is the word 'diary' better than the word 'blog'? probably not.
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Breaking the Birdline.
Yesterday I saw a group of large birds flying over Manhattan (near 58th and 10th) in a totally straight line. I love watching birds in flight formation, the way they change position but keep direction together while staying attuned to some radar of shared consciousness. But this line was a moving immobility, an unchanging inflexible inexorable A-B segment about which one might pose any number of quantifying SAT questions.
Then one of the birds decided they (the birds) should make a "v", so he (or she) broke rank and formed the beginning of a "v" on the other side of the lead bird. But no one joined the plan. The rest of birds just kept flying in one long very straight line, except now the line had one little checkmark at the end, like a cartoon arrow pointing randomly at nearby buildings.
I just wrote a sentence in which the word "now" seems to be the best choice for referring to a past event.
I doubt the checkmark-forming bird felt self-conscious about his (or her) decision to break rank. Birds probably do not feel self-conscious about things. But it's funny to think about how, when human beings in group settings step out and take a new course, hoping to be followed, it is so mortifying (for the out-stepper) to end up un-followed. (Think of the first dancer at a party, the first slogan-shouter at a rally, the first-ever painter of an impressionistic or an abstract painting, and so on.) There's the bold stepping, the initial pleasure in doing something new, the turning back to see you're alone, then (or "now") the humbling crush of shame (or, if you're lucky, the stakes or low, or you're brave or hubristic, a simple form of chagrin... or even contempt for lemmings), and then the steely moment of decision: do I admit defeat and stop, fall back into step with the rest? Or do I just keep on keeping on, alone, ignored, possibly misunderstood?
Moving around so much these past years, I've had whole weeks or months where every day felt like it was up to me to turn the birdline into a checkmark... then fast forward just a bit and there I am awkwardly solo, not knowing whether I've just done something that "just isn't done," or I'm an innovator and should accept that with all its risks and loneliness, or others are just tired or lazy or have full lives, or so on, into all the secret solitudinous reasons people have for acting and not-acting. Of course it doesn't help (or, rather, it does help... it helps put me into checkmark birdline position, so it's a helpy-hindery help) that academia isn't big on giving instructions ("organizing academics is like herding cats," "that old chestnut"), and that there is always a period of unintentional hazing attendant on a move to a new institution (because of the not-big-on-giving-instructions thing). Academics LOVE to give orientations. I am so very ORIENTED to my new job. But I still face DAILY, or even hourly, mystifying situations for which there are seemingly no rules or guidelines available (much like life and flying birdlines). (And that conflict has something to do with the disjunction between free-willed academics and bureaucracy's will-to-quash all free will.)
Of course the work of thought just is like that, no escaping it. Sometimes you find yourself alone. It's true that we are all thinking thoughts that aren't precisely ours (they are thinking us rather than us thinking them) because the thoughts which seem to come from our minds actually arrive from out of our surroundings... they are SITUATED�what we see, who we hear and believe, what seems possible and impossible, what science, art, and culture have achieved, and so on�all that "orients" and limits what we think on a daily basis. But we also have those birdline-breaking moments when we catch a glimpse beyond what's given. And the work of thought just is that.
Some of life's I've-just-stepped-outside-the-birdline moments aren't about great advances in thought, or important I've-just-busted-on-through-a-presupposition moments. Often such moments just mean that you feel like dancing, and no one else does, or no one else is as drunk as you are. But it might be time, given that we live in a democracy where torture and indefinite detention and veiled imperialism are practiced and barely hidden, it might be time to break the birdline more often.
10:36 a.m. - December 05, 2007
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