“Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul. When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy is restored. We are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again.”
- Anne Lamott
Tag Archives: meaning
Up Too Early
Tonight I dreamed I was being chased by Uzi-spraying gangsters. Actually they were after my friend, but since they saw me in the car with her they decided to kill me, too. While I was trying to get back to sleep, I started thinking about a story or two, and that pretty much doomed any effort to get back to sleep. So here we are.
It’s ten years since the attacks on Washington and New York. I don’t have much to add to all the remembrance, commemoration, and analysis of the day. I will probably watch some of the coverage on TV, and I will certainly skip most of it. I mean no disrespect by that. There is a finite limit to my ability to recall pain and grief, and there are no more words to encompass it all than there were ten years ago. So I’ll keep this short.
Most of the people who died on that clear blue Tuesday morning died for no reason. The first responders who gave their lives died because there are brighter stars than self, even if we can’t all see them. But the rest – accountants, IT techs, part-time actors, insurance agents, dentists, the whole diverse lot caught in the web of “wrong place, wrong time” – died because someone wanted to make a point, and wanted to punctuate it with strangers’ lives.
It’s up to us to make what we will of all that. No higher power is going to reach down with shadowy hands to give us a message in the charred stone and twisted steel. We can write the same words again in bigger letters and fresher blood. Or we can wash the wounds, clean the stone, and straighten the steel.
But What Kind of Stuff?
This probably comes as no surprise, but I don’t trust optimism. I have some relentlessly optimistic friends, who (as much as I love them) make me uncomfortable. It’s my issue, not theirs, so I try to keep it to myself. There’s nothing wrong with optimism. I just don’t find it a compelling viewpoint. Everything works out for the best? The universe wants me to be happy? The sun will come out tomorrow? Sure. There’s bound to be a pony in there somewhere, son – keep digging!
On the other hand, I’m also not fond of pessimism. I can’t see going through life expecting to be disappointed, counting on failure, and waiting for the worst. What kind of awful way is that to live? I think even at my most depressed I find it hard to call that rational or healthy. I just can’t get behind the “people are no damn good” idea because, well, I’m people and so is almost everyone I love. I’d prefer not to tell myself “you suck” any more than is strictly necessary. And anyone telling my friends they suck has me to answer to.
So where does that leave me? I’m not sure. I’d like to say I float like a leaf on the wind, expecting nothing, but that’s not true. Sometimes I’m more depressed, which inclines me to think that
- It’s all about me.
- I suck sometimes.
- Therefore everything around me sucks and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
I know. Not rational, not healthy. In my brighter moments, which I’m working to extend, I can reject that as obviously ridiculous. But it still happens sometimes.
Other times I’m more upbeat. I don’t know that I’m ever Polyanna von Pangloss, but at least I can find ways in which I don’t suck and things aren’t about me. Good stuff happens. Bad stuff happens. Some people are good, some people are bad. The universe is indifferent to it all.
What bugs me is the way optimism bugs me. I get my dislike for pessimism: it’s such a small, fearful, self-defeating way of life. I laugh at pessimists: silly rabbits! Optimists, on the other hand, are like dull pencils scratching away on paper. (My version of nails on chalkboards.) But what’s really wrong with optimism? Why not look at the bright side? Why not expect the best and brightest from everyone? What’s wrong with that?
I don’t know. I know it gets under my skin. I know I want to burst their bubble, but I don’t because it’s just cruel – like telling a kid there’s no Santa. And it’s not my place to impose my point of view. They’ve got as much reason to believe as I have to doubt. The only bubble there is the idea that there’s a bubble.
It reminds me of the kid on 9/11. I watched the news the whole day, like many of us did, and when the local evening news came on they were looking at local angles on the horror. They sent a reporter to a nearby Christian school to see what the kids thought about it all. They interviewed a young man, maybe 14 or 15, who said that it was a horrible tragedy but that ultimately it was all part of God’s plan and would work out for the best.
I was almost as angry with him as I was with the hijackers. The best his all-knowing, all-seeing, all-powerful God can do is a plan that includes mass murder? It’s not much of a plan. Given those resources, I’m confident I could find a better way: when you’re the one making the rules, the game gets pretty easy. I was furious. It was deeply offensive to me to see someone try to find a positive approach to all that pain and horror. I felt like it minimized it. Be glad, victims, it’s all going to work out fine. No, Johnny, Daddy won’t be coming home again – but that’s okay, because it’s going to work out fine in some undefined future way.
Maybe that’s it. Other people want to feel like suffering has meaning. Pain without meaning is just pointless. And that’s not the kind of world most people want to live in. They want an answer that’s a little clearer that “42“. That meaning helps them understand and accept what’s happened. It squares with their sense of a fundamentally just universe. Maybe they don’t see the justice now, but they believe it will come and everything will make sense and all the suffering will be justified. It’s faith in a very Pauline sense: “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen“.
And that’s where I stumble. I don’t have a lot of faith. I prefer something closer to “Доверяй, но проверяй“. I believe the sun will rise tomorrow because it’s more likely than than the earth ceasing to rotate on its axis. I believe “the official version” instead of any of the CT kookeries not because I’m a “sheeple” and won’t believe my government could do anything wrong. We’ve all seen enough now to know better, and I’m not an idiot: I trust, but I verify. It’s because it’s more likely that terrorists armed with box cutters hijacked airliners and crashed them into buildings than it is that there was a whole elaborate conspiracy to make us think so.
