Van Manen and Reflection

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#781

At this point, I’m having trouble finding places in van Manen that don’t speak to me, but I’ll try that after I consider the quotes Sondra included in the prompt for this week that scream, “Hilarie, this shit is fantastic.” “Seeking meaning” has resonance for me with felt sense, because when van Manen describes successful writing as “to search for the meaning that motivates one to be a writer/researcher in the first place,” he’s talking about bringing to light something that is (always) already going on. The meaning is already there, just as the felt sense is there – it’s our task to come in contact with them, and in so doing, challenge ourselves and open ourselves up to be able to attain fresh thought. Later van Manen cites the “reaches of understanding that are somehow prediscursive and precognitive and thus less accessible to conceptual and intellectual thought” – felt sense includes these reaches (though I think the cognitive dimension of felt sense pushes it past them, as well).

“Inducing a questioning wonder” is such a gorgeous way of describing the task of the writer, and particularly, I think, the successful academic writer. It’s what the most committed and passionate educators I’ve known have striven to do – not to inculcate blind certainty, but to inspire curiosity and the desire to keep learning. This wonder has happened most strongly for me when I’ve learned something totally new (like my philosophy major days in college, which rocketed me past my vague notion of who Plato was into the stratosphere of metaphysics and epistemology, the place, I learned, where my intellectual heart really lay). I’m noticing it now too, though, in smaller lightbulb moments – like when the right word comes, or when I jot down the name of an unfamiliar term, or when someone else says something that helps me connect two thoughts together to make a whole new one.

Van Manen articulates the moment “when our gaze has been captured by the gaze of something staring back at us.” That “something” could be our own reflection, or something totally separate from us, but we are still all in-being in the same universe of becoming and implying. Maybe our borders with others and our borders with thought don’t matter so much anymore.

“Orienting the reader reflectively to a region of lived experience” trips me up more (perhaps because I’m searching for trickiness). The first four words are great. It’s the last half of the phrase that’s tricky – because I can’t identify whose lived experience. I’m not sure that van Manen can claim that every writer is trying to orient her readers to her own experience, and it would seem that he would have to, even if limiting the pool to phenomenological writers, in order to make such a broad claim. Does my doubt here call into question my certainty about all his other points? I don’t think so – because I don’t see another place where he so explicitly marks off a thing without indicating to whom it pertains. I wonder, too, if Gendlin is the way out of my murkiness here – because he might say that the experience in question is the lived one we all share, even when it doesn’t overlap. We all live within bodies that interact with the world, so we have at least that in common. Alternatively, maybe all van Manen needs to satisfy me is add a possessive adjective.

Before finishing the reading for this week, I wrote the following short essay initially in response to Erin’s great thoughts from last week on her train ride. Reading it now, I see meaning-seeking threaded all the way through it, most concentratedly in the section on reflections and trees. That’s also where I see questioning wonder. I think this is the first time that I have consciously attempted to approach my own felt sense without the explicit guidance of Sondra’s Guidelines (though you’ll see that I try to approximate them). Felt sense is the wonder here, and feeling a little unmoored is the questioning part.

I’m writing on a train, and it’s a train with no wi-fi. The man next to me is harrumphing his way through his coughs as he watches a show I don’t recognize on his tablet. Everyone else is quiet. I have finished the homework I can do without wi-fi. My presentation for tomorrow is complete, and to edit it, I’d need wi-fi anyway. My phone battery is fading, and I need to keep myself from draining it further in case I need to call my aunt to meet me at the station. This man next to me will not stop harrumphing. I shift my hands so he can’t see what I’m writing, and then I write anyway. He’s got his show.

In this space of relative disconnection from my preferred forms of new media (if with an inconsistent ability to ignore the other distractions around me), I find myself coming back to Erin’s great description from last week of her own train experiences. What I like about getting work done on this train is that I don’t have the internet to distract me. That is also what I hate about getting work done on this train. Since I don’t travel this way that often, there’s an allure to the out of the ordinariness of it that I think helps me focus.

On the other hand, I’ve been riding this train, however intermittently, for years. I remember many trips when I’d call my mom on the way and she’d be the one to pick me up and drive me the 40 minutes to my aunt and uncle’s house. Sometimes I’d chatter with her, and sometimes I’d be more sullen, depending on how attentive of a daughter I was being. (In my partial defense, I was in my early twenties.) I remember the one Thanksgiving when my ex-boyfriend called me from Texas and I spent the rest of the ride wondering what that meant for our fledgling friendship. (It’s now definitely, deservedly ended.) I remember all of the times between December 2012 and the following January when my cancer patient uncle would pick me up and bring me to see my cancer patient mother. We’d moved her up to live with them, and my aunt cared for them both. I visited as often as I could.

