Remember Me

Note to visitors:  This is a long post, but it has bears, pictures and music.  There are three single-track music players and a multi-track player with a playlist of memory songs.

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I was waiting for a plane at an air terminal when I saw a two-year-old gleefully running from, then back to his mother –– who, upon each return landing, spread arms wide, smiled hugely, and yelled "Craash!" This was repeated a dozen times, the mother unconcerned about the time-after-time pattern, also unconcerned about place, the wider world of other passengers, boarding and arrival announcements, general bustle.  At times, when the towhead was at the outer reach of his run, his mother would say, "That's too far," and the boy would stop, swivel, charge joyfully back to crash again, little legs churning as if in a Roadrunner cartoon.

A while later, the boy looked out the window at the tarmac below.  A thought tumbled out:

     "... truck, Mommy."
     "Yes, it's a truck."
     "... a fire truck, mommy?"
     "No."
     "What kind of truck, mommy?"
     "I don't know."
     "... a mail truck, mommy?"
     "I don't think so."
     "... a email truck?"
     "I don't think so."
  
This is lovely.  Two people create a space within an airport, time is not pressing (even with a plane to catch), and unlikely things can be entertained, such as email trucks.  And one person, the mother, is reliably available to her son –– encompassingly so, as if she filled his sky.  Her presence and responsiveness sponsor her son's playful explorations.

A bit later, a man of perhaps sixty years, who had been on the edge of the mother-son space, smiled at the boy (who had just crash landed again).  "I'm going to see my mommy," he said, his lined faced softer, eyes bright, as if momentarily channeling a boy within.

The boy looked up at the man, pointed to his mother and said matter-of-factly:

     "My mommy ... ."

Let us leave the airport now –– reluctantly, since the mundane was charmed and charming –– so as to talk about it.  What strikes me is that a mundane place can become a charmed place, that a busy airport can become briefly enchanting.  The little boy clearly was living in a charmed circle, but I also felt touched by that circle, as did the older man with the bright eyes.  There is something powerful about being held in the attention and responsiveness of another, and some of that charm even transfers to those who witness it.  Charmed spaces are charming spaces.

   Anyplace is Paradise:
   Elvis Presley

So ... magical relief can sometimes be near at hand, or as Elvis Presley put it in 1956, "Anyplace is paradise when I'm with you."

Living is easier when the world we inhabit recognizes our expressions and initiatives.

Having set this out, I'd like to focus now on the reverse situation: what happens when our expressions elicit no response, when "... truck, Mommy?" is left dangling.  Typically, we feel disappointment when initiatives and life-state changes go unnoticed.  Such changes may be major –– significant successes or setbacks, life crises –– but more frequently, they are lesser everyday initiatives ("... truck, Mommy?"). Either way, a lack of recognition may leave us disappointed, somewhat stalled.

And I think this stalled feeling is cousin to grief, that sorrow occasioned by loss of someone or something.  Except that, unlike grief, the loss here is of a wish to be recognized –– so that when the expected wind never arrives to fill our sails, deflation follows.  (This presupposes that it is reasonable to expect a friend to respond to our overtures, assuming that friend is neither depressed, narcissistic, drunk, nor otherwise self-absorbed.)

Fortunately, we are seldom stalled forever, although it is true that certain life routes may be abandoned.  What releases us from our doldrums, either to resume the tack we were on or switch to a new one?  For some the simple passage of time helps.  For some, a certain temperamental boldness backs them up, since those with inherent verve more easily rebound from deflations and move on to other things.

For most others, two related attitudes help to restart us, faith and belief.
These attitudes are not synonymous, though each shows a confidence that things will work out.

Of the two, faith is less explainable and trickier to discuss: it's just there, in whatever measure, in the rigging of a person.  I think it operates quietly much of the time and kicks in more noisily when needed.  Belief is similar but more empirical, grounded in prior hands-on activities.  A sailor can be becalmed, yet have faith in the steadiness and safety of vessel and voyage.  That same sailor can believe in his knowledge of tide, wind, craft, and likely outcome, but his belief is a byproduct of learned experience.  Faith knows matter-of-factly that things will turn out OK, belief is pretty sure they'll be OK and can give you reasons why.

