staggering multitude
Back on campus yesterday, and it felt good to be out in the world, even to make my way through the slushy snowbanks and feel the cold light rain as it fell intermittently. I remembered the aliveness that can happen in the physical presence of other people, and I left feeling buoyant and possible. At night, we saw Tiny, Beautiful Things at Trinity, the theatre nearly full, the soft chatter and murmurs of other peoples conversations, the sense that we are part of something so much larger than ourselves, eternal, despite the brief moment of our singular contributions. My happiness surprises me.
I met with a student yesterday who had requested office hours, a bit unusual so early in the semester. He had questions about writing and how to think about the class, how to write about the self, how to write about others, how to take on a longer, sustained project, how to know things it is only possible to know through the mortifying experience of doing.
At times, in their company — the young, fiercely smart and accomplished, so much still unknown — I feel yearning for a past that could not have been possible. A life that was not my life. But at times, I can see the anxiety and panic of their unknowing, how they are searching for boxes to check, for steps to follow, for instructions for living, so they can know, with unwavering certainty, that they are getting it right. In those moments, I can see more clearly the gifts of age, of experience, of moving through. How if we are lucky, the years allow us the space for grasping and reaching and failing in such a staggering multitude of ways, and how (again, with luck and a little grace) we can recognize the falling and failing as the only way to live. That it, in fact, is life itself.
It has been difficult, these last years, to keep literature and art in focus. To understand the mattering of these pursuits in times of such acute, such visible suffering. Such grief on a scale that is overwhelming, unimaginable. I have wanted, in shame and horror, to distance myself from the practices and structures that have shaped me, to retreat from the chaos and uncertainty, the complicity with the institutions and ideologies and ontologies that obliterate and destroy. But to retreat from what has given me life feels like killing off a part of myself. The part that yearns and grasps.
The death of my desires serves only death.
Knowing this provides no roadmap, no checklist, but does, I think, create space for being with, for holding, the uncertainty a little longer. For long enough, perhaps, for other possibilities to rise up.
