Something Hopeful, Something Terrible, Something Sad, Something Funny, Something Weird: Part Three
Grief is a rip tide that tells no lies.
Hi. It’s been a while. Life’s been tough, which by association makes this post one that I’ve run from.
I’m committed to finishing this series, though the process has been glacial. But hey, the world’s glaciers are moving faster than ever, abandoning their frozen stasis for one of escalating flow. Maybe I’m doing the same.
I’m not ready to ask for monetary support, but as always, if you read this and are moved, please share far and wide. Opportunity thrives on chances.
Another note, I talk about suicide. Some of it is graphic.
Onward.
PART THREE: The Sad
It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.
― J. Krishnamurti
Do you wonder what happens when happiness becomes a pursuit, a compulsive rumination? An obsession, a possession? Maybe we should ask Neil Gaiman. I’m sure he has some thoughts about how Delight becomes Delirium.
What if our mania for happiness is a symptom of our neglect of sadness, our revulsion of grief? What if the specters of suffering and discontent and unease are simply heralds of truths we refuse to face?
Blithely, fearfully, ignorantly…regardless the impetus, when we refuse the calls from the shadows, our individual and collective aspirations become vulnerable. Brittle. We confuse threat and salvation. Dreams go astray. Meaning and reason are swallowed by artifice.
Avarice and misattributed rage run amok. Destruction ensues.
Here’s an unwelcome proposition: Happiness is a fetish in this world.
To be happy is to be well—an inevitable characteristic earned by those deemed successful at the “game” of life.
If you feel sad or depressed for too long, or if your dogged despair is a mystery, then something must be wrong with you. What you are feeling is irrational. Because everything’s fine. In fact, they’ve never been better.
Countless books and authoritative campaigns are devoted to various techniques of the summoning and binding of happiness. We’ve grafted it to both matter and mindset. We’ve perverted it into a product, a destination, an ethic, a metric.
But let’s not confuse happiness with joy. Happiness operates under subjective conditions. Joy is spontaneous, emergent. Joy has no agenda.
This means happiness is malleable. Corruptible. Falsifiable.
Strangest and most mindfucking of all, we sometimes tell each other that happiness is a simple choice, a state we can turn on at will:
Turn that frown upside-down!
🎶Don’t worry, be happy🎶
As if this is some emotional hack, some mental kung-fu that frees us from the effects of the chronic wounding and industrious tragedy inherent to our shared lifestyle.
…or somehow it grants the fortitude to strive on and accept that “this is just the way it is and always will be.”
This is how we manifest a world of moral hazard and injury.
James
In early May of last year, I got a call from an old friend. He and I have maintained contact over the decades despite distance and irregularity. As soon as he began to speak I knew he was delivering bad news.
The news: a mutual friend, someone I considered my best friend in my youth, had purposely shot himself in the head. The bullet traveled though the roof of his mouth, obliterating his sinuses and blinding an eye. The devastation continued though the frontal lobe of his brain and, I assume, out the top of his head.
That would have been the end of it but his mother-in-law showed up and cleared the pooled blood from his airway. She happens to be a nurse. His autonomic nervous system was unaffected and he made it though surgery. Still, it seemed unlikely he’d survive.
My heart broke.
Later updates proved that fate and modern medicine had decided otherwise. James still lives. But he did not escape his suffering. He compounded it. This kind of brain injury comes with all kinds of curses.
Now he’s a shade of his former self, resurrected to be witness to all the pain he caused in trying to be free from his own.
James and I had a falling out over thirty years ago after spending our final few years of friendship being complete assholes. There’s a duality to being an asshole: sometimes you aren’t one. Sometimes you are and know it, other times you are oblivious. Eventually the destructive behavior bleeds into your inner life and cherished relationships. And boy, it did.
The time was a shitshow nexus of poverty, unmoored purpose, inherited disfunction, substance abuse, criminality, and personally, several near-death experiences. Any way you slice it, I was running towards oblivion. I got lucky enough times that I decided I wanted my latest bonus round to be different. I togethered my shit the best I could and took a different path.
I never spoke to him again.
I grieve because I remember the innocent years. I still remember the day we met in eighth grade, our lockers fatefully assigned next to each other. I remember finding some solace in our friendship as chaos and neglect reigned at home. We roamed together for shelter. For better, and eventually, worse.
I don’t know if he ever tried to choose a different path. Maybe he did and it turned into a circle. Maybe in neglect of his shadows, past and present, they took the helm. Maybe the callous weight of the world broke him with its empty promises.
Maybe it was all of the above.
I morn the bright lights we were together. We were good kids. Kids brimming with creativity and possibility. If only our potential had been fostered. If only we’d found a mentor’s wing. If only we’d had well-resourced and emotionally intelligent families.
If only. If only.
Logans Running
In a society hell-bent on individual will as the forge of transcendent destiny, the accumulation of trauma as an actor in outcomes is dismissed. Mental illness is a personal weakness or disorder. Addiction is a moral failing. Poverty is a shortcoming. The inability to achieve is a choice. There is no acknowledgement of our web of causality. The only factor is yourself.
