12,412. RUDIMENTS, pt. 911

RUDIMENTS, pt. 911

(for this we left Holland?)

Sometimes I used to hear

the phrase, 'He didn't know

his own strength.' In the

context of whatever, I can

recall hearing it and  -  as

it turned out  -  I found I

never knew my own

weaknesses, which I think

is a lot worse. I was often

darting around in waters

that were untested for me;

maybe too deep or maybe

over my head. But unlike a

fool and his money, which

the saying said were soon

parted, I managed to hold

on  -  until I didn't. Were I

a stage instruction in some

playwright's scene, it would

read ('seen scurrying off,

stealthily, stage left...).

-

My own fit, within my own

time, the time I was in, never

meshed very well. I managed,

yes, but always without any

comfort. Henry Adams, the

great-grandson of John Adams,

and the grand-son of John Quincy

Adams, wrote a number of nice

books; the foremost for me being

'The Education of Henry Adams.'

I pored over that, for many times

and for varied reasons : it was

a learned and aware world-view

I really wanted to know of.

It was like a displacement of

time, rolling one bit over the

other, and it really worked for

me. Kind of contemporary with

Mark Twain as well  - I was, by

this book, presented with a

completely different outlook

and viewpoint of the world

around me. It fit NYC, and

it fit Elmira too. One far more

beleaguered than the other,

back then, and neither being

the City of Boston or the Town

of Quincy, Mass. for contrasting.

It was all a glance through a

different set of windows, into

some other guy's house and

living arrangements, for sure.

-

There are contexts everywhere,

and they are different everywhere.

Something that means one thing

in one place may have an entire

other meaning in another. Henry

Adams starts out, oddly enough,

as an interesting opening point,

with the idea that to 'see' mankind

as a whole and as a force, one

must choose a fixed point from

the past by which to measure

any comparison. Fair enough,

picking  fixed place to start

from. What was weird, based

on interests and references, was

that I chose like, maybe 1900,

or a little before, for the exercise,

yet  - with his old learning and

expertise of things, he, born in

1838, goes back to much older

things  -  the years 1150 - 1250;

Amiens Cathedral, and the

works of Thomas Aquinas. 'As

the unit from which to measure

the motion own to his own time,

without assuming anything as

true, or untrue, except relation.'

He called politics, which mostly

'ran' in his family, 'the systematic

organization of hatreds.' In the

same way, I have always viewed

politics as a pollution, spewed

forth as filth from those who

would pollute, despoil, and

otherwise ruin our world. With

their hatreds, so I guess it fits.

Or, as I heard once, about

living itself  - 'going through

time? It's all you can really do;

don't know much else about it

 -    like asking a drunk, 'How'd

you become a drunk?'

-

He wrote this entire life, of

himself, in the third person.

Which at first is completely

unsettling, or maybe confusing,

(I kept thinking a narrator was

'telling' this story to me). Back

in the 1980's, The New York

Times had a columnist, John

Leonard, as I recall, with a

column called 'Metropolitan

Life' or something close to

that   - and he too always wrote

in the third person. In the same

way, it was odd, and distancing.

['He once again passed the

bagel ship at the corner of 81st,

and he noted, as he passed, that

strange blue light, always on,

above the second-landing

doorway. He wondered what

it meant']. The 'he' here
being the 'I' of the omniscient
narrator. So why bother?

-

The little things, the cultural

markers like that, always stay 

with me. Maybe they were

deemed inconsequential at the

time, but they lingered, as an

echo in the mind, and through

persistence earned some status.

I always liked balancing the

past against the present, but

was never able to decide  -  

had I the power to do so  - 

where I'd want to come 

back to, what decade or 

era, if I had that opportunity. 

It hardly matters, because I 

never got clear with myself if

I'd enter it with my awareness

of the present (now) as the 

future (then) intact, or just

be ignorant of all that and 

stumble. How do explain to

a 17th century Pilgrim what

in the world 'Alexa' or 'Cortana'

is, saying with 'I can better 

help you if you'd tell me 

what it is you want.' They'd

probably mumble....'Huh?

For this we left Holland?'
-
I'd always figure there's a means
of getting to the point where that
position of viewing one's own
self as a 'third person' becomes
operable. Detachment being, on
the whole,  good thing  -  or being
seen as such anyway. Putting  value
on that is another story. There
have been lots of madmen over
the centuries who have been
SO detached from themselves
that they never even realized how
mad whatever they were doing
actually was. We paid the price,
and we. as a masse, had to pick
up, always, the pieces.