That distillation of experience

“The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives. It is within this light that we form those ideas which are – until the poem – nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but already felt. That distillation of experience from which true poetry springs births thought as dream births concept, as knowledge births (precedes) understanding.”

(page 25)

Lorde, Audre. (1984). Poetry is not a luxury. In Sister outsider (pp. 25-27). Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press.

Hearing is faster than vision

“Your brain is a pattern-seeking machine, constantly identifying relationships between all the sensations and perceptions that bombard you. Sensory inputs that are correlated in some way – by similar frequency, timing, timbre, or location (or, in the non-auditory world, shape, colour, flavour, or smell) – cause neurons to fire in similar patterns or at nearly the same time. Neurons that fire in synchrony are more likely to trigger their target neurons to fire, hence passing the message ‘Something non-random happened’ farther up to the executive processing regions of your brain. Since your perceptions are based on binding common elements of sensory input together in time and space, other senses such as vision that are spatially limited and relatively slow often get false positives when correlating heavily overlapping or ambiguous features. This is why there are so many web pages devoted to cool optical illusions, and so few that even mention auditory illusions – it’s harder to trick your ears. Hearing tends to be better at segregating inputs properly even though it gathers information from a much wider region, unlimited by line of sight. This is because hearing is faster than vision.”

(page 49-50)

Horowitz, S. S. (2012). The universal sense: How hearing shapes the mind. New York, NY: Bloomsbury USA.

North (Wisdom): We become more by giving away

“To be truly wise is to understand that knowing and not knowing are one. Each has the power to transform. Wisdom is the culmination of teachings gleaned from the journey around the circle of life, the Medicine Wheel. Circles have no end. We are all spirit, we are all energy, and there is always more to gain. This is what my people say. When the story of our time here is completed and we return to spirit, we carry away with us all of the notes our song contains. The trick is to share all of that with those around us while we’re here. We are all on the same journey, and we become more by giving away. That’s the essential teaching each of us is here to learn.”

(page 100)

Wagamese, Richard. (2011). One story, one song. Vancouver, BC: Douglas & McIntyre.

Looking along and inwards to mystery

“Most works of mountaineering literature have been written by men, and most male mountaineers are focussed on the summit: a mountain expedition being qualified by the success or failure of ascent. But to aim for the highest point is not the only way to climb a mountain, nor is a narrative of siege and assault the only way to write about one. Shepherd’s book is best thought of, perhaps, not as a work of mountaineering literature but one of mountain literature. Early on, she confesses that as a young woman she had been prone to a ‘lust’ for ‘the tang of height’, and had approached the Cairngorms egocentrically, apprising them for their ‘effect upon me’. She ‘made always for the summits’. The Living Mountain relates how, over time, she learned to go into the hills aimlessly, ‘merely to be with the mountain as one visits a friend, with no intention but to be with him’. ‘I am on the plateau again, having gone round it like a dog in circles to see if it is a good place,’ she begins one section, chattily. ‘I think it is, and I am to stay up here for a while.’ Circumambulation has replaced summit-fever; plateau has substituted for peak. She no longer has any interest in discovering a pinnacle-point from which she might become the catascopos, the looker-down who sees all with a god-like eye. Thus the brilliant image of the book’s opening page (which has forever changed the way I perceive the Cairngorms) in which she proposes imagining the massif not as a series of individual summits, but instead as an entity: ‘The plateau is the true summit of these mountains; they must be seen as a single mountain, and the individual tops…no more than eddies on the plateau surface.’

As a walker, then, Shepherd practices a kind of unpious pilgrimage. She tramps around, over, across and into the mountain, rather than charging up it. There is an implicit humility to her repeated acts of traverse, which stands as a corrective to the self-exaltation of the mountaineer’s hunger for an utmost point. The pilgrim contents herself always with looking along and inwards to mystery, where the mountaineer longs to look down and outwards onto total knowledge.”

(page 10)

Macfarlane, Robert. (2011). Introduction. In N. Shepherd, The living mountain. Edinburgh, Scotland: Canongate.

Language detectives

“It’s as though the simplicity of self plus action equals consequence is a math problem they cannot solve, a sequence they cannot face; language, loose language, vague language, becomes an out. Things happen.