Faith in one's safety and agency, and belief in one's value, both can offset bruised hope and reinvigorate.  Of course acquiring and sustaining either faith or belief is seldom easy; many, maybe most of us, have much mental work to do before we can resume sailing.  And those with shaky faith and belief will likely have a harder go of it.

I imagine there are libraries of theological, psychological, and philosophic texts on these issues.  Much can be found in the works of D.W. Winnicott, and I am drawn specifically to Christopher Bollas's distinction between fate and destiny, also to the thought of Ernst Schactel.  (See informing sources at the end of this post: some sources so permeate my thinking that they are difficult to peg to specific sections.)*

Just now, I will emphasize one strand of Bollas's thought: the importance of feeling known and it's connection to feeling loved. Meaning: to feel deeply known, to feel that one's particularities are recognized, held, remembered in the mind of another, is to feel loved (Bollas, 1989).  Bollas stresses particularities of knowing.  This is not a fuzzy, "Honey, I'll love you 'til the seas run dry."  This is, "I love the way you hung those paintings in the hallway, with the eggplant color in the one kind've working off the ochre in the other."  The sense here is that someone really gets it, has been paying attention.

(Bollas's is a useful definition of love that could spin out in several directions: why older people treasure the company of peers who "knew them when"; why people attach themselves to eras, or objects of those eras –– as if oldies music, say, were an entity that "knew" them, contained some part of them; why it is generally not a sensible idea for a long-married man to ditch his wife and move to Acapulco with the office intern.)

So when major (or minor) life expressions pass unwitnessed by significant persons, it can not only disappoint but disappoint in an insidious, festering way.  We feel not just off the radar but possibly unloved.  And if unable to harness faith and belief, we can get stuck in a slough of despond, perhaps even retaliate by refusing to recognize the other, thereby becoming more stalled.
 

   Keep a Knockin:
   Little Richard

For a raw version of such retaliation, here is Little Richard's "Keep A Knockin'" (1957).

The thing is, the people near us who are inexplicably far from us on occasion, unresponsive, seemingly uncaring, these people are usually just mired themselves in their own preoccupations.  The flip observation made earlier –– that people may be too "otherwise self-absorbed" to respond to us –– may be more true than not.  Perhaps naively, I prefer to think that people are limited (for whatever reason) in their capacity to acknowledge our initiatives and course-shifts, versus my imagining that they intend to be or know they are hurtful.

Put otherwise, sometimes we all forget to remember what others need; we are "absent" when the situation requires presence.  Thinking of it this way universalizes it, lessens the sting of non-recognition.  We needn't take it personally; we can't always be our best selves, and maybe some absences should be excused.  We would then feel less hemmed in by hurt feelings and could free up the mental space necessary for faith and belief to take hold again.

Still ... it is comforting to be known and remembered the first time around. It frees us to go out into the world, choose and change courses, cast our offerings about without undue care.

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In the last chapter of A.A. Milne's The House At Pooh Corner (1928), there is a poignant variation on this theme.  Christopher Robin is growing older and will be leaving the 100 Acre Wood:

     Christopher Robin was going away. Nobody knew why
     he was going; nobody knew where he was going; indeed,
     nobody even knew why he knew that Christopher Robin
     was going away.  But somehow or other everybody in the
     forest felt that it was happening at last.

Eeyore has written a good-bye poem; all the animals sign it and give it to Christopher Robin, then drift off, feeling awkward and distressed. Pooh and Christopher Robin are left alone, and there follows a dialogue about aging, being known, and remembrance.  Christopher Robin tells Pooh that what he loves most is doing "Nothing," defining this as:

    It means just going along, listening to all the things you
    can't hear, and not bothering.

An interesting sentence.  Doing "Nothing" is partly about a careless puttering about, but it is also about "not bothering" during moments of non-orientation as one putters.  You can be "listening" for orienting stimuli yet not worry when "you can't hear" them –– sort of like drifting at sea, listening for a foghorn, but "not bothering" when you can't hear it.

I infer that doing "Nothing" requires an attitude of faith.

