During a snowstorm last winter the electricity went out. Put like this it seems completely normal, like saying: I got up this morning and brushed my teeth. Why not say this? But that wasn’t the way it felt: that’s the simple version, after the fact, when you’ve established causality.I’ve learned to say this because I do know some of the fundamental facts about houses and the lives we live in them. I know that electricity comes to the house and all that’s in it over wires I see strung by the sides of the roads. Most adults are aware of this, but children aren’t. If I were a child I would no sooner be able to give this short version from the outside than I would be able to diagnose as illness X or Y an unexplained feeling of tiredness, or internal bleeding.Alternately, I might live in a place that’s so frequently subject to power outages that this is something I take for granted as part of the fabric of life, as I take for granted the fact that periodically the car has to be filled up with gas to make it run, or its oil changed, or my teeth brushed. I drove my father’s car out of gas when I was a teen-ager, because I didn’t know that the tank was empty when the gauge showed 1/8 full: that too came as a surprise to me, but he had long since built this knowledge—fill the tank when it gets to the ¼ mark—into his daily routine.

            In retrospect, in fact, it seemed not so much surprise that the electricity had gone out that was the appropriate response, but a weary feeling of “of course”: we should almost have expected it. After the fact, it seemed logical that this snow would have caused the problems. We live in a wooded area that hadn’t had a big snowstorm in a while; it stood to reason the branches had grown back up since the last time anyone had had to be aware of them. It was wet snow that began as rain, perhaps this froze on branches and the weight of the snow took them down.

            But all this was after the fact, as after an accident that happens so fast you have no idea what hit you, or what you hit: only in the aftermath of things can you untangle the skein that didn’t seem tangled, and figure out what happened. Indeed, had the neighbor with the four-wheel drive not been obliged to go out and had he not phoned back the report of branches down, I might not have known exactly what had caused the problem for days. As it was, general knowledge enabled me to say “the electricity is out,” and blame the snow; I could go no further.

            Like all changes that affect routine, the electricity being out was something I only articulated slowly. I awoke that morning to a sense that I was colder than usual; I pulled the blankets up and went back to sleep. Later, when the sun had come up I got out of bed and tried to turn on a light in the bathroom: nothing. Then I understood. Still, it didn’t seem to me like a major disruption in routine. The few times when we’d had power outages they had been quite temporary. I figured that by the time the rest of the family was up we’d be back in business. In the meantime making do was more a game than anything else.

            Absolutely nothing worked except the human beings in the house. We have no backups for power outages in the form of propane stove or non-electric heater; our house is on a well with a pump, so that no water came from the faucets and, past the first flush, none went down the toilets. I knew enough not to open the freezer, but as it was cold outside I figured that things in the refrigerator could be put out on the porch, if need were. So I got milk and a bowl of cereal. At least the fireplace burned wood, I reflected. I made and lit a fire, though as I consumed the cereal didn’t think that much of the heat was reaching to the other side of the room.

            As for the tropical fish, their life or death would be determined by how long the electricity stayed off, something I couldn’t control. At that point, however, I was still being optimistic: surely this wouldn’t last for long.I tried to go through the things we normally did, categorizing them into “can do” and “can’t do.” We could breathe, dress, eat, and use the toilets. We couldn’t get water, flush the toilets, stay warm without getting dressed in multiple layers or cook complicated food past left-overs. It was like looking at things from the outside, as if a Martian, all actions spread on the table and re-classified rather than merely being things in one path or another we didn’t think about—rather like packing for a trip, where it’s necessary to visualize all the things one will do and get the pajamas, bathrobe, swim suit, and multiple socks that ordinarily we wouldn’t have to think about as either we don’t use them in our normal lives or they’re ready to hand and don’t have to be thought about.

            And then the family awoke.

            We discussed the situation, dressed the children warmly, determined that we weren’t getting out of our driveway that sloped up to the road, told the children not to flush the toilet—which they chose to understand as saying to flush the toilet. We hadn’t stored water to flush the toilets, and it was only later that someone told us we could drain the hot water heater to get water for such things. For now, we knew we could continue to use the toilets without flushing them.  And then we got on with our lives, knowing that we could at least dress them in their multi-layered snow clothes and go out to play: this was a first large snowfall that Owen, 3, remembered, and certainly it was so for his younger brother. We would be fine.

            At this point we still didn’t know why the electricity was off, though we remembered seeing what had looked like lightning in the middle of the night, when we had both been awakened by strange noises outside: later we heard that a “transformer had blown up,” though we did not know what this meant. To say that it was “the snow” was the closest we could come, the way you decide that that tired feeling is “something going around,” or “something you caught from the children, who were coughing last week.”

