THE SOCRATIC SCRIBBLER ON BLANK PAGES and GRAND COLLISIONS
Trapped home during the plague, my wife Karen and I joined a faith group of several people who meet on Zoom early Saturday mornings to discuss the scripture readings for Sunday’s mass. We begin by reading the passages aloud, then we take a solitary “meditation” break for twenty mintues, and then return to discuss.
During my twenty minute meditation period, my mind seems to go blank. My thoughts just seem to echo memories of things I had heard or read about the scripture passages. Although I am supposed to use my meditation time to have an “authentic encounter” with a spiritual text, I still tend to react like I am in school…looking for an idea to impress the teacher and other students. In Loss of the Creature, Walker Percy talks about a similar experience. Percy tells us that it is impossible to see the Grand Canyon “for real” because of all those beautiful postcards. If we get to the canyon, we approve with the praise “Looks just like the postcard.” I had an identical experience the first time I saw the Eiffel Tower. This is why I try to avoid landmarks; they seem like cultural cliches. I did not know how to begin looking at the Taj Mahal or the Great Wall when I saw them from the tour buses, other than to kind of verify that they are, yup, there. I’ve seen images of the Mona Lisa a million times in books, and I did a walk by once in the gallery. I’m not sure I’ve ever really looked at it.
When somebody asks me what I think or feel about something important like God or love or evil or the Statue of Liberty, the truth is that I usually have no idea what I’m thinking or feeling. I do not think I am alone in this. I wrote Socratic Scribbling trying to help people find something to say when they sit down to write. Anyone who has ever tried to keep a journal knows what I mean. You sit down ready to enter your great insights and observations for the day, and you end up just writing your shopping list.
Fortunately, on occasion, there are times when I do know what I think. What’s the best way to get to Miami, who will I vote for as Mayor, how should we market the Great Books to a world that now thinks that they are politically incorrect?
So, what empowers us to have an authentic opinion about something? I think we have real opinions when we are actually trying to do or accomplish something. These are times when we have to make choices, when we put ourselves a bit at risk. You have to think and plan when you give a birthday party, look for a job, or correct a child. We have to think ahead and make choices. When we think and plan, things don’t always turn out the way we expect or want, but they still somehow make sense…as a success to enjoy or a failure to negotiate.. The folks who fix the elevator in the Eiffel Tower may not know its history, but they know all about the quirks of the elevator. When we do not think and plan, things just sort of happen. The Marine drill sergeant orders us to “Move with a purpose!” We also must think with a purpose, with an interest.
Many years ago, about a dozen of us were taking a class about Chaucer from William Ringler, a wiley professor. On our desks, we all had our new “critical edition” of Chaucer’s works. Ringler assigned us a simple bit of homework for the next week. He gave each of us a different “minor” poem included in the text and told us to come back next week and tell the class why we thought Chaucer did in fact write the poems he gave us. The next week we all appeared after spending hours looking at microfilm and researching every factoid about our poems. We all reported that, unfortunately, we could not find much evidence that Chaucer had, in fact, written our poems…included as Chaucer’s in the critical edition…indeed, there was a very good chance the poems were written by someone else. Beyond a lack of any solid manuscript evidence, the words and style of the poems did not fit very well with Chaucer’s “other”works. Ringler also pointed out something to us about each of our poems: the sources of each of the poems were on the last pages of manuscripts that held a longer work by Chaucer. Our hypothesis: once the scribe had finished copying the Chaucer work, he could not waste very expensive writing materials, so he filled up the space with poetry by others. These could then easily be mistaken as Chaucer’s, with the error compounded in edition after edition of Chaucer’s works. Suddenly, Chaucer was no longer the Grand Canyon. We were not sure where Chaucer started or ended, and we could not count on even very smart scholars to always be guides. We had to do our own Chaucer hike.
When the Eiffel Tower just becomes a way of proving to yourself that you are in Paris, well then a glimpse and a smile is all you need. I am more likely to go back to Paris for the food than for the Tower. Sometimes places will shock you. I went to Berlin a few years ago on business, and I was amazed how hip everyone looked walking down Ku’damn avenue. People my age, fellow septuagenarians, sported fashionable purple jackets and orange hair. Everybody looked as if they were en route to a club that played amazing jazz. People in Chicago, where I live, walk more invisibly and more vigilantly, especially when cars drive by slowly. Unfortunately it is not music that is making us a little jumpy.
Aristotle in his Organon is occasionally given credit for collecting and sorting the first organized grammar and logic of thinking. Beyond the formal procedures of subject and predicate, Aristotle begins with an amazing insight: We can only understand or explain one thing in terms of something else. If you let that idea sink in for a minute, you become a befuddling Bavarian philosopher pronouncing that you can only know what is by what it is not. (This is when you wisely decide not to become a philosophy major). Still the idea gets particularly useful when we encounter something new to us. We can only understand the unfamiliar in terms of something familiar. Aristotle also reminds us of an obvious but important fact: when we put things in language, that language must be thought or spoken or written. And then those words must be read or heard, by ourselves or someone else. We are always writing to someone else or to ourselves, perhaps even trying to persuade ourselves of something. It’s hard, if not impossible, to separate our ideas from our relationships with the world, with other people, and even with ourselves. Ideas and words seem to be about how we make connections.
Scribbling questions and answers teaches me that I can only make authentic encounters with Grand People, Places, Events, and Passages by trying to connect them to something familiar — to my own life experiences — not an expert’s guide. I can only see through my eyes, not somebody else’s. When I do this, I remember the first time I saw the Eiffel tower — in a 1950s documentary on tv showing Hitler dancing in the streets after his conquest of Paris. That memory shows the pride of Paris, even in defeat, standing tall and still elegant while a killer clown dances. It is the role things and people play in events that connect them to us, that give us opinions to write. When I do this, I am not just seeing…I am looking. If knowledge is just knowing what something it is, it can go on being what it is without any help from us. But when we connect what we are looking at with our own memories and experiences, new connections are made. The Mona Lisa is no longer just an old image on a wall; by connecting with us, it has a future.
The page is never blank when we connect a new experience with the old and let them collide and connect. It is collisions of our new experiences with ingrained memories that are the cure for the blank page. You let your mind wander in the desert. Eventually it will take you home with something new to say.
