Hannah Miller’s blog post, which I discussed in my previous post, also points to another way in which the urge to document our lives might be problematic, one that I actually was writing about over the weekend.
To get to my point quickly, let me reference a great New Yorker cartoon. A woman is addressing the guests at what is evidently a fairly fancy party. She says, “The video of the first half of the party is now playing in the family room.”
The apprehension to which this cartoon points, and that I see in Hannah’s post is this: the urge to document our lives, indeed the urge to reflect on our lives, can be a way to escape from living our lives. (I certainly see, though, why Hannah is writing about it at a family event. The urge to reflect is likely to come forward when one is hanging out with one’s extended family. Family life is one thing that drove me to become a reflective person and if my mother were not on Facebook, I’d quote another famous line of Philip Larkin’s to explain why.)
There is always a tension between reflecting on and living our life. And while documenting our life is a fairly low order kind of reflection, it is one that can distract us from and even partly disengage us from our own life.
I don’t think the urge to tweet has been a problem, but this is a tension I’ve sometimes felt in my own life. I’ve had a passion for reflection since I was very young, partly a result of innate curiosity I suppose, and partly from finding out that reflection about myself helped me out of jams. At a critical point in my life, really painful reflection about the kind of person I was and wanted to be changed my direction quite dramatically.
But, there have been times when I’ve seen reflection get in the way of spontaneity and the joy that comes with diving head long into life. In truth, that’s not often been a serious problem for me, though I’ve seen it time and again in other people. I’ve been lucky in that, and many other, respects. Any capacity I have for reflection or critical appreciation of the world around me has been hard won. And I’m grateful it never came easy because that is one reason it rarely interferes with my appreciation of the things in life which can absorb us and into which we can lose ourselves—movies and plays, painting and architecture, the natural world and the food we eat and for me, most of all, music, dancing and sex. If you truly love these things—if your love starts not with critical appreciation but with a tangible, sensual, bodily connection to them—then I don’t think you can ever lose the natural wonder and attraction that draws you to them.
(By the way, it is the work of another friend Joanna Bouldin that taught me the important point that our appreciation of movies is rooted in our experience as embodied beings. )
I once heard an interviewer ask John Sayles if he finds himself thinking about the director’s style while watching a movie. He gave exactly the answer I would have guessed, and which was my own after I started learning about and teaching film: only when the movie is a bad one. With a good movie, he said, he always gets so drawn into the film that he never thinks about how the director has shot it. Only when the movie is not working does he start thinking about the director’s choices.
I used to see a lot of movies with friends. WhiIe it was sometimes fun, sometimes it was problematic. My highly verbal and critical friends loved to talk about the movies immediately afterwards. And while sometimes I enjoyed this, sometimes I found it hard. It takes me time to absorb a film that really move me. And I find it hard to think at all let alone think critically after being blown away by a film. Reverie—and a single malt scotch—not analysis seems to me to the appropriate response immediately after seeing a great film. (Catch me a day or so later, however, and you may find me hard to shut up about a film I loved.)
Similarly, though I’ve written music criticism, I simply can’t do it soon after hearing a new piece of music, especially one which particularly knocks me off my feet. It takes me many hearings—sometimes over months—before I can find any critical ground on which to stand.
Even though Plato is thought to be the defender of philosophical reflection and the effort to distance ourselves from our own individual lives, I’ve been arguing in some recent writing that his understanding of eros can, at the same time, help us appreciate the importance of momentary and transitory beauty in our lives. One way we connect up with eternity is, as I put it in the last post, to procreate in light of beauty. Another, opposite, way is to lose ourselves in beauty. That’s what happens to us when we are absorbed in a play or a book. And even more, it happens when we are physically engaged, in athletics or dancing or perhaps most of all in sex.