            There were some victories: I realized I could heat leftovers for lunch in the fireplace: we had a pot that could be put directly in the fire, and I found a way to remove its rubber handle-guard, which otherwise would have melted and gone up in stinking smoke. We finally got the telephone to act normally. The alarm system had begun to hemorrhage in some odd way; there was a high-pitched ringing we almost thought was imaginary until we left the room it was strongest in and suddenly the world was mercifully silent. We managed to get through to the alarm people, who informed us it was the backup battery, and told us how to disconnect it.

            We did go out to play in the snow; this was a moderate success, as our snowman was at best rudimentary and the children’s hands got cold despite their gloves, little blocks of red ice protruding from multiple layers of puffed clothing.

            And the day wore on. We had several gallons of water in the basement, which though it tasted funny we were using. Of course bathing was out of the question; this early in the day in any case it wasn’t an issue. We established contact with the neighbors, heard about the branches, discussed the extent of the outage—extensive, so we concluded that the electric company had to know about things. But what if everyone thinks that way? We asked. I called the number in the telephone book (this was all on a Sunday) and got a recorded message saying to call back during business hours. Clearly nothing was going to happen today.

            During this period, automatic actions had become problematic, things we had taken for granted had come to the foreground and become challenges by themselves, many of which we simply lost. Getting clean was no longer the automatic background action that served as a means to other things; it had become the main thing. How to get hot water? I figured out I could remove the rubber cover from the pan’s handle and put it in the corner of the fireplace next to the burning wood. In a few minutes the water was boiling; I diluted it with some of the stored water we still had—only a few gallons—and took a sponge bath with a cup, squatting in the tub. Were there sources of food beyond the left-overs? Perhaps the boxes of protein bars in the cellar? But we weren’t that desperate, yet. Others had food; we could go out to eat once the roads were cleared.

            It was the coming to the fore of background that had suddenly become foreground that was so unnerving about this.

            Several years before I had stepped off a curb and, within 24 hours, developed a leg cramp so severe it took me literally five minutes to ease myself out of bed. I could barely drive. I dragged myself to the doctor and was misdiagnosed as having a pulled something. But as an added insurance, the doctor gave me a prescription for some physical therapy.  Within hours I had dragged myself to the therapist, who told me I had pulled nothing. He worked on me and after a single session I was considerably better. After three sessions it seemed like a bad dream, evaporating into the morning.

            That, I thought, must be what it feels like to be old, where even normal motion becomes problematic. Or infirm, or ill—all words we use to describe this strange inversion of background and foreground.

            Yet inversion isn’t the right word either. The strangest thing was to realize that until it comes to the fore, background does not in a sense even exist: that’s the taken-for-granted part. The ability to brush teeth, flush the toilet, get food out of the refrigerator—all these aren’t the main show, only things that allow the main show.

            What it suggested is that nothing we say about life can be held to be true, since it’s always possible we’re simply not seeing the things we take for granted that an abrupt alteration will bring to the fore. Wittgenstein says, “The world of the happy man is not the same as the world of the unhappy man.” This suggests the troubling possibility that each person has a different view of things—a discovery much exploited in early twentieth-century art forms. Yet the lesson of the snowstorm is far more unsettling. We can at least seem to see, simultaneously, the world-views of the happy and unhappy men, or the four views of the same robbery in Rashomon: we stand outside all four.

            But the realization that we’re never aware of background until it becomes foreground, which is something we can’t predict—that is beyond our ability to line things up and see the whole thing. We don’t know what we’re not seeing while we’re not seeing it.

            

 

The world is buoyed up by the fact that it is what is: the default of existence is consonance, not dissonance. We can justify or prove or discover any particular thing, but we all this is on as-needed basis, which means, a situation of lack arises. For every one thing we demand an explanation for, there are an infinity of things we don’t. So we can’t explain everything, and while we are explaining one thing, we fail to explain everything else.

Though the default of our existence is consonance, its fabric is one of dissonance. Every act of naming, explaining, discovering, thinking about or altering the world presupposes a rift in the lute, as Tennyson had it, a crack or a moment of friction. Perfect consonance would be like floating in a hot tub of brine that buoys us up: it’s warm, it’s womb-like, and we merely are. But this doesn’t happen often, and it doesn’t last too long. We do not glide forward in life, we negotiate forward with fits and starts, sometimes through a thorny way. But we solve specific problems, not all problems, give specific answers, not all answers.

