What the heck is with all these people who don’t see the world the same way I do? There are so many examples, from the personal to the political (especially the political, but we won’t go there…) where I find myself thinking, ‘what a fucking idiot!’
To demonstrate, I’ve picked out a fairly innocuous example that happened yesterday. Try following along as I do a sort of bad Joycian stream of tutti-frutti-ness of my thought process:
I’m browsing the latest issue of The Georgia Review. I find this essay, The Art of Looking Down by Rebecca Emlinger Roberts [pdf file]. I’m reading … reading … Here’s a bit from it:
… To live with chronic disease is to learn to be artful in a most unceremonious way, simply to think through the moves that get a person going: tying shoes, climbing hills, walking on sand, getting out of bed, getting on the plane.
… Such are the perversities of the mind as it conforms to the pressures of disease. The second joint of each of my thumbs droops like a tired flag; my fingers cross and curl; there are unintended bumps and swellings. Still, I own them: they are my hands, my fingers. Something is in me, in us — in those of us whose bodies do not match our illusions — that is willing to take in the orphaned parts, that impels us to preserve the integrity of the whole. Thus does the self attempt to make of the will and the flesh a unified being.
This might be art.
Oh, that’s good. Profound. Deep. I really like what she’s saying, and, by extension, I like her. Feeling all warm and fuzzy — connected, if you will, to the phantom of Ms. Roberts. I go on reading her essay:
… I have learned — after years of rheumatoid-induced joint erosions, after replacements of both hips and knees in surgeries stitching up but never quite replacing the precision of the originals, and after years of falling — the art of looking at the ground.
… Art: resistance, compliance, compliance, resistance. And so I look down. But I don’t want to look down. I want to look up: at the sky, at birds in flight; this is not natural; this is unfair. The ground is the ground: homely, uninspiring, empty of focus. What’s to look at down there? The ground is where grubs live, where serpents crawl — the sinner’s reward. The ground is bleak and brown and hard and yields only to our shovels, our machinery — never to our souls. It is penurious; it is caustic and brutal and faceless.
The ground. Where’s the dream in it?
Jeeeezus. What a fucking idiot! What the hell does she know? The ground, the earth is down. You know, mother earth??? Life?? All that good stuff like plants and bugs and rocks … (and about, oh, 80% of my photography). Get out of yourself, lady. Open your fucking eyes. Note — of course, I would never actually call her a fucking idiot out loud. Only in my head — which phrase I apply at least a dozen times a day to various people; and about half the time I’m talking about myself as in “you fucking idiot” as I drip, crash, and generally do my cow-in-the-china-shop thing.
So I back button out of her page on The Georgia Review web site and click on the next essay. It’s Forms and Structures by Stephen Dunn and in it, I ponder this sentence, “Either we’re working within chosen confines, our details pressing up against the boundaries and those boundaries pressing back, or we’re seeking those confines that will hold in place our wanderings. Or both. Each presents its own demands and opportunities.” At the time, I couldn’t decide what I thought of that one, though, now, in the context of this post, it seems kind of funny. But I won’t go off on a tangent like some other blog-writer who shall remain nameless; whose posts sometimes wander off in loop-de-loops — quite possibly deliberately, to throw off the hounds of pursuit.
Erm … where was I? Oh. Last night. Reading … Okay. So, eventually night falls, I disconnect the brain and do the sleeping thing. This morning, as I’m puttering around through the AM chores, I’m getting little, irritating bleeps about that Looking Down article. What exactly was she saying …? What was the first part of that thing? So I go back, and read it. Slowly. Now that I’m prepared for it, the ending doesn’t make me so defensive. And, I eventually circle back to this sentence:
Something is in me, in us — in those of us whose bodies do not match our illusions — that is willing to take in the orphaned parts, that impels us to preserve the integrity of the whole. Thus does the self attempt to make of the will and the flesh a unified being.
Okay. So, she’s not a fucking idiot.
I’m not preaching relativism. What I am suggesting is that far more harm is done by spreading the net of one’s absolute values too wide such that what are in fact only relative values get included — than vice versa. At least as much attention needs to be paid to making the distinction between what is absolute and what is relative, as needs to be paid to what one’s absolute values ought to be. Many times, I think that doing the former will find the latter.
-Julie
