on significance.
Reconceiving the value of my time has been today’s theme. A fifteen-minute conversation with a friend in the midst of a busy day delights and brightens my hours. Running into a colleague, then another, distracts translating but gives me more energy, and desire, to research actively and *productively*, and delights in its own invaluable way. It’s so lonely sometimes, the academic craft, and an unexpected reminder that no, it’s not all in vain, is irreplaceable by any other form of compensation.
Then, an eternity spent in a lecture They expect me at, mostly having nothing to do with my interests but — most importantly — this passive listening isn’t how I learn. It makes me impatient, fidgety, annoyed even more easily than usual. I resent being Expected to be here, and even if some of what this poor tortured speaker is saying might possibly be useful, I close off and have to force myself to concentrate, so that later I may take up a thread or two with people who are actually interesting to me.
This is a failing on my part. Of course, the lecture ends up being significant and useful, if I only get off my high horse.
–
There is a people in Africa whose artists create sculptures with patterns of shells and stones embedded in them, as diagrams for — anything: the structure of the human body, of the cosmos, of poems. Visual aids to memory, visual maps of memory, ties between memory and invention — they seem to be geoculturally omnipresent, they’re such European notions but also intrinsic to Other Peoples, and I want to learn more about memory. Do microbes have memory? Do they, individually, learn? Do cells learn? Does Bruce Chatwin say anything about how Aborigines remember?
(No, of course I’m not done with The Songlines yet. Am not a serial book monogamist, I’m afraid; and Sasha Shulgin is rather an entrancing distraction.)
Aforementioned friend is on a bus 45 minutes outside Seattle as I write this. (As I wrote this, over an hour ago.) I’ll have a visual memory of him in this moment, in the future, which, although informed somewhat by my own experience of Washington, is unlikely to be rooted in any sort of reality experienced by him at this moment. It’ll also be radically different from the visual memory he’ll retain from the last hour of his journey; yet I’ve traveled enough that we’ll be able to relate the two, and approach each other’s emotional state through these memories, should we choose to do so. Yet, the result of such a process in my head will be completely unlike its result in his; so which will matter more, the process of becoming closer, or the remaining essential difference?
Being an optimist, I say the former. Remaining separate, we enrich each other. Wording visuals, we produce more – different – visuals. It’s a chain of human experience that doesn’t [have to] end.
Imagine, then, all of this on a larger human scale. How can any of us ever be bored?
–
I get shakily insecure about my research because it does not always feel like legitimate research. It’s too elementary for this 21st century of after-Christ knowledge, too primitive for our millennia-worth of species. Yet I persist, because even now there is a new filter through which to view what our minds have produced, and it’s up to me to construct that filter, to formulate it. It’s not New, of course; but it’s been too many hundreds of years since it was last widely used, and I feel like a scribe in a long line of preservers of our essence. Does this mean I’ve found my calling?
Cosmic insignificance and specific importance seem to not be in conflict, and this is what’s unsettling.