We discover we were wrong, and we correct the error; we can question any particular belief, but doing so takes time, and precludes us from questioning others. The real is all there is, but we can alter that real by taking detours into the unreal: the not-yet, or never-will-be-real realm that doesn’t exist but that somehow allows us to alter what does. The daily mysterious is the fact that the world is what it is: the red car passing as I write isn’t a blue one, and it is driven along a specific course. We can paint that car blue and drive a different course, but the world then contains the before, the after, and the in between. All this is what is.

Conceptualization is the basis of thought: it allows us to break the bond between the world of sensations in which we find ourselves at any given moment and to visualize alternatives. And this in turn allows us to change the world. Identifying a brown blur as a leaf allows us to figure out it’s stuck to our glasses, perhaps in a gale, and make us realize we have to reach up and pull it off. Calling a leaf a “leaf” allows us to see it as one of a type of object that is related to other leaves, and that, like other leaves, has certain qualities in common with them. (It doesn’t matter if these common qualities are the result of “family resemblance” or equal connection to a Platonic Idea.)

Conceptualization, such as calling this thing a “leaf,” or water “water” (the latter the “miracle” of William Gibson’s play about Annie Sullivan and Helen Keller, The Miracle Worker) is the basis of explanation, which is at least two levels of abstraction beyond where we are: explanation is a parallel set of facts more general than the individual thing we have identified. We conceptualize to call the sensation we have a “headache” (of course “sensation” is already a conceptualization) and abstract beyond that to suggest or repeat that our headache is caused by X in our brain. We can’t conceptualize this whole process: it’s something we do, except that this suggests that “we” and “do” are logically prior to anything else. What’s the motion of motion? Stillness.

We only ask for explanations for the things for which we do so, which means things we want explained. Our default is lack of explanation. Asking for explanation occurs as the result of aberrations, when something is not what we expect. We don’t ask for an explanation of why my bed is still under me in the morning, since that’s what’s supposed to happen and we’ve very likely never even conceived of anything else happening, nor why tuna fish cans contain tuna, since that’s just what they are and what they do. More likely, we would ask why this can that says it’s got tuna doesn’t, or why I wake up with the bed gone. If a child asks for a treat we don’t ask why; more likely is to ask what’s wrong if he refuses one.  Explanation is the furthest layer at any given point, which doesn’t mean it will always be so. We may not be able to say what causes the cause, and typically don’t ask: explanation goes a layer at a time, and is offered on as as-needed basis, with lack of need being the default.

If we ask why we have headaches, we have to look and experiment: we can’t make something up. Let’s say we discover that it’s because the brain releases X: when X is released we get headaches, when it isn’t we don’t. We do studies to make sure this is causality rather than correlation (though coming up with these usually requires ingenuity). But finally we have it. At this point we stop, at least for now, because is the question we wanted to answer. We don’t ask “why?” in a monotonous string, like a child. What’s the explanation for the release of X? At this point it’s not even clear what this question means, as it seems an example of the infinity of questions we don’t want to answer at any given point, such as: what is the meaning of my sandwich? Huh? The questions we ask at any given time are a tiny fraction of those we could; perhaps at some time even this last question would make sense (as we’d say) enough to really try and answer it. Now we brush it aside. And the history of ideas or of philosophy is the trail of the relatively few questions we have asked and had arguments about: we know how the arguments go, as we do not know how the argument over the  meaning of my sandwich goes.

But at some point, if we had a reason, we could ask why the brain does things in this way. The sort of answer we could eventually give can vary: a valid explanation is one we accept, it’s not a certain sort of content. And we can explain anything we do, even this process—only we cannot, until we have done so, explain what allows us to explain. And while we are doing this, we are failing to explain an infinity of other things. Life is bigger than anything within it.

Think of all the blades of grass in any lawn. Most people want only the sensation of “lawn,” of a green carpet. But if we look closer, we see that there are worlds between every two blades, and three blades of grass in a row will make a symphony of near- but not absolute symmetries, little bending uprights that echo each other without being completely congruent, some leaning over others, a symphony of verdant scimitars. Paying attention to only one square foot of any normal lawn could take us a lifetime. Sane people, however, can’t afford to spend their lives contemplating the blades of grass under their feet: we simply ignore the fact that the world is full of particulars, refusing to let it bother us.

Still, this unrecognized murmur of unperceived particulars is tapped over and over. It’s the reservoir from which things we do notice surge.

