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| June
1999 Volume I, Number 6 |
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Living
On The Rim: Notes From The Ontologically Insecure The
Mindless Carpenter Christmas
Day Workout With Dad
A Tribute Patiently
Learning
A Thing Out Of Place (Poetry) From
the Editor |
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 Living On The Rim: Notes From The Ontologically Insecure(top) Renee Lertzman Graduate Student, Communication Studies, UNC It was the day after our professor Carlos Norena lectured on Kant that I felt something slipping away from me. I was in my dorm room, looking out the window at the redwoods, and the view of the Pacific Ocean beyond the knoll. I suddenly had the sense that I had no idea what was real and what wasn't—and how to tell the difference. Under this new gaze, the chair, the table, the cup, all became questionable entities in the universe, each containing their own subjectivity, truth, and meaning. Coherency was elusive and beyond my grasp. How was I to know what was going on here? How could I continue to live - buy groceries, run errands, call friends—if I did not know? I went to Carlos' office that day, and told him, "I don't know what is real and what isn't. I am thinking of dropping out of school to do organic farming. At least I know that growing carrots is real." I imagined being down in the dirt, digging up roots. He laughed and said to me in his thick Spanish accent, "Let's not do anything too drastic here. I suggest you take up swimming." Since that day my freshman year in college, I have felt a sort of "waking up" from sleepwalking through life. I had never before been aware of such a keen sense of not knowing. Was this something normal, something we all felt, as we crossed the street, bought our groceries, poured another cup of tea? I was perplexed by my own catapult into wanting to know what was life was about, and the discrepancy in the behaviors of those around me. Why was no one talking about this? It was when I left college midway for a eight-week field study in the Sierra Nevada Mountains studying "nature philosophy and religion" that I began to locate this inquiry into the larger context of how we live among others—humans and non-human species. For two months, we lived in various wilderness areas. We walked between worlds; drinking the cold clear waters of the mountains while making plans to return to the streets, lamps, steel and glass. To step into wilderness is to see how complex our relationship with the ecological world is, and to see more clearly what we have determined as "meaningful." The constructs of culture become sharper, the designs more clear as an architecture of meaning, myth, ideology and value. The questions I was asking that first year in college did not go away; they only deepened, found new contexts and arenas. I had a professor once who jokingly called me "ontologically insecure" like the people on the Star Trek holodeck. It is as if to question reality and living deeply is to almost be partially materialized. The level of questioning can actually unhinge one's attachment to normative reality, so as to occupy a space of "always looking in." This sense of being ontologically insecure, I have come to see, is where I draw my strength; it is what informs my work, my relationships, my experience of the world around me. I have also come to see that to question and investigate life, on the deepest levels possible, is to walk on a rim of sorts. It is like the poem by Pablo Neruda, about fishing for fallen light. He writes: "If each day falls/ inside each night/ there exists a well/where clarity is imprisoned./We need to sit on the rim/of the well of darkness/and fish for fallen light/with patience." For me, the life worth living is to have the courage to be on the rim, and tolerate the space of not knowing, and honor what is known. The people I tend to look to as role-models and teachers are those who live contemplatively, ask keen questions, and tolerate uncertainty. They five on the rim. Their minds are like diamonds, glittering with inquiry and beauty. Not those who are barely contained and seem about to fly apart, or who forget to eat or do their laundry, but the people who are so deeply in love with being alive that they accept the not-knowing, follow it fully, and are deeply engaged with the world of the living. They may garden voraciously, throw pots, renovate old buildings. They may love lipstick and velvet and suede and antiques. My aunt Sandra is an example of this sort of person. She is a painter, takes remarkable photographs of cathedrals, old French streets, lakes in Italy, knows how to make moussaka and grilled endive, tends her twenty or so rosebushes, loves her cats, and collects southern Italian pottery. She always has these amazing bars of soap in her bathroom that smell of dandelion and wisteria. Whenever I go to her house, a small cottage surrounded by Bay and Oak trees, I see books lying around about the meaning of life; poems by Rumi, a new interpretation of the gospel of Jesus, psychoanalytic object-relations theory, Sufi stories. Sandra seems to embody the contemplative life; she teaches a spiritual practice to people for work, and is able to dwell in multiple realms of material and spirit. And she has about fifteen kinds of lipstick. I suspect the most familiar things—parents and church and meals—are scratches of pen across the surface, representations of what truly exists, far deeper at our words and the thin tap tapping of thought can reach. Can we know what lies beneath our names and patterns, our attractions and routines? The sidewalks and buses, alleys