 #3 (permalink) Mon Dec 17, 2007 14:55 pm a question about an essay |
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Thank you very much Micawber. I have some more questions.
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A Formation of Self
Before even touching the camera, I made a list of some of the photographs I would take: web covered with water, grimace reflected in the calculator screen, hand holding a tiny round mirror where just my eye is visible, cat’s striped underbelly as he jumps toward the lens, manhole covers, hand holding a translucent section of orange, pinkies partaking of a pinkie swear, midsection with jeans, hair held out sideways at arm’s length, bottom of foot, soap on face. This, I think is akin to a formation of self. Perhaps I have had the revelations even if the photos are never taken.
I already know the dual strains the biographers will talk about, strains twisting through a life. The combination is embodied here: I write joyfully, in the margin of my lab book, beside a diagram of a beaker, “Isolated it today, Beautiful wispy strands, spider webs suspended below the surface, delicate tendrils, cloudy white, lyrical, elegant DNA! This is DNA! So beautiful!”
I should have been a Renaissance man. It kills me to choose a field (to choose between the sciences and the humanities!). My mind roams, I wide-eyed, into infinite caverns and loops. I should fly! Let me devour the air, dissolve everything into my bloodstream, learn!
The elements are boundless, but, if asked to isolate them, I can see tangles around medicine and
writing. The trick will be to integrate them into a whole, and then maybe I can take the photograph. Aahh, is it already there, no? Can’t you see it? I invoke the Daedalus in me, everything that has gone into making me, hoping it will be my liberation.
Music is one such element. The experience of plying in an orchestra from the inside is an nvestigation into subjectivity. It is reminiscent of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle: the more one knows the speed of a particle, the less one knows its position. Namely the position of the observer matters and affects the substance of the observation; even science is embracing embodiment. I see splashes of bright rain in violin arpeggios fading away in singed circles, a clarinet solo fades blue to black, and a flute harmony leaves us moving sideways, a pregnant silence, the trumpets interrupt with the smell of lightning. Perhaps in the audience you would sense something else. I think of rowing as meditation. Pshoow, huh, aaah; pshoow, huh, aaah. I can close my eyes and still hear it. We glide over reflected sky… and lean. And defy the request for “leadership positions,” laugh at it, because it misses the entire point, that we are integral, one organism. I hear the oars cut the water, shunk shunk; there are no leaders.
Once I heard an echo from all quarters. “Do not rush,” said the conductor, “follow the baton.” “Do not rush,” said the coach, “watch the body in front of you.” Do not rush. I write about characters’ words: how they use words, how they manipulate them, how they create their own realities; words used dangerously, flippantly, talking at cross purposes, deliberately being vague; the nature of talking, of words and realities. Perhaps mine has been a flight of fancy too. But, come on, it’s in the words, a person, a locus, somewhere in the words. It’s all words. I love the words. I should
be a writer, but I will be a doctor, and out of the philosophical tension I will create a self.
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1) What are the "dual strains" that combine to make the "combination" ? What does "writing joyfully in the margin" have to do with the strains that biographers notice ?
I don't understand that paragraph (the 2nd) and the next paragraph  . Can you explain this for me ?
2) Why does the writer mention "Daedalus" ? What is "Daedalus" ? Can you explain this paragraph ?
3) What does "plying in an orchestra" mean ? The meaning of "ply" doesn't make sense here, Am I right ?
Thanks so much. |
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Sympathy
You can meet me at english-test.net
Joined: 08 Dec 2007
Posts: 99
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