For example, in the sudden April snow on the woods behind my house, which I see in the breaking daylight as I jump rope on the back deck. All the branches, not yet fleshed out with proper leaves but disfigured in a green haze by buds, are outlined in a thin set of white lines, the snow not enough to accumulate but enough to accent. I see all the trees, the curvature of the ground, the trees that have fallen, with their roots up in the air like women in hoop skirts, roots meant to anchor the trees vertically to the ground but rendered non-functional by horizontality: the sun glimmers behind other houses, whitening the white.

Yet it’s only chance that had me up at that hour, chance that had me, or probably anyone, notice this. I can take the attitude that it’s a good thing I was up. At least someone noticed it; somehow, it seems, this wasn’t in vain on the part of the world. It almost seems as if I’ve saved the day, or at least the morning: I’ve been conscious of this virtuosity on the part of the world. I’m conscious of the “save”: I got to see this after all. By the same token, the narrowness of the save—the fact that I’m not usually up at this hour at all—reminds me that most of the world goes unperceived. The fact of so much of what seems waste can remind me that little of it is saved” in this sense, which ought to make me question whether the saving has a point, given that it’s so rare. If I need to see the world to save it from non-being, that doesn’t bode well for most of the world: after all, I’m not usually around. Indeed, nobody is, and somehow the world goes on producing these things, which may seem therefore wasted, like meals lovingly prepared that no one eats, that simply spoil and are thrown away.

The Russian Formalist theoretician Victor Shklovsky thought that a lot of the world spoiled in this sense. He was horrified by a passage in Tolstoy’s diary noting that when he, Tolstoy went to dust the table, he couldn’t remember if he had or hadn’t. Tolstoy is shaken with the existential feeling that the unnoticed is the unoccurred: we alone cause the world to have been, a later echo of Bishop Berkeley: esse est percipi, to be is to be perceived. Shklovsky echoes his feeling.

The solution to this horrible situation, Shklovsky suggested, was to notice the world. He believed that it was only artists who made people notice the world. Hence his famous conclusion that “Art makes the stone stoney.” Unnoticed, the world simply isn’t. His conclusion is that art and artists are necessary for any of the world to be at all, to be saved from oblivion.

But Shklovsky was wrong about the middle term of his reasoning, the assertion that noticing only takes place in art. It can also take place in what I’m calling the aesthetic sense of life. I noticed the dusting of snow on my trees as the sun rose, and need never have tried to make art from this. Whether or not I try and transmit this perception to others is a subsequent decision that has nothing to do with the noticing, but we speak of art only if I do decide to make this attempt.

It’s also a mistake to think that the world is producing finished meals that somehow we have to show up for; if we don’t they’re thrown away. In fact, it’s only when we show up that there’s a meal. What causes the noticing to happen is an effect not of the world itself but of what we, the perceiver, are familiar with. The woods in the snow made an impression because it looked so different than it usually does. That’s what we notice: a situation where we can establish commonality (same woods, same place) but also are aware of differences: how the trees looked in the snow vs. how they looked outside. For the same reason we think the world transfigured in the spring when, as in Washington as I write, the world is turned to frothing pink, with all the ornamental cherry trees all over the center of the city in gushing bloom. But if this were the norm, the way green leaves are, we’d presumably not notice them even if we saw them—or only the way we do the green leaves, occasionally, the sky dark, the air sweet-smelling, or in their first, pale green phase that itself looks so different from the norm. Green is no less startling a color than pink, only we’re used to it.

Interest is produced by variations from the norm: the fact that I have the background of woods without snow in comparison with woods with snow look interesting. Or the light of full day in comparison with which the faint glimmer of dawn is interesting.

It’s true that all the things we liked, we noticed. However we tend to draw a false converse: if we could notice them all, we’d like them all. I fact, we’d simply be overwhelmed, which is why we fail to notice most things to begin with. It might be interesting, as an artwork, to take photographs of the same three blades of grass in my lawn over a period of time. But if we did this with the next three, and the next three, and the next three, people would turn away. Interest isn’t “fair”: it doesn’t mean the world is this interesting, in fact the opposite—that one thing being interesting presupposes many things that aren’t.

Let’s say we could get all the six billion people on the Earth busy noticing for every minute of their waking time. Or create another six billion whose job was merely to notice. Why would that be better? They’re all busy noticing; who notices that they notice? How would that valorize the world? Would we be sure that even then we’d scratched the surface of things to notice in the world? And for that matter, the most fundamental question of all is this: in what way, beyond my own pleasure, have I “saved” the world by noticing it? Perhaps the world doesn’t care to be noticed.

