Train-Track Tolerations

 

Toleration can be an awkward exercise. It suggests a challenge to being fully integrative. It suggests an unelected pathway of having to humor another. It suggests that one is (or at least feels, however uncomfortably) ‘superior’. Yet in the long progress of being ‘fully human’, being tolerant might at best incorporate the practices of compassion, consideration, care, and co-operation. Still, being there, something or other too easily can upset one off track.

Such are the cracks in the tracks of our contact with others. Are you herewith included? Did we journey a relatively short while in the same train-compartment, and then you, or I, got off at a given station, and went on our individual way? 

The trainset on my plywood table goes round, and round. It usually obeys such power as I feed it. But occasionally, with the disuse of time, or because of the over-long interval in which I focused on another activity, the trains dislocate, stop up, or refuse to budge. Always, it takes quite some careful sleuthing to determine the problem’s cause.

Are we at such a disconnect? Has it been too long since we gave power to our words, or gave continuity to our correspondence? Did either of us disembark, deplane, or detrain? The stations in our lives naturally involve new journeys. Details, foreign to another, take up much of our time and energy; the limitations in our sharing increases; we feel the disconnect becoming natural, non-affected, and sensibly tolerated. (Besides, one grows tired of talking just about Things; or just about Other People; and even one’s ‘wayward’ Ideas can simply become too frustrating to accommodate.)

Imprecision, quite unlike myself, is not tolerated by my trainset. Even the tiniest hair-crack in the connection points of the rails can freeze up the train’s motion. But we humans are not like that. We can accidentally reconnect with a wave, a word, a smile, or an intentional handshake. And like some strangers on a journey, we can even resume our old intercourse without the hiccup of an utter disconnect, at times sharing such intimacies of personal information as can take oneself by surprise.

We are connected. Despite all our discord and fragmentation and warmongering; despite all the Faustian pharmaceutical fallacies and their commercial iniquities; despite our ‘Territorial Imperative,’ (with its investment in our Identity; our need for Stimulation; and our want of Security,) * we cannot escape our essential inter-dependence. Our molecular osmosis is felt in the soul. At least, it is felt by those of us who are not too embroiled in an existential intolerance of others, such that our own pathways disallow the psychic current of our ‘entelechic’ energy to keep us evolving.

Unlike the relatively flat metaphor of a toy-train-set on a plywood board, the analogy of one’s place within the larger sphere of our observed universe is indeed multidimensional. It is that very multiplicity of advents, opportunities, perspectives, choices, and proclivities that impels us as individuals to make decisions for which we bear consequence, good, or bad. We are not ineluctably yoked to each other on a train-track, nor even collectively (anymore) societally mandated to 1^st, 2^nd, or 3^rd class conveyances for the rest of our lives. We are free to interrelate.

Tolerance, practiced with care, does much for us all.  

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*See: Ardrey, R. The Territorial Imperative. Athenium, New York. (1966)

A Pentacle Criteria for Perceptual Critique

Next to a taped-up poster of Mona Lisa on the blackboard, I draw a five-point star.

“Five points, referenced by a star shape, or conversely, by the fingers of one’s hand, make up a Pentacle of Criteria by which art, literature, (and much music too,) might readily be evaluated,” I say to my interested students. “For example, let’s take Mona Lisa.”

“Ha! She always smirks at us!” interjects Buddy, with a laugh.

I smile. “Very good. Humour, like our palms, may be central.” My hand high; I wiggle my fingers. “Yet, like all other possible points, not always obvious.” I draw a smiley in the star’s centre, then scribble a stuck-out tongue. “Next?” My index finger points. “What starts things?”

“How about ‘action’?” Roger suggests. “After all, adventures need ongoing action.” He points: “Look at those disappearing pathways, behind her. Like our ‘two paths in a yellow wood’.”

I turn, and at an arbitrary point of the star, I write:  Action/Adventure.

Purposefully, I thrust up my middle finger. “Next?”

“Sir!” Felicity demurs. “Don’t be rude!”

“Ah! Very good. But how do we know that it’s a rude gesture?” I ask. “In some countries it might be construed as a good luck symbol. Very many symbols have esoteric references, or intellectual terms, and like innocent children, we may yet come to learn their significance.”

“So,” Felicity ventures, “would the next point of the star be: Esoteric/Intellectual?”

“Say,” Clarence offers, “given the finger, we once discussed Shakespeare’s overt sexual references, or sensually subliminal ones, ‘not just to appeal to the commoners.’ But I do not see any of that in the Mona Lisa.”

“I do!” Buddy brags. “Look at that cleavage, and at her satisfied smile,” he adds, a trifle lewdly.

I shrug, give a thumbs-up, and write: Sensual/Sexual.

“But just look at her eyes!” Mandy suggests. “They’re full of love and care! Might the fourth point be: Romance, and Sentiment?”

After chalking up the phrases, I put up my pinky, and say, “Insightful observations, thanks. Now then, what might be the fifth? Given the over-arching intentions of this class, lesson after lesson, for what are we consistently searching? Is it just knowledge? Or is it something more?”

Little Linda, the youngest in our class, stands up. “We are in a search for wisdom, Sir. Always. We are, as we have often discussed, ‘spiritual beings, being human.’ And Mona Lisa does look as though she knows something that we do not, yes?”

I smile, and write the last label: Wisdom/Spiritual  

“Wonderful. Thank you. Now then, along with your insightfulness, we’ve devised, or divined, yet another rubric for what might be endemic to most enduring works of art, or literature, or music, and film too. Our criteria, even if subconsciously, variously appeals to the broad spectrum of humanity. What bears recalling is that, like the five fingers of one’s hand, those diverse aspects are not necessarily equally deployed. From our thick thumbs to our little pinkies, differentiation can be variously ascribed. Hence our circle, lest we presume that there is a necessary hierarchy, as opposed to a preferential focus. After all, just like humour, good for us as it is, every element is not necessarily in any and every classical artform. Why, even Mona Lisa, here, is but caught up in a moment.”

 “Yeah,” Buddy nods. “But what a moment! It keeps going on and on. See, she’s still smiling!”