the passion of anna (ingmar bergman, 1969)
"We fail, but I think we should strive for spiritual perfection."
Sometimes I am made dizzy by the number of ways in which certain experiences keep coming back to me time and time again. And this time I'm not talking about actual repeating incidents like that one with the flask, I'm talking about experiences that I've either seen, or read about, or heard about, or dreamt, or been through - until eventually I can no longer remember which came first, and whether I experienced it directly or simply had it relayed to me, or whether it was even real in the first place. Here are two examples:
1. I'm in the forest, listening to something that I can't see. It sounds like a number of belled animals - not cats, something larger, like sheep or goats. I can't hear hooves on the ground, but the bells sound like the kind you would find on a larger animal, so this is my guess. There are no human voices accompanying this sound. It's somewhere between 21:00 and 22:00, I know this because the sun is setting. I don't have a clock here, and sometimes I miss the sound of a clock, although at other moments I am glad to be temporarily away from the inexorable reminder of time passing. I would only look at a clock too often, anyway, and for no real reason other than to know what time it was, information which serves no purpose here. While listening to the bells I keep my eyes focused on the trees because in this forest things pass quickly, and sometimes you only get the briefest moment to glimpse them. I keep expecting the animals to emerge from somewhere, but there's no sign of anything, and although I don't know it yet, no animals will ever emerge while I'm looking, and the sound will very slowly fade away as the source of the bells passes by, unseen, and I will make my way down the hill again with nothing but supposition. Guess work. But right now I don't know that that's what the future holds, so I keep looking. Above the trees the Sun is shining its last for the day, it's reached that mellow point where it doesn't burn the eyes. Deep down I know that the sky shines blue because of light waves bouncing against the particles in the atmosphere, and that the red hue which is slowly taking over the sky is happening because the light from the sun is travelling further now, at an angle, revealing the red light waves which are hidden when the Sun is high in the sky - and although I know this, and could possibly teach it to very young children, it still feels like a cold explanation for what I'm seeing. At the same time I'm also thinking of an experience from earlier in the day - I placed a bucket down, but it slipped and toppled over, the contents fell to the ground. Instead of getting angry I smiled and picked the bucket up, put it back, but it fell again. So I left it. It may have wanted to lie where it fell for a while.
2. I'm holding a bucket, a different one, but indistinguishable to the one above, and I'm collecting pine cones. These cones are small, closed, tightly wound. Bending over to collect them hurts somewhat, but there's also something good to the pain, and the bucket needs to be filled, so I continue. The longer I spend collecting pine cones the sooner the bucket will be filled. Insects buzz around me and fly into my head as I do this, and I think it's because the longer I do this the hotter I become, and the hotter I become the more visible I am to insects. It's an unfortunate situation, but unavoidable. Most of the pain is in my neck, especially on the right hand side. I don't think I've ever had a serious injury that would explain it, but it recurs with the regularity of an injury from something that happened in the past. While performing the routine of these actions I experience a vision of what I look like from above, as though I could actually see myself, boots on, stooped, the pine cones intermittently scattered across the forest floor around me. I'm holding the bucket by the handle and every time I move it swings slightly, making a gentle sound of metal scraping against metal which competes with the crunch of my boots against the forest floor as the only sounds that I can hear. The pine cones are dry, and I wonder what they would look like when they burn. When I first started throwing them into the bucket they made a louder sound as they hit the metal base and rattled around, but now that there is a layer of them, the sound is different, and far quieter.
These two experiences are things which happened to me, but they're also things I've seen before, experiences I've had relayed to me in incredible detail, with a wealth of possible meanings allocated to them. Or perhaps there is no greater meaning, neither to my experiences of them or to the relay. Alternatively, perhaps this is untrue and all experiences whether lived through or described are rich in meaning. I don't know.
What I do know is that we have the possibility to see each experience in this light, as being important to us, and drenched in meaning, regardless of whether we experienced it directly or not, but so often we don't. We rank experiences into having lesser or greater spiritual value to them. We have a list of 'greatest experiences,' ones that we prize more dearly than others. Something I'm not sure about is at what stage we decide to keep an experience - as it's happening, in the moment, or afterwards, upon reflection? Being that everything is passing all the time, I like to think that we make this decision as the experience is happening, it's more immediate, less contemplated. To support this there's the fact that we even take some experiences, such as waiting for a taxi, and completely remove them from our filing system altogether so that there is absolutely nothing to return to in the future. And we seem to do this as the experience is happening. How often have you arrived somewhere only to discover that you have no memory of the journey you took? I know, right? The amount of time I've spent sitting on trains is largely gone now - nothing remains of it because I never felt that the experiences were worth keeping - they were immaterial and fleeting. Once, a dear friend of mine experimented by seeing if she could remember a perfectly boring moment for the entirety of her life. She chose a moment on a train. She still has it, over twenty years later. We can lift any experience up above others if we choose.