A letter to the household hints columnist “Heloise” provides a paradigm for the way our knowledge of the world alters over time. A reader writes to say that of course everyone knows that putting some lemon juice or citrus on fresh-cut fruit keeps it from turning brown and enhances the taste. For those who may find themselves momentarily without a lemon or lime, however, she recommends using powdered lemonade mix, which has the same effect.

This is a good example of lateral thinking: if a lemonade isn’t available, try using lemonade mix. The problem is, someone trying this out might discover it doesn’t work. I’m not convinced, as it is, that powdered “lemonade” mix has much to do with lemons. It seems likely to me it’s nothing but chemicals. In fact, one of them may be an acid that produces the tartness of chemical lemonade, but I’d guess that it’s not the same acid that’s in lemons—assuming that’s what produces the brown discoloration of cut fruit.

Putting ourself in the position of the person in the kitchen who’s been told that lemons prevent cut fruit from turning brown, we can see the logic of moving from lemons to lemonade mix. It might or might not work, as someone wise to the ways of the mass-market food preparation world would be aware, since many things which bear the names of natural products have nothing to do with those products. If all we need to know is that lemons produce the effect we want, that’s what we know: lemons produce this effect. It’s only if we have to substitute something for lemons, lemons (say) being unavailable, or if something goes wrong that we look for an “explanation” of what causes lemons to have this effect. We don’t ask for a more precise “explanation” than the explanation we already have unless the one we have fails to work or must in some way be generalized.

Because the properties of citrus fruit is not virgin territory, it seems likely that the active ingredient is an acid of some sort, this being the most remarkable quality of lemons. It probably suffices to ask someone with a degree in nutrition to get the answer. An educated guess would suggest that there is some acid in powdered lemonade that produces the same result, though not necessarily the same one as what we call citric acid in lemons. Something produces the “tang” in powdered lemonade. If we isolate this, we can ask what other sources contain it. Perhaps it’s not powdered lemonade at all, but other household items or prepared foods. We can suggest other things that seem to belong to this same family—though in fact for our purposes they may not. Perhaps vinegar has the same result—though we would understand that taste issues would be the reason why this is not generally suggested as an alternative. But perhaps a splash, with lots of sugar, in an emergency…

In any questioning situation, there is a layer of what we have and the layer of “explanation” we are looking for in order to bring the world into focus. The explanation is an explanation with respect to the layer we have; it itself might require its own explanation some day. For someone with an unlimited supply of lemons, knowing that “lemons prevent fruit from turning brown” may itself be the explanation, the response to a child that asks, “Grandma, why are you squeezing lemons on the peaches?” “Lemons” in general and “fruit” in general are already explanations with respect to these lemons, these peaches.

In simple cases like this, it’s likely we already collectively have the answers to questions like, what is it in lemons that keeps peaches, or any fruit, from turning brown (not all fruit turns brown, so this too is something we might want explained: which fruit turns brown and why?). We have only to ask.

It’s not absolutely necessary that we find ourselves without lemons before we ask this question, though this is likely to be the impetus. It’s perfectly possible that someone idly wondering might ask, Is there anything else that can have this effect? This is the mind-set of what we call “pure science”; people who set about looking for explanations for things we don’t have an immediate need for. But later on, suddenly, people might well need this explanation, say if the lemon supply dries up.

The explanations we come up with are always the generic ones of the order of “lemons cause fruit to stay fresh.” They are generic by contrast with subsequent explanations. The explanation we come up with always seems more specific, seems to fit exactly the hole we want to fill. Only it’s always possible that this itself will have to be refined; what seemed a perfect fit no longer is a perfect fit.

Now we say, it’s not lemons that cause this effect, it’s the acid in the lemons (i.e. not the rind, not the color, not the shape, not even the fact of its being a fruit). We’ve refined our statement. Science is the process of helping us get to the more refined statement, not the statement itself. When we had lemons, saying that “lemons” cause this effect was satisfactory: to us it seemed as if this explanation filled the hole we had. There’s no guarantee that circumstances will continue to leave us satisfied with a statement, however. We can be satisfied by saying that “acid” or “acid X” causes this effect. But perhaps the day will come when the fruit fails to be kept from browning when we apply what we take to be another source of this acid, or a pure form from the laboratory. At that point we may realize it wasn’t the acid itself, it was some property of the acid, or this acid in these circumstances.