Equinox sensitizes me to light-dark contrasts.
‘Chiaroscuro’ (clarus: light + obscurus: dark), art’s intense shadowing (Caravaggio, Rembrandt), surfaces from deep memory while looking at stark contrasts in my email in-box: terrifying news and dire philosophies alternating with shiny announcements from a hopeful world, sprinkled with techniques for dealing with the terrifying news.
Simultaneously, I’ve felt more unstuck in time, the world’s pace off-kilter. I hear Hamlet’s “time is out of joint.” I remember Jorge Luis Borges: “Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.” Thus I am off-kilter, out of joint, the consumed and the fire. I’m not alone in this sensation, in our current world.
How can I/we create a coherent plot for a story – for life or art – with all these extreme, changeable lights and darks whirling around like mirror shards? An orienting structure would have to encompass the climate crisis, the freakish internet, threats of expanding war and economic instability, recurring pandemics, and migrations of all sorts. I’ve been listening for inspired new frameworks, for directionality, for myself and my fictional characters, since none of us can rely on the way things were in the before times.
In listening, I’ve heard a vocabulary emerging from a polymathic professor of cognitive science – also a wonderfully humble, enthusiastic, cosmic dude – who’s become the center of a wave of people who want to bring good into the world, to access and embody Wisdom. My favorite concept of his (so far) is “recursive relevance realization,” in which “I” (as “agent”) interact (recursively) with my ever-changing environment (the “arena”), changing and being changed by each other. The process heightens my awareness of what I’m paying attention to and why (relevance), and how I’m reacting to it, so I can develop and integrate (realize) the optimally relevant bits for my own life, rippling outward. The professor’s “meaning series” seems to be creating an erudite shared vocabulary of good will and self-understanding, a language that’s self-organizing into benevolent patterns of activity and comprehension across cultures.
For a beautiful literary treatment of “shared reality,” and what happens when it’s not, Nancy Kress’s speculative story “The Flowers of Aulit Prison” lights up brilliant metaphors for the ways people of different worldviews sometimes treat one another.
Individually, the movement toward coherent relationships is about integration, which also asks the right questions for art, whether it’s lived viscerally (life as a work of art) or contained in a literary package. A transformational neuroscientist-psychiatrist poses “nine realms of integration” with a priority on assuring that each mind-element is both differentiated (recognized) and linked (cohered) with the other elements. The nine domains are consciousness, bilateral (brain hemispheres), vertical (limbic/cortical), memory, narrative, state (how one feels, inside and out), interpersonal, temporal (change across time), and “transpirational” (sense of participation in the All). My new practice, which is proving to be a revelation, is to select an image or feeling or idea, welcome or unwelcome, and contemplate it through the nine realms. This brings all the dimensions of my experience to the surface so that I can sense the whole with awareness and equanimity. It’s building thought-muscles, rewiring neural pathways, for graceful encounters with phenomena more distressing than, say, a bumblebee or a diamond, a headline or an attitude, each conceived in nine realms. It’s also enriching my public and private responses to other people’s experiences and outlook.
If it sounds too theoretical, just try it with any object in the space where you’re reading this, sensing your way through all nine aspects of (your impression of) its existence. My hope is that you’ll start feeling more spacious and alert, more observant, more aware of your personal role in generating the impressions you get. The creativity could get exhilarating.
To be lifted into this timeless transcendent state with less work, to relax beyond the chaotic light-dark scramble of these times, I can recommend two Borges stories that permanently altered my way of seeing: The Garden of Forking Paths and Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius (both in Ficciones). In the reading, if absorbed deeply enough, our creative role in the omnidirectional chiaroscuro of life on Earth becomes palpable. We are more free, more alive, without losing tenderness for the suffering or the instinct to help, without losing love or joy.
Photo Credit: Europeana via Unsplash