is the word 'diary' better than the word 'blog'? probably not.
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The World of Adults.
I got some very bad news today. The kind of news that makes a mockery of any worry a person might have over getting rejected from jobs or not getting a job anywhere a person might also be loved. (It�s not that I am not keeping an open mind about the job market. It�s just that I don�t want to �return to Amherst,� metaphorically speaking, that sad, dark, isolated year that at least had the merit of only being a year.)
(Yes, I had real friends that year. My time with Tom and Alison and Peter and Chris and Nasser was meaningful and I�m grateful for it. But the year mostly resonates now, and did so then as well, as sad, dark, and isolated, in part because some of the people on my list of good friends in Amherst were themselves living a form of darkness and isolation, no matter how much I tried to be good to them.)
And anyway, today�s news makes all that seem like the self-indulgent worry of a spoiled person who can�t take the bad with the good. Even the worries I almost always have about being loved or unloved or unlovable seem vaguely silly, if still inescapable. Today�s news is the kind you can�t really read when standing up. It knocks you down, even when you�ve known it was coming.
In addition, it seems that my cat is probably terminally ill. And I didn�t get the job in Los Angeles.
So I was looking through my CDs to hear some the kinds of songs I needed to hear today. And of course I resorted fairly quickly to Cracker, because most of Lowery�s best songs are precisely the right mood for today. Is it that he and I mourn the same things in the same way? Or is it that he�s just good at those kinds of songs? Or maybe it�s just that he taught me something about being sad that was once very personal and now just lingers on as a residue that, strangely, I can hear in a bar, on the radio, or on my home stereo, by choice even. I don�t know.
It made me realize that the anecdote I told about David renting the Cadillac must have been before the second Cracker album, not the first. Time passes, unevenly.
And yet most of you are �tuning in,� as it were, if I guess correctly, to find out how my tiny vacation was with Cutest Boy Ever. So I�ll just admit straight out that it was Best Ever. He makes me very happy, happier than I�ve felt in what seems like a long time� that kind of happiness that feels good but also hurts a bit, because it reminds you of how long it has been.
But I�m not living in paradise. I�m in a boat nearby, always threatening to founder in the waves or hit treacherous rocks and then sink. My boat is always waging the fight between optimism and pessimism, and usually stays afloat, despite all the weight of sadness the water has to offer. And let�s just admit that sometimes the water looks lovely. It is inviting, and sinking into it is so very easy that one can be seduced to sadness precisely because happiness takes more work.
Who knew? That�s the adult�s truth. Happiness is sometimes harder than sadness, given all the ways of the world.
It�s fitting, then, that for my next job interview (all day Friday; wish me luck), I have to teach someone else�s class on Kant�s Categorical Imperative. Those of you who know philosophy will have intuited already that I�m no Kantian, but there are things I admire about him that go way beyond the manifest brilliance of his capacity for reason. I love his cruelty, because it is the kind of cruelty born of love of the world� the kind of cruelty that produces kindness, and thus is not the same as the cruelty that destroys people. Some of you will disagree. Maybe I�ll explain myself sometime.
I�ve recently come to realize that my next or current struggle with self-cruelty (and my philosophical cruelty is always Nietzschean, or Levinasian, not Kantian) will have to be this: admitting that the recent life episode that runs under the title �Disappointed Adult� has destroyed me on some level. On some level, not every level. But the destruction is real, and more vast than I realized before now. The levels that get destroyed by that kind of disappointment are mysterious, and they raise their dumbass (and why still handsome? MUST THEY MOCK ME?!) heads at surprising times. They would like nothing better than to sink my boat, as it were. They love it when I shoot myself in the foot, or when I undermine my own possibilities, or when I am left without excuses for my sadness, when I have to admit that the past has infected the present, no matter what my will-to-power.
The past always attends the present. What we want to try to avoid is letting it determine it. Because that�s called tragedy, when the past renders you unfree, incapable of willing your way to anything worthy of you.
I�ve spent so much time writing about how difficult it us to find love as an aging single person, given how much baggage, wreckage, and dreck is carried by everyone after a certain amount of life experience. I�ve expressed sadness caused by those who seem to fear even trying, or those who no longer seem able to love anyone. But I�ve rarely stopped to consider the possibility that I am one of those inexorably-aging dreck-dragging persons. This week it seems that I am.
But I�m not terrible at everything. For instance, I can love people, and I do. I do that well, even, at least most of the time. I accept the risks, too. However, everyone I love has to pay at some point for every sadness that won�t let go of my tail (iykwim). That�s part of what love is, of course: doing it even when it isn�t easy (um, iykwim). And man, am I thankful for all of those friends of mine who do that for me. I am!
And I�m also pretty good at teaching, no matter what some distant parties might think (another story I�ll tell later, perhaps). I just got my teaching evaluations from last semester. They cheered me up. And then, with funny timing, Caroleen IMd me today with this quote about me from Ratemyprofessors.com: �I have seen the headwaters of the Nile! Oh YES! She's SO smart and SO lovely -- would I rather see or be her?� hahaha. I was also marked with a Jalapeno for hot. HA. HA. HA. The answer to this student�s dilemma is, I guess, to BE me while looking in the mirror. But that�s too-clever as a solution. Just try to BE me looking in the mirror, and things won�t look so good. Such is the way of the world.
But there�s a reason why the teacher-student relationship, while needing a certain closeness, also has to encompass some distance. Students can want to see me and/or be me, without all the baggage. It's idealism at its finest. Aspiration is lovely because of its breathing room (literally!), no?
And then again, speaking of �being me,� and of sadness, identity is not such a simple thing anyway, is it? Or, as Judith Butler once wrote:
�When we lose certain people, or when we are dispossessed from a place, or a community, we may simply feel that we are undergoing something temporary, that mourning will be over and some restoration of prior order will be achieved. But maybe when we undergo what we do, something about who we are is revealed, something that delineates the ties we have to others, that shows us that these ties constitute what we are, ties or bonds that compose us. It is not as if an �I� exists independently over here and then simply loses a �you� over there, especially if the attachment to �you� is part of what composes who �I� am. If I lose you, under these conditions, then I not only mourn the loss, but I become inscrutable to myself. Who �am� I, without you? When we lose some of these ties by which we are constituted, we do not know who we are or what to do. On one level, I think I have lost �you� only to discover that �I� have gone missing as well. At another level, perhaps what I have lost �in� you, that for which I have no ready vocabulary, is a relationality that is composed neither exclusively of myself nor you, but is to be conceived as the tie by which those terms are differentiated and related.� (from �Violence, Mourning, Politics� in Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence)
I think most adults will see themselves in that paragraph somewhere.
And also, it explains why we all carry the weight of the past. The weight isn�t only made of what we wish were otherwise. It is formed also by every moment of love we�ve had that has passed away, for better or worse. So keep it. Keep it all. Just don�t let it drag you under.
You won't always succeed. But, as Kant knew, your motive in acting matters more than your success.
3:31 p.m. - January 17, 2007
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