At the Lake

There were no chanting Tibetan monks,
Only the wind whistling overtones
Through the corrugated metal roof
And whipping the surface of the water
Into a thousand white, frothy peaks,
Each one an eye blinking in the midday glare,
Watching as the waves tried to shake the
Dock off the lake into the bottomless blue sky.

Lost Things

I lost my bottle early on,
Followed by my wordless innocence.
Hard on the heels of this tramua,
I lost the services of those
Who bore me effortlessly
Wherever I needed to go.

I adapted, of course;
I'm nothing if not flexible.
I ate; I talked; I walked.
But it didn't end there.
I lost countless days in the
Forced pursuit of education.

It never stops, you know,
This continuous litany of loss.
Toys and friends,
Money and jobs,
Certainty and delusion
All get misplaced eventually.

There's more to come,
Or so I've heard--
Memory, eyesight, bladder control--
Until, finally, my last breath
Escapes me, and I find
I've misplaced myself.

Spin

Today I ran across a blog entry entitled The Sustaining Narrative on a blog I had never read before, Crunchy Con. Here is an excerpt:

I heard a very sad report on the BBC over the weekend. Their correspondent visited a Vermont family that backed the Iraq War foursquare. They had lost a son in the fighting, and the young soldier's mother said she hoped Americans didn't forget what our troops were sacrificing so that America could still live free.

This is heartbreaking. We're not asking young men and women to die in Iraq to protect American liberty. But this grieving mother needs to believe that so her son will have died in some greater cause. When I contemplate the possibility that my brother-in-law might die in Iraq -- a member of his unit was killed last week by an IED -- I can't hold on to the thought for more than half a second, not only because it's so painful for obvious reasons, but because I can't see the moral justification for it. I mean no offense to you who do, and God knows the courage of those young men and women is unquestionable. It's those who sent them to Iraq in the first place I question, and I don't see why we have to pretend the war is about American liberty to justify the decisions those leaders (with our support, it must be said) have made.

What the author is getting at is the way we construct narratives around social or political issues to help cover the tragedy that would otherwise threaten to overwhelm us, the way we sometimes become good at lying to ourselves about (or at least distracting ourselves from) uncomfortable truths. Of course, politicians have long made use of "spin doctors" to make the truth seem better than it really is, but this sort of thing is not limited to politicians.

I remember the funeral of a friend I had in college, a young woman who had been married for only a year when she was killed in a car accident. At the funeral, the preacher went on and on about how my friend had died for a reason, standing up for what was right, a martyr of sorts for the Christian faith, an example to all the sinners in the room who had better take notice of her sacrifice for their sakes. I'm guessing the preacher didn't know how, when all her fellow Holiness church members were away, my friend and her husband would put on their forbidden wedding rings, turn on a little forbidden music, and dance the night away together. If she had known, maybe the funeral sermon would have been about the danger of worldly pleasures that lead you to an early grave.

Either way, I resented the preacher's need to use my friend's death for her own ends, to bolster her appeal. My friend had not died for the audience's sake, and she hadn't died for her sins. She had just died--a wonderful, vivacious, happy life snuffed out. Maybe there was a bigger reason, but it just seemed arrogant to me for that preacher to pretend she knew what it was in order to get a response from her listeners.

Looking back, farther away from the grief of that moment, I wonder if that preacher might have been overwhelmed with grief herself--she might have been related to my friend for all I know. Maybe like that mother who lost her son in Iraq, she felt like she had to attach a deeper purpose to her tragedy so she could stand the pain, weaving a concealing narrative around the hurt to distance herself from it. I think we all do this, with our meaningless platitudes when someone loses a family member, with our sour grapes when we don't get our way, with our excuses when we fail.

And so I have to say, as my looking outward turns back inward, that, no, this isn't healthy, that it isn't helpful. Some things cannot be allowed to hide behind the protective coloration our invented narratives provide--self-pity, arrogance, hatred, prejudice, greed. If we hide these things, if we deny them to ourselves and others, we risk acting out their stories over and over again. But this propensity for spin that I find inside myself also serves to remind me of the humanity, the ache, the loss that is often behind it. It is all to easy too despise in others what lives comfortably in me, to see the lie but forget the pain that created it. This too is a kind of spin.

I am reminded of a verse from the Bible:

Mercy and truth have met together; Righteousness and peace have kissed. --Psalm 85:10

I don't know exactly what this would look like, but it is what I think is needed: compassionate truth that is able to pierce the lies we tell ourselves and others without piercing the broken heart mourning within. Perhaps generosity to our own hearts and those of others is where we must start in order to strip away the tangled narrative threads we have wound around the truth. Only when we can look unflinchingly at the painful realities we so fear can we deal with those realities and turn from the stubborn pain that imprisons us in the failures of the past to find hope and redemption in the present.

Analog

One of my favorite NPR programs is This I Believe, a program where people from many walks of life share their beliefs or core values. One of my favorite essays on This I Believe was entitled The Imperfect Traces Left by Human Hands, by T. Susan Chang. Here is a short excerpt:

I am a child of the digital age, but I believe in analog.

I love the hiss and pop of vinyl, and the black splotch in the corner when a movie changes reels. I enjoy the hushed, uneven ticking of a windup watch. I love handwriting.

I believe in analog because it captures the imperfect traces left behind by human hands — smudges and echoes that can't disappear with the touch of a delete key.

My job involves responsibility for computers, networks, database reporting, and the software we use for medical practice management and electronic medical records. In spite of this--or maybe because of it--I find myself drawn to "analog" living outside of work. Yes, I use email; yes, I blog. But I do most of my personal writing, note-taking, and scheduling using pen or pencil and paper. I am strangely delighted by sending and receiving actual letters. I love physical books, the way my memory of the story is somehow tied to the spaghetti sauce stain on the upper right hand corner of page 112. I gravitate towards acoustic instruments; it's not that I haul them to mountain tops for impromptu unplugged cloud concerts, but I could.

Ms. Chang has captured it perfectly--analog is an antidote to perfectionism, a manifesto of humanity, a record of the touch of actual hands. It's also the possibility, the inherent unpredictable nature of real life in all its messy, complex, surprising glory. Analog contains the truth that reality isn't always divisible into discrete categories or bits of information; everything is intertwined and interdependent, a continuous whole. Most of all, it's a reminder that we are all connected; and, if no one can claim to be completely in control of their lives, neither must anyone feel completely alone.