Holding the universe together

Guided meditation this week reminds me: Your heart is devoted to your existence.

Today, after five months, curfew is lifted. Tonight I think I'll take a midnight walk.

It's been 450 straight days of German lessons.

My hanging strawberry plant, purchased prematurely enough to have had to suffer a few too many too cold nights, has yielded one perfect strawberry, which some creature or other helped themself to.

Between other things, I've been reading J.D. Salinger's Early Stories (1940-1948). There's a line I've loved forever, which appears in "A Girl I Knew."

The apartment below mine had the only balcony of the house. I saw a girl standing on it, completely submerged in the pool of autumn twilight. She wasn't doing a thing that I could see, except standing there leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together. The way the profile of her face and body refracted in the soupy twilight made me feel a little drunk. When a few seconds had throbbed by, I said hello to her. 

I've always wanted to be that girl, the girl who could breezily hold the universe together such that one poetic soul might actually notice it. 

Today I had my chakras cleared by a Reiki master. Psychotherapy has helped release me, somewhat, from my emotions, yet I still feel blocked, like I have a permanent lump in my throat. Maybe I need spiritual release. What could Reiki hurt?

Research this for too long, and you start to sound vaguely stoned. Is Reiki real? Does it matter whether Reiki is real? And whose definition of real are we working with: Is it real according to the presiding scientific and medical framework, which tells us that phenomena need to be measurable to be taken seriously, or is it real in the looser, unquantifiable way of spiritual practice?

I felt my hands get extremely hot and heavy. I felt paralyzed. I felt like I was breathing without breathing. I had an image flash across my mind, the strangeness and violence of which jolted me out of and into myself.

A friend directed me to an episode of the Invisibilia podcast, The Great Narrative Escape. Storytelling is as old as time, but clearly individuals, for various reasons, are drawn to different types of stories.

This episode resonates with me for a million reasons. I've always been anti-narrative. It shows in the books I choose to read, the movies I prefer to watch, even the people I listen to. I've always felt there's more to "story" than plot twists and character development.

[Perhaps marketers actually get this, as it's surely a stretch to call what they do "story." It's only in the last decade or so that "storytelling" has become the dominant terminology to describe the m.o. of marketing departments everywhere. The decade before that it was about shaping a "narrative." (Remember when marketing was about selling things?) I've witnessed the evolution of marketing's jargon to disguise its own purpose in an attempt to legitimize it. The goal is to make marketing entirely invisible.]

The podcast preamble mentions how people weaponize narrative to advance political agendas. People feel defenseless against narrative. So, does a "boring" story have any power, and where does it come from? 

This episode is primarily about low-narrativity Slow TV. It gives people agency to decide for themselves what's boring, what's interesting. It puts you inside yourself.

It's not actually "slow" — it's real time. What is it that makes us believe that reality is too slow? Why would anyone want to speed up time?

Things I am doing slowly
Writing thoughtful secret things. 
Practicing my penmanship with a fountain pen.
Sanding a sculpture, for about an hour nightly, with no noticeable progress (with the intention of painting it soon).
Healing my heart.

The private, exposed achievement

Here are some amazing passages from J.D. Salinger's Nine Stories. Full portraits in miniature. This is a masterclass not only in crafting sentences, but in perceiving the true marks of character.

"A Perfect Day for Bananafish":

She was a girl who for a ringing phone dropped exactly nothing. She looked as if her phone had been ringing continually ever since she had reached puberty. 

"Just Before the War with the Eskimos":

From his breast pajama pocket he two-fingered out a cigarette that looked as though it had been slept on. [...] He lit his cigarette without straightening out its curvature, then replaced the used match in the box. Tilting his head back, he slowly released an enormous quantity of smoke from his mouth and drew it up through his nostrils. He continued to smoke in this "French-inhale" style. Very probably, it was not part of the sofa vaudeville of a showoff but, rather, the private, exposed achievement of a young man who, at one time or another might have tried shaving himself left-handed. 

And:

He spoke exclusively from the larynx, as if he were altogether too tired to put any diaphragm breath into his words.