But Christopher Robin is on the edge of leaving his childhood world of care-less wandering, of doing "Nothing."  He seems most aware of his deepest love at the moment he has to leave it.  There are intimations of a more structured and constricting adulthood impinging on his mind-frame.  And these intimations take shape in the place where he and Pooh are talking, at the top of the Forest in a place called Galleon's Leap, where a vista opens upon a far wider world:

     ... Sitting there they could see the whole world spread
     out until it reached the sky, and whatever there was all
     the whole world over was with them in Galleon's Leap.

     Suddenly Christopher Robin began to tell Pooh about
     some of the things:  People called Kings and Queens
     and something called Factors, and a place called Europe,
     and an island in the middle of the Sea where no ships
     came, and how you make a Suction Pump (if you want
     to), and when Knights were Knighted, and what comes
     from Brazil.

There is a breaking of something here.  Up to this point in Winnie-The-Pooh and The House At Pooh Corner, Christopher Robin has been a character in the woods, a benevolent and participatory friend to the animals.   He lives in a tree with a green door.  But in these closing pages, he is drawn into the wider world of history, science, "Factors," and drawn away from the 100 Acre Wood and its enchantment:

          Then, suddenly again, Christopher Robin, who was
     still looking at the world, with his chin in his hands,
     called out "Pooh!"
          "Yes?" said Pooh."
          "When I'm ––when––––Pooh!"
          "Yes, Christopher Robin?"
          "I'm not going to do Nothing any more."
          "Never again?"
          "Well, not so much.  They don't let you."
          Pooh waited for him to go on, but he was silent
     again.
          "Yes, Christopher Robin?" said Pooh helpfully.
          "Pooh, when I'm––you know––when I'm not
          doing Nothing, will you come up here sometimes?"
          "Just Me?"
          "Yes, Pooh."
          "Will you be here too?"
          "Yes, Pooh, I will be, really.  I promise I will be,
     Pooh."
          "That's good," said Pooh.
          "Pooh, promise you won't forget about me, ever.
     Not even when I'm a hundred."
          Pooh thought for a little.
          "How old shall I be then?"
          "Ninety-nine."
          Pooh nodded.
          "I promise," he said.

I find this passage vastly sad.  Christopher Robin is on his own here, even though he is with his friend Pooh.  The life change he is going through is painful; it is hard for him to speak, and it is desperately important that he be remembered by his bear.  To move on he has to store his child self in his bear, and that storage has to be lifelong.  In some area of Christopher Robin's future self, there must always reside a living endowment of childhood, some beating trace of a boy who lived safely in a tree with a green door.

A.A. Milne, Christopher Robin, and Pooh

I interpolate here that Christopher Robin was the real son of A.A. Milne, that the father wrote bedtime stories for his son in which Christopher and his stuffed bear were characters, and that those stories were compiled into Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner.

In addition, the real Christopher Robin had a relationship with a real black bear at the London Zoo.  That bear had originally been named "Winnipeg," after the hometown of a Canadian soldier who had brought the bear to England during World War I.  (See Winnie-The-Pooh.)

Christopher Robin Milne at the
London Zoo

Thus, Pooh is a bear laden with meaning and remembrance: a storied bear commingling with real black bear and real stuffed animal; a storied Christopher commingling with a real Christopher who listened to and stored bedtime stories; a father in whose lap, real and metaphoric, Christopher was held. This could get dizzying, but for our purposes let us accept that Pooh has valuable and special properties.

Special in a remarkable way.  For although Christopher Robin cannot yet know this, his bear has to do more than remember Christopher's deepest self.  He must also be able to call to the adult Christopher and remind the man that a boy lives inside, recalling for him his deepest contentments.  In later life, when Christopher Robin will be living amidst "Factors," at times perplexed and "silent," he will need a memory nudge from Pooh.  He will need to hear, "Yes, Christopher Robin?" when he is stalled.