and hotels press onto our awareness, affirming the edge of word, name, the chill of separation. For me, the sheer shock of being here, in this infinitely complex, defiant, lovely and sad place keeps me paying attention, for the jolt of insight in that which is least expected. And that is the life worth living. Christmas Day Workout With Dad(top) Eric Clark works in Raleigh, NC, as a software salesman. My Dad’s been at it for a long time—fifty years, in fact. Five decades of lifting weights, starting in the late forties and early fifties at clubs with his buddies in Patterson, NJ, then later during a brief stint with the Navy in Rhode Island. But for most of the past thirty-five years, lifting has been a solitary affair down in the basement of our turn of the century farmhouse. Dad works out down there alone, except for an occasional visit from Jay Sullivan, a friend of mine. Jay, a NJ State Trooper, comes by and talks for a while, then disappears into the Clark dungeon to exercise his neck on a strange apparatus I will describe later. This past Christmas, after our thirty or so lunch guests had left, Dad and I worked out together down in the basement. Dad wore his thirty year-old gray sweatshirt, looking like a holey relic from Flash Dance, only dirtier, and his twenty year-old leather weight belt, which was starting to crack around the holes. Dad put grommet reinforcements around the holes to make it last longer. This subterranean gym is my Dad’s laboratory. Like an able-bodied Vulcan, Dad has been hammering away down there for as long as I can remember. Virtually every piece of equipment he built himself. The design philosophy is derived from civil engineering (everything is huge and heavy) and from his natural tendency towards penny-pinching. Dad drilled holes in the huge posts which support half the weight of the house, then obtained a convenient squat rack; angled pipes attached to the ceiling are perfect for lat pull-ups—just don’t grab the hot water pipes by mistake; and an intricate system of hooks, pulleys and cables with an old bent gray bar on end, makes a satisfactory lat pull-down machine. I have childhood memories of the whole house vibrating when he did these pull-downs. To exercise the neck, he took a football helmet and bolted a piece of pipe to the top. You slide weights on to the pipe, and then you move your head up and down or from side to side. When Jay was engaged to be married, he would imitate domestic life by nodding his head in an exaggerated way with the helmet on- "yes, Tara, yes Tara." I’ve tried out most of the equipment, but some of it doesn’t fit me quite right, and others make me just a little nervous that a pin will pull out or a cable will snap, and I’ll be crushed. Jammed in with the racks of dumbells, barbells, and plates, is also the hotwater heater, (with a fairly recent copy of Muscular Development on it), a washer, dryer, and a table saw which has not been used in thirty-five years. There is also a cabinet full of paint pigment which Dad inherited from a job he had in the late fifties as an estimator. Most of the time, father and son make corny jokes while we are resting. I tell him about getting my annual dose of Italians at Frank Pinto’s annual Christmas Eve party. I ask him about his softball team, and which piano pieces his mom played when she was on the radio. We are similar, Dad and I; neither of us likes to talk about our or others’ interior lives—we want the other person to do all the talking. I asked my Dad, how did you get to lifting weights? He says that for him, being very strong was magical, he was amazed at how the strong men of his day did what they did. We used to stop in Bob Hoffman’s Gym in York PA on the way to Pittsburgh. I remember this great big mural painting there of the strong men of history, larger than life, with men bending horseshoes and pulling trains with their teeth. As for me, I started lifting when I was around 14, with the very distinct thought that big muscles would help me with the girls. I figure some of the same motivation was in my Dad, too. There are many things I’d like to know about my Dad, not facts, but just things like, "what was it like to be in school in Alabama in the mid 50’s?" I want to know the same kind of "feeling-detail" that people are always asking from me. But most of the time I can’t get the conversation going. I have to find a way to go first. For years, I’ve had the idea of writing a letter to him, telling him all the things I’ve never quite managed to say, but I’ve never finished it. Midway through our workout, my Mom comes down with a load of laundry. Lifting weights doesn’t make much sense to her, and she doesn’t really share in that part of his world. Dad and I enjoy each other’s company, for a few moments I can’t believe that twenty years have passed. I’m still sixteen, and Dad’s forty-five. Then a moment later I feel constrained, I feel the ceiling a few inches above my head, I dislike the damp darkness—there are only 2 light bulbs burning in this dungeon of a place. I’m frustrated by my inability to get a good conversation going, for us to build a stronger rapport. The day after tomorrow I go back to my life in North Carolina. Am I ever going to get over this speaking block? But we are still too similar, and the block remains. When I’m at peace with myself, I feel my strong love for my Dad. When I’m wrestling with my faults, I am more likely to blame him for the way I ended up. We finish up our exercises together while I’m still searching for that moment of grace. Two days later, I went back to Raleigh. "Maybe next Christmas," I tell myself. Maybe next Christmas, it will be different. |