To venture into a totally unscientific description… if time is pushed forward, so to speak, by space expanding outward (accompanied by light, matter and energy), it seems curious that we as humans do tend to, as the Danish philosopher, Kierkegaard put it, understand life backwards*. The curious notion of reflection that we experience in our minds as when we look into a mirror seems to capture the moment, but it also always throws us back on ourselves. Images many times seem to occur in the present, but in fact are rooted in the past, both the faraway and immediate past. Inasmuch as the lights in the sky that we see at night come from stars that possibly died eons ago, the things that seem most real to us sometimes are those things that are rooted in old and sometimes deserted places of the past. This does not make them necessarily ugly at all. In fact there is beauty in such memories. However, as Kierkegaard goes on to say, it does occur to me that we may be called to move beyond that reflection, but always taking the reflection “forward” with us.
Besides the mirror images, there are also the reflections that get warped and sometimes polished through the experiences that follow the image-creating occurrence. I can attest to this in the following story:
In 1995, I lost my brother. The following year, I applied for and was awarded the opportunity to participate in a graduate exchange student program between LSU and Heidelberg University in Germany. This experience was never on my radar beforehand and, in fact, I only applied because it seemed the most appropriate response, since it was offered through my major department, Philosophy. So, I embarked on going abroad for no particular reason whatsoever, other than the fact that the opportunity presented itself. Actually, I was still quite lost in the wake of my brother’s death and emotionally reticent to leave my loved ones behind. After 4 months in Heidelberg, sitting in classes, deciphering the content of the lecture, always one to four sentences behind in my mental German-English translation, and an occasional side-trip here and there in Germany and Italy, I returned home. The fruits of the trip initially were minimal from a purely practical perspective. I received no academic credit, since my coursework for the master’s program was completed, and I didn’t even necessarily return with a better understanding of the German language. Aesthetically and socially, I would say, the gains were more apparent in an enhanced appreciation for the history and art as well as the people of Germany. This appreciation ranged from trying to understand an irate German station manager yelling at me when trying to purchase a train ticket to the experience of climbing down into the serenity of the San Callisto catacombs outside the walls of Rome.
These types of experience are ones that takes a while to “unpack” I believe. I still find myself musing about how this was “where” I needed to be in that particular place in my life, and that the yet undiscovered harvest of the experience would occur in the proper seasons. And, for the most part, that has remained true.
So, the “season” today was, driving in my car, on the way to work, listening to a poor cassete-to-mp3 conversion of a year-end musical chronicle “countdown” of my favorite songs of the year 2000, replete with my own voice-over (DJ) providing far too much trivia about each song and artist on the “countdown.” A German song played on the countdown and I listened as the DJ (myself) mentioned the context for the song within the 1996 trip that I had made to Germany…
Then….SNAP!
The mental polaroid popped out of the past. And yet a “new”one, or a fine-tuning, or even creative blurring, of the image already set. Hmmm….
My brother had “left us” … “went on” … “passed,” or whatever other chosen word or phrase that devastatingly failed at describing the happening. Words and language did not make sense. The extreme connection or bind that you have with a loved one leaves you mute (note the disguised “first person”). Without explanations or criticisms of the reason for the feelings of loss, this was it. This was the experience. And so… I rode on buses and trains, sat in lectures in Universities, prayed in churches, and saw movies and art in foreign countries and a foreign languages. There was a strange affinity that I had with this loss of language and understanding. It was like watching life from both a privileged and disenfranchised place. It was safe and terrifying at the same time. I was there, but I wasn’t there. I interacted and distracted simultaneously. It was self-absorption and self-renunciation, but no self-cancellation. I was carried by an elusive phantom that both cajoled and castigated me…..I’ll leave the rest of that for another time.
This is the “throwing back” on yourself that I think we experience in this type of reflection**. The mirror we are looking into cracks, and there are suddenly more than one image to look at and ponder, and the shape of each particular crack can provide new insight and depth. So, the task is always to move forward and find connections, whatever that may mean, and at the same time, carrying with you everything from the “past.” It is not a process of discarding, as it is of collecting, sometimes sifting, and more times than comfortable, simply dragging the mysterious bundle until we can, fretfully or joyfully, cut loose of that which does not help us to connect with ourselves and each other as we travel in space-time moments of our universe.
* Kierkegaard, in saying that life must be understood backwards but that it must be lived forwards, is characterizing his idea that our lives can never be properly understood, because there is no one instant or moment that we are at rest so that we could actually adopt the position of looking “backwards.” (Papers and Journals, Hannay, p. 161) (43 IV A 164)
**Heidegger talks specifically about Anxiety as that which throws us back upon ourselves and ultimately allows for the possibility of authenticity (Being and Time, John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson, p. 232)