Christopher Robin is thus not the only one going through a life change. Pooh himself is altered, having been given a mission, which is to be not only Christopher Robin's memory but a re-minder of that memory.  He will perform that task from the inside now (assuming the grown-up Christopher Robin does not go out and about in the world carrying a stuffed bear).  Pooh is necessarily traveling from outside to inside, crossing the territory from external fluffy companion to internal felt-when-needed companion –– on standby as Christopher Robin's faithful sidekick.

As such, Pooh has been repurposed by his friend.  He will still dwell in the 100 Acre Wood, casually visiting Piglet or searching for honey –– only that 100 Acre Wood is now inside Christopher Robin.  And from that inner place Pooh will do his job, ever "on call" for Christopher, his memory-beeper as well as his memory-keeper, a companion that can trigger a state of mind.

   There Goes My Baby:
   The Drifters

This triggering function is similar to that of the "oldies" music cited before: something holds memories for me, but it also "beeps" me on occasion.  So that the next time I have an urge, say, to listen to "There Goes My Baby" (1959) by the Drifters, I will be in touch with a 1959-me, yet I will have also been "beeped" by that earlier me.  What feels like an "urge" to spend time with a special interest is an instance of having been paged by that latent interest.  (See this blog, Dreaming My Star, for a discussion of self-beeping; also, "Being a Character," Chapter 3 of Being a Character [1992], by Christopher Bollas.)

If asked, I could not tell you precisely how music calls to me, or how an internalized Pooh might call to an older Christopher Robin.  But perhaps this is a psychophysical question that need not be asked –– how a stuffed bear can be listening to, open to, and present for Christopher Robin; or more accurately, how the memory of a stuffed bear can be open to and present for Christopher Robin, this being a question about the internal movements of a memory-bear.  (Crossword puzzle enthusiasts will be aware of a phenomenon in which the answer to a word-clue sometimes pops into mind the next day, even days later –– as if solutions take their time, follow their own movements.  In the case of Christopher Robin's Pooh, maybe a situation in which the older Christopher is puzzled will be sensed by a memory-bear "open" to this situation ... and ready to provide a life raft.)

All we really know is that this bear, this very special beloved bear, has been invested with foundational properties by a young boy, properties having to do with easy exploration in trusted waters.  These properties do not simply vanish when the older Christopher understands toy-making, fibers, and stuffing.  Cherished trustings and interests may be off his radar but they are still in his ocean.  Not only do they not vanish, it seems unbearable for him to move on through life without his bear-part to hold these essences.

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Finally, this: when sometimes we forget what others need from us, so too do we forget what we need from ourselves –– a reliable flotation.
This returns us to faith.  It's hard to put into words but something there is that holds us up in difficult times. Our experience of staying afloat precedes our knowledge of logs, charts, suction pumps and Brazil.  It is there in the reliable presence and responsiveness of a mother in an airport, a mother of a two-year-old who knows he can safely explore, knows that something will prevent his going "too far," knows he is never off her radar.

Always known, he can be simultaneously at sea yet anchored in familiar moorage.

Perhaps faith is a substrate of unregistered beliefs that comes from having lived in an enclosing and supporting world, from a time when we were not that verbal, not overly involved in assigning descriptors ("King," "Queen," "Brazil") to things, and when we were too absorbed in doing "Nothing" to categorize anyway.  Such an unregistered trust in one's buoyancy –– faith –– is felt more than understood.  As such, it makes palpable one aspect of an "unthought known" (Bollas, 1987) from earliest life.

So "Bother!" if a friend fails to acknowledge me, but foolish me for dwelling too long in my doldrums.  I can fall back on a deeper knowing, which is that when I lose my moorings, fall away from myself, I can always re-find them and me –– and keep on sailing.  All I really need do is let myself drift, and I find that I'm still afloat.  My vessel was seaworthy before ever there was a clear record of me, my craft, or sea:
         
          Still with his eyes on the world Christopher Robin
     put out a hand and felt for Pooh's paw.      
          "Pooh," said Christopher Robin earnestly, "if I––
     if I'm not quite––––"he stopped and tried again––      
     "Pooh, whatever happens, you will understand, won’t
     you?”         
          "Understand what?”

(And then, wonderfully:)         

          "Oh, nothing."  He laughed and jumped to his
     feet.  "Come on!”         
          "Where?" said Pooh.         
     "Anywhere," said Christopher Robin.

