In what way were we trapped? where, our
mistake? what, where, how, when, what way, might all these things have been
different, if only we had done otherwise? if only we might have known. Where
lost that bright health of love that knew so surely it would stay; how, did it
sink away, beyond help, beyond hope, beyond desire, beyond remembrance; and
where the weight and the wealth of that strong year when there was more to eat
than we could hold, new clothes, a granfanola, and money in the bank? How, how
did all this sink so swift away, like that grand august cloud who gathers–the
day quiets dark and chills, and the leaves lather–and scarcely steams the land?
How are these things?
-
James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
*
* *
How
are these things? By what mechanism do they come to be? Where was the moment
the wheel came loose before popping off? What seed was inadvertently planted?
What weed came of it? How did intention and inattention become this?
There
is no answer, no true answer, just feints and eclipses and ellipses. We are
troubled by the answers we find because of their incompleteness. There is no
grand unifying theory of fucking it up, having it get fucked up and being
fucked. It is unique in its specifics, but I’ll suggest there is a thread–different
colored as the case may be–that runs along and through such questions. It is
this: the underlying premise that our lives are made meaningful by ease or
comfort or success or the good fortune to not be familiar with tragedy is
wrong. Our lives are not made meaningful by the pursuit of happiness, but by the
willingness to undergo the experience that is uniquely ours. It may or may not
hold much peace or quiet or love or relief. It may have all that in spades.
What is certain is it is yours to suss out and see what is there for you to
see, to learn, to forgive, to experience.
Sounds
grim. Lord knows it can be. But that, too, is a type of lie, a keeper on the
very experience you’re to wade into. Preconceiving, prejudging, allowing
circumstance to be the arbiter of what is possible for you is as crippling as
the saccharine mantras of self-help gurus who peddle a snake oil that, at its
root, blames you for not believing hard enough.
No,
the life in your hands has but one master: you. What you choose to believe, how you choose
to act, where you choose to go are
all under your control.
“Everything can be taken from a man but
one thing: the last of human freedoms - to choose one's attitude in any given
set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.”
What
is outside of that choice is the outcome, the very circumstance you find
yourself in, but to you goes the freedom to choose how you’ll experience your
life. This is the only truth to hang a hat on. Everything else you do, from
religion to politics to work to love to how you will experience your death,
flow from that one point. Culture and expectation may blind you to it, but it
is there waiting for you.
*
* *
Agee
wrote about tenant farmers in Alabama during the Depression. Impossibly hard
lives: subsistence farming, no education, crushing poverty and failing health
from overwork. Children died early and often. How could that be bearable? How
could the yoke of a nation’s indifference have a shred of meaning or purpose?
It would be easy to say they lived so Agee could write of them and haunt us
with their desolation, but that is facile. No, Agee took with him the
photographer Walker Evans to document these lives and if you can’t find the
meaning of these lives in the fury and righteous fire of Agee’s words, you’ll see
the inherent dignity of these lives in the photographs themselves. The
physical, the corporeal, the bent and withered bones themselves answer back: I
lived. I struggled. I didn’t choose my birth, but made my way.
Would
you switch your life for theirs? No. No one would. But that is beside the
point. We have but the life we have to see what can be made of our days.
Comparing it to the experience someone else is going through or has gone
through keeps you from seeing all there is for you to see. There are no
promises made about what that will be, only that it is yours to know.
*
* *
Things
sink swiftly away when we pay no attention, when we take their presence for
granted, when we make assumptions instead of taking the time to learn and know.
We do so, in part, because we fear what we might learn: a love shorn of its
wonder, a job reduced to paycheck to paycheck living or no job at all, a mole
ignored for fear it might be cancer. We tend to delusion, indifference and
being a victim as it is easier to skate by. Few things actually sink swiftly.
Mostly we lower our expectations for ourselves bit by bit until things are
threadbare.
But
there is a tonic, a cure: being awake to the life in your veins. That alone is
promised (for a while). The rest is up to you.
*
* *
“It is not likely for any of you, my
beloved, whose poor lives I have already betrayed, and should you see these
things so astounded, so destroyed, I dread to dare that I shall ever look into
your dear eyes again: and soon, quite soon now, in two years, in five, in
forty, it will all be over, and one by one we shall all be drawn into the
planet beside one another; let us then hope better of our children, and of our
children’s children; let us know, let us know
there is cure, there is to be an end to it, whose beginnings are long begun,
and in slow agonies and all deceptions clearing; and in the teeth of all hope
of cure which shall pretend its denial and hope of good use to men, let us most
quietly and in most reverent fierceness say, not by its captive but by its
utmost meanings:”
I
have lived and this is my story.
*
* *
I
wish you well.
__________
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