I am picturing a circle. Like the geographical representation of the Globe, latitude and longitude lines score across its surface. The lines mark a distance. The distances lengthen and shorten. The longest lines stretch across the respective diameters. The diameters, were you to draw every single diameter, you would fill in the entire circle. This is the nature of circle. This is also the nature of time.
Before I proceed, here is the song and scene I’ll mention.
Carl Jung writes that we spend the first part of life preparing for life and the latter part of life preparing for death. That is, if we are wise. A set of Buddhist prayer flags hang across 19th century room-dividing screen that survived being concealed from the Japanese army in a basement of my grandparents house in Tianjin, China. I did not have to tell you all of that. I did it for a reason though that I’ll come back to as I further foray into my meditation on the circle I am still seeing in my mind.
The circle is now a sphere. It isn’t a hard sphere. It isn’t the wooden sphere my 10th grade Geometry teacher, Mr. Gorman, used when he saw that I really wasn’t getting all this Pi-radius-squared thinking going on all around me. He was a wonderful teacher. I didn’t understand Math for the simple reason you expect. I was good at it. In sixth grade at a little independent school that used to be a bird sanctuary or was a bird sanctuary so we 12-year olds did penny-drops (at least Tina, whom we nicknamed Roach when we all nicknamed each other. I was Inchworm.) from the single-bar monkey bar by the tiny lake with two black swans then ate our microwave-heated chicken pot pies (damn, I want one) at the picnic table surrounded by peacocks.
Peacocks were all over our pre-teen dreams. We were four friends in a magical world. This magical world had many magical worlds inside it. One of them was Math. I preferred Peacocks to Math so much that I raced through the textbook at my own comfortably cognitive pace. I finished months before summer vacation. I expected the logical according to my Peacock Logic. I expected the very nice teacher to say, “Okay, Laura, go be with the Peacocks and Black Swans.” I do not have to put into words for you that this is not how the American education system operates.
My teacher gave me another Math textbook to work through amid the cries of my fantailed counterparts. I read the directions. I solved the equations. To this day, when I see the Peacocks at the Western North Carolina Nature Center, I think of Math and vice versa. Happily, this means I am thinking about Peacocks a lot more than Math, but I would not mind it were it the other way around. The Dalai Lama keeps a ton of Peacock feathers in his rooms at his residence in Tibet. If you think about it, you know why. The tailfeathers have eyes on them. They perceive everything, and when these eyes are fanned out they remind us to be open and attentive so we can receive and witness everything being given and shown us.
Do you see how far I have drifted from my circle—not to mention Keith Partridge and The Partridge Family, whose hit song, “Hey, I Think I Love You” embodies the message of what I feel a bit excited to call Peacock Logic? That sentence itself jumps among worlds. It exemplifies my observation of drift. I’ll call it cognitive drift, allowance of mind to wander as though to wander were its optimal application. This is the logic we apply to exploring our stories. We invite the associations because those reveal the bones of our stories.
Now, I want to articulate my mental image of my friend’s Toronto basement at 285 St. Leonards—patron saint of sick animals and captive women—Avenue in third grade where I first heard “Hey, I Think I Love You” and felt entirely elated. When I wrote like this in college, I got a D. Holden Caulfield of Catcher in the Rye speaks a whole book in this fashion. On page 1, he remarks that his teacher tells him not to digress. A wandering mind, vagabond thinking leads to the Fall of the Empire, and this may be why Plato doesn’t allow Poets in The Republic. I just did a search for Plato’s words, clicked on a link and arrived at “Page Cannot Be Found.” My wandering mind hit a wall. Does it stop? Not for a second. Meanwhile, through all of the above, a part of my brain has “Hey, I Think I Love You” on loop.
