Failure

Maybe it’s not as bad as we like to think: no melodramatic rendings, sackcloths, nothing so acute
as the fantasies of conscience chart in their uncontrollably self-punishing rigors and admonitions.
Less love, yes, but what was love: a febrile, restless, bothersome trembling to continue to possess
what one was only partly certain was worth wanting anyway, and if the reservoir of hope is depleted,
neither do distracting expectations interfere with these absorbing meditations on the frailties of chance.
A certain resonance might be all that lacks: the voice spinning out in darkness in an empty room.
The recompense is knowing that at last you’ve disconnected from the narratives that conditioned you
to want to be what you were never going to be, while here you are still this far from “the end.”


C.K. Williams

Here’s a bit of cold comfort – maybe failure isn’t so bad. It probably has its own recompenses, like the ability to give up trying to gain something that you suspected might not be worth having anyway, and the relaxation of being able to disconnect “from all the narratives that conditioned you to want to be what you were never going to be.”

I can see that. Boy, can I see it. I’ve done things just because I was “conditioned to want to be something I was never going to be.” The biggest example might be the years I spent trying to convince myself that I really loved academia.

Julie Neidlinger, who writes at Lone Prairie, has an interesting poem that looks at the same idea from another perspective -- inability to accept failure. What do I do when I "can't let go of what I never had"?

I know that concreteness and specificity are prized in poetry, but what I like about both these poems by two completely different kinds of poets is that they are so unspecific – you can imagine them talking about numberless kinds of failures and disappointments.

I also like them because they work well with several of Gretchen Rubin’s Secrets of Adulthood:

• You can choose what you do; you can't choose what you LIKE to do.
• You don't have to be good at everything.
• If you're not failing, you're not trying hard enough.

Finally, I need to apologize because I don't know how to make CK Williams' poem look right on Blogger. Those lines should be longer, running across the page in a loose-limbed, raggedy fashion.

Depression is nature’s way of telling you that you’ve got complex social problems that the mind is intent on solving

". . . depression is nature’s way of telling you that you’ve got complex social problems that the mind is intent on solving. Therapies should try to encourage depressive rumination rather than try to stop it, and they should focus on trying to help people solve the problems that trigger their bouts of depression. (There are several effective therapies that focus on just this.) It is also essential, in instances where there is resistance to discussing ruminations, that the therapist try to identify and dismantle those barriers.

When one considers all the evidence, depression seems less like a disorder where the brain is operating in a haphazard way, or malfunctioning. Instead, depression seems more like the vertebrate eye—an intricate, highly organized piece of machinery that performs a specific function."

Very interesting article in The Scientific American on the possible value of depression. The odd thing is that the researchers seem to have found that depression helps people think - I thought it was just the opposite.

Photo courtesy Flickruser Photos8

Abandoned church photography

A "new" genre - maybe not so new, since abandoned churches have been with us for centuries, and photography is not such a new medium any more.

Click here to see a really great example.

At least one of the churches I visited during my year of visiting churches was teetering on the edge of becoming a magnificent ruin.

Photo courtesy Flickruser craigfinlay.

Three Beautiful Things

3. Philip K. Dick says, “Any seeming reality that is obliging…is something to suspect. The hallmark of the fraudulent is that it becomes what you would like it to be.” Disappointment, he says, is “the stamp of authenticity.” As I type the quotations, my shoulders convulse with a chill: though I am alone tonight, I imagined there was a child in the room and I was reading him those words.

I have also been writing down Three Beautiful Things in my daily journal, as has Richard Lawrence Cohen, whose Beautiful Thing #3 from July 29 is quoted above.

Disappointment is the stamp of authenticity. Good God, that makes me shiver, too. And then to add the idea of a child in the room. Arghhhhhhhh.

Reminds me of one of my favorite quotations, Philip Larkin writing about "fulfillment's desolate attic."

How disappointing it is to get what we thought we wanted. Better to be continually striving for the unattainable.

Finally, I highly recommend the practice of writing down three beautiful things every day. It makes every day more fun.

Want to tweet God?

Go here.

I'm trying to think of what I would tweet if I had only one tweet to God, 140 characters or less.

God be merciful to me, a sinner.

That might be a good start.

