Hello, It's Me

Apr 01, 2007 06:36 PM Filed in: Stories For A Friend
PokeInEye2
It’s been some time since I’ve actually sat down to write something other than a short comment or pithy summary of some play, movie, or some such thing. I used to write all the time. I'd write letters and keep a journal. I'd write sometimes just to sort through my own thoughts and see where they would lead me. That was a good thing. But at some point, somewhere along the way back there, I stopped. I stopped writing. And time passes. Before you know it, months or even years have gone by, and one day you look around and realize where you are, and you wonder aloud how you ever got there. It happens. In the words of Buckaroo Bonzai, “Remember, wherever you go, there you are.” Truth.

And so it is that here in the spring of 2007 I find myself writing again, word smything, forging words into phrases and sentences and whole thoughts even. I ask myself rhetorical questions that first appear fuzzy and unfocused to my mind’s eye, but which then shift and shimmer before finally snapping into place like keys in a lock. Then click, the tumblers shift and the door opens on a new thought, a new question. It’s a Chinese box sometimes, the mind, and sometimes the more you dig, the deeper you go with no real end in sight. Down and down with only the hope of eventually popping out on the other side of the globe, perhaps with a small pile of mental debris perched on top of your head. Or perhaps not.

Self reflection can be that way. There’s a feeling that comes with it, at least for me, a sense of delving and digging. Of rooting things out. I feel like an archaeologist sifting and brushing away, cataloging and classifying my own layers, and in the end, hopefully, enlightening myself. Self reflection. It really has a very different feeling to it than the mental acrobatics of intellectual, critical thought.

Pirsig’s Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance is about a quest for the definition of Quality, a philosophical journey which over the course of the tale leads his character to a mental melt down and back again to the world and to Life. That type of outwardly focused critical thought has a feeling of expansiveness and openness to it, so open in fact that at times you can feel as if your brain is going to fall out. That’s Pirsig’s “High Altitude of The Mind”, the philosophical high country. The air can be thin up there. Rarefied. One needs to be careful. In Pirsig’s story his character is not careful, and his intellectual mountaineering leads to a crashing fall, a long period of sanctuary in a mental institution, shock therapy, forgetfulness, and eventually a long and winding road to recovery and the rediscovery of lost memories and a past life. That quest for discovery ended disastrously and put him instead on a journey of self discovery. Self reflection. The long and winding road.

His companion on that long road is a shadowy character named Phaedrus, a blurry mental projection of Pirsig's former self, him as he was Before The Fall, no longer recognized or understood, but hauntingly familiar and vaguely unsettling. It’s his story of course, Pirsig’s. It was his life, his own journey of discovery, his fall, his pain, and finally his journey of self-discovery, or really more self-rediscovery. And that’s sort of what this feels like to me, writing again after many years of simply not. Self rediscovery. It's not a dramatic story like Pirsig's though. It's much simpler.

You see, a friend poked me with a stick. She poked me and said “Why don’t you start writing again?” Poke. And I didn’t have any good reason why I couldn’t except for laziness, and of course that answer got me nothing but another poke with the stick. Poke.

So it’s a new season, and the weather is turning, and my slumbering brain grudgingly shifts a little, then rolls over muttering something about more sleep and please go away, but there’s that stick, and so I poke it again myself this time just to see what happens. And I write a little. Feels funny. I write a little more. Still feels funny, but not so much. And I see my own Phaedrus watching me from just down the way there, watching, considering, waiting to see if I'm serious about this or if I'm soon going to weary and quit. And I write. I string together words again, I feel how they fit one with another, and soon I notice the small tugs of memory, that sense and awareness now of an other, forgotten self for whom this writing was second nature. And it feels...kind of good actually. It feels, right somehow. Overdue.

And so here I am in the spring of 2007 saying hello to myself. Hello, Phaedrus, it's me. Welcome back. How’s it been? Whatcha’ been up to? It’s been awhile, hasn’t it? Well, let’s sit here and talk a bit, see if we can’t catch up on some of the years gone by. Come over here and tell me if I spelled this word right. Spelling is the first thing to go you know. What do you think? Well, maybe it will come back. Let's write awhile and see. It's spring again, and I'm glad you're here. Say, what are you doing with that stick?