Absence is Content

"Myth is the hidden part of every story, the buried part, the region that is still unexplored because there are as yet no words to enable us to get there. Myth is nourished by silence as well as by words."

~ Calvino, Italo

"Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths."

~ Campbell, Joseph

"A myth is a religion in which no one any longer believes."

~ Feibleman, James


"It is a myth, not a mandate, a fable not a logic, and symbol rather than a reason by which men are moved."

~ Edman, Irwin


"It is a sure sign that a culture has reached a dead end when it is no longer intrigued by its myths."

~ Marcus, Greil

Tripping

"Look at the stars lighting up the sky: no one of them stays in the same place."

~ Seneca

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Now that we have resided in Mikkeli long enough to see what the town has to offer (I believe it took approximately 31 hours), we have begun to make plans to see the greater area. For grandness and immodesty we are fortunate to be children of the 21st century. We travel by bus, train, plane, and ferry, holding timetables if not itineraries, and paying our privileged way with loaned government funds to be paid back in our working years with our greater productivity. We don't have the luxury of time to find out what is over the next hill, because our destinations are more grandiose. To economize, in expense or experience, is to miss the point.

There exists a feeling in my mind that comes to me late at night, when I am falling asleep, and the anxiety of the day has worn away but before my mind has fully pulled me under. It is the sound of a church bell ringing too far away to discern, or the word that slips out of reach as a sentence slows and hangs unfinished in the air... I think Terence McKenna called this the 'vegetable state', where ego is extingushed and sensory experience alone speaks. Sometimes I believe that all my searching is for this, because moments of gravity can scream past unnoticed in our concentration, but moments of raw experience are always moments of peace.

"Why do you wonder that globe-trotting does not help you, seeing that you always take yourself with you? The reason which set you wandering is ever at your heels."

~ Socrates

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Next weekend, we are visiting Helsinki, as the closest and easiest destination worth pursuing. The following weekend will take us to Stockholm, which has been called "the Venice of the north" due primarily to the fact that the central city sits on a number of islands. Sometime fairly soon after, we hope to visit Estonia, traveling by ferry from Helsinki.

I could exercise some measure of my knowledge about these places, but that would only serve to express my ignorance. Easier for me to merely state that I am largely ignorant of these places.

"Don't listen to what they say. Go see."

~ Chinese Proverb

Eyes on the Horizon

Carl Jung believed that in the same way that an individual matures as they grow older, their psyche also progresses throughout the years, so that an individual capable of understanding the symbols of the subconscious and with sufficient attention paid to an individual's dreams over a significant portion of a lifetime will be able to chart these developments in linear and understandable patterns. The most powerful forces of psychic development are known as Jungian Archetypes, which represent blueprints for psychic processes and their relevant predispositions. The relevance of this fact is that although we may, at any point in our lives, feel adrift, there are very real and powerful forces in our subconscious that are acting to progress us in some specific direction. In a similar (indeed, connected) sense, I believe that our moral lifetime undergoes the same process.

I believe that morality is inseparable (and from certain perspectives, indistinguishable) from the choices we make for ourselves in the name of happiness and fulfillment. Therefore, it should come as little surprise that I believe we are only truly happy when our choices both agree with and certify the moral center of our beings.

I have always believed that the difference between the chronically happy and the chronically sad is a matter of expectations. Perhaps (and this is a large leap, I will admit) the real difference is our ability to reconcile our daily actions to our morality. Indeed, if we draw a strong and encompassing picture of morality, these two philosophies are not so disconnected as they might first seem!

The other day, when reading a brief synopsis for the upcoming Anne Michaels book, "The Winter Vault", I encountered the phrase "most essential life". I now think that it might be more accurate to say that I re-encountered it in a new context, as it most certain RE-awoke a feeling that I have felt intermittently for a very long time. Whatever Anne Michaels means by this term, to me it is synonymous with the idea of leading the most productively moral life possible.

Concepts can be interesting to other people, as long as we can provide a context that transcends language barriers. And of course, I am not referring to soveirgn languages but to the gaps that exist in conceptual understanding itself. On the other hand, our own inner turmoil is much harder to connect to another person, because we all see ourselves and our struggles through our own keyhole, so to speak. It is a rare gift, in fact, to find someone with whom we connect with even incompletely. People must, it seems, desire some satisfaction that comes from sharing their inner turmoil in a way that makes people understand them. Now, this seems relevant:

"We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies — all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes."

