By Bill Felker
Talk of mysteries! Think of our life in nature,–daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it,–rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! The solid earth! The actual world! The common sense! Henry David Thoreau
Lately I’ve been forgetting the names of some of the wildflowers I’ve identified through the years. I’ve also been forgetting the names of a few of my old acquaintances.
“Hey, how ya doin’?” I greet them, adding a soft mumble for the person’s name. Sometimes the other people remember who I am. Sometimes they mumble the same way I do. Sometimes a bob of the head is part of the ritual as though the person were choking on something or about to cough.
It’s easy to look up the forgotten flowers in my botanical references. Since I don’t have a people reference with photos, however, it often takes me a while to figure out the name of the man or woman I have just encountered. And even the momentary loss of a name is disconcerting in that the cerebral landscape suddenly becomes less familiar than it was seconds before. In some ways, the experience is like one of my repeating dreams in which I walk lost down a familiar childhood street on which everything has changed.
As I am accustomed to making much out of little, I worry that I’m losing my grip. After all, the process of taxonomy (naming things) is the way of the scientific world, the business world, the academic world, the broad world of social intercourse. I remind myself without names, there is no language and no human identity.
I weigh options and choices. Should I really bother to take the time to distinguish between silverweed and a flower that looks a little like wild strawberry? I always have. Is my acquaintance with what’s-his-name superficial, and that’s why I don’t recognize who he is? Am I simply forgetting, with good reason, the unimportant people in my life? That is also possible. Perhaps I do not recognize so-and-so because I have no need or desire for significant intimacy with her. That is likely.
Or maybe these aren’t the real issues at all. Maybe my organism is simply shedding its skin and preparing me for the great winnowing, the long oblivion. Is this intermittent forgetfulness, I wonder, the ante-room of a final metaphysical and psychological journey, the onset of dementia, incipience of Alzheimer’s? I ruminate and pick the scab of my memory lapse, trying to make sense of my aging.
Then, finally, I have it. I conclude that my anguish is merely a kind of disorientation caused by the perfidious Platonic Fallacy. That philosophic error was spawned by several of Plato’s dialogues in which Socrates encouraged people to think that ideas and their names were more permanent and ultimately more important than material objects, that the idea of a chair, for example, was more durable than the transitory, material chair from which the idea came.
Silly Plato! Silly Socrates! The truth is that any theory of ideas is useful only if you can remember. Once you forget the name of what’s-her-name, then her physical presence is much more significant than any conceptual shenanigans. My body, then, is simply telling me to get real. It is telling me that what’s-her-name simply is, and that, as Sartre said over half a century ago, existence indeed precedes essence.
And so I embrace the existential wisdom brought on by changes in my brain, allowing expedient insight to shatter arrogant and youthful concepts about high reasoning and subtle wordsmithing. I embrace the consolation of my friend, Henry what’s-his-name, his talk of mysteries, “daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it,–rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! The solid earth! The actual world! The common sense!”
Bill Felker observes nature in Yellow Springs, Ohio and records his observations in Poor Will’s Almanack. This is a reprint of the essay he wrote for June in the 2005 edition.
