Experience kneads the dough of life. In youth, we are raw, workable material. Our environment, our culture and society, and our evolving innate selves collide with and impact one another in a continuous process of development. As an individual is pummeled (or caressed) by his circumstances, he takes shape. Sometimes he becomes a snug fit, sometimes one that is all rough around the edges and finds its space in the margins as many artists do. Some influences are consciously selected by individuals and you feel like “the master of your own destiny” (Charlotte Beall); others are matters of necessity or force. Some, like the structure of our language or of male-females interaction, are simply so engulfing that they are not easily discerned. I find my mother to be the most influential person in my life. Her individual presence has impacted me directly, but she has also formed the circumstances, the culture, in which I have grown up, and so helped craft the tools that I use daily by living in this world.
Children are young and mushy, like oatmeal. Many children look for someone (like Logan) to “LEAD US TO THE PROMISED LAND..!” (Prof. Bump) because without the critical mass of experience, a child has no real form or direction. I would qualify that by saying that each individual does have a deep inner core that persists throughout life and that does not rely utterly on external conditioning. Like an atom – that’s the image I get – like some compassionate, evolving atomic particle (see homemade graphic).
The inchoate atom (I’m creating my own vision of what the human-atom is) has at its core a nebulous mass of raw material. It has not yet solidified into a nucleus (though the material is there) and there are not yet many electrons (which will represent experience) in its orbit. The young, yet-to-be-molded glob waits to be spun. Indeed, that is just how I have felt during this past week and a half in Austin, like I’ve been spun. Like a magnet, the youthful nucleus is attracted to a denser, more fully formed atom. This atom is “on the brink of a great change” and “will never be the same again” (Charlotte Beall). It draws the electron-knowledge, of which the elder particle has much, into its own field, “vacuuming [it] up into [its] knowledge box” (975). Sub-atomic particles are flung off as readily as they are absorbed, and occasionally, if one is just the right fit, it sticks. As electron-experiences gather, they add mass and momentum to the orbital rotations, spinning the nucleus faster and faster until it begins to become dense solidified. Eventually the effects of new particles embedding and old ones departing lessens. Enough experiences have accumulated that the exchange of only a couple does not alter the revolving rhythm.
“At any given moment in life, it’s very hard to see a pattern to” (990) the maelstrom of influences that sculpt an individual life, but in hindsight a thread is strung through it all. It is very lucky that experience-particles are in no short supply (if my metaphor plays out scientifically – and I believe it will – “this works out to be just under 10^81” (http://pages.prodigy.net/jhonig/bignum/qauniver.html), a perfect correlate to one estimate of the number of atoms in the universe) because “no one person has a lock on the right way or only way of doing things” (989). Formative instances are often no logically linked in the mind as it experiences them. It can require a rest stop in the future for the order of train stations in the past to make sense. Why is it the awakening “the next morning in the furrow of a plowed field” (953) that the “senses still recall?” (952). Tom Jones will never smell freshly churned earth without feeling the sensation of that morning after.
My mother has not smelled the world for me, and I do not live by the food she puts into her mouth. But she has in so many ways conditioned the way I interpret these first hand experiences. I cannot perceive blue headbands without relating them back to the one my mother used to wear; lilies smell like our house; and I do not relate to other people independently of the way my mother related to her son. Though “role models should not be expected to change the world” (Ryan Edwards) [italics mine], they do change our world. My mother certainly changed mine.
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