That maybe even if we’re not always so glad to be here, it’s our task to immerse ourselves anyway: wade straight through it, right through the cesspool, while keeping eyes and hearts open. That Nature (meaning Death) always wins but that doesn’t mean we have to bow and grovel to it. And I feel I have something very serious and urgent to say to you, my non-existent reader, and I feel I should say it as urgently as if I were standing in the room with you. But the painting has also taught me that we can speak to each other across time. “Whatever teaches us to talk to ourselves is important: whatever teaches us to sing ourselves out of despair. But in a strong light there was no good spin you could put on it. Open and dined and travelled and distracted themselves with all kinds of gadgets and devices, flooding themselves incessantly with information and texts and communication and entertainment from every direction to try to make themselves forget it: where we were, what we were. People gambled and golfed and planted gardens and traded stocks and had sex and bought new cars and practiced yoga and worked and prayed and redecorated their homes and got worked up over the news and fussed over their children and gossiped about their neighbors and pored over restaurant reviews and founded charitable organizations and supported political candidates and attended the U.S. Oh, isn't he cute? AMost people seemed satisfied with the thin decorative glaze and the artful stage lighting that sometimes, made the bedrock atrocity of the human predicament look somewhat more mysterious or less abhorrent. Squirming babies and plodding, complacent, hormone-drugged moms. And yet somehow people still kept fucking and breeding and popping out new fodder for the grave, producing more and more new beings to suffer like this was some kind of redemptive, or good, or even somehow morally admirable thing: dragging more innocent creatures into the lose-lose game. Even the beautiful ones were like soft fruit about to spoil.
The writhing loathsomeness of the biological order. This was a plunge encompassing sorrow and revulsion far beyond the personal: a sick, drenching nausea at all humanity and human endeavor from the dawn of time. What if one happens to be possessed of a heart that can't be trusted-? What if the heart, for its own unfathomable reasons, leads one willfully and in a cloud of unspeakable radiance away from health, domesticity, civic responsibility and strong social connections and all the blandly-held common virtues and instead straight toward a beautiful flare of ruin, self-immolation, disaster?.If your deepest self is singing and coaxing you straight toward the bonfire, is it better to turn away? Stop your ears with wax? Ignore all the perverse glory your heart is screaming at you? Set yourself on the course that will lead you dutifully towards the norm, reasonable hours and regular medical check-ups, stable relationships and steady career advancement the New York Times and brunch on Sunday, all with the promise of being somehow a better person? Or.is it better to throw yourself head first and laughing into the holy rage calling your name?” Only here's what I really, really want someone to explain to me. We don't get to choose the people we are.īecause-isn't it drilled into us constantly, from childhood on, an unquestioned platitude in the culture-? From William Blake to Lady Gaga, from Rousseau to Rumi to Tosca to Mister Rogers, it's a curiously uniform message, accepted from high to low: when in doubt, what to do? How do we know what's right for us? Every shrink, every career counselor, every Disney princess knows the answer: "Be yourself." "Follow your heart."
We can't make ourselves want what's good for us or what's good for other people. Only what is that thing? Why am I made the way I am? Why do I care about all the wrong things, and nothing at all for the right ones? Or, to tip it another way: how can I see so clearly that everything I love or care about is illusion, and yet-for me, anyway-all that's worth living for lies in that charm?Ī great sorrow, and one that I am only beginning to understand: we don't get to choose our own hearts.
And I keep thinking too of the more conventional wisdom: namely, that the pursuit of pure beauty is a trap, a fast track to bitterness and sorrow, that beauty has to be wedded to something more meaningful. “I look at the blanked-out faces of the other passengers-hoisting their briefcases, their backpacks, shuffling to disembark-and I think of what Hobie said: beauty alters the grain of reality.
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