Counterpoint: Often what we need is some kind of physical or financial gain to convince ourselves that an experience needs to be recorded, but just as frequently sometimes the gain is abstract. Maybe just reading this is as abstract as you can bear, and maybe you don't see any gain to contemplating these ideas. What does it matter, after all? We go through things. Time passes. Something happens. Along the way we accrue things and it's only over the course of time that we assess the value of the things we accrue, and decide whether we want to carry them with us or whether we should discard them along the way. But that doesn't account for how quickly we discard so many or our experiences. How fast we are to judge some periods as being an immediate waste of our time. The two moments above, the bells and the pine cones, garnered me nothing, and could have been deleted, but they weren't. Why not? Why did I hold on to them even as they were passing?
Something that I marvel at a lot these days is the number of time saving devices we have now. The other day I saw two robot lawn mowers at houses which were next to each other, like Roombas, but for cutting lawns rather than vacuuming. I'd never seen one of these before and when I saw the second one I thought I must have been mistaken and was in fact seeing the same robot, but from a different angle, so I walked back to the house next door to see the first robot chugging away, negotiating a divot. Yup. Two identical robots. What do we do with all this time that we've saved for ourselves? What do we spend it on? Are we not embarrassed by the amount of wealth and comfort that we've surrounded ourselves with? We can have any luxury that we like now. We can eat summer fruits at any time of year. In fact, we can eat anything we like, at any time. We buy so much food these days that we throw it away. And yet our horizons are so close that we consign entire regions to chaos to ensure our lifestyles continue without interruption. And what is at the root of this lifestyle? What do we need comfort for? What are we trying to save time for? What are we protecting? I know what matters to me, but not to others, or to you. Part of me would like to know.
Recently I've noticed how often people place a money/vanity connection to everything. I'll talk about something that has no financial value, and they'll tell me how much money they think it might be worth. I'll talk about something that has only intangible value, and they'll try to attach one of health or fitness. Things don't need these values. You are allowed to understand life and all its direct and indirect experiences in other ways. And yes, of course, you're free to understand them in terms of money/vanity as well, but my point is that you're also free to understand things in other ways, and that's something you don't hear enough. So I'll leave you with this well-known Buddhist joke, and bear in mind that I don't subscribe to any ism:
Student: Master, how do I achieve enlightenment?
Master: Chop wood, carry water.
Student: And what do I do after I've achieved enlightenment?
Master: Chop wood, carry water.
Sometimes I am made dizzy by the number of ways in which certain experiences keep coming back to me time and time again. And this time I'm not talking about actual repeating incidents like that one with the flask, I'm talking about experiences that I've either seen, or read about, or heard about, or dreamt, or been through - until eventually I can no longer remember which came first, and whether I experienced it directly or simply had it relayed to me, or whether it was even real in the first place. Here are two examples:
1. I'm in the forest, listening to something that I can't see. It sounds like a number of belled animals - not cats, something larger, like sheep or goats. I can't hear hooves on the ground, but the bells sound like the kind you would find on a larger animal, so this is my guess. There are no human voices accompanying this sound. It's somewhere between 21:00 and 22:00, I know this because the sun is setting. I don't have a clock here, and sometimes I miss the sound of a clock, although at other moments I am glad to be temporarily away from the inexorable reminder of time passing. I would only look at a clock too often, anyway, and for no real reason other than to know what time it was, information which serves no purpose here. While listening to the bells I keep my eyes focused on the trees because in this forest things pass quickly, and sometimes you only get the briefest moment to glimpse them. I keep expecting the animals to emerge from somewhere, but there's no sign of anything, and although I don't know it yet, no animals will ever emerge while I'm looking, and the sound will very slowly fade away as the source of the bells passes by, unseen, and I will make my way down the hill again with nothing but supposition. Guess work. But right now I don't know that that's what the future holds, so I keep looking. Above the trees the Sun is shining its last for the day, it's reached that mellow point where it doesn't burn the eyes. Deep down I know that the sky shines blue because of light waves bouncing against the particles in the atmosphere, and that the red hue which is slowly taking over the sky is happening because the light from the sun is travelling further now, at an angle, revealing the red light waves which are hidden when the Sun is high in the sky - and although I know this, and could possibly teach it to very young children, it still feels like a cold explanation for what I'm seeing. At the same time I'm also thinking of an experience from earlier in the day - I placed a bucket down, but it slipped and toppled over, the contents fell to the ground. Instead of getting angry I smiled and picked the bucket up, put it back, but it fell again. So I left it. It may have wanted to lie where it fell for a while.
