Not The Only Starfish In The Sea

I've been seeing lots people I only-kind-of-know around. Everywhere. Right and left. Is it just because it's summer in Minneapolis and that's what happens? People are surfacing for the summer?

But I'm the worst. I think I have this entirely forgettable face and no one would ever recognize me. Or I think they might know who I am but I freeze up and can't can't find words or courage enough to make a connection. All I can do is desperately try not to make eye contact.

Everyone does this, right? ... Right?

The truth is that I always WANT to make a connection. Really, I want them put their hands on my shoulders and say, "Hi Rebecca. How are you? Do you want to get a drink? Because you seem like an interesting person and you probably think I'm an interesting person because you think everyone is interesting and, anyway, no one can ever have enough friends."

Sometimes it's hard to break the ice but I'll work on it if you will.

HERE ARE SOME QUESTIONS

About 1% of the things I've been thinking about lately:

  1. What if the artificial inseminations don't work and the white rhino really does become extinct? I'm not much of a cryer but I think I would cry.
  2. Would people rather die or drastically change their lives so that their being-ness restores earth's resources instead of depleting them? I feel like they would rather die.
  3. Has anyone done a study on how poetry affects the brain? (I bet it's a cross between meditation and listening to music)
  4. Do birds sleep in nests? (The answer is FASCINATING)
  5. Why is contact solution so expensive? It’s just saline in a bottle.
  6. Should you ever have to ask someone to love you?
  7. What would cross-dressers do if fashion became completely androgynous?
  8. Why do I feel trite for wanting to wear a wedding dress someday?
  9. Why doesn’t Cinderella’s glass slipper disappear at midnight with everything else?
  10. How do people go on european trips where they land in a new country every 2 days? Is that enough time to get a sense of anything? (except constant motion and considerable disorientation)
  11. Why are outdoor music festivals so popular? The fashion?
  12. Can we use track pads and touch screens for fingerprint passwords instead of trying to make up a new and appropriate combination of words and symbols for EVERYTHING?
  13. And finally, why don't we broadcast Nick Drake from the tops of the tallest buildings every morning like a call to prayer:

Look At Your Fish

This is from an old David McCullough interview in the Paris Review:

It says, “Look at your fish.” It’s the test that Louis Agassiz, the nineteenth-century Harvard naturalist, gave every new student. He would take an odorous old fish out of a jar, set it in a tin pan in front of the student and say, Look at your fish. Then Agassiz would leave. When he came back, he would ask the student what he’d seen. Not very much, they would most often say, and Agassiz would say it again: Look at your fish. This could go on for days. The student would be encouraged to draw the fish but could use no tools for the examination, just hands and eyes. Samuel Scudder, who later became a famous entomologist and expert on grasshoppers, left us the best account of the “ordeal with the fish.” After several days, he still could not see whatever it was Agassiz wanted him to see. But, he said, I see how little I saw before. Then Scudder had a brainstorm and he announced it to Agassiz the next morning: Paired organs, the same on both sides. Of course! Of course! Agassiz said, very pleased. So Scudder naturally asked what he should do next, and Agassiz said, Look at your fish.

I love that story and have used it often when teaching classes on writing, because seeing is so important in this work. Insight comes, more often than not, from looking at what’s been on the table all along, in front of everybody, rather than from discovering something new. Seeing is as much the job of an historian as it is of a poet or a painter, it seems to me. That’s Dickens’s great admonition to all writers, “Make me see.”

And thank you to one of my dearest, best, and oldest friends for taking me away for a breath of cabin air last weekend. It was a short and cold but beautiful and relaxing 28 hours.