slow breath of memory
My first memory really of thinking through an idea of identity was in university. I’d imagined this tree, a tree where each branch represented the growth of individual ideas and patterns that i had started or subscribed/ascribed to. The more a given path was followed, the more that particular branch was strengthened the harder it was to change, or, indeed, cut off.
Last week… i found myself walking across a parking lot road. Half sunny late spring day, and the sun had mostly dried the water that was, that morning, spread across the rumbly asphalt. I was caught up in immediate issues, getting to the next step in my day, following the drudge of a Saturday spent catching up on Wednesday and hoping for a late night that might allow for a little more (or less) reflection.
A worm, was lying, still shiny in the middle of a crack in the middle of that rumbly road. It had, i figure, crawled out of whatever hidy hole it had gotten into - chased out by the rain. It had gotten caught though… in the middle of this road, as it had dried… and had retreated to the last vestige of moisture that it could cling to, settling into the dampness of the crack, awaiting the off chance of rain, or a slow dessication.
I walked by. And stopped. And returned and picked him up, tossing him into the grass. The movement, strangely reminiscent of childhood. And I walked passed, weighted by the slow breath of the memory of that tree… and the sawing I’d tried to do, trying to create someone that I could live with in university. And a new critical leap, a simple truth, one of those moments that knits together four threads of thought into a thought that seems so sleek and tidy and obvious looking back that you realize that there’d been a joke you’d been missing all along.
- Buddhist Koans that i read for a year or so… trying to let the nameless, indirect wisdom filter in.
- The good social deed, the good christian, exchanging good deeds for a place in heavenly reward… the strange marketplace of morality, and the inevitable crisis of the need of an ominicient observer that one is left with when one falls victim to a post enlightenment ethic. When one wants still to do good, but doesn’t understand how the marketplace works without something keeping score.
- That tree.
- And my own need to be observed.
I was changed, just a tiny bit in that moment. I’d created another little move towards the peaceful, i was a more merciful me than i was scant seconds earlier. There was no need for an observer in that marketplace of one, I had set this action against others not so printable.
It requires that one sees, I suppose, identity in time, as a random sum, rather than some sort of culmination. A random sum more affected by recent movements, by decisions made and forgotten, but still made. One thing chosen over another that creates a pattern of behaviour that is the only relative judgement of self. A moment, true, that had four or five presents when it happened, but, still, actually driven by a simple desire to spare the creature the inconvenience (pain?) of being scorched in the sun.
A marketplace of one.
photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jiva/123664080/sizes/m/
May 30th, 2008 at 12:42 pm
a part of me has felt for years some vague but powerful social injunction against this type of mercy, what you call the “simple desire to spare”…yet i think it matters. i think each act of it makes the person doing it a little more conscious, a little less self-consumed.
the marketplace of one is interesting. less pure than altruism, still a weighing of oneself…still open to retelling and thus judgements, but not for the purpose of those things.
guys who save worms are hott.