In a curious twist, I'm choosing to take an excerpt of a post that I had previously deleted and put it back on this website. What the heck, right? If you read it, might you volunteer to help me refine some of the things I discuss?
Best,
Heather
Sky, Sea, Rock: Misc. Thoughts on Relationality
I know I am not alone when I say that I feel something powerful when I look at the sky. I am never disappointed at the ability of the sky's expansiveness and the movement of clouds across it to provoke wonder and awe. And it's not just the movement of the clouds, it is the way that their colors and shapes at dawn or twilight are really quite magical. I focus on these times of day because often that's when I'm coming to or from home, down a long stretch of highway in the Deep South. My commute consists of travel up and down a ribbon of asphalt punctuated every now and then by a chicken or hog-toting eighteen wheeler, in the midst of gently rolling hills, and underneath a sky that makes me feel large and quite small at the same time.
I would not feel this magic in the same way if I was not situated with my feet or the wheels of my car on the ground--anyone who's been in the window seat of a 747 can attest to that. Different kind of magic all together. There is something about looking up from a "situated" place at the sky…Pilots talk about the danger of losing one's bearings when flying a plane because of the way in which you can lose a sense of what is up and what is down. It is this fear that popular culture plays on when they show a space traveler who, as the victim of foul play, has been set adrift forever in space. This same fear is used in movies set in the ocean. Think about Titanic, Poseiden, The Hunt for Red October, or The Abyss.
Conversely, think about how different it feels, the sense of wonder and awe and peace one feels when we have the opportunity to take a long walk along the beach. Even the innocent child's game of "keep away" with the incoming waves of the tide seems to be implicitly tied to our constant search for both a figure and a ground, a metaphor for the interdependent way that our "rock" (earth) and the "unknown" (sea/sky) helps us feel as if we are a part of something "real."
Feeling connected, feeling that we are a part of something real requires, absolultely requires a connection--be it to an idea, a place, a person, a discourse….and it absolutely requires a PRACTICE that is based in those connections…Feeling that we are a part of something real requires an acknowledged practice of the interdependence between space and place…and our movements between spaces and places. Of course, this is nothing new to anyone who is reading this that has spent much more time than I puzzling through these things, and in much deeper ways, but given that I'm pretty much the only one that consistently reads my blog, if you happen upon this post, please forgive my broad brushstrokes and feel free to help me think more deeply. So maybe I'm not even too the brushstrokes stage yet. I guess I'm mostly fingerpainting now...but you never know...someday soon I might be doing water colors like Bob Ross used to...
...In any case. The other night I was driving home and I looked up, as I often do, at the moon. On this evening it was a half moon, a pale glowing yellow…like a photograph of a luminous bowl provisionally taped to a midnight sky. As its position changed, its color deepened…I started trying to capture what it was that I was seeing. I imagined that the moon was this large rock, slippery with sea moss, half submerged in some vast body of water. I felt reassured by its presence…and even as I watched, wisps of nighttime clouds coalesced above this half-circle moon, like waves of some water that had been captured by Ross's brush.
Skip forward to today.I was thinking about the concept of time. Actually, I was thinking about why it was that I was trying to do something weird like imagining that the moon, or time were my "friends." The moon is cool with me, but it is much more difficult for me to be friendly with time. And then I started thinking about how the moon aganst the sky is also a metaphor for our relationship, an uneasy one, with time. We have a constant need to mark time,to fix ourselves in particular ways based on our understanding of where we are relative to the moments that have just passed or that seem to be approaching. The moon helps us to do that, whether it is in the course of a single night, and we are standing in a field or whether we are traveling home on a course that takes us West , and then Southwest…Or whether it is in the course of a month and we see the way the moon changes as it goes through different phases.
The sky and the sea are scary precisely because they have the ability to unfix us from our ways of understanding who we are within the flow of time. We know through the work of so many philosophers and social scientists that it is through time that we make meaning of our lives and the lives of others. That's why, when we see Brad Pitt's character at the end of The Perfect Storm, bobbing up and down so precariously on top of the roiling monstrosity of the hurricane-whipped ocean, it conjurs up feelings of hoplessness and despair.
Perhaps that's also why we are so very excited to see video of the ballroom of the Titanic still intact. We like to know that there are dishes and knives and spoons that are sitting at the bottom of the ocean in this great ship's kitchen, just waiting for us to come down, fish them out, clean them up and eat off of them again.
All of this leads back to the importance of a relational ontology for social science research and methodology. Isn't all of social science predicated on this idea? Whether one's view of what can be known falls up or down the objectivity/subjectivity continuum, what we choose to try to know still requires that we orient ourselves through relations…how fast does a bowling ball fall from the Tower of Pisa in relation to a feather? Aren't things so much better for black people now that when we were slaves? In what kind of relationship does a dependent and independent variable exist? Who am I now vs. who I was ten years ago? We constantly meditate, fixate, and relate through time/temporality.
Maybe that is why the sea and the sky seem so scary (to me) when (I'm) we're in the middle of it, why the moon is comforting when we are standing on the ground, and why we penetrate the sky with space shuttles and satellites.…Time is just too central to our lives for us to be on friendly terms with it.
