Sometimes I See Myself Fine…

Note: Let’s call this one “by request,” sort of. Some peo­ple with whom I’ve been cor­re­spond­ing wanted to know how my brain works and how it got that way. My response is an attempted abbre­vi­a­tion. For a fuller account, I refer you to the com­plete archives and all future posts of this very blog.

Every­thing is bro­ken. We have rav­aged the planet in ways that all but assure our own demise. In case some­how our glut­tony does not erad­i­cate us and we side­step the many small acci­dents that could crush our frail forms, we tire­lessly invent new and excit­ing ways to kill each other on pur­pose. Our abil­ity to com­mu­ni­cate is ham­pered by a short­age of mean­ing­ful pub­lic dis­course and a dwin­dling atten­tion span. The few who can still find beauty and respond to it are crushed by the many who are held rapt by mod­ern bread and cir­cuses, who per­ceive any chal­lenge to this unsus­tain­able way of life as an absolute indict­ment. Every move we make is check­mate. Every con­sci­en­tious act requires a bat­tered but will­ful opti­mism. Cor­mac McCarthy describes this world beau­ti­fully in Blood Merid­ian: “The truth about the world…is that any­thing is pos­si­ble. Had you not seen it from birth and thereby bled it of all its strange­ness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a med­i­cine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepop­u­late with chimeras hav­ing nei­ther ana­logue nor prece­dent, an itin­er­ant car­ni­val, a migra­tory tentshow whose ulti­mate des­ti­na­tion after many a pitch in many a mud­died field is unspeak­able and calami­tous beyond reck­on­ing.” My pre­oc­cu­pa­tion is with how to live in such a world.

I am bro­ken too. Empa­thy in the face of our pre­car­i­ous posi­tion feels like the only recourse, but it is crip­pling to expose myself to both the pain and the apa­thy of other peo­ple. Kurt Von­negut seems to con­cur: “There’s only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you’ve got to be kind” (from God Bless You, Mr. Rose­wa­ter). For those of us to whom the impulse toward kind­ness comes eas­ily, the reward is a gen­er­a­tive energy that smooths the bumpy road. Those of us who mis­trust the motives of other people’s kind­ness carry a con­stant, tax­ing wari­ness. I need all the energy I can muster.

We can­not make our way alone, and I look to the com­pan­ions in my life for many strengths. The song­writer Dar Williams says “I act like I have faith, and like that faith never ends, but I really just have friends.” I come from a large fam­ily, but I am not com­fort­able among them. Their fun­da­men­tal­ist world has no room for faith in any­thing other than God (or even other ways of wor­ship­ing the God they do accept), but I hold my friends as dear as any spir­i­tual guide. Dar also says, in the same song, “Some­times I see myself fine, some­times I need a wit­ness.” How­ever well I may think I know myself, it is impor­tant to me that the peo­ple with whom I share my life also know me. We can­not give each other the solace of kind­ness until we have tried to under­stand our­selves and each other.

It is a kind­ness to share our sto­ries, to help each other piece together our own mea­ger truths. This is why we write. Annie Dil­lard warns us: “[T]he impulse to keep to your­self what you have learned is not only shame­ful, it is destruc­tive. Any­thing you do not give freely and abun­dantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.” This may be why we bur­row into mem­ory, not to hide in the sand, but for clues that tell us how we should live. We have noth­ing else to share.

Know­ing each other isn’t as sim­ple as shar­ing our sto­ries. We get lost in the trans­la­tion, as Mar­i­lynne Robin­son observes in Gilead: “Every sin­gle one of us is a lit­tle civ­i­liza­tion built on the ruins of any num­ber of pre­ced­ing civ­i­liza­tions, but with our own vari­ant notions of what is beau­ti­ful and what is acceptable—which, I has­ten to add, we gen­er­ally do not sat­isfy and by which we strug­gle to live. We take for­tu­itous resem­blances among us to be actual like­ness, because those around us have also fallen heir to the same cus­toms, trade in the same coin, acknowl­edge, more or less, the same notions of decency and san­ity. But all that really just allows us to coex­ist with the invi­o­lable, intra­vers­a­ble, and utterly vast spaces between us.” Though per­cep­tion is fal­li­ble, even with some­one as artic­u­late as Robin­son telling the story, I choose to wel­come my peo­ple ‘round my own sput­ter­ing camp­fire instead of hold­ing them, sus­pect, at arm’s length.

Since mis­per­cep­tion is inevitable, any of my actions can have any mean­ing, depend­ing on who per­ceives them. What is truth to me might be anath­ema to some­one else. This does not stop any of us from seek­ing uni­ver­sal answers to the big ques­tions, often with results as absurd as the ques­tions them­selves. Dou­glas Adams had a par­tic­u­lar flair for demon­strat­ing this absur­dity. In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the answer to the great ques­tion of life, the uni­verse, and every­thing is revealed to be “forty-two.” The prob­lem, of course, is that we don’t know what the Great Ques­tion is.

Eric Tay­lor, a song­writer from Texas, thought the Great Ques­tion might be whether or not God exists, and he went look­ing for Him in the desert. Miles from civ­i­liza­tion, alone and still god­less at the end of his quest, one night he dug a fire pit and unearthed a baby blue Don­ald Duck dia­per pin buried in the sand. Is the dia­per pin God? He is unwill­ing to deny the pos­si­bil­ity. I wouldn’t like to guess either. Eric is prone to exag­ger­a­tion, and I’m not cer­tain any part of his story ever even took place. It wouldn’t mat­ter if it hadn’t. We still need fables, too. So much of the infor­ma­tion I receive is delib­er­ately misleading–processed through fil­ters of adver­tis­ing or par­ti­san pol­i­tics or false piety–that I think it becomes habit­ual to assume all infor­ma­tion is mis­lead­ing. Those who seek to share some­thing true with me have to work around this almost uncon­scious sus­pis­cion, skirt­ing the facts, if there are such things, to make another kind of point. “Trust me,” pleads Jeanette Win­ter­son in The Pas­sion, “I’m telling you sto­ries.” Like Eric, she then tells an absurd story in which the metaphor­i­cal becomes real—the nar­ra­tor is asked to reclaim a lover’s heart, which is in a lit­eral jar on a lit­eral shelf in the home of a for­mer lover. I trust sto­ries that are as askew as our off-kilter world. I don’t trust any­one claim­ing to have access to absolute truth.

It doesn’t help that the answers don’t have to make any sense. Walt Whit­man in “Song of Myself” issues this chal­lenge: “Do I con­tra­dict myself? Very well, then, I con­tra­dict myself; (I am large—I con­tain mul­ti­tudes.)” I’d like to be so com­fort­able with con­tra­dic­tions. In many ways I am, but I won­der: if I were truly at peace with the mul­ti­tudes, would I still be search­ing for answers? I think so—I think each new answer joins a cho­rus, which unlike those of Greek the­ater is unchore­o­graphed and inco­her­ent, some mem­bers jug­gling fire, some shout­ing Touret­tic from the stage, and some sit­ting with their knees pulled to their chests and blan­kets over their heads, rock­ing back and forth under the near­est tree.