Nate: You know, I keep thinking it’s going to get easier, but it just doesn’t.
David: No it doesn’t. It just gets more familiar.

Before MOMENTUM I was given little choice but to take and share a picture with my friend Syl, who requested it for proof that I actually possessed a face and so that she would recognize the near-stranger she was set to pick up in her zippy red car. That’s reasonable, I thought, then instantly fell into a panic at the idea of committing my face to film. Somehow, however, I managed to get the job done. The picture even looked nice! And I thought I could be done with such a distasteful task for at least another half-decade.

But during our visit Syl brought up the picture and my reluctance to make it. “Your kids are really going to regret not having pictures of themselves with you,” she said, and the guilt took even stronger hold. “But I know how you feel,” she continued, and she told me about a project she’d undertaken a year or two back in which every day she took and shared pictures of herself. “You should think about trying it,” she said. “You’d get a whole new perspective on how you look and your children would have images of you. And,” she continued, “Once you get going I bet you find that it’s not as hard as you think.”

Every day. For a year.

That’s three hundred sixty-five pictures.

But sometimes even the most daunting of projects can catch hold, and a week or so after I returned home I rounded up an unsuspecting child and before she could protest the first picture was made. In the intervening days I’ve posed with every permutation of my offspring, with the furchildren, and by myself. I’ve shot body parts, faces, extremities and the whole, as it were, enchilada. I’d like to say it’s getting easier but as is so often the case it’s only gotten more familiar: I die a thousand deaths as I post each image on Facebook and we’ll not even mention the approximately five billion ones that are discarded, aghast, before I find one that passes muster.

There is an upside. Even after so short a duration this project has already generated 2000 times the number of images of myself with my children as compared to the last three years combined. This is good, right?

“You’re a groundhog!” the little boys in third grade teased but I just smiled, secure in the knowledge that the day of my birth was the best day ever on which to be born. I mean really, if you have to be born on a minor holiday what better one could there be? Arbor Day? I don’t think so!

Then at some point a pagan friend filled me in on the fact that my birthday is also Imbolc, which celebrates the midpoint between winter solstice and spring equinox and the return of light to the northern hemisphere. If I can just make it to my birthday, I’d tell myself in the darkest days of winter, then we’re halfway there.

Of course February 2 is also the topic of a film; I felt nothing but a faint revulsion at having my birthday associated with such a worthless piece of pop culture until I learned about eternal recurrence:

What if a demon crept after you one day or night in your loneliest solitude and said to you: ‘This life, as you live it now and have lived it, you will have to live again and again, times without number; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and all the unspeakably small and great in your life must return to you, and everything in the same series and sequence – and in the same way this spider and this moonlight among the trees, and in the same way this moment and I myself. The eternal hour-glass of existence will be turned again and again – and you with it, you speck of dust!’  Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who thus spoke? Or have you experienced a tremendous moment in which you would have answered him: ‘You are a god and never did I hear anything more divine!’ If this thought gained power over you it would, as you are now, transform and perhaps crush you; the question in all and everything: ‘do you want this again and again, times without number?’ would lie as the heaviest burden upon all your actions. Or how well disposed towards yourself and towards life would you have to become to have no greater desire than for this ultimate eternal sanction and seal?

This is my reminder every day and I will ask it of you now: If that demon came to you, would you be happy to relive every day again and again? Would you be filled with joy or horror? If the latter, then what would you have to change so that your answer could be different? Could you, like Billy Pilgrim, come unstuck in time?

Eternal recurrence also shows up in Douglas Adams:

There is a theory which states that if ever anybody discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.

All these thoughts have blended in my mind to bring extra significance to the year I turn 42. I’d planned on buying myself a little tattoo¹ for my birthday but  #Snowmageddon11 will probably postpone that plan at least for a few days.

However, if I go with this plan I’d be stuck explaining it for the rest of my life, and past experience has taught me that people expect the question “What does your tattoo mean” to be answered in fewer than ten words, so maybe I’ll just get a wee dolphin instead?

1. Die ewige Sanduhr des Daseins wird immer wieder umgedreht — und du mit ihr, Stäubchen vom Staube! if we are ambitious and amor fati if we are not. [↩]

This is a story that reflects poorly — very poorly — upon your humble narrator.

At 10am one Tuesday I languished in a seemingly interminable pre-holiday crush to pay for my groceries. The cashier (as evidenced by her shiny name-tag) was new and had not yet developed the rapid-fire technique of scanning items without painstakingly searching for every barcode.

I was already late and having forgotten my phone in the car I could neither pass the time in perusal of Twitter nor text my friend to say I was running behind. I was therefore in the grip of two powerful and dangerous forces: boredom and crankiness.

My attention was caught by a group of some half-dozen twenty-something men the next register over. Each made his purchase then joined the growing throng laughing and jostling by the bagging carousel. Any objective observer would have called them loud, at least when judged by the noise level usually found in such circumstances. Their cashier must have been as much of a novice as mine because progress, considering how few items each man carried, was equally slow and the longer they waited the louder they got.

Here is the part I’m ashamed to tell. Why are they even here? I thought to myself. They should be working at this time of day. They’re probably spending their welfare checks instead. My eyes went to my own cashier. Her too. Don’t these people ever work?