I remember the trip I took in the bitter cold of January 2013, my frightened cat in tow, when I thought I would have many more chances to take her to see my mom. (I think I brought the cat more for me than for either of them.) That’s when I thought I’d go on leave from work and move up to Connecticut to be with my mom as she transitioned to hospice. Strangely, I don’t remember the train part of the trip when my mom was, as I thought of it then, officially dying. What I remember is the car ride with my aunt, slicing through the dark, brining me closer to a mother whose last word to me, three days before she died, would be my name.

Internet wasn’t the biggest concern for most of those trips. Even as I write about it now, I’m not crying. I’m still. I’m cried out for right now. Some of my recent tears have been for or because of other people. It’s very interesting, I’m finding, when grief shifts to allow you to care about other things. Death is still there. My mother’s loss threads through every aspect of my life. Even thinking of her as lost is still so evocative for me: it’s like she’s behind a wall, and I can’t reach her. Sometimes she seems to be moving backwards away from me. Sometimes I can feel her calming, smiling, sometimes angry, always loving self practically peeking over my shoulder. That poor man, she might say, or Jesus Christ, just cough already. I wonder if the phrasing is hers or mine.

The man next to me has packed his tablet in his suitcase and moved. I worry that he has seen what I wrote until it occurs to me that he’s probably getting off at the next stop. As soon as he disappears, I wonder where the edge of the thinking I’m doing right now is. (I think this just as someone else coughs.) I have more space, so I decide to do a quick version of Sondra’s Guidelines. I settle my feet on the floor. I ask myself, what do you want to write about. I add, in silent parentheses, something that you’re not already writing about. You are writing a memoir about your dead mother. You are writing about her life, and yours. What else do you want to write about?

I take mental stock of my in-progress abstracts. I flit my attention over to the essay I wrote for Jessica, and the journal in my bag that I am hoping will accept it. I decide to edit it on the train home, after the conference. Thinking of the conference makes anticipation rise up, a combination of “oh g-d, am I prepared enough” and “oh boy, I get to present my ideas to smart people.” I reflect on how far I am from my felt sense in this moment. I am having thoughts I have so many times, semester after semester.

I try another version of one of Sondra’s questions. What do I know about (and I add to myself, other than grief)? Today, I decide, I will think about knowing about – I cast around for something outside the window. Trees. No, reflections. There’s a beautiful image outside the rushing train of the sunset above the lake and the evening-blackened trees reflecting onto the water. What can I write about reflections?

My first thought is that they express recursivity. You can look at them from two distance angles, but it’s almost as though there’s no beginning or end. You could have the trees without the reaction, but you couldn’t have the reflection without the trees. Those ideas don’t seem to go together. I look again, and I notice how fuzzy the trees’ outlines are in the water, as opposed to to the way their progenitors cut sharply through the sky. This is Gendlin’s edge: these fuzzy tree shadows. When you get to their end, you are firmly in the water, and there’s no place to attempt to go but somewhere new. You probably haven’t been there before. (I haven’t.)

I am not the swimmer in this increasingly odd thought experiment, but my imagined figure doesn’t want to go to shore just yet. She wants to see what else is out there. She wants to challenge her own orthodoxies, the meanings of her own words. She’s not worried about someone else’s coughing. She’s like my mom in a lot of ways: fearless, open-hearted, gleeful, creative, dedicated. I like this swimmer. There’s a bit of me in her somewhere.

I take an email break (11% battery. Leave it alone, Hilarie). I take stock: 1,100 words and counting. Two guidelines at least partially considered. Annoyance at coughing man abated. Love for and feeling of connection to Mom re-established, as every moment I continue breathing ceaselessly allows me to do. In some ways, when my mom died, I thought I’d reached the edge of my strength. I didn’t know how much I’d need to keep going, and to keep going in a healthy way. Sometimes now, fifteen months after her death, I still don’t, but I keep going anyway. Like a train, like a lake, like a fresh thought, like love.

[Anonymous]

#788

Hilarie,

How beautiful and powerful. Thank you for sharing it here. You call it a thought experiment. Maybe. It’s like a train story inside some train stories inside another train story, inside a stream of consciousness meta-nonfiction essay prose poem, inside a reading response. The metaphoric imagining circles in really cool ways around these different ideas and keywords of felt sense.

If gazing leads to seeking leads to touching, I think what inspires questioning wonder in me is not your awesome writer-craft here or the intellectual musings about edges of thought as you gaze out at dark reflections of trees on a lake. It’s your reflection on your grief and loss your mother and those few terrible moments you share with me. I feel touched by that in ways the rest of this would not reach if you had left out the heart of it. –Sean

[Sondra Perl]

#804

So beautiful and evocative and loving, induing wonder in me for sure. I couldn’t say it any better than Sean does above. Wonderful phenomenological writing.

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