Island
Living 30: Letter to a Friend Still Unmet
by A. D.
Coleman |
|
A good friend
of mine, living in the Nordic countries for some
years, recently emailed me to ask a favor. Her co-worker,
founder of an innovative digital project for artists
and teachers and the general public, found himself
hitting a brick wall with his venture in its start-up
phase. He and I haven’t met yet, but she asked
if I’d write him a letter and see if I could
cheer him up. So I did. Here it is. A few sections
have been cut, and the names changed, to protect
the innocent.
Dear Sven:
We don’t
know each other, but our mutual friend Kathleen
has asked me to email you with some words of support.
She’s worried about you, says “He got
married just last Saturday and hasn't smiled at
all.” I take Kathleen very seriously, and I’m
the kind of guy that does what he’s told. So
here goes.
I assume you’re
not sad because you got married, but rather because
you and your mate and your colleagues inhabit a
world that obstructs you, seemingly at every turn.
From what Kathleen tells me, you and she are both
struggling against the pervasive dumbness of the
people around you and the idiocy of the systems
in which you’re entwined. (A distinction worth
bearing in mind always: Ignorance is a condition,
dumbness is a commitment.)
Apparently you
find yourself surrounded with incompetence, greed,
pettiness, stubbornness, backbiting, and unreliability,
all of which interfere greatly with your ability
to do your job and further a perfectly sound, intelligent,
exciting, socially useful and even visionary set
of projects that will benefit humankind.
Here’s
the good news: You’re not alone in that situation.
As a bigger country, we in the States have even
more dumbheads and obstructionists unfit to pour
piss out of a boot with the instructions written
on the heel than you do. (I speak here numerically,
not statistically; I suspect the proportions are
about equal.) I meet them everywhere else I go,
too; the problem is most likely global.
It gets even
better: They’re breeding faster than we are.
There’s a great science-fiction story from
the ‘50s by Frederick Pohl called “The
Marching Morons,” a classic, which you should
look up if you really want to get depressed.
So anywhere
you might flee for refuge in the world this same
situation pertains, I guarantee it. All across the
planet, points of light, small pockets of sanity,
intelligence, foresight, responsibility, ethicality,
integrity, surrounded by pandemic infantilism. The
terrible truth is that we inhabit a world full of
children of all ages, and the occasional adult --
I mean a truly mature person -- you meet is as an
oasis in a desert, and you must learn to fall on
such a one like a thirsty man on a watering hole.
“There are many people, but very few human
beings,” Chief Dan George tells Dustin Hoffman
in the film Little Big Man.
The more you
realize this -- and the blunt ugly fact of it sinks
in deeper as you grow older, I can tell you -- the
more justification you have for despairing and tearing
your hair and screaming at the walls, as we all
do periodically. I am not sure that will ever improve;
as the song says, “this old world/ain’t
about to change.” Maybe Marilyn French has
it more precisely in her novel The Women’s
Room: “Things change, but more slowly than
we do.” Terribly frustrating, the waste and
stupidity we confront every day, and if you let
it then it can drive you mad, or cynical, which
may not be too much different.
But I’ve
become convinced that surendering to those negative
energies is not an option. A poet of my acquaintance,
Carolyn Forché, speaks the deepest of truths
when she says, to people like ourselves, “It
is/not your right to feel powerless. Better/people
than you were powerless.”
Remember the
saxophonist and playwright Vaclav Havel, who had
it much tougher than you or I ever will, and who
wrote, in his book Disturbing the Peace,
“Either we have hope within us or we don't;
it is a dimension of the soul, and it's not essentially
dependent on some particular observation of the
world or estimate of the situation. Hope is not
prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit,
an orientation of the heart. . . .
“Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is
not the same as joy that things are going well,
or willingness to invest in enterprises that are
obviously headed for early success, but rather,
an ability to work for something because it is good,
not just because it stands a chance to succeed.
. . .
“Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism.
It is not the conviction that something will turn
out well, but the certainty that something makes
sense, regardless of how it turns out. . . . It
is also this hope, above all, which gives us the
strength to live and continually try new things,
even in conditions that seem as hopeless as ours
do, here and now.”
Now the plain
fact, sir, is that you may be doomed to live in
this mess of a world, but you are also blessed.
You have intelligence, and creative energies, and
an attunement to the future. These are gifts. (I
take this on faith because Kathleen believes in
you, and she has proven an infallible guide to the
rare human beings. If she takes you seriously, I
do too. And she has never asked me to write a letter
like this to anyone.) You have occasions when you
get to use those gifts, even if you must fight battles
to get those chances.
You also have
a wife who loves you, I gather, which means you
have a life partner with whom to stand side by side,
back to back, face to face. And you have the friendship
and respect and collaboration of Kathleen, one of
the most extraordinary people it’s ever been
my privilege to know. Which means you have ready
access to two sources of the miracle of supportive
female energy and intelligence and protection, one
in your private life and one in your workplace,
a benevolence without compare. Cherish all this.
Relish it. Feel grateful for it. Those things, all
by themselves, signal that you live a charmed life,
better than most people will experience. Recognize
its enchantment and give thanks to the great spirit
for this bounty.
Here is my suggestion:
Go find as a wedding present for yourselves Lewis
Hyde’s astonishing meditation, The Gift:
Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property
(New York: Vintage Books, 1979). The luminous comments
of this poet and essayist on the differences between
a gift economy and a market economy must surely
resonate for creative people everywhere who nowadays
find their fields of activity entirely and unapologetically
market-driven, increasingly populated and dominated
by bean-counters, number-crunchers, desk jockeys,
career bureaucrats and MBAs.
Yet his is not
a despairing book, if only because Hyde knows that
the world’s need for the gifts of its teachers
and artists endures, inexhaustible. “If the
commodity moves to turn a profit,” Hyde asks,
“where does the gift move?” His answer:
“The gift moves toward the empty place. As
it turns in its circle it turns toward him who has
been empty-handed the longest, and if someone appears
elsewhere whose need is greater it leaves its old
channel and moves toward him. . . . The gift finds
that man attractive who stands with an empty bowl
he does not own.”
The challenge
for you, Sven, for you and I and Kathleen and the
rest of us, is to learn to see the world and all
its people as “him who has been empty-handed
the longest, . . . that man . . . who stands with
an empty bowl he does not own,” and to see
our job as depositing our gifts in that bowl even
when the one who holds it out puts obstacles in
the way of our getting to it.
Get up tomorrow
morning and enjoy your new marriage. Enjoy your
wife, your home, your city. Go walk among your fellow
citizens, sit with your beloved holding hands in
a café to watch them and marvel anew at the
fact that every single one of them thinks, like
you, that they’re the very center of the universe,
and that they’re each and every one of them
exactly right. Take a deep breath, replenish yourself.
You have serious work to do next week. It’ll
keep till Monday morning. Meanwhile, make coffee.
Make love. Make dinner. Make love. Get a good night’s
rest. Make love. Make breakfast. Remember this:
“Got to do what you can to keep your love alive;
try not to confuse it with what you do to survive,”
Jackson Browne sings. And, in another song, he adds,
“And when the morning comes, get up and do
it again. Amen.”
No need to answer
this. I hope it helped, though if so I’m not
sure how. It was Kathleen’s idea, and she’s
usually right about these things. I trust her implicitly.
If it didn’t do any good, that’s probably
my fault.
Things could
be worse.
Fuzzy logic,
Allan
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©
Copyright 1999 by A. D. Coleman. All rights reserved.
By permission of the author and Image/World
Syndication Services,
P.O.B. 040078, Staten Island, New York 10304-0002
USA.
