Big words claim too much attention (Joubert).

In high school, a Freshman English teacher whom I remember mostly for her protruding teeth and slightly sardonic teaching mode, talked frequently about little words and big words, placing a pseudo-monetary value upon them: one-dollar words, five, then twenty, up maybe to fifty-dollar words.

I wanted, I recall, to know them all, ordinary to obscure, simple to elegant. But I hated using a too-big word when a cheaper one would do as well. A question of who I am, of audience, of a too-cheap impression, a trying to take on a mantle of faked elegance, where ordinary seemed more genuine? A friend, I remember, now a physician-professor at an important university, used the highest priced word he could find to do the job. I felt jolted, cheated, trying to make something appear better than it was, the words overtaking the content, the form calling loudly: “Here I am!”

I, who have spent much time with words: translating, writing, reading Thesaurus’ entries moving from one skein to others, want the words to do the job, to work, to attract, to scream even when screaming is useful – or necessary. But too big words proclaim themselves, stand out, want to be re-read, repeated, to grow…

Big words: claim too much attention.

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…?