Here are the last lines of The House at Pooh Corner, spoken as a coda by A.A. Milne:         

          So they went off together. But wherever they go,         
     and whatever happens to them on the way, in that         
     enchanted place on the top of the Forest, a little boy         
     and his Bear will always be playing.

Both reader and author are now, like Christopher Robin, at the edge of story.  We are all going away from the charmed space of the book, possibly to catch a plane.  The childhood story is over for us too ... until the next time we feel "an urge" to take this story off the shelf.

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*See, by Christopher Bollas: "Being a Character," in Being a Character: Psychoanalysis and Self-Experience (1992); also, Forces Of Destiny (1989); also, Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known (1987).  See, by D.W. Winnicott: "The Five-Year-Old,” in The Family and Individual Development (1965); also, "Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena" (1951), in Collected Papers: Through Paediatrics to Psycho-Analysis (1958).  See, by Ernst Schactel: "On Memory and Childhood Amnesia," in Metamorphosis (1959).  See this blog, Seaweeds, for a discussion of Winnicott, or Fate And Destiny and Dreaming My Star for applications of Bollas's thought.

Fog

In 1964, a college friend introduced me to Kenneth Patchen (1911-1972).  I recently rediscovered this poem of Patchen's, "Do The Dead Know What Time It Is?" (1939) :

     The old guy put down his beer.
     Son, he said,
             (and a girl came over to the table where we were:
             asked us by Jack Christ to buy her a drink.)
     Son, I am going to tell you something
     The like of which nobody ever was told.
             (and the girl said, I've got nothing on tonight;
             how about you and me going to your place?)
     I am going to tell you the story of my mother's
     Meeting with God.
            (and I whispered to the girl: I don't have a room,
             but maybe ... )
     She walked up to where the top of the world is
     And he came right up to her and said
     So at last you've come home.
             (but maybe what?
             I thought I'd like to stay here and talk to you.)
     My mother started to cry and God
     Put his arms around her.
             (about what?
             Oh, just talk ... we'll find something.)
     She said it was like a fog coming over her face
     And light was everywhere and a soft voice saying
     You can stop crying now.
             (what can we talk about that can take all night?
             and I said that I didn't know.)
     You can stop crying now.

What an absorbing poem.  Published in 1939 when I was minus-seven, it still speaks to me today.  There is much going on in it:

I like the set-up: two guys talking in a bar; the pull on the reader to attend to alternating narratives (a meeting with God, a meeting with a woman); and notably, the antithesis of the two narratives.  That is, the meeting with God results in a profound contact which is permeating and boundary-erasing –– as ambient fog, light, and soft voice merge with and comfort the mother.  Contrast this to the meeting with the woman, which begins with sharp outlines (“ ... asked us by Jack Christ to buy her a drink") and ends with neither merger nor comfort.  

This back and forth pull is due to a nesting of narratives.  The biggest containing narrative is the poem itself, the story Patchen is telling us. But Patchen's story houses two parallel stories: that of an "old guy" telling a story to a young guy who isn't listening, that of a young guy who is involved in his own story with the woman.  Most of the poem portrays these two narrative perspectives, the old man's and the young couple's.  Interestingly, although narratives alternate, they seem simultaneous.  This is like watching split-screen film images, shuttling between images yet aware of both.  A kinetic poetry, as if the poem were a kind of mobile.  As such, the poem never really settles down, and neither does the reader.  I find it a bit jangly.

Then in the last line the poet himself appears, stepping from behind the poem-world to enter ours, speaking directly to us: You can stop crying now.  This is another unsettling movement.  As if stage actors suddenly spoke outside the play-illusion to the audience.  Patchen must necessarily be assuming that themes inherent in this poem apply to our own human dramas, that the poem's stage is also ours.

What would those themes be?  Here we travel into the elusive territory of understandings:

I think "Do The Dead Know What Time It Is?" concerns several dualities that can be collapsed into being lost versus being found.  On the side of being lost is the social emptiness seen in the young couple. They don't have a place, they lack effective speech and intention, they are isolated and poorly oriented to one another.  Nothing is born of their encounter: no common understanding, no empathic connection, no anchoring anything.  They are as unmoored at the end of the poem as they are at the beginning.

