14th July, 2016

"All or Nothing is my call;

should you by the roadside fall,

then your life's been thrown away.

No concession to distress,

no reprieve for trespasses; --

and should life not bear the strain,

you must gladly die, no less."

"O, but I had failed to see

All or Nothing it must be.

Compromise's road I blundered; --

but today God spoke to me.

At this moment, o'er this house,

doom's shrill trumpet-blast has thundered; --

and I listened, tremulous, --

crushed, like David facing Nathan, --

battered, anguished-tossed, dismayed --;

all my doubts have now been laid.

The spirit of compromise is Satan!"

--Ibsen, Brand--

"All or Nothing." This is Brand's cry. And no-one could be more earnest in practicing what they preach than Brand. He gives up comfort, home, wife, child, community, and life itself in his ardor to give all. Yet he ends the play, in the closing act, succumbing beneath an avalanche, calling upwards to heaven, "Tell me, God, in death's abyss; -- / is no fleck of hoped-for bliss / earned by man's will, quantum satis --?" And the final line reads "A Voice (calls through the thunderous din): He is deus caritatis!" He is a God of Love. The stage-prompt is so trickily ambiguous. Whose voice is it? Is it the voice of God? Is it that of Brand's companion Gerd? Is it the voice of Brand himself? One way or the other, "He is a God of Love" is Ibsen's answer to the question, "how much is enough?" "He is a God of Love" is Ibsen's answer to Brand's overriding question of what it means to give all.

     What sort of an answer is "He is a God of Love"? An answer that sent me grinning altitudinous, cheeks surging upwards to the temples in contentment. I closed the book, those disintegrating mid-century covers, stood up, turned to beam at A____, and absconded to the garden, to the Canadian March and the unthawed lake. Why did the answer make me so happy? Why was I so satisfied with it?

     I desire to give all. I, like Brand, feel I must live to the tune of "All or Nothing." I, like Brand, cannot content myself with compromise. And I do recognize that this is potentially a very dangerous way to be. It is the sort of personality out of which monomanias are born. It is to be in attitudinal league with Ahab and Hamlet. Yet I know no way of throwing off this aspect of myself, and, more significantly, I would not throw it off even if I got the chance. 

      So. I live with a powder keg within myself. Willfully I live so. Why? Why would anyone take the risk of such internal intensity? Why would anyone embrace a philosophy of all or nothing? I can only answer that I have found no way to disentangle the things I most desire from the philosophy of all or nothing. As soon as I try to logically unhitch the things I most desire from this philosophy, they lose their desirability. I stop desiring love as soon as I stop seeing it as something that deserves my all. I stop desiring truth as soon as I start supposing truth might not be, in its deepest sense, absolute. I stop desiring life when I start to think I owe it anything less than everything. And the moment I came to believe that God could be sufficiently honored in half-measures would be the moment I came to disbelieve in God. 

     Am I to be Brand, then? Am I to give up all that he gave up in order to fulfill my commitment to "all or nothing"? No. No. That cannot be it. I would not have smiled so merrily at the closing of the book if that had been the conclusion. The conclusion was not that "all or nothing" requires complete surrender of all the things that render life dear. The conclusion was the opposite. "He is a God of Love." That was the conclusion. Brand misinterpreted what it meant to give all. He supposed giving all was synonymous with giving up all. Yet, in giving up all, he gave up every manifestation of love. In giving up all, he self-avowedly made "no concession to distress" and "no reprieve for trespasses," and thereby acted contrary to compassion, to mercy, to all of the principle tenets of Love; he acted contrary, indeed, to the very wording of the Lord's prayer. 

      And what of myself? It is so difficult to unbiasedly scrutinize oneself. Yet I think I have myself fallen into Brand's same rut of misinterpreting "all or nothing." I have not thought deeply enough. I have not thought bravely enough. I have not trusted enough. I have said to myself "obey," forgetting that Love's injunction is not to "obey" in and of itself, but to obey those commandments in which one has Faith or concerning which one has understanding (granted, one may object that I am here expressing a personal and not an orthodox Faith/theology, but my Faith/theology is personal; any attempt on my part to swallow an orthodox Faith/theology that went against my personal Faith /theology would be a pretense, a nothingness). If one obeys an edict that does not strike one's thought and Faith as wholly in line with Love, one is not obeying Love, but some other master (most likely, in my case, fear). 

     Light burst upon me yesterday morning. Lightness did. With an intensity I had forgotten for sadly many months, possibly even years, I recalled how very dearly I loved my friends. Such lightness. A great weight, carried unbeknownst for such a long while, left on the mattress with the insomnia that attended it.  

17th February, 2016

“A few million years ago, the present site of the city of Chicago was buried under three kilometers of frost.” –Carl Sagan, Cosmos.

Buried under three kilometers of frost! Never escaping frost despite the Spring, despite the Summer! Lifeless, cold, a wasteland. Oh, world! How impermanent, how fragile everything is. All that I love-- the cracked calls of the cardinal and the redwing, the various jade-golds of Spring grass and Spring leaf, the perfect palate of a vital globe--all of it is so fleeting. If it were only the case that I would not remain, the thought would not be so heart-breaking; but to think that all of it must vapor?! To think that there will come an end to seasons?! To think that there will come an end to the Earth and its circling romance with the sun?! So hopelessly final!

