I'm not thinking about that anymore

I read an article several years ago by David Quammen, a nature writer whose collection of essays called The Flight of the Iguana is about as good a reader for a composition or rhetoric class as you can find out there. In the article I am speaking of now, entitled "Thinking about Earthworms," Quammen discusses Darwin's strange obsession, later in his life, with earthworms. Turns out, of course, that earthworms are probably in the top 5 of the "Most important species to the survival of the human race," just after bees and the bacteria that makes cheese. But Quammen's point is not that earthworms are important, it is that Darwin spent a large chunk of his life thinking about them, which is weird I guess. Quammen lauds Darwin’s decision to think about something that nobody else is thinking about, mentioning that subjects that are not part of the “noosphere” (Walter Ong’s term for simultaneous individual energy spent on a “mass” idea, like everybody in the U.S. watching the Super Bowl on Super Bowl Sundays) are sometimes the subjects that make the greatest impact on our lives, like earthworms.

The irony here is that earthworms only make their impact (keeping soil fresh so plants and food will grow) in masse. If there were just one earthworm upturning the soil, the rest of the world would quickly become cryptobiotic and the only thing that would grow would be weeds. Whatever. That is less important than Quammen’s larger idea about thinking. I have been noticing my own interests start to congeal around mass culture lately as well, and I am slightly disappointed in myself. I did watch the Super Bowl, I watch the Olympics almost every night, and I even watched American Idol this week. Not only that, I am a frequent user of Google News homepage, the largest indicator of what’s in the noosphere, and if there is something “important” happening, I find out more about it even though I don’t need to, like the health care summit or Michael Jackson’s death.

There have been times, like when I recently watched Avatar, that the only justification for doing things was that everyone else seemed to be doing it and so it seemed important. That is stupid. To think that you will be part of a public discourse by doing something that the masses are doing is akin to what I learned is bad about Peer Pressure from D.A.R.E.

It is funny how unsatisfying the noosphere is. Here we are, a collection of people whose individuality is only outmatched by the numbers of things to think about, and yet we continue to choose to think about the same things. Often, as I write my dissertation about a fairly obscure piece of poetry (actually the poems I study are not that obscure, but poetry itself is these days, so they qualify), I find myself frustrated and amazed in equal measure, never unsatisfied. These poems are mine at the moment I write about them because I assume nobody is thinking about “Epithalamion” more than I am today. It is my subject, and it is a secret, and it is wonderful. When all we think about is what others are thinking about, we’ve wasted the secret joy that makes us individuals, I guess.

But what of that? How much good will it do anyone to store up these treasures in our hearts, as Mary did, if we can’t share it or the subject isn’t as universally applicable as Christ himself, as it was with Mary. But this is precisely the point: the subject is as universally applicable, we just haven’t figured out why and how because we haven't thought about it enough. My poem of choice, Spenser’s Epithalamion, has more universal worth in it than anyone knows—it is not only about union, grace, myth, love, and family, but it seems to magically bestow those things as well. But the grace that the poem contains and creates is felt alone, privately, while thinking about earthworms, so to speak.

As to the second question, what good does it do to store the treasures in our hearts? Well, storing something is only holding it to use later. And what is the good of old age if you haven’t stored enough wisdom and beauty to last you through the physical and mental degradations of decay? That is, all these things give us joy, and will give us joy later, when we need it a little more.

I suppose the reason this little musing is part of this blog is to motivate myself to break out the old esotericisms. Instead of spending my nightly free time blithely watching American Idol or the Olympics, for all their entertainment, I might break out the new book by Ishiguro that I put aside, listen to the Hovhaness symphony that I never initially got through, watch the movie that nobody ever told me about, write the dissertation that no one will read.

I’ll report what happens with some reviews later, I hope.