Mind you, this is true as well of the relationship between the old guy and the young guy.  These two are also misattuned to each other.  And so all these people meet and talk, about Godly matters or earthly matters, but nothing mutual comes of it.  In effect, the poem's characters are more concerned with passing time, killing time, than with living in time.  As such, they appear unaware of the limits of time, of the fact that time and life run out.  There is a listless quality to their movements, an absence of spirited living and creative intercourse.  For that reason, they seem lost, fog-bound within themselves and with each other –– "dead" to the possibility of quickening, collaborative activity.

But where in the poem is the being found part of the dialectic?  Is it only an implied opposite to the pervading mood of isolation, or does it reside somewhere?  Is there a "room" in the poem where someone is not alienated?

I think there is, in the moment that the old guy's mother finds and is found by God.  But if so, what exactly can that mean, since it is unlikely that "She walked up to where the top of the world is" and talked to God. Certainly there is an illuminating, transcendent contact of some sort –– inaugurated by God's saying, "So at last you've come home."  A homecoming then, a comforting re-union, some deeply human experience of soothing and merging seems to be in play.  Even if the mother's story is totally imaginal, it counters the detached alienation of the bar-life down below.

Plus, I don't think we should too quickly dismiss the idea of a meeting with God.  Such an encounter is worth considering.  After all, some things may be untrue but real nonetheless.  Let us imagine, say, that the mother's meeting with God is a dream, a dream of intimacy and overwhelming sensory intensity:

     My mother started to cry and God
     Put his arms around her.

And later:
  
     She said it was like a fog coming over her face
     And light was everywhere and a soft voice saying
     You can stop crying now.

There is a feeling of peace and safety here, unlike the edgy, unsettling alienation elsewhere in the poem.  This feeling has psychic reality and texture, I imagine you could float in it.  And this feeling is attainable, through good fortune or hard work, in everyday life.  It is visible in the contented mooring that "holds" some mothers and babies, some husbands and wives, some companions of every description. (See this blog: Seaweeds, for a discussion of supportive containment.)

Finally there is that last line, seemingly aimed at us: You can stop crying now.  I believe it is the poet finding us, recognizing in us the potential for that same social emptiness depicted in the poem.  As such, it is on the side of thoughtful, direct communication, of talk that links up with others and nullifies isolation.  As if Patchen were saying: Hey, you out there, wake up, snap out of it ... come alive!

"Do The Dead Know What Time It Is" is over seventy years old, written well before the humanistic leanings of the last fifty years; nevertheless, it still works today.  Everyone is in a fog in the poem, but the being-with-God fog is a return to something primary and containing, hushing and quickening.  The fog down below is merely inertial.

Dreaming My Star

Note to visitors:  This post is about dreaming and my anniversary.

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I like the word "consideration.”  My dictionary says it derives from Latin (com-, with, + sidus, a star), and it offers definitions such as "meditation" and "careful thought and attention.”  I don't know how the meaning of with-a-star transformed into consideration, but were I an ancient earth-bound Roman beholding a star, I think I'd likely be filled with imaginative speculation.  Mental states such as "pondering" and "musing" come to mind.

Presumably we "consider" things not known or obvious.  We don't as a rule consider meatloaf.  Thus our ancient star-smitten Roman would experience literal and cognitive distance between observing self and observed object.  Necessarily, because of a star's faraway unknownness.  And his consideration might involve patience and humility on account of that distance –– something like "What's this, then?" instead of "I know you.”  Rather than coursing full-bore towards Truth, he would be musing in an aura of compelling mystery.

In any event, that is how I prefer to think about the process of considering something.

Now some thoughts, like stars, are worthy of consideration.  Here is one of them:

     He was part of my dream, of course –– but then I was part of
     his dream, too!

     (Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass [1871], p. 126)

Interesting thought, this.  I want to sit with it a while until meanings settle: consider it.  I don't know much about Through the Looking-Glass or Lewis Carroll, but then I don't know much about the galaxy either. Even so, this quote twinkles, gets me wondering about the experience of finding oneself attracted to compelling objects.

