Mind Watching: Field Notes from Wilderness Solitude – Day 23

50 days of observations, insights, and contemplations...

by Tyler Volk

Tyler Volk’s “Mind Watching” Series Table of Contents

Day 23 - Memory for All Time

As English poet William Wordsworth demonstrated in his famous poem about daffodils, one way to tap into joy is to recall past joyous moments. Indoors, on a couch, “in vacant or in pensive mood,” he could recall a past experience outside in nature,

And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the Daffodils.  

Another way to enter joy is more purely in the moment, completely unencumbered from a specific incident in the past. This evening I did that, though memories did enter in a broader sense.

I was walking the paved road south for a bit of exercise. The evening had began with clouds when I started and ended with rain. At intervals I was able to intensely live through my body, with its emotions, and best of all its raw . . . moment to moment feelings of hand and arm muscles and the whole rhythm of walking and yet not ignoring whatever inner visions came along for the ride.

Is memory present all the time, even in these moments of intense here and now? I’m not talking here about the types of memories that you can point out, such as the Wordsworth had with the daffodils, or one I might have about winning a trophy in bowling at age twelve. Or, for example, recalling my first sexual experience. The type of memory considered here is more subtle. It’s memory as an overall context of being.

It’s similar to the context that an author such as Borges would play with, or Kafka, whose surreal fictional character woke up and discovered that he was a cockroach. He had to deal with that big fact. The fact was traumatic because he had lost his prior context. Context, which gives continuity to being, is for the most part unconscious. It’s part of the subterranean engine room, or the bakery behind the sales counter. Context is another example of the profound automaticity we live within.

I will switch to the present tense here, in original words as I taped my thoughts during the experience:

So even though I’m walking along the deserted highway right now, under the clouds that threaten rain in the mild, very mild, evening, and even though I’m not remembering anything in particular, still I know who I am, where I am, and what I’m doing. I know about how long I’ll be staying out here. It won’t be minutes but certainly not hours. All these components of context surround the “pure” moment. I was going to walk to the big sitting rock juts off the road, but I went past it and without even explicitly noting the change of goals to myself and it now seems likely I’ll probably walk all the way to the bridge. I sense, in a sense know, how long that will take without mentioning a number in my head. I don’t think about such decisions very much, they almost just happen with a wave of a mental hand.

So a lot on the moment is inside as unconscious context. Of course, the terminology is awkward. I am using the word context not just for my relation to the outer world but for the unconscious, extensive “environment” within me. Is a better term “unconscious memory”? Something is there inside, something that tells, so to speak, our consciousness that . . . it’s OK, it’s OK, it’s OK . . . because “I’ve” made judgments about how the moment is going. The moment is not just the moment of quantized physics but a slice of time surrounded by these contexts of security . . . knowing where I’m going, knowing how long I’ll be out. It seems slightly ridiculous to say, “Oh, context is the possessing of unconscious memory,” and yet there is a sense in which unconscious memory of plans made at the start of the walk and knowing where I am during the walk, all drawing upon knowledge that came from previous walks, determines the pace and overall sense of the present moment. The unconscious context includes the unseen trees that drop the acorns into the present.

I’m carrying an umbrella in case it rains hard. I did have to choose the umbrella. I did have to image the possibility of rain, gather the umbrella, and take it with me. The choice didn’t happen all unconsciously. But once I have the umbrella then it recedes for the moment into part of an unconscious bubble of security.

Walking now in the rain, turned around on the highway, headed back to the trailer. Not using the umbrella. Ordinarily in this case I would have. Spreading out my arms, cold rain on my skin . . . ah . . . how rare to have this.

(When I returned to the trailer it had started to rain even harder. I curled up on the recliner chair on the porch under a blanket. I couldn’t move, couldn’t go inside, and reached a strange euphoric state in which the context of all I know and much that I feel burst forth in kaleidoscopic imagery, as follows from my recorded words.)

I am a body. I contain the world. People actually believe in god, huge masses of folks, hundreds of millions and billions worshipping various images and ideas. Giant economic conglomerates sending materials all over the world and manufacturing wherever the labor is cheapest, the executives flying in private jets. People individually worth billions of dollars and others earning a few hundred a year, drinking dirty water, cutting down firewood, scrounging to cook the next dinner. The giant catharsis the U.S. goes through every four years with its presidential election and on a world-shaking scale as two men about my age step into the ring to duke it using mind control to cajole the multitudes to submit, so the winner can dominate. Shudder—it’s all one great mind stew of beliefs and experiences and yet there’s the reality of technology, the airplanes constructed with unbelievably precise engineering principles that allow folks to bound thousands of miles in a single swoop. A few venture for science all the way down to Antarctica, to its dry valleys, where they chip away the surfaces of rock, probing for bits of algae that grow inside the minerals themselves. Others core down miles into the ice and pull up frozen pillars made of compressed snow that fell a hundred thousand years ago, to extract bubbles of ancient trapped air, and painstakingly reveal the former atmosphere’s reduced greenhouse gas contents. Still others, more numerous, sit and nod at rock concerts, or gaze at televised images of someone trying to answer questions . . . will they become a millionaire? And these might even be re-runs, popular because the second time around viewers have a better chance of getting it right sitting at home. Earth’s memories, television’s memories. And all, all this going on in the great stew of beliefs and assumptions, of thoughts and emotions, branching out from an evolutionary past, in which we emerged as the most successful primate species, probably because we killed off the nearest rival species. And we have thoughts. We have the ability to internally represent the world and then manipulate and compose those representations into systems of models to be slapped back out on the world to see if the models work. In the days long before microscopes, telescopes, infrared cameras, magnetometers, DNA analyzers, and differential equations—these models were more imaginatively unconstrained, subjective slatherings of mind on to the world, as they were prompted to depict animal-headed gods, although even back in the Babylonian days with their fantasies about astrology, folks still had to have their agricultural act together, as well as possess an understanding of compressive forces to build enormous temples, which facilitated the change from instinctually-bonded small bands into methods of controlling swarms of plaza-bursting crowds. A Mayan king-priest sticks a sting ray spine through his tongue, displaying the rite high up on the golden pyramid as a stage-set for the fearful, expectant masses, who see the blood drip into the attendant priest’s bowl next raised up and with the collective cheer the group knows that all will be well, the leader has sacrificed. Strange scripts have swept across the planet, rising and falling over hundreds and thousands of years, from hamlets to continents in scope, and many have gone extinct. Many are still out here. Chinese, English, Arabic, Spanish, Urdu, Hindi, Japanese, and six thousand others. Who can grasp it all? Who can have all-encompassing knowledge? No one. We can only be parts of this whole yet we do glimpse every day what others are probably knowing and appreciating as we are all . . . in it . . . together.

© 2024 by Tyler Volk

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