The message? Life is a competition. Keep running. Keep reaching.
My corrected path included sobriety and embracing societal guidelines in the blue-collared strata. I started reaching towards the prizes of cultural redemption. The touted reward is the ability to carve out some kind of fulfilling life. If you excel, you’re lauded as a hero, a leader, an example and inspiration to all.
Determination is all that matters.
What happens when you succumb to exhaustion or suffer injury? If the path steepens until it’s a wall with a locked gate, what then? If you are in the leader’s pack and the grade of the path you are blazing imperceptibly declines until it becomes an unstoppable slide into a gaping chasm of fire for all participants, what did all that excellence achieve?
Underneath all the rhetoric and actualization, the repressed shadows of our collective reality lurk. Festering. Metastasizing. Because we are all running into darkness now, despite our celebrated milestones.
When a dark night of the soul arrives, usually in crisis or the cognitive wreckage left by unspeakable tragedy, we are given an opportunity to acknowledge the deception and madness. If we do, the sense of loss is overwhelming. All the time and effort, all the rationality, all the accepted truths, turn to dust. It’s too much. That’s why we choose to defer and deflect and deny. Better to hold the course. Better for it to be Someone Else’s Problem. Better for it to not exist at all.
Modernity has hidden away vast reservoirs of grief in its brutal pursuit of greatness. It’s no wonder why happiness has been given an altar. It’s no mystery why suicide is a leading cause of death.
One by one and en masse, our worldview is fundamentally suicidal.
The Sorrow of a Dying World
I’m old enough now to remember a world with more wildlife. Not as it’s witnessed today on television, but right outside my door. Historical accounts from a century before my birth detail an abundance of wildlife than even in my youth, no longer existed.
I’ve always been enthralled by nature. In another life I would end up a biologist. Regardless, there’s a particular form of grief that emerges being a witness to the spiraling effects of our addiction to transforming nature into our desirous designs. Death is a part of life, but the wholesale slaughter of life that comes with our ceaseless expansion creates a terrible sorrow.
We can hack away at our bonds to nature for only so long.
When scientists, who by rule are not to show emotion for fear of bias contaminating their data and upsetting the institutional hierarchy, begin to revolt out of desperation, you know things are bad. Scientists are starting to risk their hard-earned careers where they believed they could make a difference. There’s only so much research and data collection you can share and still be met with resistance and inaction before something breaks. Institutions don’t like breaches of formality and decorum because they are more concerned with funding than reality.
This ecological grief is something we all feel, even if we scorn environmental concerns and action. We refuse to have a relationship with death even as we destroy life with increasing efficiency. It’s right here in front of our eyes. Denial will not keep the anguish from perching somewhere in our minds.
As the adults in the room refuse to consider fundamental change, the youth see the writing on the wall. Too little, too late, and policies of artifice instead of action, the kids know they are inheriting a world of chaos and collapse if immediate and meaningful change continues to be refused.
The Tyranny of Success
When you’ve got a good thing going, why would you stop?
The leaders of commerce and industry have developed strategies to reap enormous wealth and influence. They’ve even figured out how to prosper and grow when the rest of us are deep in one crisis or another. They’ve completely blurred the distinction between business and government. This has solidified their success by orders of magnitude.
But when their great machinations begin to fail, the “unskilled” suddenly become essential. Those who risk their lives daily managing the carnage are hailed as heroes while they drown in despair. The biosphere has to absorb one ecological disaster after another.
And when their winning practices descend into war, fodder must be found. So begin the campaigns of patriotism and duty. The “othering” of humans escalates, transforming them into demons. The great wings of Atrocity unfurl and take flight. Terror and death rains down on all.
In the aftermath of the consequences of their leadership come the calls and promises to rebuild. Better. Stronger. But strangely, not much different as before. We are coached and forced to change our expectations. The social belt of austerity gets tightened measure by measure.
Blame finds a home anywhere but in their hands.
And then we think, man, that was really, really, bad. Things will change for the better now.
But they never do. All that can be heard from the towers of success and leadership is the booming chant of…
MORE. MORE. MORE.
In the land of empires, all that exist are insatiable ghosts and their haunting grief.
But it’s not the inevitable outcome of human behavior.
The Truth is in the Trash
A civilization cannot be judged by its winners and successes. Its failures define its merit and sustainability.
If we truly want to know how healthy a society is, we have listen to its losers and oppressed. Their suffering is our own. We have to be willing to delve deep in the trash and retrieve the worst it has to offer. Not in judgement, but in acknowledgement. We have to hold the rotten effluence in our hands and admit, this must exist in order for the world to turn as it does. It will never be dispelled by the ideologies in which it is found.
Denying this truth is the abandonment of our humanity.
Accepting it is to remember our humanity and all the other possible worlds it can create.
And should the children weep
The turning world will sing their souls to sleep
When you have sunk without a trace
The universe will suck me into place
—Sting, We Work the Black Seam