And then in less time than it took to think the realization of how awful and ridiculous and shameful those thoughts were slapped hot red on my face. My cashier was working, and while the group of men were not at that hour then neither was I. But reason matters little in these circumstances. It is all too easy to allow messages from the past to butt in on the present and as I nosed back over the filthy trail those thoughts had left in my mind I knew they were things I’d heard from my earliest days and which, if I were not careful, would still be voiced at every holiday, every birthday, every family gathering.

This is not how I think of “those people” when I’m rational, but how often is rational thought lost in the rush of barely-acknowledged half-thoughts from the past? I have to imagine that everyone is at least occasionally ambushed by whispers of prejudice learned in the cradle, whispers that all but those who relax most complacently into their own privilege must address if they are ever to grow beyond their own learned classism, racism and every other ugly -ism.

And now having shared this nasty little episode I’m curious: If I’d written more and more vividly in the fourth and fifth paragraphs and less (or not at all) after that, would your opinions about my attitude be altered? Would you reach different conclusions about the kind of person I am?

My guess is that if I’d given you two hundred lovingly detailed words on the awfulness of that group of young men with no hint as to my thoughts around it you would think I was a very bad person indeed. As it stands you may still think I’m a very bad person indeed, but I bet the context makes it just the tiniest bit more interesting.

“The poet takes from life that which is quite particular and individual,
and describes it accurately in its individuality; but in this way he reveals
the whole of human existence…though he appears to be concerned
with the particular, he is actually concerned with
that which is everywhere and at all times.”
–A. Schopenhauer

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Programming Note: I’m still enjoying a little time off here, so expect posting to be light through the holidays IF I COULD EVER SHUT MY BIG FLAPPY MOUTH THAT IS.

Not long ago I had the words Il faut imaginer Sisyphe heureux permanently written on my inner arm because the essay that ends with that line has for many years been to me a source of great comfort. ¹**

At least it was my intention to end up with those words. In actuality I had the words Il faut imaginer Sisyphe heurcux written on my inner arm because by the time the artist got to the final “e” my arm was weeping fat droplets of blood which washed away enough of the stencil that I walked out of the shop flying with elation but shamefully misspelled, a mistake I only noticed once home and de-endorphinated enough to compare essay to arm and note the difference.

But my artist is a professional. “Come in when it’s healed,” he told me over the phone. “It’ll only take a minute to make it right.” For the next two weeks I itched and fretted until I thought enough healing had taken place at which point I wandered back into the shop.

“He’s with a client right now,” they told me, so I waited and waited and waited and then waited some more until finally he was done. I presented myself with arm outstretched. He capped off my hour of waiting with a three second look-see. “Nope,” he pronounced. “Not yet healed enough.”

Well fuck, I thought, then I slouched toward home to heal some more. Over the next week I took especial care of it, and as my hours free from children are so very limited I made an appointment to avoid any additional wait. But the time I was given meant that I’d have to rush out the very second the exhusband came in or else lose my slot and have to wait another week, and as the exhusband is often sometimes late, I needed to plan very carefully to avoid this eventuality.

Very carefully indeed².

So carefully did I plan that I intended to have the entire meal on the table, the children served and car keys in hand when he walked in the door. To that end I made a black bean soup, and at t-minus twenty minutes I endeavored to perform the final step which transmogrifies rustic pot-of-beans into velvety spicy deliciousness; to wit, The Blending of the Beans.

At that exact moment I received a text. Oooooo, I thought. Perhaps it is one of my friends requesting some nakedness. This would have made my night. Instead it was from the exhusband, who warned that he might be running just a teeny bit late and reminded me that he still needed my Christmas list. He’s always late, I grumbled to myself. But no matter. I’ll just be more efficient. And I was. In the space of thirty seconds I’d assembled the blender, set the table and found a piece of paper upon which to write my list. What should I ask for, I wondered as I scooped scalding beans into the blender. I have everything I need.

As I made to flip the blender’s switch it hit me. An immersion blender, I thought, pausing just long enough to scrawl it on the list. You really should have an immersion blender for tasks like this because running scalding food through a traditional blender is just asking for trouble. And as I carefully pushed the list a respectable distance from the steaming blender³ I gave myself a brief, silent lecture. Put a towel over the lid, I told myself sternly. Pulse briefly. Remember what happened when you made this soup a few months ago? The last thing you need is…

And then I hit the switch, and despite my best efforts with pep-talk, towel and rapid pulsation the my tragic bean-blending history repeated itself. Picture it: Kitchen covered in scalding beans, Christmas list covered in scalding beans, self covered in scalding beans, carefully-tended arm covered in scalding beans.

There you go, Alanis. I’ve written you a whole new verse.

You’re welcome.

————

*”Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth.”

**You can read the essay in English here or, if you’d like a challenge, in the original French here. Ima go read it again too, as clearly I need the refresher.

1. My very soul revolts at the idea of summarizing the essay instead of expecting you to read it. You really should read it. You are not going to read it? FINE. The mythological Sisyphus could be seen as a tragic figure as he rolls his rock up the mountain again and again, but Camus says that we are all Sisyphus. We all are forced by an absurd world into seemingly meaningless toil, but this is not a tragedy. Instead we create our own meaning in the midst of our toil and this is how we find happiness. In the middle of a ridiculously and needlessly painful crisis a decade back, the idea that Sisyphus could have been happy was monumental. It may have saved my life. Now, you really should read the entire essay, geez. [↩]
2. All of the above is foreshadowing. Pay attention. [↩]
3. Right next to my very expensive phone, naturally [↩]