To spend a morning or afternoon or day so absorbed that you don’t know where your own body ends and your lovers’ begins, content to repeat and repeat the most basic ways of making each other feel good, is to stretch time almost to the breaking point. And, in orgasm, we can lose time and ourselves completely. It doesn’t matter whether our love making is languid or energetic, passionate or playful, or whether we move from one mode to another and back. Sex at its best is a way to be entirely in the moment and connected to eternity at the same time.
It’s this quality of sexual life that leaves me wondering about the current vogue of people video-taping themselves having sex or engaging in group sex. Those practices strike me as motivated almost entirely by the head not the body. Why make oneself self-conscious about an experience that is wonderful precisely because it so absorbs us? Even if one is totally unembarrassed by one’s body and sex, how can the presence of an observer or a camera not diminish the freedom and spontanaeity of great sex? And given how sometimes two consciousnesses can interfere with good sex by making it hard to be entirely in the moment, what possible advantage is there in adding a third or fourth? The extra hands and genitals might bring something to the experience, but the extra consciousness surely takes away more.
In pointing to all these ways in which we approach eternity not through reflection or through what Plato calls procreation in the light of beauty–which requires reflection–but through an immediate connection to the world around us I do not mean to denigrate reflection but to show that it need not undermine our unreflective appreciation of the world. Certainly reflection changes that interaction in many ways. After all, what we take in and what moves us immediately is shaped by what we know and a critical appreciation of movies and plays, painting and architecture, the natural world and the food and music, dancing and even sex can heighten and deepen our interaction with the world around us and bring us more pleasure from it. We can learn to take in more and experience more in all the arts and certainly in sex as well. As our capacity for reflection and self-conscioussness grows, it does sometimes diminishes the immediacy of our interactions or our ability to lose ourselves in the world around us. But it need not do so if we keep immersing ourselves in our experience of the world and learn to quiet our critical mind when it gets in the way.
And we need to retain the capacity to be lost in the world if our critical appreciation of it, and of ourselves, is to have any real meaning, that is, if it is to be more than an academic exercise. To think seriously about art and nature and sex we have to grasp their power to overcome us. If we can’t experience the passion we bring to these modes of life; if we can’t be rocked by them; and if we fail to acknowledge that this passionate experience is one way we learn about the world and ourselves, all the reflection in the world won’t teach us anything of interest.
So reflection and spontaneous life need not be at odds. Still, it’s hard to deny the potential for tension. A life lived entirely in reflection can leave us disconnected from activities in which we immediately are at one with eternity. And as Socrates said, an unexamined life is not worth living. The question, then, is how to pursue both tracks in life without one compromising the other.
It may be a matter of just trying to alternatively move first in one way and then another. As i suggested above, we can have moments of hot passionate connection to the world and moments of cool yet no less passionate reflection on it. But with his passion for wholeness, Plato—and later his follower Wordsworth, in works such as Tintern Abbey—suggest another possibility, although at least Plato acknowledges it as an aspiration so unlikely to be fulfilled as to be almost crazy to pursue. And that is to be connected to another person one loves in both body and soul, someone with whom one can, at different times, both lose and find oneself. Imagine reflecting on one’s life in the company of someone who shares your life, and your passions, both ideal and physical. Imagine losing oneself in music and dance and sex with someone who, because she shares your life completely, you utterly trust. This is Plato’s vision of wholeness, of love enabling us to bring together body and soul, and our individual experience together with a surview of the world of which we are just one small part.
In this time, in which we so distrust love and so misunderstand sex, this is an aspiration that is hard to credit. And maybe, given how unlikely it is to reach it, and how disappointed one might be to live a life in pursuit of an impossible ideal, that is not such a bad thing. But having gotten close to that ideal with my partner, I know how wonderful it is to approach it and how damaging it might be to give it up. I’m inclined to think that if it fits our nature as much as this one does, an impossible dream is worth pursuing and realizing to the extent one can. For to lose that dream, is itself, to lose some part of that which makes us our lives worthwhile.