     And I here, bound to the robins and the Spring grasses and the hum of a lawnmower, and an apple tree newly in leaf; bound in the sublimest and most delicate communion of a shared moment; suspended in the most tragic of all vessels, the inescapably doomed ship of a finite moment in time.

     I was alive with the robins, in the days when Michigan was mitten-shaped and was full of Spring grass. I was alive when stars glowed overhead in the night sky. I was alive when there was a solar system with the sun at its center, a sun that warmed the Earth and melted ice-cream in children’s hands. I was alive when there were colors, and fellow men, and a language to name things. I was alive when there was light. I was alive when there was matter. I was alive in the days of LOVE and of BEAUTY. I was alive when birds migrated and butterflies emerged from cocoons. I was alive when men smiled, and sang, and put their arms around one another in friendship, and cared deeply about one another. I was alive when the universe was expanding. I was alive when sunshine wrought freckles. I was alive to hear poetry. I lived in the days of the chickadee, and the ocean, and the hurricane. The tortoise was my companion, as was the mosquito and the whale. The world has never known days like the ones in which I was alive.

     We will all go. The robins, the rivers, the poetry, the stars. We all lived together, and though some of us will last longer than others, we will all go. Not a one of us will last. We are even now a living memory.

     Let me not forget the communal bonds of time, the kinship of a shared temporality. All that is, at this moment, is as a passenger on the same shipwreck-bound raft. Not a one of us will survive. We are, every one of us, brothers in tragedy. It is all so lovely and so…so…doomed. Like the beautiful consumptive in an old-fashioned novel whom we know, know from the first cough, must die. The story cannot let her live. Even Horatio and the angels must perish. But we were once in one another’s arms. The robins, and the Spring grasses, and the stars, and the men embracing the ones that they loved—we were once all of the same temporal piece. A shared experience. A shared memory. A moment in time. 

1/21/2016

Classical guitar. Skies lacquer black, slick black, lake black; polished. Or, perhaps not. Perhaps a fraying sailor-suit blue. Perhaps navy-grey and garlanded with smoke-orange about the horizon, like the eyes of a heterochromiac, like the fire that rings the heterochromiac's pupil before being doused by the sea-storm of the iris. Hot tea, decaffeinated and very milky.

"Consolation resides where we, having ventured out into all these dangerous experiments of individual living, at last [find ourselves] coming back, and swallowing our pride, and humbly acquiescing in a social order that is bigger than ourselves." -- Roger Scruton.

There is something that pulls us back, that rightly pulls us back to a place of community, to a place of humility, to a place where we divest the garments we donned to mark ourselves apart from our fellow man (whether these garments were donned originally for defense or attack, for fear's sake or for pride's, does not matter), and become part of a whole. The further I stray from humility, from the acknowledgement that I am not a piece-apart but rather a part-of-a-whole, the more troubled I become. I must remember this. How can I make myself remember?

The following from a journal kept five years back:

4-18-11

Do not conceive of yourself as in competition with the world, Sarah. You do not have to be so. Even when it all seems like a grand game of the prisoner's dilemma and everybody is defecting, don't ever defect yourself. Always cooperate. The most to be lost in cooperating is your life. In defecting you risk far greater losses, namely your very will to live. Hush the ego. Hush the voice that begs for distinction over your fellow man. That is a voice of fear, a voice born of the insecurities inherent in trying to compete with the world. You no longer need it. You are choosing to cooperate. It is the most liberating, joy-inspiring, happiness-inducing choice you could ever make. You are freeing yourself to rejoice in all that is around you, to add your voice to the universal ode to joy without having to worry about whether it is off-key or less sonorous than your neighbor's. You are not in competition with your neighbor and thereby are no longer in need of fear of him, or, to allay such fears, superiority over him. What is left? To love him. Love is what remains when you have stripped away the husk of competition. Love and all the inestimable joy that attends it. Do not fear cooperating though all else are defecting. It is the sure and solitary gateway to joy. My heart aches. I shall love. 

We learn lessons and then we lose them, and find them, and lose them again. We are continually having to humble ourselves at the feet of our past. And this takes so much pride-swallowing, for it is one thing to be ignorant of a lesson one has not learned, but quite another to remain ignorant of a lesson one has learned multiple times over. But swallow my pride I must. Provided I am not as I am meant to be, I shall vary even as the seasons do, and like as not be five-hundred different selves in the course of each year. It is only once we draw closer to who we are meant to be that we can draw closer to consistency; only then can we retain our lessons. Until such a point, we must learn the lessons again and again, and remind ourselves of them over and over to stave off the risk of forgetting, and practice their teachings in earnest, for this is the only way in which to draw closer to whom we are meant to be, to draw closer to whom we most truly are. 

      I have been reminded of this lesson this evening. Let me work with all my might not to forget it.