In the wildlife sanctuaries of literature, we study the science of speech, the flight patterns of individual words, the herd behaviour of words together, and we learn what language does and why it matters. This is excellent training for going out into the world and looking at all the unhallowed speech of political statements and news headlines and CDC instructions and seeing how it makes the world or, in this case, makes a mess of it. It is the truest, highest purpose of language to make things clear and help us see; when words are used to do the opposite you know you’re in trouble and maybe that there’s a cover-up.

Detective work and the habits of perception it generates can save us from believing lies and sometimes show us who’s being protected when a lie is also an alibi. The CDC is right to warn about the dangers of misusing alcohol, if not in how it did so. For my part, I am trying to warn about the misuses of language. We are all language detectives, and if we pay enough attention we can figure out what statements mean even when those don’t mean to tell us, and we can even tell when stories are lying to us. So many of them do.”

p. 315-319

Solnit, R. (2017). The case of the missing perpetrator. Essay in The mother of all questions (pp. 278-319). Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books.

Echolocating bats

“Echolocating bats use sound differently than we do. We are passive listeners – we listen to sounds in our environment and try to identify what made the sound (based on its frequency) and how far away and where it is (by its loudness and phase). But bats are active listeners – they supply the sound they use to navigate their environment and listen for the echoes. Even though their brains are tiny compared to ours, they are mighty auditory engines. They compare the echoes to an internal representation of their own call and figure out what is out there based on tiny differences in those echoes stemming from what they bounced off of. Echolocating bats use two different basic types of calls, which generate different types of echoes. Constant-frequency (CF) bats send out calls that are mostly a single steady tone, sometimes with a small downward chirp at the very end. When a CF bat is flying around in a cluttered area, such as woods, the echo that returns is largely a delayed version of the tone the bat set out. But if the CF bat’s tone strikes a fluttering insect, the motion of the insect’s wings will create a Doppler shift of the echo, and the bat knows that something is moving in front of it. The other type of bat, including the big brown bat, is called a frequency-modulation (FM) bat. FM bats put out a different type of call, ‘chirps’ that sweep from high to low frequency. FM bats call with more variability that CF bats: when they are just flying about, they put out chirps only about once a second, but once they detect an echo, they sharpen their calls, putting them out faster and faster and sweeping their echolocation signal around like a spotlight until they start receiving echoes. Rather than relying on Doppler shift to detect prey, FM bats work more like specialized radar units, picking up multiple reflections from targets and integrating them into the auditory equivalent of three-dimensional views of the world.”

(page 44)

Horowitz, S. S. (2012). The universal sense: How hearing shapes the mind. New York, NY: Bloomsbury USA.

Both emptiness and fullness: It carries the possibility of everything

“There’s a special shade of blue that appears where the sun meets the horizon every morning. It sits in that mysterious space where darkness meets light, where night begins its brightening into day. My people call this time of day Beedahbun, first light, but there’s no word for that particular colour, an off-purple fading into blue grey. You need to sacrifice some sleep and comfort in order to be out under the sky when that colour emerges, and not many people are motivated to do it. That’s sad. For me, that colour is gateway to the spiritual realm.

[…]

At first I saw nothing. Then I began to discern swirls and shapes in the sky. As the sun emerged, a wild palette of colours I had never imagined spread slowly across the skyline. Time slipped away, as did the discomfort I’d been feeling.

I was awestruck when I first spotted that impossible blue. I recognized it immediately, not as a memory but as an ache at my very centre. That incandescence awoke somthing inside of me, and when I felt it stir to life I wanted to cry.

When I described this to the elders later, they smiled. They explained that special colour represents both emptiness and fullness; it carries the possibility of everything. When the universe was created, it contained both those properties. So do our spirits when we are born. But as life happens, we gradually shut that boundless possibility down. Rules and judgement cause it to shrink. The storyteller in all of us can go into hiding, lying dormant within us. When I saw that special blue, my storytelling spirit was sparked to life again.”

(page 74-75)

Wagamese, Richard. (2011). One story, one song. Vancouver, BC: Douglas & McIntyre.