What's going on when we are considering?  Why do some things "grab” us, much like a stars's pull on an ancient Roman.  Especially when those things are more human-scale than stars, mountains, vistas; not inherently majestic, that is.  Certain things –– people, objects, activities –– strike us but, as with stars, there is mystery and ambiguity.  I can't tell you with 100% accuracy, say, why I love my wife or how her being firms up my being; similarly, with music I like or art or other interests. Yet my life is bound up in the aura of this person and these interests. 

That said, and while I lack specifics, I do have a framework for knowing what's going on.  It is not my own but borrowed from psychoanalyst, Christopher Bollas.  It is this: we move through our lives being grabbed by certain things, star-struck so to speak.  More importantly, the things that strike us also express us, give outer shape to the indistinct, shifting muddle of our inner lives.  Huh?  What "indistinct, shifting muddle”?

Helen Vendler, cited by Bollas (1992), puts it this way:

     Something –– which we could call ruminativeness, speculation,
     a humming commentary –– is going on unnoticed in us always,
     and is the seed-bed of creation... .

Vendler’s quote appears (p. 47) in Bollas’s book, Being a Character: Psychoanalysis and Self Experience (1992).  Bollas extends this "humming commentary":

     Our inner world, the place of psychic reality, is inevitably
     less coherent than our representations of it, a moving medley
     of part thoughts, incomplete visualizations, fragments of
     dialogue, recollections, unremembered active presences,
     sexual states, anticipations, urges, unknown yet present
     needs, vague intentions, ephemeral mental lucidities, unlived
     partial actions... .
     (Ibid, p. 47)

The notion here is that what grabs us does so because it is a suitable vessel for something unclear and unformulated in our mental life.
Some things interest us, hold our attention, some don't.  Only certain people, objects, activities constellate for us in significant ways.  We all live in our own universes.

Bollas likens this process to dreaming.  In dreams, the mind conjures images and stories that give form to something less distinct, that shape up the jumble.  In everyday life, the mind is drawn to people, objects, activities that house and express (if imprecisely) inner psychic leanings.  The process is invisible.  We see the effects of our dreaming, the dream image, but not the dreaming itself.  We see the effects of the "moving medley," the "humming commentary" of inner life –– in our social, intellectual, artistic concerns –– we don't see the movements themselves.

Bollas uses an exact analogy to make this point.  He is trying to arrive at the deepest, subjective nature of a friend, by examining objects in his friend's room.  Then he notes:

     We are, however, imagining the room without its inhabitant.
     What if we could watch this person move about his room,
     picking up objects, moving them about, giving form, as it were,
     to his person?  To make this imagining sharper, throwing into
     relief the point I wish to make, let us think of this person’s idiom
     by conceiving him to be a ghost.  We are in the room, then, with
     a ghost, whom we can see only as objects are stirred or moved
     around the room.  By seeing the objects move, rather like
     observing the wind by watching the moving trees, we would, in
     effect, be watching his personal effect as he passed through his
     life, and theoretically, we could film subjectivities' enacted
     dissemination by catching the movement of objects over time.
     (Ibid, p. 55)

And somewhat later:

     Being a character means that one is a spirit, that one conveys
     something in one’s being which is barely identifiable as it moves
     through objects to create personal effects, but which is more
     deeply graspable when one's spirit moves through the mental life
     of the other, to leave its trace.
     (Ibid, p. 63)

We are haunted by ourselves, inspirited, perhaps sleepwalking –– and we glean something of our nature through our involvement with the stars by whom we are struck and towards whom we gravitate.

This is a headful of ideas.  Where does it lead?  In part, to this: we are not clear-eyed navigators sailing known waters, we are starry-eyed dreamers in poorly charted seas.  Also, in part and unexpectedly, to this: it comes to me that, without knowing it, I have been musing about my wife's and my 29th wedding anniversary.

