Life's Tallest Order

 

“There is a solace in finality and a grace in resignation, no matter what one is resigned to—death, helplessness, the end of chance, resignation itself. But life’s tallest order is to keep the feelings up. To make two dollars worth of euphoria go the distance. And life can’t do that. So fiction does. And there, right there, is the real-- I want to say ‘only’ morality of fiction. Not much, is it? It’s all there is.”

Stanley Elkin

A Long Time Coming

“…We live in an age which is so possessed by demons, that soon we shall only be able to do goodness and justice in the deepest secrecy, as if it were a crime."

Franz Kafka, from Conversations With Kafka 

Been Here Before, Sort Of (Ending with a Joke)

 

In a personal sense, obviously I've been here before.  An incomprehensible election result, anticipation of at least four years of consternation and despair.  

This one of course is incomprehensible on steroids, as are the likely consequences. (And what suggests itself as comprehensible is almost too ugly to contemplate.) 

But the consequences are yet to come, and the task now is to tamp down the adrenal panic, and proceed prudently.  Part of the panic is not knowing how to protect ourselves.  There doesn't seem to be much we can do, especially at our age.  Flight means different sets of difficulties, for few places on Earth are going to be untouched.  We're vulnerable, but so are many, many others, including those far more vulnerable than we.

So now it's just occupying ourselves, attending to the moment at home while at same time living for awhile in other worlds in books etc.  When I've been out this week--walking, at the nearest grocery, a hike up Trinidad Head--people have been unfailingly gentle, polite and kind.  It may be the last calm before the onslaught of storms, and since we suspect it is, it has a sense of unreality that goes with life going on as before.

There are maybe two things different about it this time.  The first is about the country and therefore the world, which is that this is a more thorough catastrophe.  Maybe the nation will be so fucked up that in four years the Democrats take power again, but...they'll have to reinvent themselves first.  Everything about politics and elections--political operatives and campaign theorists, pollsters and media--are all utterly discredited.  That's even just assuming that what just happened is political in that sense.  It feels more societal, and that doesn't bode well for change.  In fact, given the pressures on our system that nature will provide, as well as wily dictators, it bodes well for chaos.  From what little news I've allowed myself to see, that's already begun.  But it may take some time to reach critical mass.

The second, since I'm taking a personal perspective here, is age.  The aging life is likely to make its own demands on my time and attention, forcing its priorities.  What's going on in the outside world probably won't help, may materially hurt, but eventually it all becomes part of the same thing: living in time.

So if I'm fortunate I can find the inner and outer resources to complete the work I want to do, the final acts of witness to the world I've experienced, a world now almost totally gone.  And live partly in those alternate worlds of story, of memory, of my remaining capabilities. 

But for now it's one day at a time.  Or one hour, as I deal with sleep and other physical issues, the day is seldom predictable.  I'm also finding that shorting out the anxiety during the day seems to simply move it to when I'm asleep.  I can feel it strongly then, making sleep lighter and more broken at best.

 As I cast about for things to occupy me away from all this, I was provided with the sight of a book on a shelf I didn't remember putting there, in plain sight of where I walk by several times a day.  It was an account of Paul Newman directing a film version of The Glass Menagerie in the early 1980s.  I'd not read it before.  And also, when looking for something  I didn't find, I saw that I had a film version of this play on VHS I'd never watched, a library discard.  It's the same Paul Newman directed film.  So I'm now reading the book, and then I'll watch the film.

Margaret suggested I also look at film comedies I have that I like (and mostly that she doesn't); the Marx Brothers and so on.  So far I've reveled in some Rocky and Bullwinkle (the administration of Whatsamatta University is meeting because the school is going broke.  "Why don't we give Daddy Warbucks an honorary degree?"  "Daddy Warbucks is a fictional character," the president scoffs.  The guy who suggested it looks stricken.  "You mean we're real?")

I've also got DVDs of a great unheralded Italian comedy, "Big Deal on Madonna Street," and a package of 1980s comedies including "Airplane" and "The Naked Gun."  And the Marx Brothers, of course.

Margaret also learned a joke going around now, likely in European circles:

Q. What borders on Stupidity?

A. Canada and Mexico.