Violets in the Street

When my stepmother was eighty-eight and I was fifty-nine she said, “I never realized how very thoughtful you are.”

It surprised and pleased me. What had she seen that led her to that conclusion? It also angered me to remember all the times I had been thoughtful in our family and never been recognized for it.

I pictured violets in the street. Every time I tell this story I picture violets in the street.

When I was ten and my stepmother was thirty-nine I went to a nearby field and picked a large handful of wild violets to give to her. She loved violets, they were her favorite flower, and she cultivated several small flowerpots of African violets. On my way home as I crossed the street in front of our house, the bundle of violets came apart in my hand and most of them spilled to the street. There were not enough of them left in my hand to make a decent gift so I let them go, and I went into the house weeping with shame and disappointment.

“What’s the trouble?” my stepmother asked as I lay inconsolable on my bed. I could not tell her. And I never did.

I call her my stepmother here, but my sister and I were never allowed to disclose that she was not our natural mother. It was never spoken of, even in our family, though my sister and I did occasionally speak of it. But that’s another story.

When you are a thoughtful person it doesn’t occur to you to say, “I’m being thoughtful right now.” When you are a thoughtless person it doesn’t occur to you to say, “I am being thoughtless right now.” No one can say that truthfully because to do so requires some bit of reflection.

When you are a thoughtful person you might remember something and say, “I was thoughtless yesterday,” and you will wince inside. It is very painful. When you are a thoughtless person you might remember something and say, “I was thoughtful yesterday,” and the recollection will bring you great satisfaction.

When you are a thoughtful person if someone says, “That was thoughtless what you did yesterday,” you will feel pain and think about what you did and apologize. When you are a thoughtless person and someone says, “That was thoughtless what you did yesterday,” you are aggravated and you tell that person that, one, you were not thoughtless and two, that it was the other person’s fault.

When you are a thoughtful person you are not thoughtful all the time, but you are regretful when you become aware of your missteps—and every time you remember them thereafter. When you are a thoughtless person you are not thoughtless all the time but you don’t think about it one way or the other, perhaps because you act out of a sense of duty.

There are many thoughtless persons in the world, and they are angered at the thoughtlessness of others. Thoughtful persons are also angered by the thoughtlessness of others.

But when you are a thoughtful person and are the recipient of a thoughtful act you are deeply grateful. When you are a thoughtless person you don’t notice thoughtful acts.

When my son was thirteen and I was thirty-seven I passed an empty space in the Walmart parking lot and took another two spaces beyond. He asked me why I did that and I explained that there was a car behind us and if I had taken the first one the driver of that car would have had to wait for us to get out of the way, whereas this way both of us could pull into our spaces. He remarked that I was thoughtful and I rejoiced inwardly because if he was noticing the thoughtfulness of others there was a good chance he would himself become thoughtful.

One has to work at evolving into thoughtfulness. Remaining thoughtless all one’s life is pretty easy.

When I was sixty-eight and my stepmother was ninety-seven I drove two thousand miles to be there for her and help out any way I could. The day I arrived she said, “I love you but I want you to go.” I asked why and she said because she didn’t want me to see her like this. A thoughtless person finds a thoughtful person easy to love. I wanted to tell her this was not the worst I had seen her but I left her room in tears. Her friend/caretaker chastised her then came out to talk to me and told me how older people could be but I was not crying because of my long drive but because this was a completely accurate and poignant depiction of my whole life with her.

I stopped in the next morning before my departure to say goodbye and I could tell from the look she gave me that she knew we would not see each other again. She wanted our goodbye to be somehow profound. She made no mention of regret over sending me away. I said my goodbye but was restrained. I do not regret my restraint.

A thoughtful person’s ability to love is not infinite.

Acknowledge Consciousness!

I recently finished reading a book by Stanislas Dehaene titled Consciousness and the Brain. This was the third book bearing a seductive title that had disappointed me to the point of anger. The other two are The Mind’s I by Douglas Hofstadter and Consciousness Explained by Daniel Dennett.

Each of these three books bludgeoned me with information about brain function and about how one or another kind of electrical stimulation creates this or that conscious feeling. Researchers have used all kinds of fancy technology to map the active part of the brain or plot brain waves and correlate these data with the experiences reported by the patient. The implication is that feelings and ideas and the subjective sense of self are not the stuff our consciousness is made of; they are nothing more than electrical impulses beeping around among neurons and dendrites and synapses.