Pessimists don’t have faith. They’re like the militant atheists who want religion to shrivel up and blow away. (It won’t, and it shouldn’t.) I can identify with them to some extent because I’m an atheist, but they take it too far for me and they stop making sense beyond that point. I’m enjoying myself in the water, and they’re over there critiquing everyone’s strokes while they dogpaddle in the deep end.
But optimists come at the world from a totally different place, someplace totally foreign to me. As much as I can try to understand it intellectually, it has no emotional resonance for me. In fact, it’s actually dissonant: without faith, I don’t know of a way to reconcile all the pain and suffering in the world with the idea of some Greater Benevolence. And I know the pain and suffering exist. So when I try to understand optimism in my faithless way, it makes no sense to me. It looks like a willful obstinacy, a self-blinded refusal to look at what’s plainly right in front of us because it’s not pretty or pleasant.
I can’t really criticize optimists for their rose-tinted glasses. Mine are equally tinted to block out faith. (What color is faith? Aquamarine? Marigold? Not cobalt, I hope. I would miss cobalt.) We all have a shade or two missing from our personal spectra. The only way to compensate for that is to recognize it.
Apocalypse How?
I’ve seen too much arguing at That Other Place lately. It bothers me – there are Tea Partiers and knee-jerk Obamacrats and Holocaust deniers and who knows how many others slugging it out over there 24-7. I don’t mind a good discussion. A little debate can be fun, and I’ve had my mind changed by others’ arguments plenty of times.
But then someone takes it a little farther. Someone gets scornful and says “if you can’t take the heat, get out of the kitchen”. (News flash: the oven has many settings. Also it’s not the only tool in the kitchen.) Someone gets bent out of shape because the stakes are too high – we can’t afford to worry about the thoughts and feelings of those on the other side of the aisle. Niceties like courtesy and respect are time-wasters, right?
It’s the end of the world as we know it, every day, all day. And the only people who feel fine are the adrenalin junkies who live for the black-and-white absolutism of the apocalypse.
Let’s be crystal clear on something: not one thing you do matters. You and I and everyone else are completely meaningless and irrelevant in the cosmic sense. You can’t so much as erase a single atom, so where do you get off thinking that the universe will be the least bit changed by what you do? If the world really is on the brink of destruction, are you really so arrogant as to think that you can stop it all on your own? If you really have that kind of impact, aren’t you more than a little culpable for letting things slide this far?
Good or bad, weak or strong, noble or base, you and everything you’ve done will be forgotten in a thousand years. And that’s the very least twitch toward the blink of an eye in cosmic terms. You can’t stop the sunrise. Your words won’t add one bit of warmth to the entropic cold. Your will hasn’t the strength to stay the fall of a leaf on the breeze.
Nothing you do is going to change one single thing about the universe.
And none of that matters. Irrelevance is irrelevant. In a cosmic sense, the stakes are so low that the very idea of risk is ridiculous. Your life and death will do nothing for or against the universe.
So if nothing we do matters, then all that matters is what we do. Choice defines us, not chance – not even the random fact of our own existence. Whatever happens, the stakes are no higher or lower than we make them. Set the bar where it suits you and stop blaming circumstance.
So suck it up and be civil. Mean-spirited “red meat” snark isn’t funny. It’s pathetic. It’s childish. It’s simple-minded schoolyard bullying. Angry comics with nothing to say but “fuck you, you look ridiculous ” stop being funny once you grow up. I don’t care what high motives you claim to justify your desire to swing that sword, you still have a weapon in your hand. Try putting it down – and that doesn’t mean pick up a megaphone instead. Two ears, one mouth – “let him who has ears listen”, not “let him who has a yap keep flapping it”.
And for frak’s sake stop carrying that ideological torch. Yes, it’s throwing off heat and shining light. That’s mostly from all the bridges you’ve burned. Liberty carries a torch to illuminate, not to incinerate. Imagine someone who insists that the world is all red and violet. No orange, no yellow, no green, blue, or indigo. Now tell me how that’s not just as ridiculous as insisting on a black and white view. Wake up and smell the high-def, friends.
Everybody seriously needs to dial it back a notch.
Writing a Different Story
I’m still dealing with the loss of Gizmo. It’s not something I dwell on or think about a lot, so it’s not like I’m sitting around sobbing every day. But it still hurts to think of him, and I still miss being able to cuddle him when I come home.
The hardest part for me is the memories. I have about eight years’ worth of memories to choose from, and I keep replaying the worst ones in my mind. Those last awful hours are burned in my brain. Some of what I saw and heard and felt that night will haunt me. I worry that I’m only going to remember that – that all I’m going to carry with me from my time with my beloved cat will be that horrible helpless feeling of watching him die and the ache of loss that sits at the bottom of my heart like a dark deep pool.
I felt much the same way about Taffy’s death for years. I used to imagine her last few moments as a combination of some of my own worst nightmares: abandoned, confused, powerless, and drowning. Then a wise friend helped me find another way. I’d written a bad end for her in my mind when I could write it better. For all I know she drifted off peacefully and fell into the pool. Write a different story, she told me. And she was right.
That’s what I’m trying to do with Gizmo. I remember the sweet, adorable way he would rub his head in the crook of my arm when I picked him up. I remember playing the edge of the bed game: I’d lie on the bed while he sat on the floor, then I’d peek at him over the edge and pull back quickly. He’d reach up and swat me with his paw – I was never anywhere near quick enough to get away, and after a couple rounds of this he’d jump up after me. I remember how much he loved sleeping under the Christmas tree. I remember him climbing up in my lap while I was trying to read and basically shoving my book out of the way. I remember him sitting on my chest while I lay on the couch.
I’m never going to forget what happened that night. But just because it’s the end of my time with him doesn’t mean it has to define my time with him.
