 |
| All my thoughts in high-res |
You do not have to be good...but what will you be if not good? There is limited to no choice in this matter.
I have found myself yet again struggling with elements of my existence.
And I would have wound down a spiraling staircase of morbid fascinations and
circular conversations with myself, until I came across the poem "Wild
Geese" by Mary Oliver. Since then, like the character from St. Denis, I
have found myself repeating the phrase to myself.
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
And no, I am not a self-confident surgeon thrown into an existential
crisis about perfectionism by this verse. If anything, it is a source of solace
to me.
I am content with being...not good. This is a tale as old as time
though. None of man's current problems are new. Everything has been vivisected
multiple times across years, and all our emotions have passed through the sieve
of history and either been described in better words by creative men, or
rationalized by thoughtful men. I am neither; just a vessel of regurgitated
matter.
Let me try to make some sense of this poem in my own words, and in my
own understanding, based in all the philosophies that guide my life. I think
there is a rejection of guilt in the poem. It is offering me a simple existence
and it is refusing transcendental answers. It tells me that the universe
continues to be indifferent to me, but that does not mean that I would have to
be indifferent to it. Just embracing it in itself is a quiet personal revolt.
It's not defined and it's not exactly an acceptance: it's learning to live
meaningfully without any kind of incongruence and without the usual
metaphysical comfort.
I think there's also a recurring insight in the poem that the self does
not need to strain towards salvation. There's a point of letting go, moving
away from self-improvement to simple alignment with reality. I think that's
very important where I am right now. There's a lot of room for improvement, but
there's also the fact that I need to accept different facets of reality. I'm
not old, but I don't think I'm very young either at this point.
I think "the soft animal of your body" is a particular phrase
that rejects guilt and helps me embrace instinct. I do not want my actions and
my thought processes to be tied too closely to guilt and repression. I think
this is why I don't have to be good; if those motivational feelings are
associated with the need to incriminate myself in my own shortcomings.
Yet I bristle at the consoling tone in some of the verses. Maybe I do
not want to be a part of the family of things. That sounds too communal, too
soft. It just takes away a little bit of becoming. This is important for every
man; for him to transform into something as close as they can to an Übermensch.
Yet at the same time, just my own last line seems like a contradiction to what
I've said earlier. Maybe it's not about the act of becoming, then why do I
choose to undergo becoming at all? And the becoming that I'm referring to here
isn't a big process. It's the improvement, the evolution that is a dynamic
process of every human being's life.
I do savor the poem's invitation to let instinct reign supreme. There is
definitely an escapist tone to the poem and an urge to dissolve identity into
landscapes, and there's definitely an invitation to become one with that and
exploit any crack in the rigid self that we've imposed on ourselves.
At the same time, there's Stoicism that has dictated multiple vital
aspects of my life. Hearing about being a part of nature, about not being alien
from the world and living in agreement with it—these are all seemingly lines
from Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. And there's definitely some aspect
of Stoic cosmic sympathy, but the inference in the poem that "you only
have to" is kind of in contrast to what Aurelius would like. For him,
virtue is not optional. And although people like Nietzsche and Schopenhauer
would probably make fun of Aurelius for even thinking that virtue has to be
compulsory (virtue has to dictate your life) yet that's the life Aurelius and the
Stoics lived.
I do think, getting back to the guilt aspect of the poem, that most of
our guilt is socially fabricated. I think deeming myself unworthy and deeming
my weaknesses greater than what they should be does have some social
construction associated with it. I think if I were to dive deep down into
myself, I would find myself maybe not as incompetent as sometimes I find myself
in society's eyes. And none of these improvements and none of these
happenstance mistakes can build or destroy the image that I have of me. The
image that I have of me is not dependent on any external factors.
"You do not have to be good" echoes the idea that virtue is
not grim rule-following, but the pursuit of our freedom. And lastly, I think
there's something to say about human frailty that's very obviously Camusian in
this poem. We are just here and we are part of everything that is here. We just
are. We don't have it easier than any of the other things that are here with
us, and we surely don't have to make it harder for us and the other people who
are here with us. We just have to be decent.
You don't have to be good...just decent. And yes, you do belong to a family of things, and the family is very, very dysfunctional. Trust me, I would know. But at the end of the day, you're still invited to dinner, and that's what matters.
___________________________________________________________________________________
There is another poem that has taken my fancy recently: "The Defeat
of Youth" by Aldous Huxley. It is too long to paste in its entirety here,
so I will have to reference it and trust that anyone still reading can look it
up for themselves.
I suspect that the end of this year, along with a few other things, has
made me realize that I am not that young anymore. It's odd—I've mentioned this
twice already in a single entry. Maybe it's the responsibilities I now have,
the ones I always thought I would eventually shoulder. I had imagined that
taking on new responsibilities would mean forsaking older ones, but it seems
that life is just a long road where at each stop you simply add to the pile of
responsibilities on a cart you're dragging forward; that image is the only
moment where my words might shine, so I'll leave it at that.
The defeat of youth. What is that about?
I think the loss of illusion is not actually a defeat. It is the
beginning of lucidity, perhaps even the first move towards actual agency and
freedom. This is where it becomes the myth of Sisyphus—he has been pushing the
boulder, and maybe that recognition, that awareness, is the defeat of youth.
Instead of mourning youth's collapse, we should welcome it as a step from
illusion to clarity. Instead of resignation, we should respond with measured
revolt: knowing our own limitations while also knowing the limitations of the
tragedies that befall us.
The poem invokes anxiety in me and takes me through a labyrinth of
desire. There is a quiet indictment of the human condition here, the world
forever keeps us just outside the door of fulfillment. Maybe youth is defeated
because the world itself is structured so that every sincere aspiration
eventually confronts an incomprehensible, impersonal system: time, mortality,
social expectation. Against these, no one can argue. This is the bureaucracy of
life. It is not merely about growing older or accepting things. It is an
awareness of the world's impenetrability and of our own helplessness against
these systems.
We must reject the poison of resignation. Huxley talks about beautiful
lies sustaining early life, but I resort back to Nietzsche here: this evolution
is important. I would say that the poem's mood of melancholy acceptance is
actually a kind of decadence, a surrender to life rather than an interpretation
of it. Instead of mourning youth's collapse, we should use it as a hammer with
which to sculpt ourselves anew.
Maybe youth is never truly defeated. Maybe some of it escapes every
time, leaking through cracks and fissures, finding its way through evolution as
little traces we only find if we're looking hard enough. But I cannot deny that
youth often signifies unruly desires and immature vices. Moving away from them
may represent true peace, beginning with the fall of illusion. Perhaps instead
of lamenting or praising this transformation, we should simply be thankful for
this liberation from the turmoil of youthful longing. Maybe it is the beginning
of self-mastery. Maybe it is just the course of nature, something we don't even
need to thank anyone for.
To be honest, maybe youth is defeated. Maybe everybody is defeated.
Maybe that's the point.
The trick is that we just have to be kind and have our eyes open while it happens. It doesn't matter what we call that phase of life, as long as we continue to be who we are. Because no matter what evolution we go through, our dreams are universal, inevitable, and definitely deserving of tenderness.
