like this right of passage, you know. You won't have this feeling again until you create a new idea of home for yourself, you know, for you kids, for the family you start, it's like a cycle or something. I miss the idea of it. Maybe that's all family really is. A group of people who miss the same imaginary place.

The following poem is my attempt to unify the unspeakable emotions I felt when I heard those words spoken aloud (after years of their inaudible screaming within me), and the ideas presented in today’s anthology reading.

Drifting Onward, Homeward[1]

“We are always trying to make sense of the world.”[2]

So that things which are ambiguous

Like this

Word

Bother us.

We read the world because

We want to know if the world tells us

anything about who we are … or whence we came.

This “dimensionless, timeless, and chaotic”[3] place might be more tolerable

If it would give me a hint as to where I belong.

Or at least where I ought to go.

But for now, I’ve set “adrift” to ask the world

If it would welcome me.

And as I float along, I’ll give glory “to God for dappled things.”[4]

Dappled things can be pretty.

Besides, I have nothing that isn’t dappled,

So I’ll thank Him for what is.

My family is dappled, my body is dappled, my decisions are dappled.

So that I often wonder how anything exists and is real

That is not mottled, spotty, piebald.

And the “signs”[5] I see along the shoreline:

Familiar people

Familiar places

Where once I docked my raft

All along the way are symbols and images

Trees and photographs, seashells and exquisite paintings

I see them, and I feel them.

They speak to me in the silence of their colors and texture

Thought I know neither their name nor their reason

I hear their statement.[6]

These signs shall point me onward.

For a person is not a harbor[7]

And a past is not a home

But the two together give me a place to rest awhile.

Then, onward I go, where I may one day reach

That unknown place to which I drift.

The currents will pull me there[8]

And upon arrival

I will know that I am home.

[1] The title, “Drifting Onward, Homeward,” refers to the feeling I get when I think about what my home is. Since the sixth grade, I have felt entirely out of place in my home. As the only child living at home during the worst parts of my parents’ hostile marriage (as my brother leaving for college opened the door for new expression for their differences), and the only child subject to custody agreements and weekend visitation, I’ve often felt like an alien drifting between the two islands who are my parents. That said, for years I’ve wondered what a “home” is.

[2] Silverman, 137. This is why “we find ourselves in semiotic situations.”

[3] Crowe, 145B: “A sense of place concerns that need to find a familiar landscape as refuge from the unknown, perhaps from the terrifying prospect of being set adrift in what would otherwise be a dimensionless, timeless, and chaotic world.” Perhaps this is why the statement, “Home is where the heart is” holds such weight in our emotional intellect: home is not just the formation of an individual but a constant assurance of security and peace in a changing, untrustworthy world.

[4] Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “Pied Beauty.” http://www.theotherpages.org/poems/hopkins1.html:

[5] Silverman, 135: “…everything is a sign of sorts.”

[6] On page 143, Silverman suggests: “Instead of trying to figure out what the painting ‘means,’ try to pay attention to what the painting or photo ‘evokes.’ What sort of reaction or response does the piece elicit? Is there a mood or tone? Does the painting or its colors create any particular emotion?” It is thus, by feeling art rather than interpreting it, that we understand the truth within it.

[7] Crowe, 145C: “We frequently imbue places with human characteristics,” and similarly, I think, we create “places” within people. During my childhood, my home was my life’s nucleus because the tenderness of my mother and the provision of my father were there. In fact, these two people were my home. It was much later, when I found out the terrible ways they treated each other, that my home lost its appeal.

[8] These lines refer to Crowe’s statement on 145B that “for a family in Paleolithic times the center of the world might have been a certain cave, near a certain river, within a certain valley. Their place – the cave, the river, and the valley – was for them an important bulwark against the chaos.”

Journal #9: Why Nature? Recollections of Youth in Nature

“The mystery of how everything is… or came to be” seems to consume us (683). We search for “the World in a Grain of Sand and a Heaven in a Wild flower” (Blake, 666). We look at the aging of all around us, knowing that “the sun is young once only,” (Thomas, 669) and so are we. Watching the passage of time, the passage of “water through the rocks” and the passage of a flower “through the green fuse” that ignites its transient existence, we understand the fleetingness of our lives are here upon this earth.

Yet at the same time that we are haunted by the sunset, because it reminds us that our faces too will one day cease to shine upon the world, our souls are kindled aflame by our unity with nature. As the grass grows wild, so do our passions; as a lily pad in the Biology Pond is intricate and beautiful, so are our souls. “Until we recognize a grandeur in the beatings of the heart,” Wordsworth teaches, we will not hold a proper reverence for the “sanctifying” “life and nature” that “build up our human soul” (662). “The mean and vulgar works of man” do not compare to the infinite beauty found in nature (Wordsworth 314). And this awareness of beauty, exposure to “the uniqueness of place” afforded by nature, apart from that “relative and only skin deep” kind of beauty that is “actually a kind of recent human invention,” is what teaches a man the truth of the world.

One wonders, then, what the world’s truth is. In his “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” nineteenth-century poet John Keats arrives at the conclusion that “ ’Beauty is truth, truth beauty’ – that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’” Dictionary.com defines truth as “conformity to a fact or actuality,” “sincerity, integrity,” or “fidelity to an original or standard.” This is interesting to think about, since I had never thought of truth as an action but as an entity. According to dictionary.com’s definitions, truth is a shaping of the self in response to a reality. Only one definition I could find did not have something to do with the application of truth’s essence to the individual: dictionary.reference.com defines truth as “a fact that has been verified.” Interesting, it stands alone, but it still needs a person to verify it! I’ve always considered truth to be an intransient certainty, verifiable but independent of my verification, applicable and relevant reality. It’s with this definition that I’ll continue.

