Notes from October 19

 

Notes from October 19

You think you have an attention, and yet everything we learn in this work shows us we don’t.

You think that attention belongs to you. But it’s the other way around. And yet an attention is possible. 

It isn’t my attention. I participate.

The pandemic has refocused the question of my own work. How do I more intelligently gather my personal magnetism in the midst of isolation? I don’t just need to bring the “parts” into relationship. They are big things, clumsy pieces of a puzzle that has a great deal of detail in it. It’s the details that need to come into relationship. If they don’t, the big parts won’t fit together. So the magnetism, the attraction of the molecular parts of being needs to concentrate itself.

Is there an organized work in me? Perhaps I don’t establish the order. I just allow the laws to do so. If I’m going to do this, I need to be very gentle with my ordinary parts.

I always want to adopt someone else’s point of view. I change it a little and call it my own. I'm a hunter that specializes in having my photograph taken with other people’s kills. 

It would be useful to let this go and to try and allow an original intuition. One that doesn’t rely on posing with the ideas of others in order to make me look important. It would be useful to stop posing and to just stand within my own life and allow it to be ordinary, allow myself to be ordinary. 

If I really think about it carefully and I experience the question in a living way, I begin to see that everything that comes out of human beings is this kind of posing. For a human being to just be themselves is a very big thing, and quite rare. People who do this appear to others to be simple and perhaps even stupid; posing by adopting a cloak made of what everyone else is and does brings us into sympathetic relationship, but it conceals our actual nature at the same time. 

The minute all of that is gone, it turns out we are like the man in In Search of the Miraculous who, when he was reduced to his essence through hypnotism, turned out to only be interested in raspberry jam.

When we hear this story, we're tempted to laugh at how simple the man is; yet that simplicity rests in a foundation of absolute honesty, something that none of those who laugh at it have in them.

May you be well within today.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.