To know fully one field

“Crucially, The Living Mountain needs to be understood as a parochial work in the most expansive sense. Over the past century, ‘parochial’ has soured as a word. The adjectival form of ‘parish’, it has come to connote sectarianism, insularity, boundedness: a mind or a community turned inward upon itself, a pejorative finitude. It hasn’t always been this way, though. Patrick Kavanagh (1904-67), the great poet of the Irish mundane, was in no doubt as to the importance of the parish. For Kavanagh, the parish was not a perimeter but an aperture: a space through which the world could be seen. ‘Parochialism is universal,’ he wrote. ‘It deals with the fundamentals.’ Note that Kavanagh, like Aristotle, doesn’t smudge the ‘universal’ into the ‘general’. The ‘general’, for Aristotle, was the broad, the vague and the undiscerned. The ‘universal’, by contrast, consisted of fine-tuned principles, induced from an intense concentration on the particular. Again and again Kavanagh returned to this connection between the universal and the parochial, and to the idea that we learn by scrutiny of the close-at-hand. ‘All great civilisations are based on parochialism,’ he wrote finely:

To know fully even one field or land is a lifetime’s experience. In the world of poetic experience it is depth that counts, not width. A gap in a hedge, a smooth rock surfacing a narrow lane, a view of a woody meadow, the stream at the junction of four small fields – these are as much as a man can fully experience.

(page 9)

Macfarlane, Robert. (2011). Introduction. In N. Shepherd, The living mountain. Edinburgh, Scotland: Canongate.

The life of the story and the life of the teller are separate, though intertwined

“In this sacred temple of storytelling, there is room for expansiveness, for the release of trauma, but there is also a mindful awareness that the story and its telling are not and will never be everything. The story is a dream of healing, but it is not healing in and of itself. The spirit must heal itself. The story is a dream of the revolution, but it is not a revolution on its own. The people must make their own revolutions. The story is a dream of love and the seed of love and a map for love, but it takes people, not stories, to love each other. And here, the storyteller learns that the life of the story and the life of the teller are separate, though intertwined. The storyteller comes to understand that the telling of a good story is not the same as the love of one person for another. And so, the storyteller is at once freed to tell their stories and to live beyond and outside of them.”

(page 63)

Thom, Kai Cheng. (2019). I hope we choose love: A trans girl’s notes from the end of the world. Vancouver, BC: Arsenal Pulp Press.

Language that shunts meaning aside

“I wish all this telling women alcohol is dangerous was a manifestation of a country that loves babies so much it’s all over lead contamination from New Orleans to Baltimore to Flint and the lousy nitrate-contaminated water of Iowa and carcinogenic pesticides and the links between sugary junk food and juvenile diabetes and the need for universal access to health care and daycare and good and adequate food. You know it’s not. It’s just about hating on women. Hating on women requires narratives that make men vanish and make women magicians, producing babies out of thin air and dissolute habits. This is an interesting narrative for the power it accords women, but I would rather have an accurate one. And maybe a broader one talking about all the ecological and economic factors that impact the well-being of children. But then the guilty party becomes us, not them.

Language matters. We’ve had a big struggle over the language about rape so that people would stop blaming victims. The epithet that put it concisely is: rapists cause rape. Not what women wear or consume, where they go, and the rest, because when you regard women as at fault you enter into another one of our anti-detective novels or another chapter of the mystery of the missing protagonist. Rape is a willful act: the actor is a rapist. And yet you’d think that young women on college campuses in particular were raping themselves, so absent have young men on campuses been from the mystificational narratives. Men are abstracted into a sort of weather, an ambient natural force, an inevitability that cannot be governed or held accountable. Individual men disappear into this narrative, and rape, assault, pregnancy just become weather conditions to which women have to adapt. If those things happen to them, the failure is theirs.

We have a lot of stories like that in this country, stories that, if you believe them, make you stupid. Stories that are not expositions but cover-ups of things like the causes of poverty and the consequences of racism. Stories that unhitch cause from effect and shunt meaning aside.”

p. 301-306

Solnit, R. (2017). The case of the missing perpetrator. Essay in The mother of all questions (pp. 278-319). Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books.