Rene Magritte, The Blank Page
Once again, the blank page. Every two weeks. I don’t “have to” write this blog, but I’ve committed myself to it. Generally, something will appear as I type. I look out the window. It’s early morning. Snow again, of all things, just when I had given up on a “normal” winter. I’m sitting here with my computer on its handy-dandy lap rack, thinking I’ve finished my “diary.” It’s short, 188 pages, but it’s as long as I want it to be. Now to scout out a publisher.
I can’t seem to get started on anything else. Yet.
All this forward movement: Could I live any other way? Could I be without a project? Would it be more noble, more enlightened, to simply “be in the now”?
The woman who’s knitting a sweater, or shelling peas, has a project. If you’re reading a book, isn’t that a project? Reading the Sunday Times is a project! Can you only be in the now when you’re sauntering through the woods listening to the birds?
I seem to be in a period of watching and listening. That doesn’t mean I’m not putting words on paper, seeing if I can make something of them. Watching and listening doesn’t mean doing nothing else, does it? Maybe the watching and listening is going to mean more poems. Maybe not. I seem to be feeling out my surroundings to see what’s next, with as little prejudice as possible.
The between-time for writers is difficult, isn’t it? The blank page. If you’re a writer, maybe you never have a between-time. But I do. It’s scary. Even the time between one poem and the next. Maybe by the next time I write this blog, I’ll be happily into a new project, or maybe not. Maybe “project” is the wrong word. Maybe the best word is “intention.”
Intention could be so small you hardly notice it, like flipping the light switch. Or it could be huge, like getting a divorce or deciding to have a baby. The sources of the intention are so far below the surface, we only feel the results as they bubble up and become what we call our “choice.”
Like the choice to get a new kitty. Nah. Not a choice. Here the kitty came, and we simply took him. We were primed to take him. By the way, Ollie’s hysterical. He tilts his ears back and dives fiercely at everything. He started batting the steam coming out of our room-sized humidifier. That was so much fun, he sat on top of it and got his bottom soaking wet. Then the thing quit running. We had to dry it out for a day.
Is Ollie playing in order to practice being a predator? Is he diving at his toys, chasing madly after the laser beam, with the intention of becoming a skillful adult? You could say it’s the intention of the universe, to teach him. And it is, but that’s like saying the intention of the universe is that we breathe. It’s all inseparable, isn’t it, the act and the intention.
Does that mean we have no free will? Wow. I used to argue this one with my father all the time. My father the materialist saw nothing but cause and effect. Indian yogis, on the other hand, would say that what they mean by free will is a freedom that transcends the physical world, which would entirely bypass my father’s argument.
On the Indian yogi side, consider the things we thought were solid—waves, particles, time, distance—and how they’ve been dissolved before our eyes. When there’s nothing solid to stand on, it’s hard to talk about cause and effect the same way.
Instead, how about we talk about “conditionality”? “When one thing is present, another comes to be; from the arising of this, that arises. When this is absent, that does not come to be; on the cessation of this, that ceases.” Sorry, I don’t remember what I’m quoting.
Maybe you could think of free will like a medical diagnosis: By showing that the illness depends on a series of conditions, you can find the point at which the series can be broken, so it’s possible to cure it.
Good lord, how did I get in this deep? I was just drinking my coffee, looking out at the snow. I hope you like idle musing. Maybe next time I’ll float back down to earth. Maybe I’ll have a project.