Protentions and Retentions

Phenomenologist Edmund Husserl thought that our lives were lived in moments of protentions and retentions. That is, in the present, the mind is either looking back to make sense of what has happened, or looking forward guessing what is going to come next. Or both. He built this from centuries of time theory, including St. Augustine, Plato and Aristotle. Derrida ran with this, suggesting that, with the advent of archives, and cheap archiving technology like camcorders and photography, the mind no longer looks backward, but instead conceptualizes the present as a future memory. In other words, we take pictures imagining how this moment will be remembered later. We are, in essence, living our lives in a series of future memories.

The one holiday that jars the mind from the present and forces these protentions, retentions and archival tendencies to the front of consciousness is New Year's Eve. Here, people quite literally turn the page from one chapter to the next. People use this holiday as a time to make changes, reflect on what has happened, and start to imagine what the future holds.

A lot has happened this year. For those familiar with my relationship to Erika, New Year's Eve was a particularly important milestone in our relationship. It was on that day that we both decided to give the relationship a try. A year later, and she broke off the engagement, and no longer speaks to me (which, as she told me, was for my benefit; an idea that I take a lot of issue with).

As the initial shock of the moment is wearing off, my mind has taken to making sense of the series of moments that lead to this, and frankly, I should have seen this coming. Erika was immediately on board with the plan that we laid out early in our relationship. In fact, within a few weeks of deciding to give our relationship a chance, she started thinking about how she could get over to Wales. This is not the first major life plan she has made, though. There were other ventures (independent sources of income, a house, etc.) that she started, and then later backed out of. My Mom told me that she even backed out of most of her responsibilities for my 30th Birthday Party, which was her idea. All the great ideas were either dropped last minute, or passed off onto my sister (who came through like a champ). I don't know why I thought my relationship with her would be different.

But. It is important, here, to remember that my life with her was not horrible. I genuinely loved her, very deeply, and I was ready to commit to her. We had a lot of fun either staying home or going out. She gelled with my family very well, and I with her's. There were a lot of tender moments, between us, and when she wanted to be, she could be very sweet. If I remember her as just the recent actions, it paints me in a bad light. After all, if she was this irresponsible and flaky, why did I ask her to marry me? Truth be told: things with her were really great. Or at least I thought they were. All the things I had to do to make the relationship work did not seem like work, or problems. I was happy to do them because I genuinely liked to make Erika happy.

And that, there, is what hurts the most: I would do anything to make her happy, and she wouldn't.

But #2. There has been a lot of looking back. What New Year's Eve also allows is for looking forward. Resolutions to be made and so forth. While I am not a big fan of saying what I will and will not do in the next year, I have thought about what the next year will hold. Honestly, it's a little dizzying. The changes in my life are made even more prominent by the fact that I in one location, and will be going to a different one. I am quite literally leaving all of this behind me. Some of that come tinging in sadness: I leave behind my family, and a lot of good friends. But more exciting, and terrifying, is that I don't really know what comes next for me. I could come home for the whole summer, stay at my Mom's house, traveling around to see my friends. Or I could stay in Aberystwyth, finding cheap lodging, flying home for Buddy's wedding in June and possibly Comic-Con.

Then after the summer...

There are a lot of exciting things that I could be doing for the next few years. Once I am done, I have even more options: I could take a few post-doc assignments in English speaking programs. One in Helsinki I saw earlier looks pretty sexy. I could look for temporary or permanent positions in English speaking countries: America, Canada, UK or Australia, as well as English departments in larger cities like Berlin, Paris and so forth. I could push the editorial angle, looking for work with some comic publishers (or any publishers, really). Really, there are a lot of pretty exciting things to look forward to.

And, hopefully, a new love interest, which is also exciting. Someone who was as much fun, if not more so, than Erika, but with the ability to follow through on her decisions. Really, the future looks bright, terrifyingly so, but bright nonetheless.

