When I’m being a delinquent, I tend to read and watch far too much news. This is how I know that I’m a geezer. Well, that and the Geritol.
Politics involved all the usual bizarro-world treats: some news channels suggesting that Barack Obama’s popularity on the global stage was a cause for profound concern; the McCain campaign trotting out a revisionist history of Iraq just to create an excuse to use its newest zinger, “the audacity of hopelessness” (which ranks just behind “Yes we will” in the annals of “aren’t we adorable?” rhetoric); Brian Williams cutting an alternative reality out of the cloth of the cosmos in order to create a magical realm in which the troop surge was unequivocally and exclusively the cause of all changes in the Iraqi political climate. It was like the Inquisition, but with extra gravitas.
And on the human scale, we have the woman who killed her husband with a cocktail glass, the pitcher who whipped a baseball into the stands (and is pretty frickin’ lucky he missed his intended target), and the dude who thought he would ace his breathalyzer test by drinking wite-out. Kudos, by the way, to the man who set the new blood alcohol level in Providence–a healthy .491. I’m betting his apartment is decked out in a dazzling array of paper cocktail umbrellas.
Which leads me to a conclusion: I don’t understand humans so well. And that makes me happy.
The collection I’m working on, as it turns out, involves an effort to grapple with two subjects that inform most of my writing: ineffability and impenetrability. I’m unduly fascinated by the complexities, insufficiencies, and impossibilities of expression, a mild obsession surpassed only by my fixation on the problems that attend all attempts at identification, perspective adoption, and empathy. Back in the day I used to kvetch, fret, and agonize about such things. What use was all the language in world if I couldn’t say things right? Why bother communicating if the message received–once stewed in the juices of someone else’s bubbling psyche–bears no material resemblance to the message sent? Think about it long enough and you’ll go mad, and then you’ll have to spend all your time with psychiatrists fumbling at your madness, as if it were somehow accessible, comprehensible, as if they were not nutjobs themselves.
Now that I’m all wise and wizened, however, that awareness strikes me as much more liberating. Even the finest writers work by approximation and periphrasis when confronted by the Big Ideas. The best we can manage are snapshots, mosaics, and montages, hoping that the reader will round out the image or idea if we’ve been lucky enough to slip a few perfect words into place. Moreover, there are quite a few minds out there I frankly don’t want to understand, and I think we’re generally better off not knowing when we’re miles off the mark. We can glimpse, gather, and infer, but walking a few thousand miles in someone else’s shoes only teaches us that the same lesson we might have learned after the first step: we’re the same person with the same point of view, trotting around in shoes that just don’t fit. That’s a bit of complimentary Zen for you; satori costs extra.
Nowadays, when I read terrible rhetoric or stories about people behaving in ways I just can’t grasp, I find it reassuring. Although I’m perpetually fumbling around for meaning and understanding myself, I’ve at least caught a current that will nerve and nourish my verse for as long as I’m willing to ride it.
