The Art of Listening

My excitement comes in letting my ideas flow freely... My frustration comes in try to force these ideas to fit the frame of this blog--in trying to frame myself. So what follows here is a map (as my Proforker calls it) of how I arrived at the question that follows in bold. Beyond that are the ways in which I have begun to experience its answer.

Here is the original poem where I started this exploration:

STYLE
Flaubert wanted to write a novel
About nothing. It was to have no subject
And be sustained upon the style alone,
Like the Holy Ghost cruising above
The abyss, or like the little animals
In Disney cartoons who stand upon a branch
That breaks, but do not fall
Till they look down. He never wrote that novel,
And neither did he write another one
That would have been called La Spirale,
Wherein the hero's fortunes were to rise
In dreams, while his walking life disintegrated.

Even so, for these two books
We thank the master. They can be read,
With difficulty, in the spirit alone,
Are not so wholly lost as certain works
Burned at Alexandria, flooded at Florence,
And are never taught at universities.
Moreover, they are not deformed by style,
That fire that eats what it illuminates.

HOWARD NEMEROV

Themes about life, even nothingness, are inherently limited if you write them down, they may be better understood if you never try to articulate them.

If you stick only to what you know, if you limit the story to what you know, will you ever really understand anything?

Can life be understood if you never try articulating it, if you write a book about nothing, if you never write a book about nothing?

The imagined works.

Maybe all of the ideas are not meant to fit together, or maybe they each fit together at a different time.

How do we frame the act of asking and answering questions? Do we listen to real things or things that don't exist?

Our frame is a need for answers.


We search for understanding (in reading poems, in listening to people, in telling stories), through the frame of needing answers, but would we understand more if we could create a frame that let us experience understanding without actively searching for it?

"Once for instance, my father asked me a series of questions that suddenly
made me wonder whether I understood even my father whom I felt closer to
than any man I have ever known. 'You like to tell true stories, don't you?'
he asked, and I answered, 'Yes, I like to tell stories that are true.'

Then he asked, 'After you have finished your true stories sometime, why
don't you make up a story and the people to go with it?

'Only then will you understand what happened and why.'"

-Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It

The lecture was on the writing of Primo Levi which describes his time in Auschwitz. My professor began discussing a point he called the art of listening. He then went on to explain the two problems we have with listening: 1. There is the danger of premature understanding. In an attempt to reach out, we end up reaching over. 2. We listen only to the point of finding a tag where we can tell our own story.

How do we truly listen, truly understand?

*For some reason I couldn't get the original version of Listening to transfer from Word with the right format. This version has the right format but is hard to read... I'm working on getting both to work together.

I think that many times our rectangular frame through which we view the world is happiness. Someone said to me yesterday, "Isn't it better to always be happy?" or no, maybe it was a statement, "It is better to always be happy." I don't like this frame. Even in my quest for happiness I have a deep notion that there is much more to life--that the truest beauty is always found in the midst of the deepest sadness and despair. How can beauty and happiness ever be separated from the ugliness and pain that are assumed to be their opposites?

Symmetry

"What if I'd been born fifty years before you
In a house on a street where you lived?
Maybe I'd be outside as you passed on your bike
Would I know?"
-"The Luckiest" by Ben Folds

It makes sense that one would find Van Gogh's Sunflowers in an electron microscope image of Spanish moss, and it makes even more beautifully awful sense that Starry Night is found in the microscope image of melanoma. It makes sense that all of life would be symmetrical because it is all the same--all one.

The powerful video by Samuel Beckett, Come and Go, took this idea of the symmetry of life and related it, for me, to the allness of life.

The opening quote is from one of my favorite songs. I think it perfectly portrays this idea of allness through the greatest symmetry in life--love.
The Luckiest

Symmetry

The urge, to sit directly,

perfectly in the center of my bed

knees hugged to my chest.

Smoothing the sheets out from me—

slowly, precisely

with the palm of my hands.

This is how you make

the world go quiet.

An image, of a small boy

with little hands clasped over his ears,

rocking back and forth,

slowly.

They say he’s autistic.

He just wants the world to quiet down

a little bit.

We discussed falsity today in class and it made me think of a controversy that took place over James Frey's book A Million Little Pieces. Read about it here. I really liked this book when I read it, and I couldn't believe when all of these issues arose with it. I don't believe that you should lie and say that details are factual when they aren't, but I also strongly believe in literature as art. Falsity is part of art. The exploration of truth is part of art. The blurring of this boundary might be what makes art wonderful. What was important in this novel was the emotions presented and the feelings created, not about dates and facts. It is often necessary to create details or images or experiences in order to give a reader the "truth" about life, the truth of the emotion. Creativity should never be stifled with the regulation that stories must be told exactly as they happened. Who is to say exactly how an event happened anyway?