"Down at the Dinghy":

His sentences usually had at least one break of faulty breath control, so that, often, his emphasized words, instead of rising, sank. Boo Boo not only listened to his voice, she seemed to watch it.

"For Esmé — with Love and Squalor":  

They sang without instrumental accompaniment — or more accurately, in their case, without any interference. Their voices were melodious and unsentimental, almost to the point where a somewhat more denominational man than myself might, without straining, have experienced levitation.

"De Daumier Smith's Blue Period":

The fact is always obvious much too late, but the most singular difference between happiness and joy is that happiness is a solid and joy a liquid. Mind started to to seep through its container as early as the next morning.

[Bliss, then, might be a sublime gas. What is this thing I feel now? It is subtler and more complex than joy.] 

It's not lost on me that many of these selections are related to breath and breathing — a current preoccupation of mine.

Then there's "Teddy."

His voice was oddly and beautifully rough cut, as some small boys' voices are. Each of his phrasings was rather like a little ancient island, inundated by a miniature sea of whiskey.

While on an ocean liner, there's much made of whether what happens happens inside or outside of the mind. Teddy's a ten-year-old brat or maybe a spiritual guru. Since he was four, he's been able to get out of the finite dimensions. 

"The trouble is," Teddy said, most people don't want to see things the way they are. They don't even want to stop getting born and dying all the time. They just want new bodies all the time, instead of stopping and staying with God, where it's really nice." He reflected. "I never saw such a bunch of apple-eaters," he said. He shook his head.

When he was six, he saw that everything was God — his sister was God and the milk was God and he watched her pour God into God. He claims to be reincarnated, having made some good spiritual advancement in his previous life. Clearly, according to Teddy, Adam should never have eaten the apple in the Garden of Eden — we need to vomit up all the logic.

"I grew my own body," he said. "Nobody else did it for me. So if I grew it, I must have known how to grow it. Unconsciously, at least. I may have lost the conscious knowledge of how to grow it sometime in the last few hundred thousand years, but the knowledge is still there, because — obviously — I've used it.... It would take quite a lot of meditation and emptying out to get the whole thing back — I mean the conscious knowledge — but you could do it if you wanted to. If you opened up wide enough."

I find it strangely serendipitous to have found this story so late in my life, when I am learning to open my mind and my body wider.

Holding the universe together

The most beautiful sentences...

She wasn't doing a thing that I could see, except standing there leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together.

— from "A Girl I Knew," by J.D. Salinger.

That used to be me, I was that girl. But my universe has crumbled apart. Someone else holds his universe together now.

Goddamn phonies

Last weekend the kid had another birthday party to attend, obliging us to drive out to the burbs and exchange pleasantries with other parents with whom we have nothing in common except for our offspring being in the same kindergarten class (why do suburbanites send their kids to school at the end of our street? and why can't the downtown parents find fun, age-appropriate birthday activities for their children in the neighbourhood they live in?).

In those few awkward moments before we abandoned our children to the care of the unwitting parents who'd extended this invitation on behalf of their fresh 6-year-old, the conversation fumbled a bit, but being that there was a cinema complex in the mall in which we'd assembled, movies seemed a natural subject.

J-F mentioned he'd like to see the new Terminator movie, and I smiled in a kind of solidarity — it's certainly one of the coolest trailers I've seen in ages. Who doesn't love to watch the post-apocalypse?! Apparently, all the parents of my daughter's peers. We were promptly advised that the Star Trek movie is far superior — it's multilayered! — and were snubbed for the duration of the ritual smalltalk. J-F fails to understand their lack of appreciation, and has been fuming over this incident for days.

So it comes as a kind of vindication to learn that J.D. Salinger broke his public silence this weekend to share his fervour for the latest Terminator movie.

[Apparently he's developed quite a bit of literary material over the years, all of which appears to be "without a doubt the most personal and affecting body of Terminator fan fiction ever discovered."]

J-F can keep company with the likes of Salinger while the goddamn phonies pat each other on the back.