Scots-French Poet and Philosopher, Kenneth White, originated Geopoetics, the philosophy of listening to and expressing the earth through our own creative work. He observes that of all the big brains of Western Thought, not a single Philospher suggests we talk about the earth. The Globe such as the one I mentioned earlier then wandered and in so doing have returned to it, knowing it for the first time just like T.S. Eliot promised in “The Four Quartets.” We don’t really need the word “four” there, do we, Mr. Smartest Man in England? Kenneth White coined the phrase “intellectual nomadism” and encouraged us to engage across disciplines, to make meaning of everything. This is the off-ramp from the information superhighway that only leads us farther and farther away from where we ought to be. Here. Right here on earth, exploring it, becoming friends with it, listening to it, observing it— not as object but as being, participial and noun— connect with it. The only means by which we can connect with the earth is through our creativity. When we are nurturing this connection and being nurtured by it, we open the world.
In the Partridge Family episode that contained the premiere of “Hey, I Think I Love You,” the family are performing at a Women’s Rights demonstration, which is interesting to start. Keith pisses off a feminist by saying stupid shit, and then he joins his family on stage, all wearing purple velvets suits and lacy lace stuff around their necks. The feminist Keith pissed off hears the song and, in keeping with the show’s theme song, gets happy. I know this can look like a diss to the movement, and it might have been intended to be such—oh don’t worry girly just listen to the cute boy*.
*I was a Shaun girl myself and lost my mind when he followed me on Twitter a few years ago, along with Barack Obama which I will never understand. Turns out Shaun Cassidy follows poets. This is a conversation for another time.
But let’s look at the lyrics, and while doing so recall the definitive memories (people, places, years) this song (you can choose another song) integrally resounds.
… I was sleeping and right in the middle of a good dream
Like all at once I wake up from something that keeps knocking at my brain
Before I go insane I hold my pillow to my head
And spring up in my bed screaming out the words I dread
I think I love you (I think I love you)
… This morning I woke up with this feeling
I didn't know how to deal with and so I just decided to myself
I'd hide it to myself and never talk about it
And did not go and shout it when you walked into the room
I think I love you (I think I love you)
… I think I love you so what am I so afraid of
I'm afraid that I'm not sure of a love there is no cure for
… I think I love you isn't that what life is made of
Though it worries me to say that I never felt this way
… I don't know what I'm up against
I don't know what it's all about
I got so much to think about
… Hey, I think I love you so what am I so afraid of
I'm afraid that I'm not sure of a love there is no cure for
… I think I love you isn't that what life is made of
Though it worries me to say I never felt this way
… Believe me you really don't have to worry
I only wanna make you happy and if you say "hey go away" I will
But I think better still I'd better stay around and love you
Do you think I have a case let me ask you to your face
Do you think you love me?
… I think I love you
I think I love you
I think I love you
I think I love you
I think I love you
I think I love you
I think I love you
I think I love you
This is what makes every single song amazing. It can’t go wrong. It can form an awful song and still be amazing in what it seeks to accomplish and does, even in the worst attempts. When we sing, when we are moved by music we are moved from the neural network that divides and seeks to conquer (i.e. Keith Partridge taking the entire Civil Rights (remember, women weren’t allowed to have “charge cards” in their name at the time that this episode aired) for Women Movement as a personal affront, to the neural network that embraces justice because in a world where we are all one big purple-velvetted and ruffly shirted family, Partridge and otherwise.
This is what all creative expression does. This is how Vaclav Havel nurtured a transformation by magnetizing the Czechoslovakian resistance with the Velvet-Underground inspired Plastic People. This is why we call what happened there (oh, that brief window of history’s end) the Velvet Revolution. This is also why Civil Rights movements have songs we sing while we face injustice. Our songs hold our stories. Our stories hold our courage because every story that we tell about our lives, however grim, is a survival story. If it weren’t we would not be able to tell it. We hit plenty of existential 404 “page not found” walls that breaks us entirely. We all stand to lose everything. We do lose everything. We spend the first half of life accruing it and the latter half of life feeling and seeing it all chipped apart. The message of every scripture, story, song, and sacred text is an enactment of turning nothing into something. That is the creative function of that other neural network that has been sealed off as the terra nullis of the mind.
