HarveySarles.com

My appearance is not what or how it appears.

Aha! What you see is hardly me. I walk in certain spheres and people see this middle-aged man, which is me, yet not me.

In fact, in some places, like hospitals and colleges people say hello to me as if I am someone they know and have known. I fit, somehow, right now, smack in the middle of some stereotype that people have for what I should look like, and I do – to them. And so they say hello to me as if they knew me and know me. And I say hello back, as if it is precisely natural and correct. The appearance, the I to whom they say hello, is not exactly the I who thinks ‘I am.’ So some sinner, I, shrug and remain polite, and do not challenge, saying, “You don’t know me, really.” And I feel a bit peculiar.

Closer to home, the where of where I live, where I am known in deeper actuality, I am seen as an appearance which is more closely dialectical. The ‘who’ you see, my dears, is me, almost. Some residue, some particular strangeness in me, alone almost, is the eye which is not. A plastic disc, iris painted in the detail which was the me when it was new some years ago, is the eye into which you pierce, looking for my soul. What looks back is no more than a moistened reflection of the ambience of the room’s light.

Where I am, then, in the midst of all this looking? I see very clearly, that you see the I you think I am. For me, you see, the fact of my experience is my reality.

Carlos Castaneda said – somewhere – that the most difficult thing in life is in believing what is happening in the moment; in this moment.

Both as participants in our lives and observers of it, we all live in two modes, each with its own sense of being and of time.

Unless we sense the context, know the script of what is going on, then we stand aside, watching. Like the watchful m/other when her infant is asleep, our observing self is content beyond the time of doing.

This is usually useful, because the world of happenings and doings and occurrences is mundane; almost a sleepwalking, once we know who we are and where we have been.

Occasionally, however, something happens at a distance, or in the background, and we fail to report it to ourselves because we don’t believe it; because we are not in its time, in our own time of each moment’s doing.

We live entranced, captivated by our selves’ observers, playing out its particular surety, not noticing and…Not believing what it does not see exactly. Not seeing because one self’s observer is already committed to one’s own belief.

Life is like a course of lectures, the observer seeking the content of each lecture; no longer noting what is a lecture, nor yielding life to any thought behind the lecturer’s presentation.

These happenings which we do not note, what happens to them? Do they bump our observers’ eye, push however gently at our life’s constellations?

Do we wake up some day to find our selves outside of…ourself?

Should we struggle to see and to believe what it is we see, in each moment…and if we do…?

The famous humanistic writer confessed that it was only last year that he bought an electric typewriter, his first movement in the direction of high(er) technology. He wasn’t hostile, he said, merely inept.

A mere inept, merely inept, the words and concepts run around in my mind’s conjurings, wondering what this comment represents: a confessional that he is famous and yet not good at the manufactured things in life? – an olive branch to the technology that has accelerated faster than he has been able to realize because he has been busy being a literary critic and the social times he criticizes are running with him, at his pace? – a mere statement because he does not do all of what he might, and we might, expect?

No mere inept. I ponder what this means, berate my self that I do not know all technologies, am tempted to dismiss this statement with a scoffing, scathing, muttering, sneering at the words in some stretching-out which conveys the contempt I think I should have – “meeere in-eept”: merely, merely; in-ept, inept!

A sudden sadness that the possibilities of knowing all there is, has evaporated from anyone’s life’s realities. I try to forgive myself; no mere inept, my fingers grasp this stem of black plastic holding metal ball screeching over paper depositing some substance, writing in lines which have gained meaning, writing which was invented, a technology of not so very long ago, to be placed upon a word processor full of plastics and refined metals and chips and connections and… A mere inept, twenty books later, pondering upon the times.

His theater, no mere inept, takes us to so many places that we are persuaded to take him at face value…

I have, I possess – I am told – a good voice for radio. Deep, resonant, full of an authority and depth which has replaced the phlegm of years spent in the smoker’s abyss.

Usually this idea of a good radio voice makes no sense to me. Talking, using my voice, it sounds regular, ordinary; just me. Listening to a recording of me, I sound, well, somewhat whiney: too much variation, a kind of uncoolness and too many edges of raucousness; rawness, maybe.

Years of practice, teaching in different classrooms; exploring, modulating have moved my voice down to what others hear as good, convincing, correct.

Sometimes when I record for a weekly program, especially when I am alone, I try to listen as I speak, hearing as others must hear with a feeling for style, a quality of voice which can convey…strength, truth, a belief in itself?

A slight relief. Temperature climbs to 15 degrees Fahrenheit…above zero. A month and more below zero Centigrade. Worse to think Centigrade: life is always below zero. Here, below zero F, hurts faces, burns feet, telling us that there is no heat here. The sun, brilliant, cold as the winds blowing on facial tissues, causing tears to freeze, noses to run like sieves that freeze on my moustache like the winter monster who tells most birds to go South…they listen!

Yesterday, walking through the city, snow piled high hiding large dogs perambulating. At each corner we walked up not so small hills between streets clasped in sand-browned ice and sidewalks packed in still white snow.

We crossed the several tracks of railroad yards which house, these days, only wrecks to be repaired, and tramped over hillocks into city woods where imaginations imagine a forest of depth, the slight deception disproven by packed path of skiers and walkers who sought the same scene, break upon the clearing into lakescape’s wind driven snow packs seeming so cold in the lowest rays of winter’s sun, bathed in light, steeped in strong shadows, sit down on bench thinking of the spring and summer and fall, all leading back to such depth of winter that we can sit there only for a few moments.

Snuggled in layers of cloth and felt, we stayed almost warm, walking in the deep of deepest winter.