From the Mouth of Babes

On my way to my Uncle's brother's wake, I was crammed in the back of my sister's van with her two older kids. We were close to the funeral home, so I thought I would level with the kids quickly:
"Now remember, guys, people are going to be very sad here, so they are going to want lots of hugs," I said. "But only serious hugs; not joking hugs."
Emily thought about this for a minute.
"Is that because we are going to the wake?"
"Yeah. So Uncle Richard probably doesn't want you to push him or anything. Just give him a big hug."
She thought about this again.
"Are you sad?" she asked me.
I thought about this. It was a complicated question, and I was full of different types of sadness. I didn't want to lie to the kid, nor do I think that kids need oversimplification of complicated emotions. Kids have these same complicated feelings, and they need to know that adults do as well.
"Yes," I said. "A little bit."
Without thinking, Emily just lunged and wrapped her arms around me (as much of me as she can, being only 5). She nuzzled her head in and squeezed tight.

I won't lie: I welled up a bit. That was exactly what I needed. Now, I don't want to make it seem like my family is not a close family, but we certainly are not a huggy family, particularly my immediate family. Well, I guess to be completely honest about the situation, I love to hug my family because of how uncomfortable it makes them. My sister Brianne runs away from me, my brother Kiernan will jab at me to keep me at a distance.

It all started when my Dad started to get sick. For one reason or another, I asked, jokingly, if he wanted a hug before I left. He acted like I asked if he wanted me to punch him in the face with a fist wrapped in razor wire, so I tossed my arms around him. It was like hugging a coat tree. But, a tradition was born that eventually leaked onto the rest of my family. The more the resisted the hugs the more hugs they got.

So hugging me has become a bit of an in-joke between my family and I, which is how I gauged the severity of a tragic moment. When my Dad died, we hugged each other a lot. At one particularly difficult moment for me, my brother Kiernan and I, working as pallbearers scooped me up in his arms when I lost the ability to stand. When Erika called off our engagement, my sister Brianne sent me a message over Facebook: "I'm really sorry about all this. Next time I see you, I'll let you hug me. And I won't even wince."

Back to Emily: when we got to the funeral home, Emily took her job very seriously. She tossed her jacket to her Mom, and started scanning the crowd. She locked onto my Aunt Mary, deep in conversation with someone from Richard's family, and walked right over. She stood there, waiting for my Aunt to notice, then wrapped her arms around her. Once that hug was given, she found my Uncle Richard, also in conversation with someone from his family. She sat and waited for that conversation to finish, then, when he turned, she wrapped her arms around him and squeezed tightly.

If you've never been hugged by a child at a particularly sensitive moment in your life, I suggest doing so. I don't have any facts or research to support this theory, but I am fairly certain there must be some medicinal benefits. True to her promise, Emily made sure to give everyone that needed one a big hug, as did her brother, my nephew Nate. As we paid our respects at the casket, we expressed our sympathies to Richard's sister-in-law. Nate, who generally is shy around strangers, gave her a really big hug, as did Emily. For just that brief moment, even though Richard's sister-in-law didn't know either of them, her life was made momentarily brighter. And that, really, is all that anyone can ask for.

Death and Christmas

I went to pay my respects at my Uncle's Brother's wake (and tomorrow, the funeral). While I didn't really know the deceased, I know and respect his brother very much. If Don was half the man that Richard is, then the world is slightly less bright tonight.

At the wake, there was a brief service where the priest talked about death as a stage in life. Wakes are a contemplative time, and I generally get an ache in the part of my heart that my Dad occupied. But, with Christmas around the corner, and my engagement recently called off, I found myself in a dark way. The priest talked about our lives as stories, which as a literary critic I found this to be an interesting metaphor. Don's story was over, or at least the Earthly volume; this, in turn, give us time to think about where our stories are taking us.

In the movie Stranger than Fiction, Will Farrell's character, Harold Krick, finds himself to be the main character in a novel that someone is writing. He hears voices in his head the narrate the moments of his life. In order to understand these voices and make some sense of his life, he approaches a professor of literature, played by the awesome Dustin Hoffman, who explains the basic plots of all stories: if it ends in a wedding, it's a comedy; if it ends with a death, it's a tragedy. At one point, Harold is putting the moments of his life in two piles: moments of tragedy and moments of comedy. At one particularly low point, he turns to the female character he is pursuing (Maggie Gyllenhaal) and says, "This may sound like jibberish to you, but I think I'm in a tragedy."

