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.
