Suffering from History-having

On Having a History, juxtaposed with Human Suffering

In The Ultimate Gift, Jason's dead grandfather gives this "wise statement" - 'Heck, I lost all I had three or four times. It was the best thing in the world for me.' Jason proceeds to have everything (material) he owns removed from his home, garage, and person.

So what I'm going to try to articulate here is something about how ordinary it is to keep what you have, and if you lose it, do so by getting rid of it intentionally, in small quantities; and how not ordinary and painful and wrong it seems to have this happen otherwise. With this discussion of the physical matter we interact with and possess, I consider the metaphysical "haves" that go along with the physical or at least with relationship, um...

A) First, what is history? As humans it is our nature to be located in time, 1) i.e. to HAVE histories, as well as 2) to have them of various sorts (my history with the law, the confessions priest, or my riding instructor are quite different things). History is relationship, if resembling certain cafeteria meals - slushily-frozen, only half-remembered, but cell-buildingly-nutrifying.

B) I suppose we best become aware of history in practice after having tried to ignore it in theory. I have been provoked to think about history, particularly in my own pain of uprootedness (which has led to an increased appreciation of the familiar, sometimes inclusive of the boybands in my past, Barbara). I also hear that modernity models for us po-mos the dilemma of ignored history.

This picture was central to getting me out of bed to try to write all this: I attempt to make a picture of the way we experience life (reality) in light of "history". It's a weaving (there must be better metaphors?) Things fit on on top of the other; within each other; it's like water, which cannot be torn apart, just measured and moved and its space quickly re-filled, with more water, or with sand, or with salt-water,.... No thing leaves until shortly around the time something takes its place.

Ex: Your house has a lot of crap in it. Well, over the course of time (especially if you move often enough, or if your mom goes through a 7-step-sprint-phase of "Living Your Simplified Life Now!" - the new bestseller by Joel Osteen?) the amount of stuff in it may stay the same, but the type undoubtedly changes. Specifically, your underwear drawer may go from dinosaurs to minnie mouse to pink flowers to straight black, without you knowing it consciously enough to make sure you save one as a keepsake from each era. Weaves.

*Sidenote: To the effect that since the material stuff we own is stuff we use and probably won't hold on to, our lives take on a different dynamic than that of the people of the prairie days; Laura treasured her doll for her entire childhood giving it a new button or piece of hair; I had countless toys growing up and can't remember them or so much particularly special memories with most of them. So matter has much less meaning to us b/c it spends less time in our presence ("developing a history with us" if you will.)

Sooo...stuff in my life moves in and out.

C) Sometimes, though, it doesn't flow so aqueously. Sometimes the weaving is torn; there is a rip in the water - belief-staggering, unjustifiable reality that it may be. To the previous understanding of being human add suffering. [Pain, of course, is what is physical; suffering may or may not only include the (possibly corresponding) rational in our being.] Suffering results when you don't go through the ordinary process of one thing leaving just as another takes its place. (I forgot about love, of course - where you actually appreciate the identity of the thing, which is b/c the thing is someone/thing you had a history with, and that has a self of its own, and thus is irreplaceable.) So Jason had both the suddenness and the completeness of his loss to deal with. (The movie failed to show this causing him much duress.)

A couple's basement got flooded within the first year or so of their marriage; she had a lot journals destroyed. I empathized with her very much; yes, we have memories, but no we don't hap upon them them without triggers. Think about how much of her life got eaten away in one swoop. Do you see why it's a dilemma to (when I) have an empty feeling head?

If I always bring the general-specific categories to play, a friend of mine frequently draws in a distinction between either-or and what fits, instead of at poles, between them in gradation (kind of like black-white, and color). Apply here?

Conclusion: MMMAYBE some other time. Conclusion? What? That involves a far too disciplined thought-flow.
Random: Did you realize that the problem of pain would not exist as a problem, apart from the existence of Christianity? (CSL)

Unrelated, haunting questions:

- How (apart from living in moment-to-moment dependence on Christ) do I speak what is appropriate to speak or write when meeting a given audience (of one or many)? This seems like an endless challenge, possibly impossible to get the hang of.

- When I struggle so with getting it across, Is meaning (clarity?) frikkin pre-linguistic or not?? The thought-word dialectic. Something I read today went back a step further even and used pre-thought as a metaphor. Wow.

- AS I discover writing: How best for me to communicate, taking into consideration rules given by the culture, and rules given for clarity? What I do when I write is try to get you to come along on my thought process. Perhaps this is just since that's how it makes sense to me to get from point A to point Q - or b/c I have no other way of going about it - or ...whatever. That "method" though seems the most natural, and natural is bound, if still tweak-worthy, to be most consistent.

- Why, when I think about it, do I really, really, want to find some way that I am very significant and unique? There is not a simple answer to this, and it's probably one of the things (along with the curiosities of the male-female relationship) I'll be answering for a lifetime. It fits right along with a whiney "God, if everybody's your favorite, why should I care that I am, too?" I reckon the answer goes along the lines of, "b/c you don't know who you are fully yet. if you did, you would be quite satisfied with that."
- What is a, and what is your (given, not chosen, and perhaps current and changing hues at various stages of life) driving life-question? At one point, I thought mine might be, since I always come back to it, and since it is the reason I identify with the fundamental-ness-seeking of Philosophy: "What is most important to ask?" I have problems with the places this one leads, "How do I best live life?"