Ironically, I was watching this movie, at that particularly section, when Erika called to break up with me. There is a kinship between Harold and I: we both feel that we are part of a story that we have no control over. Harold eventually realizes that he plays a part in a larger narrative, and that author, in killing him, gives his life (and his story) meaning. In the end, the narrator rewrote the story to a less meaningful version, giving Harold the control over his life that he wanted (and his chance with Maggie Gyllenhaal).

Hoffman and the author have a conversation at the end, discussing the ending of Harold's story. Hoffman is slightly disappointed that Harold lives, claiming the original was one of the most important pieces of fiction in the canon written to that point. The version where he doesn't die was understandable, but not all that great. So, the choice the narrator had was between an important and interesting ending, or a happy ending.

People spoke at the wake, retelling stories of Don's life, and I was really moved by how he was remembered. Again, I only knew his brother Richard, who has impacted my life in meaningful ways, so really my experiences with Don are limited to these vicarious retellings, filtered through my relationship with Richard. These stories were reductive, of course, glossing over the horrible times. But that's not really important. There were enough genuinely warm moments that the two eulogies were extremely touching, particularly from Don's daughter. She told a story about a humble, spiritual man who clearly loved his family, and lived his life as if it were a celebration of the happy moments of every day.

She ended her eulogy with a quote from e e cummings' "I Carry Your Heart With Me":

i carry your heart with me (i carry it in
my heart) i am never without it (anywhere
i go you go, my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing, my darling)
i fear
no fate (for you are my fate, my sweet) i want
no world (for beautiful you are my world, my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)

This poem is immense, and paints a picture of the selflessness that is necessary for a functioning relationship. And this is really the heart of the matter: I want someone to think of this poem when they think of me. I want to find someone with whom I can spend my life, and carry her heart in mine.

Sorry that this is so sad-sacky. Christmas is a particularly cuddly time of year, and my puppy Leo, while quite cuddly, is not quite adequate.

British Buildings and the Calendar

In America, where is the first floor? That's right, reader: the floor that is at ground level. After all, it is the first floor that you walk into, so one would expect that. To clarify for buildings that are built into hills, the first floor will also be called the ground floor, marked in elevators with a "G", but the other floors are then numbers as if "G" = 1. That makes logistical sense.

In England, as in Germany and other European countries, the first floor you walk into is the ground floor. The next floor up is 1, and so on. The difference is subtle, but can cause major issues. For example, our bathroom light has not been fixed for a while. This is really annoying considering I've called twice to get the first floor bathroom light changed out. Turns out, they have changed the light outside of the bathroom next to my room, which is on the first floor above the ground.

What the Europeans are doing is actually mathematically smarter. They start counting by zero. Had all cultures done this with all counting measurements, there would have been a lot less confusion. For example: the millennium. In the year 2000, everyone was all excited to be celebrating the change of the millennium. Major parties were being thrown, and the world waited with baited breath for the computers of the world to crash and send airplanes careening around like Frisbees. But really, everyone was year early. How is that? We started counting with year 1, so the first year of the calendar went from year 1 to year 2. Year two ended with the first day of calendar year 3, and so on. To do the Math, you have to add 2000 to the first number of the calendar (which is 1), so the second millennium passed in year 2001 [2000 years since 1]. (It should be noted that this example and most of my understanding about the importance of the number zero comes from Charles Seiffe's book Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea. A good read, and really interesting.)

I've taken to thinking that "floor" means, "area of the house above the ground," which makes sense. If you think about it, the floor meaning level of house, is probably how they talked about the levels that came after the ground floor. After all, the floor of early houses was actually the ground. So the artificial ground below your feet when on a different level would need to be designated as something different. Thus buildings were measured by how many floors were built above the ground.

Really, though, it's one more set of codes that I have to get good at switching as I travel back and forth between the States and the UK. On that note: I'll see you all soon. Get the kettle on.