~ Aldous Huxley

Now, I have been undergoing the process of approaching some feeling with this post, but now that I have arrived, I find it hard to penetrate to the essence in an effectively communicable way. Maybe simplicity is best? Here is my attempt at simplicity:

I have begun to question whether a domestic life of meeting one ideal individual, and proceeding to start a family is anything close to my most essential life. I think that my fear of being alone has long clouded my judgment on what is capable of providing me the most lasting and complete fulfillment. But the more educated I become on issues of Finance and Economics, the more the issues of injustice and inequity in the world will not escape my mind. I don't know what tomorrow will bring, but I believe this is an evolution of my thought and not an abberation, that my moral progression has been moving towards this and will not cease. I believe that I cannot choose to ignore these feelings without long-term and lasting consequences. I am beginning to believe that utilizing all I have in me, all I am capable of to help others may be my most essential life.

???

Aiming for Survival

"Most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes."

~ Oscar Wilde, "The Picture of Dorian Gray"

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I suppose it is apt to start with a quote such as the above before discussing what I have done "right" and "wrong" since I have gotten here. Indeed, I believe such trivialities as listing either would be wholly uninteresting, and so I shall avoid them. More important is to acknowledge that any situation that pushes our limits provides not only lessons but inherent and immediate forgiveness for the mistakes we make.

My sleep pattern since arriving has gone from tenuous to backwards to laughable, in roughly equal intervals. My five previous sessions of sleep have been (from most recent to most distant): 6 a.m. to 8 a.m., 5 p.m. to 7 p.m., 4 p.m. to 9 p.m., 5 a.m. to 8 a.m., and 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. My body is running, as it is, off of whatever mental supplements the uncertain nature of my situation are providing. I can rest only when safety is achieved. With some good fortune, may it never come again...

I like the friends I am making and can't look forward enough to what lies ahead - the possibilities for travel make headlines in my mind, but it is almost always the subtler moments, and the transcendent core of situations that won't come again.

First class

Today marked the beginning of the first class session after break. Classes are taught one at a time, are three hours a day, and last M-F for three weeks.

Besides the flurry of activity required to get settled into the school's technology and procedural systems, today marked another important first for me: I do not recall falling on the ice.

Friends are nice to have in a strange place but it may become too easy to rely on them for social causes. The point of this exercise, in part at least, is self-sufficiency. I have not struck an acceptable balance yet.

Why is it so much easier to talk to people here than at home? Is that totally in my head??

This, we shall see, is the open case of priority for my detective skills. Tonight, there is a party happening that many if not all of the exchange students will be attending. My goal (silly as it is, as goals go) is to talk to everyone at the party. My other goal is to avoid getting drunk, or at least make my drinking decisions based around a logical process rather than a recreational one.

We can see, from the available evidence, that my body-to-mind relationship is not all that dissimilar to Robin Williams as the title character in "Jack".

Tonight is about relaxing and meeting people. As an emergency precaution to failing to relax, I am arming myself with one of the Dramamine pills that I was generously given by my new friend from the north, for deployment at a moment's notice.

Just kidding, those are for sleeping.

Arrival

The Nordic countries are known for possessing breathtakingly harsh landscapes; unremitting extremes of weather; light and dark lasting for months on end; not to mention exotic women of great beauty. Coincidentally, these are all things that I did NOT see while traveling to Mikkeli (I found the list online, so I'm going to have to assume for the time being that it is correct).

I stayed awake for approximately 36 hours by the time I had made it to Mikkeli, and then proceeded to take a sleepwalk tour of the town (fortunately by car). Sleepcar tour, then.

The following forty eight hours have been a haze of meeting people, socializing, forgetting names, shopping for items with non-english labels, tasting horrible foods that i thought were supposed to be yogurt, agreeing to trips months in advance without premeditation, slipping on ice in front of people, walking long distances to tiny parties, walking long distances home, and finally, sleep.

If you blink at an inopportune moment, you may miss the daytime. On the other hand, night stretches on like the ocean.

Dorm is acceptable, people seem nice. But my bedroom light fixture stopped working just as it was getting dark.