Stupid or evil

I’ve been getting discouraged about how easy it is to jump to the conclusion that anyone who disagrees with us must be either stupid or evil. Perhaps this is an artifact of believing something passionately. If you are whole-heartedly on one side of the debate (any debate), it just seems downright impossible that anyone in his or her right mind could see things in a contrary way.

This habit of seeing opponents as either stupid or evil is being pretty well demonstrated at present in the debates on health care reform. Passionate people on both sides are declaring that folks on the other side must be invincibly ignorant – or else downright evil. They either don’t realize how bad the health care system is now, or don’t realize how terrible it will be if we make these changes – or they do realize, and are just plain evil. They actually want to deprive people of health care, under one system or the other, out of sheer evilness. Bastards.

Theological debates, which you might think would be governed by more civility, all too often fall into the same “stupid or evil” trap. Folks who have strong convictions on a topic such as women’s ordination, or predestination, or baptism, or various social issues simply can’t believe that anyone who looks at the scriptures with a modicum of logic and common sense could disagree. They think, “You seem like a nice, sincere person, so I have to believe that you will eventually come to see things my way, since it’s really the only way that makes any sense. Either that, or . . . . you’re evil.”

It generally seems nicer to believe in the stupidity of others. That is, people who disagree with you just haven’t read the right books, or looked at the scriptures hard enough, or aren’t quite up to snuff in the brains department. If they were just a little bit smarter, or examined the issue a little bit longer, they would surely agree with you and your church. Well, unless they’re evil.

It’s hard to talk to people who think you are either stupid or evil. Conversation is not so much “Let me hear what you have to say on this, and maybe I can understand it better,” but “Let’s talk about this until you see that I am right.”

Wild Gratitude

Tonight when I knelt down next to our cat, Zooey,
And put my fingers into her clean cat’s mouth,
And rubbed her swollen belly that will never know kittens,
And watched her wriggle onto her side, pawing the air,
And listened to her solemn little squeals of delight,
I was thinking about the poet, Christopher Smart,
Who wanted to kneel down and pray without ceasing
In every one of the splintered London streets,

And was locked away in the madhouse at St. Luke’s
With his sad religious mania, and his wild gratitude,
And his grave prayers for the other lunatics,
And his great love for his speckled cat, Jeoffrey,
All day today—August 13, 1983---I remembered how
Christopher Smart blessed this same day in August, 1759,
For its calm bravery and ordinary good conscience.

This was the day that he blessed the Postmaster General
“And all conveyancers of letters” for their warm humanity,
And the gardeners for their private benevolence
And intricate knowledge of the language of flowers,
And the milkmen for their universal human kindness.
This morning I understood that he loved to hear---
As I have heard—the soft clink of milk bottles
On the rickety stairs in the early morning,

And how terrible it must have seemed
When even this small pleasure was denied him.
But it wasn’t until tonight when I knelt down
And slipped my hand into Zooey’s waggling mouth
That I remembered how he’d called Jeoffry “the servant
Of the Living God duly and daily serving Him,”
And for the first time understood what it meant.
Because it wasn’t until I saw my own cat

Whine and roll over on her fluffy back
That I realized how gratefully he had watched
Jeoffry fetch and carry his wooden cork
Across the grass in the wet garden, patiently
Jumping over a high stick, calmly sharpening
His claws on the woodpile, rubbing his nose
Against the nose of another cat, stretching, or
Slowly stalking his traditional enemy, the mouse,
A rodent, “a creature of great personal valour,”
And then dallying so much that his enemy escaped.

And only then did I understand
It is Jeoffry---and every creature like him---
Who can teach us how to praise---purring
In their own language,
Wreathing themselves in the living fire.

Edward Hirsch

I love this poem for so many reasons, and I'm so happy to be able to post it today, August 13, 2009 - because the poet is writing it on August 13, 1983, thinking about poor Christopher Smart, who blessed this same day in 1759. This puts me in mind of my new habit of reading diary entries from the last four centuries, and also reminds me that in some ways little has changed in the last 260 years.

People still love their cats (I miss Felix, our good gray cat, dead these 4 years), people still feel wild gratitude for the simplest things in life, like the sound of milk bottles clinking in the morning, and good people still suffer from mental illness.