I have been experimenting with doing things while trusting my hands without looking. I reduce the visual overwatch, sometimes completely removing my vision by pointing it elsewhere, sometimes moving the ‘action’ to the periphery while I consciously explore other things in view, meaning I reduce my consciousness and my vision as far as I can without completely removing them from the act being visible. An example is making eggs. I found I make eggs better without looking. My hands know how to break eggs better than my sight plus hands do. I can do many common tasks better when I either remove them from or reduce them in my visual perception. I’ve also found that doing something with one hand while looking also means better eggs – most of the time – because that act of partially looking enables my working hand to complete the parts of that task that require visual oversight without complications. These complications are well meant questions, worries and attempts toward perfection, but they cause interference with the carrying out of the activity. I can now express this across all the ways I’ve developed fCM and fCMd.
When I say eggs, I mean a special thing. My method is to salt the pan and let it warm on low heat, then break in the eggs and let them sit until they show sufficient cloudiness, then stir, let sit some more – heat may be slightly adjusted to speed or slow down and I may move the pan if it looks uneven in cooking – and then stir. Repeat until the eggs start to dry, move around so they don’t form a hard skin, then gently turn to one side, then typically back so the skin is only as thick as necessary to lift and hold. Turn out. This makes eggs that are contained in a roll or half moon shape but which are custardly and salty and molten inside. The best thing I eat regularly. It’s easy to watch too much, to worry them too much. Oh, I forgot: I did this because I got a new non-stick pan and wanted to never use it on high heat or with a fat, just as a non-stick surface. The rest was intuition the first time, then I got worse as I over-watched it, then I let it happen by shifting the visibility to the edges of my conscious visual frame. The hands embody so much of what the brain has learned.
I use this process in boxing as well. The hands know the motions ancients used because they are hands the ancients used just on my body. It’s a process discovering the ancient motions of attack and defense and much of that process is identifying not only when things ‘feel right’ but the body shapes and movements when that occurs. This gets deeply into Hindu: the poses in yoga, the poses attributed to a God, represent specific, often very complicated body arrangements that are epigrams for all the twisting and turning and all the learning and all the pathways it took you to get to that pose. These are reversed in the representations of the Gods so they are the emitters and receivers; they represent all the pathways that come to you and they represent the ends of the pathways you follow.
Many years ago when I considered really writing poetry – so I did and didn’t enjoy doing it – I found the problem in me was that I wanted to write not about my experience but about experience. I grew up in an era when ‘confessional poetry’ was the norm. And it grew out of ‘contemporary poetry’, meaning TS Eliot et al, which abstracted personal experience as though it were freighted with the deepest meanings. Time, gentlemen, time invoked in a pub for last call also echoes MacBeth, echoes existence. And that all seemed only possible if you wrote about yourself and your life. Like Roethke’s only really good poem about his drunken father waltzing with him. Or Robert Lowell talking about his mother. And then it went into McKuen and poetry now became just a bunch of words that may or may not symbolize something or maybe they mean something else because the absence of a word or the space – or the punctuation, thanks e.e. cummings – can mean something, so maybe not writing poetry is actually writing poetry and then you might as well just stay in your room. Or not.
I kind of like Emily Dickinson but her interests were all so narrowly about her specific place and God, and I actually am interested in other places, other times and other things, and particularly in how people experience. So I wrote a few poems like that. One was from the perspective of young men in WWI, meaning those raised to be consumed by the machine gun and artillery shell. One was a Native American young man offering a prayer to the Great Spirit whose eyes watch over him day and night. And one was of a young man knowing he was going to be murdered when the train stopped. I couldn’t make it through the last one in my head. It became too real, like I was watching a movie I was in. With the WWI poem, I could write it at an emotional distance. The other was just a snippet from life so I could physically live it in my mind over and over until the words became clear. I could not live through the last. So I pulled myself off the train.
The only thing harder than poetry is painting. Poetry made me reach the best and worst spots humans can occupy. Painting just fucking wore me out. I’d paint and my eyes would start to devour the image. Very hard to control how hard you think about what you’re making when you’re making something you see in your head. I developed some workarounds – dashing things off, intentionally reducing the emotional and technical palette – but I could see one thing very clearly: to paint to the level I knew inside me I could reach would require a devotion to it that I did not have. Anything else would be cheating. I can’t cheat myself. I ended up solving really difficult problems in part because, when all these temptations were set aside, that was the only one left, the temptation to figure out the answers that have never been figured out. I succumbed to that temptation: forgive me.
jomi: playing with perception 