2. I'm holding a bucket, a different one, but indistinguishable to the one above, and I'm collecting pine cones. These cones are small, closed, tightly wound. Bending over to collect them hurts somewhat, but there's also something good to the pain, and the bucket needs to be filled, so I continue. The longer I spend collecting pine cones the sooner the bucket will be filled. Insects buzz around me and fly into my head as I do this, and I think it's because the longer I do this the hotter I become, and the hotter I become the more visible I am to insects. It's an unfortunate situation, but unavoidable. Most of the pain is in my neck, especially on the right hand side. I don't think I've ever had a serious injury that would explain it, but it recurs with the regularity of an injury from something that happened in the past. While performing the routine of these actions I experience a vision of what I look like from above, as though I could actually see myself, boots on, stooped, the pine cones intermittently scattered across the forest floor around me. I'm holding the bucket by the handle and every time I move it swings slightly, making a gentle sound of metal scraping against metal which competes with the crunch of my boots against the forest floor as the only sounds that I can hear. The pine cones are dry, and I wonder what they would look like when they burn. When I first started throwing them into the bucket they made a louder sound as they hit the metal base and rattled around, but now that there is a layer of them, the sound is different, and far quieter.
These two experiences are things which happened to me, but they're also things I've seen before, experiences I've had relayed to me in incredible detail, with a wealth of possible meanings allocated to them. Or perhaps there is no greater meaning, neither to my experiences of them or to the relay. Alternatively, perhaps this is untrue and all experiences whether lived through or described are rich in meaning. I don't know.
What I do know is that we have the possibility to see each experience in this light, as being important to us, and drenched in meaning, regardless of whether we experienced it directly or not, but so often we don't. We rank experiences into having lesser or greater spiritual value to them. We have a list of 'greatest experiences,' ones that we prize more dearly than others. Something I'm not sure about is at what stage we decide to keep an experience - as it's happening, in the moment, or afterwards, upon reflection? Being that everything is passing all the time, I like to think that we make this decision as the experience is happening, it's more immediate, less contemplated. To support this there's the fact that we even take some experiences, such as waiting for a taxi, and completely remove them from our filing system altogether so that there is absolutely nothing to return to in the future. And we seem to do this as the experience is happening. How often have you arrived somewhere only to discover that you have no memory of the journey you took? I know, right? The amount of time I've spent sitting on trains is largely gone now - nothing remains of it because I never felt that the experiences were worth keeping - they were immaterial and fleeting. Once, a dear friend of mine experimented by seeing if she could remember a perfectly boring moment for the entirety of her life. She chose a moment on a train. She still has it, over twenty years later. We can lift any experience up above others if we choose.
Counterpoint: Often what we need is some kind of physical or financial gain to convince ourselves that an experience needs to be recorded, but just as frequently sometimes the gain is abstract. Maybe just reading this is as abstract as you can bear, and maybe you don't see any gain to contemplating these ideas. What does it matter, after all? We go through things. Time passes. Something happens. Along the way we accrue things and it's only over the course of time that we assess the value of the things we accrue, and decide whether we want to carry them with us or whether we should discard them along the way. But that doesn't account for how quickly we discard so many or our experiences. How fast we are to judge some periods as being an immediate waste of our time. The two moments above, the bells and the pine cones, garnered me nothing, and could have been deleted, but they weren't. Why not? Why did I hold on to them even as they were passing?
Something that I marvel at a lot these days is the number of time saving devices we have now. The other day I saw two robot lawn mowers at houses which were next to each other, like Roombas, but for cutting lawns rather than vacuuming. I'd never seen one of these before and when I saw the second one I thought I must have been mistaken and was in fact seeing the same robot, but from a different angle, so I walked back to the house next door to see the first robot chugging away, negotiating a divot. Yup. Two identical robots. What do we do with all this time that we've saved for ourselves? What do we spend it on? Are we not embarrassed by the amount of wealth and comfort that we've surrounded ourselves with? We can have any luxury that we like now. We can eat summer fruits at any time of year. In fact, we can eat anything we like, at any time. We buy so much food these days that we throw it away. And yet our horizons are so close that we consign entire regions to chaos to ensure our lifestyles continue without interruption. And what is at the root of this lifestyle? What do we need comfort for? What are we trying to save time for? What are we protecting? I know what matters to me, but not to others, or to you. Part of me would like to know.
Recently I've noticed how often people place a money/vanity connection to everything. I'll talk about something that has no financial value, and they'll tell me how much money they think it might be worth. I'll talk about something that has only intangible value, and they'll try to attach one of health or fitness. Things don't need these values. You are allowed to understand life and all its direct and indirect experiences in other ways. And yes, of course, you're free to understand them in terms of money/vanity as well, but my point is that you're also free to understand things in other ways, and that's something you don't hear enough. So I'll leave you with this well-known Buddhist joke, and bear in mind that I don't subscribe to any ism:
Student: Master, how do I achieve enlightenment?
Master: Chop wood, carry water.
Student: And what do I do after I've achieved enlightenment?
Master: Chop wood, carry water.