“Hey, I think I love you!” is the fractal of this vast wonder. If we are thinking, we are not loving. If we are thinking and ought to be feeling, feeling will win. We cannot hide it from ourselves, we cannot dismiss love just because we don’t know how to “deal with” it. The magnificent bridge that I swear is the source text for the Telletubbies collapses from hookie playful sweetness in baritone control mode:
… I don't know what I'm up against
I don't know what it's all about
I got so much to think about
It’s the Age of Reason shaking its head at what’s to come once we cease being afraid of our feelings, once we recognize that our wild and wooly humanity should never have been made to do back flips on a balance beam (all due respect to everybody who actually can). Reality is not a balance beam at the Olympics. It’s the whole world viewing it on gazillion TVs, cellphones, and laptops. Reality overrides linearity every time. The longer we fight it, the sicker we become. As we expand through creativity, we find infinite space in the very nutshell of our brains. That’s how magic it. That’s how complete.
All songs are sonnets. They begin with a worry, and they end with a resolution. The resolution might not be in the words. It could be like Blondie’s 11:59 (my favorite song for its association with driving through Berlin on New Years Eve 1989-90 when The Wall was coming down in a world where all the students were demonstrating in the faces of the tanks in Tiananmen and Wenceslas Squares, the year we thought the arc of justice was bending for the final time, that justice had won. 11:59 doesn’t solve anything at all. It’s just 11:59 and we want to stay alive, and we know that and that’s enough for now so cue sweet happy music as we take ourselves down the highway like a rocket to the ocean.
Other songs do resolve at the level of words, best exemplified when the Partridge Family Logos falls into the proto-Telletubby happiness of Partridge Family Pathos and sends David Cassidy screaming the sweet, sweet water of life, love itself, over the conflicted realm of concentrated power, inequity, injustice, pain and neurosis. Lord knows he tried to stop it. And failed. As we, too, will fail as we proceed along the Peacock-shrieklessness of life’s subtractions. Eventually, we feel. The question is only how long will be put it off?
… Hey, I think I love you so what am I so afraid of
I'm afraid that I'm not sure of a love there is no cure for
That’s not the end. Even when the song of the first half of life begins its gentle fade into silence (all the women cheering!), the record isn’t over. The story can go on beyond the bridge, but we have to first build and then cross it. In the latter half of life we draw upon our past for answers, and find that where the words don’t hold the resolution, the music does if we can pay attention closely enough to hear it. In preparation for this next sentence, I glance at the Buddhist prayer flags adorning the grandparents’ room-dividing screen that was in the basement while the family spent three years starving in a Japanese prison camp very few know about. One flag presents the word “wisdom” with the Mandarin character above the Buddhist definition, “Knowledge, intuition, and experience combine to guide us in thought and deed.” It isn’t getting beamed on the head by a shaft of shining light. It’s not from outerspace or some realm we get to when we die. It’s our story.
When we know our story, we can reach back into knowledge we have gained and experiences we have had, and we can put these together to inform our journey toward the end of the song. In the same way my thoughts have meandered and wandered, following a crude path among associated memories and knowledge (trivial and non-trivial), we can move through life. We can keep track of the motifs, characters, archetypes, and other patterns we keep tumbling over as our stories show us. It is framed as madness in linear land. In earth land, though, in the land of spherical existence, straight lines transept circumference at two points. The symmetrical nature of mythic geometry dictates we are living a perfect reflection of past and present at every instant. Nothing has changed, nothing ever changes, except our reading of it. This is existential literacy: can you read your own story for all it holds?
With some serious attention, reflection, and pattern instinct engagement, we discover our lives have shown us a language. If we do it right, if we can know our story well enough we use this language lesson to read the story our lives are telling to us. Not knowing this, we run out of inspiration part way through, stop believing in magic, lose our ability to daydream and turn into our nightmares. If we do attend to our stories and discover how our wisdom interacts with nature’s, we develop perfect intuition, and that is what the Dalai Lama and friends say carries us through the Land of the Dead. Once we have that, we have no more use for abstract reasoning. We are bound to the same language the earth uses to steer its birds in migration of which 325 million will fly over our world tonight so be sure to turn off the lights. It is very important that all beings can hear the song. Every word.