Out on a Limb

Looking out the window of my stairway landing onto the backyard, I notice a dust of snow dislodged from the tall elm’s branch. A squirrel is inching its cautious way to the twig-like end of a branch of a limb, arriving finally at the gap of space separating it from the equally twig-like end of a branch of a limb across from it. The squirrel eyes that gap, regards it. Its tail undulates. The limb’s end bends under its 2 pound weight. No doubt its four-chambered heart has accelerated considerably beyond its normal 280 beats per minute. And then it leaps, hurls itself into space, across the emptiness, to land sure-pawedly, pausing momentarily as its new perch sags and recovers before scurrying on.

That safe landing is no slam dunk. Squirrels do sometimes slip, stumble at their mark, and plummet to the ground; and while their tail can function as a parachute to cushion a short fall, a fall from the height of that elm’s branch could break bones and spine. The Rodentia condition, like the human one, is filled with quotidian microdramas. Seeing that squirrel poised on a verge, meagerly supported, I’d like to think its racing little heart took on a percussive beat, a rapid and rhythmic contraction that fueled its courage to venture out on a limb.

I have been told at various times by various people to avoid going out on a limb. “Out on a limb” is an idiomatic phrase; its meaning is connotative and figurative rather than literal. Like all idiomatic phrases, it is not used innocently. It suggests a way of thinking and feeling; it gestures toward a normative boundary. Being “out on a limb” means being at risk, vulnerable, and it is almost always functions as a social warning or proscription, as a location to avoid placing oneself at, for social support there is dangerously weak, may snap, and one may fall to the lonely, unforgiving, injurious ground. Better to stay near the trunk, the solid trunk, where the branches thicken and are more compactly congregated and better able to bear one’s weight, where even the stoutest breeze barely registers on their unswayable density.

I was never cautioned against going out on an intellectual or athletic limb. “Truth is conformity of the mind with reality,” the Christian Brothers at my high school told me, quoting Aquinas; so, “sapere aude,” dare to know. They gave me Latin, and I had the key to English grammar and all the Romance languages. They gave me Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, and I had the yin and yang of Christianity. They gave me Freud and Jung, and I understood myself and others better. Subsequent teachers at higher levels gave me theology and philosophy and history and literature, told me to think long and hard and critically, with and against the grain of what I read, to add my voice to the great conversation—a wealth of knowledge that I could spend lavishly, like a plutocrat, without fear of bankruptcy. On the athletic field I was told to be a winner, not at all costs, but at the cost of all my effort and energy; to play through pain, to practice and train, to play smart and intuitively. In school and sports I was encouraged and exhorted and pushed to tread out on a limb, to accumulate and expend intellectual and physical capital, to enter the ranks of the elite.

But such was not the counsel I received regarding the social sphere. I was admonished to conserve social capital, to maintain connections, to not be a stranger in the social landscape, to not separate myself from social networks—indeed, the denser the network, the better one’s expectation of reciprocity and trust. A strange paradox seems to be at work here. In the classroom and on the playing fields, the display of individual excellence was expected. In the public square, however, in the everyday moving among and interacting with others, such behavior was experienced as arrogant or narcissistic or an idiosyncratic weirdness or difference, fit only for the margin, for the periphery where social displeasure lies, for a distant suburb to the metropolitan center of social acceptability. On the one hand, we are urged to develop a personal style, an original voice, an individualized legibility, a unique, signatory perspective to inscribe on things and events. On the other hand, we are urged to avoid those very qualities for fear of ostracism or ridicule, for fear of “the eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase.” We are urged to practice little more than a faceless gaze.

I think that, in the social sphere, this unwillingness to exhibit difference can be dangerous, inviting what media theorist Elisabeth Noelle-Neuman calls “the spiral of silence.” According to Noelle-Neuman, the social voices that are the loudest and most constantly amplified through various media garner the most attention, even if they express perspectives unshared by the majority of listeners. But hearing those perspectives expressed so often in so many venues convinces the majority that it is, in fact, a minority, a conviction that tends to render it less and less likely to speak out, less and less likely to go out on the limb of public discourse. The majority, in effect, gradually spirals into silence, and minority perspectives become dominant. The marketplace of public discourse becomes a monopoly; the dynamic churn of competing ideas is thwarted, and the truth-seeking goal of argument is stifled.

I believe that out on a limb is where we sometimes need to be. We need the risk, the sway, the feel of our own weight so we do not find ourselves conscripted and uniformed and crisply saluting ways of thinking and acting adopted at the bidding of others. We need to declare the separation point between our selves and the social self, if we feel a point of separation. We need to listen, and then we need to reflect, to hold an inner conversation between our convictions and the convictions of others. It is “irresistibly tempting,” David Foster Wallace observes, “to fall in with some established dogmatic camp.” If it calls, when it calls, we need the courage, and the intellectual integrity, not to heed the lure of the limb’s end.

