Native American weir
Consciousness is a weir. What gets snagged in the watery carapace of life flowing through us often has meaning that is very particular and specific. It’s a bit like dreams, those cinematic wonders that are designed for and about only us. The wisdom that gets caught in our consciousness weir is a bit easier to share however, and I’ve had a few pass through these last few days that may speak to you too.
From the ever-extraordinary Rebecca Solnit, in her Orion piece called Finding Time:
The Four Horsemen of my Apocalypse are called Efficiency, Convenience, Profitability, and Security, and in their names, crimes against poetry, pleasure, sociability, and the very largeness of the world are daily, hourly, constantly carried out. These marauding horsemen are deployed by technophiles, advertisers, and profiteers to assault the nameless pleasures and meanings that knit together our lives and expand our horizons…
I believe that slowness is an act of resistance, not because slowness is a good in itself but because of all that it makes room for the things that don’t get measured and can’t be bought.
Solnit’s words dovetail nicely with Patricia Druckerman‘s commencement advice for the Paris College of Art, published in the New York Times:
Stay in the room. It needn’t be an actual room. You can be alone in a busy cafe. I’ve gotten some of my best ideas while walking, or riding the Paris Metro…I’ve never gotten a good idea while checking Twitter or shopping.
You need to be blank, and even a little bit bored, for your brain to feed you ideas. The poet Wendell Berry wrote that in solitude, “one’s inner voices become audible.” Figure out your clearest, most productive time of day to work, and guard this time carefully.
Always carry a pen, a paper notebook and something good to read. A lot of life consists of the dead time in between events. Don’t fill these interstitial moments with pornography and cat videos. Fill them with things that feed your work and your soul.
These are messages that speak to the interstitial, that space in between a something that was and a something that will be. Time zone displacement can create that in betweenness, but it also can happen when one large arc of work is finished and the next large gesture isn’t quite clear. As described by Interstitial: A Journal of Modern Culture and Events:
In the modern era, interstitiality, or the space between one boundary and the next, has become an urgent area of investigation. Existing within and between entities, interstices challenge conventional understandings of boundedness, inviting us to rethink the space between objects and ideas as an erupting site of transformation.
I’m there.
Note: Thanks to my ever resourceful friend and niece Rebecca Ricks for flagging the Solnit quote.
Brilliant opening image.
Thanks A.
Thanks for the reminder: I need to go back to the practice of “guarding.”
Defending one’s self. Daily work! Thanks Ann.