 

The Brown Jacket, Oil, 1965, 32 x 24

The conclusion, which each author holds off until the end, is that consciousness is just an illusion. And they’re so smug about it!

Let’s assume for now that these three eminent scholars are using the word “consciousness” in the same way, referring to that subjective sense of awareness of self. This is a difficult thing to name; all the standard English terms are ambiguous. “Consciousness,” “awareness” and the like are most often used to describe mere wakefulness, and so are insufficiently clear for the purposes of this discussion.

There are terms that do work. The best among these, because it cannot be hijacked by folks that don’t understand it, is atman, a Hindu term. “Witness,” as used by the followers of Gurdjieff, is also clear, but only so long as we agree that we are speaking in terms of The Fourth Way. There are other possibilities, but let’s stick with atman.

If I can call an item “mine,” then it is not “me.” (Forget grammar for a moment.) “My” car is not me. I say “She ran into me” when another driver collides with my car, but she didn’t hit me. My clothes are not me. My body is not me. It’s an object I drag around but it’s not me.

More subjectively, I have feelings but they are not me. They are my feelings. My ideas, my thoughts are not me. I observe them. If I claim them, I am objectifying them.

Finally, my mind is not me. It is mine. “I have a good mind.” “I’m losing my mind.” Spending some time in silence, I sit and watch the mind cavort, tug at my heartstrings, worry me, chastise me. That mind is not me.

There is something that is truly I that watches what the mind and perceptions present. Well, I can’t really call it watching, because this atman does nothing, feels nothing, thinks nothing—just witnesses. That whatever-it-is is always the very last stop on any journey to the depth of introspection, but I can never get there, because even if I convince myself that I am identifying with atman, it is actually atman that is observing my mind thinking about identifying with atman.

Everything in our world could function just the same without atman witnessing. These days especially, with ever advancing technology of artificial intelligence, we can imagine a world of mosquitos and dogs and people programmed to do what they do, even to think about what they do, even to think about thinking, and yet never have this sense of “I-ness.”

And that is what these three authors are claiming is happening. They present the scientific evidence that the mind and feelings are brain functions, as if the brain is an extremely complex computer and no more. Well, maybe it is, and this research is profound and fascinating. But they go too far, inferring that since every feeling and idea can be theoretically explained in electrical terms, with no reference to an atman, then that must be all there is.

They conclude that consciousness—atman—is an illusion.

Look, I don’t know how or why this well-oiled human machine comes with atman, such an ineffable connection. I read books like these in the hope that someone else brighter than I has some insight into this difficult problem, but to say there is no such thing as consciousness, that it is an illusion?

“Illusion: an unreal vision presented to the bodily or mental eye” (Webster). Right, so to whom is the illusion presented? I know! Atman! Consciousness! The mere mention of illusion negates their entire argument.

These books just pissed me off.

I think they were written by robots.

Gratitude for Grace

Along the Blue Ridge Parkway. In 2014 I drove the whole thing, through Virginia and North Carolina, at the speed limit, 45 MPH. I just needed to be quiet for a while.

A minister friend of mine invited me over for dinner. He cooked, and while his wife and I sat at the table, he served us. I didn’t start eating right away and he said, “You’re waiting for the blessing. You don’t need to do that. The food is already blessed!”

Actually I had been waiting politely for him to be seated, but I didn’t think fast enough to say so, and instead picked up my fork. But you know, there is a whole lot more to say about this.

Certainly a human being is in no way qualified to bless anything; she can only request that God do so. Even so, do we imagine that God waits for our request before he blesses our food? Seems to me that our food is blessed by its very existence. That God provides for us, I am trying to say, is the blessing. But this is a quibble.

Shouldn’t the blessing, or grace, then, be an expression of gratitude? “Give thanks to Him and praise His name,” Psalm 100.  If so, how can anyone but me speak my thanks?

Let me, then, also express my gratitude for the company of an enlightened friend.

I am sure that he would be chagrined at my very non-traditional beliefs—or lack thereof—but no matter. Any human being worthy of the label can and should certainly be grateful for her life, her abilities, and her support by whatever you want to call this infinite environment through which we find ourselves drifting.