My Wife (You)

I believe Lewis Carroll's quote sparked interest not simply because of intrinsic properties but because it fit well as a container for my own "part thoughts" and "incomplete visualizations."  I think my "spirit" subliminally registered a rightness of fit.  Rather like Bollas's "moving tree," the quote's twinkling quality was an "effect" of my "barely identifiable" probing.  And maybe this is all quite normal.  If I hear a new song and feel instantly drawn to it, chances are there is an "unnoticed" scanning at play that has "moved through" the song, finding itself at home.  A kind of invisible spirit-guide.

As to that 29th wedding anniversary, I will appropriate Lewis Carroll's thought.  Pronouns and tenses have been changed:
                   

Her Husband (Me)

     You are part of my dream, of
     course –– but then I am part of
     your dream, too!

Here's to you, friend.  It's a long time we're in this thing.  Good on us!

Country Life

I have just returned from several weeks in the Canadian maritimes, where my wife and I have an old farmhouse.  The area is rural and serene, and makes our woodlands home in Rhode Island seem suburban.

But note these trees.

Pin Cherry Tree

They are not just any trees.  What these trees share is a lack of boundaries; they grow like weeds, crowding out spruce and maple in our woods.  Why?  Because they never sink deep roots into the community.  Their foundations are shallow and so are they, traveling light and spreading every which way.

The Pin Cherry, as suggested by its botanical name Prunus Pensylvanica, came from Pennsylvania years ago, most likely in the dead of night.  It is still found in Pennsylvania where, evidently not welcome, it has changed its name to Fire Cherry.  Nor does its identity-fudging end there.  Attentive readers may notice the absence of an "n" in what reasonably might be Prunus Pennsylvanica.  I've no answer for this, it's that sort of slipshod behavior so typical of this sloppily invasive tree.  (See Prunus Pennsylvania.)

Staghorn Sumac

Then there is its boisterous friend, the Sumac tree or, as regards our woods, the Staghorn Sumac.  More shrub than tree, it nonetheless leaves a wide, uncaring footprint.  Even so, you will find its promoters.  They will speak of its pretty flowers and a lemonade-like drink made from its fruit, also of its uses in jams, spices, and as a dye and dye fixative; plus, finally, the fact that maybe you can smoke it. Wikipedia, however, wisely cautions as to its beverage-uses since it can be confused with Poison Sumac.  (See Staghorn Sumac.)

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Poison Sumac Tree

And now a helpful digression, and not just for the etymologists on board.  There is the word “Sumac" itself, which comes from summaq (Arabic: red).  Then there is the botanical name for Poison Sumac, Toxicodendron vernix, which breaks down into toxikon (Greek: poison in which arrows were dipped) + dendron (Greek: tree) + vernix (Latin: odorous resin, from which our word varnish derives).  So there you have it: poisonous arrows, stinky oily stuff ... Staghorn's cousin Toxidendron is an unctious, smooth-talking, inherently ill-intentioned tree.

And Staghorn itself?  Well, not all Sumacs are alike I suppose, still these shady family traits seem suggestive.  (See Poison Sumac.)

Pin Cherry Fruit

More digressively, let us revisit the Pin Cherry.  Its botanical name begins with its genus, Prunus (Latin borrowed from Greek: plum tree).  Now the connection between plum and Pin Cherry trees takes some deciphering.  I believe the Ancients lumped certain of these fruit-bearing trees together –– those with a certain type of fruit: small, fleshy, a single seam, a pit (such as plum, cherry, peach, apricot). Maybe they were plum-like, or close enough for inclusion in genus Prunus.  It is also possible I am entirely mistaken. 

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Now during my stay in Canada I began compulsively pruning cherry and sumac from parts of our woods. Using inadequate (non-power) tools but great verve, I opened up three clearings, liberating spruce and maple saplings.  Part of this industry was compensatory for the lack of Wi-Fi at our house: instead of losing myself in the computer, I got lost in the woods.  I was so pleased with my labors that I posted a sign Kit's Assart in the largest clearing.  An assart (\as-sart\) is a good term for such a cleared area, and I credit my friend Nicola for bringing it to my attention.

Finally, it was pleasurable just being in the woods, in ways hard to explain.  I will let this four-song playlist speak for me.