⩩ 19
It is easy to march to the beat of your own drum — if you can hear it. Given you hear a drumbeat, falling into step with it is no problem. The hard thing is marching to the beat of a drum you can’t hear, not yet, and the challenge is learning to hear it. How do you do that? How do you learn to hear it? How do you magnify and amplify your drum so that you can keep time and walk in step with it? We need an answer to this question, because the drum beat is our revelation.
You have to get away from others. You have to escape the roar and clamor of other voices, going to where you can hear what always begins with a whisper. In the words of Emerson and Fox, it is the “still, small voice.” You go into the surrounding unknown, the ocean of enveloping nature, wilderness, often the literal wilderness out of doors, as for the prophets of tradition. My overall word for this movement is retreat or retirement, and my picture for it is going home after trick-or-treating. Home is where you hear your own drum. You see your whole and have your say. That is the day of judgment.
How, exactly? This is one reason I like the Halloween image. What trick-or-treaters do when they get home is sort through their pull, what they collected out and about, organizing it and trying to get a sense of it as a whole. When we go home and enter into reflection, by analogy, we sort through our experience and try to figure out what it all adds up to. At home, we come to terms with our experience, — and here is a natural expandable poem of the kind I love.
What does it mean to “come to terms” with something, as in a loss or a new and difficult situation? Colloquially, it means to accept or reconcile oneself with it. It means that we move past our defenses, our denialism, that we level with the experience, that we accept and acknowledge it. But it means more than this. Literally it says that we find words and phrases for the thing we are dealing with, that we become capable of putting it into speech. The resulting suggestion is that expression, the naming of a thing, is a central part of accepting it.
On the other hand, we are usually concerned with accepting and reconciling oneself with an experience but the relevant case in this context is not an experience but all experience, everything one has lived through and knows. What does it mean to “come to terms” with life?
When we go home from experience and ask ourselves what we actually have experienced, we are asking ourselves how we can describe it, how we can find terms for our experience and put it into words. We are engaged in the activity of naming what we have been through. We are giving an account of our lives.
This is a creative process and task. You are looking for the right words, and you know when you haven’t found them yet and when you have: before putting it into words you have an initial, incomplete sense of your experience which leads you forward and measures your attempts at articulation. This process involves selection, but it also involves creation and invention.
The use of any existing vocabulary, just as it exists, will be inadequate to the task. To adequately describe your experience you will have to change the terms you are using, expanding some, neglecting others, inventing others, in general coming to use the words you do in your own way. Coming to terms with experience means remaking the terms you use to talk about the world, and not just in one case but in many, so that you end up studded with native slang, speaking your own language, an idiolect.
There is, besides “coming to terms” with something, another idiomatic phrase that imaginatively pictures the moment of reflection and theorization we are currently attempting to describe. When we are surprised or overwhelmed or frazzled, we might say, “Give me a minute, I am gathering my thoughts,” especially if the situation imminently demands some action from us. What typical poetic fruit from our language!
It implies, first, that we have thoughts, many thoughts, a number of thoughts, second, that they are ungathered, scattered, strewn. Gathering our thoughts then involves bringing them all together, bringing them all to one place, as if to hold them all in one hand like plucked flowers. They are spread out and we walk around and pick them up, one by one, putting each in its place, organizing them — first this one, then this one, then this one. There is something of the homemaker in the image, which is fitting. As Goethe knew, everything that’s alive creates an atmosphere around itself, its own nest and habitat. Life inherently curates its environment to make it more livable, and gathering our thoughts is part of that for us.
And yet who says we have many thoughts? The first step of organizing our thoughts would be counting them, and yet how does one, in fact, count thoughts? What counts as a thought, or an experience? Where does one end and the next begin? It depends on how you count. Speaking and counting have always gone together, if we are to take things from Jacob Klein:
The act of speaking presupposes the distinguishing of one word from another and the relating of one word to another. It presupposes, that is, counting. For counting is distinguishing and at the same time relating one thing to another. At all times, therefore, speaking and the thinking involved in it have been understood as a sort of computing.
While speaking depends on counting, however, counting equally depends on speaking, or rather recounting, storytelling. Or how else could you know what is relevant, what counts as a thing? It is only through the story you are telling. Set out to count your thoughts or number your experiences and you will immediately find yourself spinning a yarn. In gathering our thoughts, we build around ourselves a thoughthome.
You are reading Footnotes, by Garrett Allen, a series of philosophical-ish short essays. You just read ⩩ 19, from the third chapter, on Retreat. Here are some highlights from what came before.
Retreat
⩩ 18 Experience, thinking, judgment
⩩ 17 Halloween
Firsthand
⩩ 16 Revelation
⩩ 14 Yourself
⩩ 12 Learning
⩩10 Habit
⩩ 9 Firsthand
Stagestranger
⩩ 7 Mistake
⩩ 6 Whim
⩩ 3 Speechless
⩩ 1 Headsup
If you enjoyed one of them or the series as a whole, please consider passing it along to a friend. And if a friend passed it along to you, welcome. By subscribing you can have these notes delivered to your inbox, too. If you would like, stay abreast.
A shoutout as usual to Danny at breakfastswerved for his ink. See his drawings for the series here.
If you’ve come this far: thank you for reading my work and spending time with me. I would love to hear from you.
I like the idea that the retelling of our experiences builds a thought-home around ourselves. As with the phrase, "Journalism is the first rough draft of history" our thoughts, or the story we tell ourselves, even the very words we select to do it, is the first rough draft of our story. When we're attached to the experiences we live, I think it would be very hard to gain any meaningful agency over the words we select and the story we tell. The "coming to terms" process seems so important. I agree that being "home" and retreating is important to setting the conditions for this to occur and I wonder what else is? What lingers on my mind this week is the importance to speak kindly to ourselves, to make space for retreat, and to get a wider perspective on our lives. I think for me these things make me feel like I have a fighting chance and telling a good first draft of my own story through my thoughts.