Palimpsests

Until quite recently, I did not know what I was, exactly. I knew I was something, and I was assured that that something was special. The culture told me, insistently, relentlessly, that I was unique, an irreducible genre of one. Advertising proclaimed that it is Me O’Clock or Me Time, that I deserved or was worth whatever product or service was being promoted, that I could customize my credit card to suit my personality, that I could demand a hamburger made just for me, that a taco was my taco, that I could buy a car that adjusts to me, that I could an app for my every heart’s desire.. Self-help gurus admonished me to cultivate myself, reach in and touch myself into being, and that now, now, now is my time. Popularized history endlessly recounted to me the storied story of rugged individualism, of the westering impulse, the restless journeying of men and women to possess the bright flame of self-actualization, each embarked on their individual manifest destiny. I was bludgeoned with the discourse of self-esteem, told I was a majority of one, an autonomous, self-referential being of unequaled exceptionality. Reality TV showed me makeovers of every sort, where I saw a genuine self can break free into the golden summer splendor of its exclusive July. I was assured from every cultural corner that I was unprecedented, one-of-a-kind. And yet, I did not know what that means. I certainly did not feel unique. I didn’t even know what feeling unique would feel like.

I suppose I could have said I am a human being, a Homo Sapiens, though, I confess, most days I felt more like Homer Simpson. I could have said I am a teacher, a husband, a father and a grandfather. I could have said I was organized, disciplined, sometimes obsessive, always driven. I could have said I am empathetic, caring, sometimes skeptical, and easily exasperated. I could have said I am a vegetarian, have a jones for Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, and mainline coffee. But those are all qualities shared by millions of others. They are not essences; at least, I do not experience them as such. They merely qualify “I am,” the fact that I exist; they merely domesticate my existence by circumscribing it with an adjective or a noun. They describe me, but do not seem to name the substance, the radical, fundamental something that I was told makes me unique.

I have my father’s toolbox. It is a slapdash affair, really, banged together from a couple of boards and painted beige. Yet, if I were offered the priciest Craftsman toolbox in exchange for it, if I were offered an exact duplicate of it, right down to the rusted heads of the tenpenny nails holding it together, I would refuse the offer. The toolbox has an essence, it is unique. It is sui generis. I know that with a knowing deeper than a dream, even though, struggle as I might, I cannot find the language to name, in a propositional way, what it is, cannot find the words to literalize what that essence is. In such cases, when words fail to provide a perch upon which to land, it is best to rely on metaphor. Perhaps that is the way to make sayable this uniqueness I supposedly possess.

Not too long ago, I ran across an article about the Archimedes Palimpsest, a volume consisting of 714 parchment pages from which the original writing had been scraped away and reused to create a Byzantine prayer book. The palimpsest is so named because among other texts contained in the original, were seven treatises written by the Greek mathematician Archimedes. It sometimes happens that, due to the simple passage of time, the “underwriting” reappears beneath the “overwriting” superimposed upon it, resulting in a text with a discernable layer beneath the surface. The trace has left a trace for the fullness of time to birth.

The article swept me back to a time when, in the middle of a conversation with my brother, I suddenly realized that he used the same hand gestures as our father, used the same grimace before responding to a question, had the same manner of speaking from the side of his mouth when intending irony, laughed the same wheezy laugh. And I realized I did those things, too. And I remembered my mother telling me my handwriting was exactly like my father’s, and that, on the telephone, my voice was indistinguishable from his. In my brother and I are the underwritten trace of our paternity appearing in the selves we have written and are still in the process of writing. We are palimpsests.

The problem with most assertions of individual uniqueness, at least as that quality is commonly conceived, is the assumption that human beings exists in a gated enclave of the self, walled off from circumstances and influences, imbued with an unrepeated, unreplicable core that, like some fairy-tale gift, like some wave of a Hogwarts wand, simply appears out of thin air. It seems to me, though, that we are anticipated, prepared for, mediated, but not determined, not passively absorbent. My brother and I are not copies of my father, not duplicates or facsimiles. The three of us are layered texts, separate in time, each telling its own story while sharing the same page, the overwriting and underwriting overlapping at some points, indistinguishable, the same perhaps, but, finally, different. We are palimpsests.

We are carried forward, like an integer in a math problem, by our legacy, but into the ethos of our own historical moment, the habitus of our own time and place. We are actively courted by our moment, and we actively collaborate in that courtship. We affiliate ourselves with others; we gain information, knowledge, perspectives, attitudes, and values; we form perceptual boundaries; we pursue enterprises; we use our natural gifts and acquire others. We are what we already have, what we find, and what we do. We are legacies, but the song of that legacy arrives in the present and is overwritten in a different key. A new song, but not quite, for under its emergence is the trace, the unerasable residue with which it started out.

That, I think, is how we are unique, the intrinsic character of what we are. Palimpsests. The gesture of the self to and beyond itself. Anything less makes the self less complete, smaller, limited. Anything less is to invoke the oven bird’s question at the end of Robert Frost’s sonnet: “What to make of a diminished thing.”