The times in my life when I have known truth most assuredly have been the times during which I stood alone with nature and opened myself to what truth would say to me. Arbor Hills Nature Preserve in Plano, Texas is a place where I have made many of my best decisions and most tangibly felt peace (coincidentaly, the time I’ve wasted sitting at my desk trying to get my computer to correctly format pictures in Microsoft Word is when I have felt the least peace and contentment, and when I’ve been least fit to write a journal about the beauty of nature. But that’s a topic for another discussion). Walking off the cemented path to find my own adventure, arriving just after school and staying until well past sunset, away from my cell phone, away from my homework, where no one else would know where I was or how long I would be away, I experienced clairvoyance. Life made sense while I was there, alone in the woods. The muddier my shoes became, the clearer my thoughts were. I walked alone, exploring for hours without ever seeing or speaking to another human being. The plants – they spoke to me. The waters whispered their secrets, and the stars glimmered their insight, asking for only my attention in return.

I think it’s notable that when Wordsworth writes of “long bathing” sun-basking, plunging, adventurous summer days, he writes of his solitude in nature (661). “I was alone,” he says, when the “moon and stars were shining o’er my head” (661). He “grew up fostered alike by beauty and by fear,” and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that much of the “beauty and fear” he witnessed spoke to him in his solitary vulnerability (661). When we are alone, then we are without a partner for conversation. Only when we are not speaking can we listen. And when we listen, we are then able to perceive “the mystery” that has haunted man for ages (683).

Journal #10: Stories of Origin

Last year I got sick of trying to believe in a God I couldn’t see, couldn’t feel, couldn’t understand, couldn’t explain, and who didn’t seem to stand up to the plenteous accusations against his credibility. I got sick of fundamentalists who claimed to have some sort of holy privilege guaranteeing them eternal life in Heaven while the rest of the world panicked and scrambled for some sense of purpose during their short lives.

I felt pretty lost: I wanted to know that my life was more than just a series of "animal interactions" and wandering "with aimless feet" from "form to form" (394, 405, 406). The thought of dwelling in my spirit, as Tennyson suggests, doesn’t bring me much hope either, because as my friend Libby says, "I don’t know who I am, and I don’t know who I want to be." My own tiny soul is hardly sufficient to hold one of the questions I ask, much less the multitude of them. I couldn’t stand the thought of believing in the same God as those pesky back-slapping, Bush-supporting, church-going fundamentalists. But at the same time, I thought there had to be some explanation for how I got here. How I would leave here. What I should do in the mean time.

I started reading. I read John Cheever’s short-story "The Swimmer," in which one man’s afternoon adventure parallels his life spent fidgeting in purposelessness, and he realizes that he’s spent his entire life amusing himself while everything he’s ever known or loved whithers away (incidentally, if anyone wants to read perhaps the funniest scene ever written in a novel, read Cheever’s Oh What a Paradise It Seems. The book is stinking hilarious). I re-read Thoreau’s Walden Pond, and though I agreed that "the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation," I didn’t really have any idea of how to overcome that. I mean, Voltaire’s Candide tells us to "tend our garden," but what does that really mean, anyway?

Things like "The Mystery," which we read in class a while ago are nice to think about, but honestly, I don’t get any peace of mind from "feeling this mystery" of how I came to be. I want to be convinced of something at least sufficiently to quiet the raging doubts in my mind. Like Dever said in Logic on Tuesday, "Perhaps knowledge amounts to having a sufficient justification before your mind." I’d be OK with still having questions about what I was doing here or how I came to be, so long as I had some evidence and facts that provided a sturdy enough belief set for me to stand on. The thing is, life is so short; there’s only so much evidence for any theory, and only so much time to spend investigating.

I read this book last spring called Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller. He, basically, admits that you can’t prove that God exists and you can never expect someone to just up and believe in Him, and he even points out that as a believer in God he associates with those same horrible people who hatefully condemn those who don’t believe in him. He admits that believing in God isn’t logical, and the reality of God doesn’t necessarily jive with what they teach in church or in private school when we misbehave and they discipline us with Bible verses. He says:

There are many ideas within Christian spirituality that contradict the facts of reality as I understand them. A statement like this offends some Christians because they believe that if aspects of their faith do not obey the facts of reality, they are not true. But I think there are all sorts of things our hearts believe that don’t make any sense to our heads. Love, for instance; we believe in love. Beauty…Reason itself would suggest that [a god who created us] would have to be greater than the facts of our reality, or it would not be reasonable… By reducing Christian spirituality to formula, we deprive our hearts of wonder.

It was nice to hear a creationist admit that a lot of Christian spirituality doesn’t make sense. I’d also like to hear an evolutionist admit the same thing about what they believe. There’s a case to be made for both sides. Once you decide to believe something, it’s not that hard to argue for that belief’s validity. I mean, maybe the "first prokaryotic cell organisms" did "develop," independent of a creator-god, around 35 million years ago (Evolutionary Timeline by Brandt, 390). For that to have happened, matter itself would have had to come into existence. From nothing. Then, all the amino acids in the protein chains would have had to be present and aligned just so, so that the proteins would be exactly right. And the thousands of nucleotides for the DNA model would have had to be in exactly the right alignment, too. And then once all the other substances of the cell combined, something inexplicable had to happen to put life itself into the cell. Where did life originate? I don’t mean living organisms – we can those investigate till the UT offense shows up to an OU game. I mean life itself. How did it happen?

The thing is, believing that God made the world takes a whole lot of faith that I’m hesitant to acquiesce. On the other hand, believing that we just happened seems to take just as much faith, if not more. It sometimes seems to come down to "Someone created us" vs." something came from nothing." To me, they both seem irrational. But I’m beginning to think that there’s a point at which we have to use reason as a jumping off point in pursuit of what’s more real than just logical evidence.