One among us striking at the root

"...and to live among monsters is to live on the edge of hell." - Kenneth Burke

 

 

From her, I receive dispatches. These reports I would craft into parables as if each were a lesson rather than a summons. By transforming them into arcs of hope perhaps her stories will not break me. But they should. And I should let them. Not only break, but shatter.

 

"...The more we remind ourselves to think positively, the more immersed we are in the business of denying our despair at the struggles we see around us. We decide to move far enough to the edge of our culture to see it clearly. What is the norm and normal does not serve us well. Many of us have tried to live a "normal" life, and how is that going? I have taken vows that I have broken, I have hurt people that I have loved, and there is no self talk that will change that. If I can accept these struggles in myself, then my chances of seeing the struggles of others compassionately increases. This means we have to be abnormal and imperfect. We have to be willing to see clearly and to question what others seem to condone...."

- Peter Block, The Answer to How is Yes

 

 

So, she tells me, this night, in this city, there is a child with cause to fear her father. This fear she has in common with her mother as she has in common with her mother the same father.

Now: how is it I can think of anything else? I do, of course, but how is it that I do?
 

I recall a night when I was a child coming to an epiphany. The word for it came much later, but what came that night as I wondered if anyone else was laying awake in the dark was a certain, laughing realization that of course there were others. If not in the house, then somewhere. A somewhere that night that expanded beyond the house and out into a world that I knew to be round, where the sun was always somewhere rising and somewhere setting. A big thought.
 

Then came a bigger thought. Somewhere someone was getting up and someone was going to bed somewhere. Someone was eating breakfast. Someone lunch. Someone dinner. Right then. All this was happening. Even when I slept, it all was happening. All the time, somewhere. All the time we have in a day and all the things we do in a day was happening somewhere.
 

Not that night, but some other night: Somewhere all the things that happen to us is happening. Someone being born. Someone dying. All manner of births. All the ways we die. All the things we do to each other, somewhere is being done. Somewhere all the things we say to each other is being said by someone to someone. On and on.

Not that night, but yet another night: All the time, all the time we have and all we do or are is happening, now. There are so many of us that all of what we are must be happening somewhere. An incomprehensible din of all of it.
 

Not that night, but later: Only god could comprehend it. All creation happens at once. In any moment, all is available for review. All virtue. All sin. All the time. One constant hiss of everything, always. What more could god possibly need? What is god waiting for?
 

"...A demon denies time, change, growth, dialectic, and says at every moment: This can't go on! Yet it goes on, it lasts, if not forever, at least a long time....(Reasonable sentiment: everything works out, but nothing lasts. Amorous sentiment: nothing works out but it keeps going on.)

To acknowledge the Unbearable: this cry has its advantage: signifying to myself that I must escape by whatever means, I establish within myself the martial theater of Decision, of Action, of Outcome. Exaltation is a kind of secondary profit from my impatience; I feed on it....

Once the exaltation has lapsed, I am reduced to the simplest philosophy: that of endurance....I suffer without adjustment, I persist without intensity: always bewildered, never discouraged; I am a Daruma doll, a legless toy forever poked and pushed, but finally regaining its balance....This is what we are told by a folk poem which accompanies the Japanese dolls: Such is life/Falling over seven times/And getting up eight."

 

 

- Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse

 

 

 And that's how I do it - think of anything else. Baffling reminiscence. Brooding "archetypes of instrumentality and desire."
 

So, she tells me, this night, in this city, there is a child with cause to fear her father. This fear she has in common with her mother as she has in common with her mother the same father.
 

In Walden, Thoreau writes, "There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root."
 

This night, in this city, she is striking at the root.
 

____________________

(originally posted elsewhere April 4, 2010)