“And I thought of all the bad luck,
And the struggles we went through
And how I lost me and you lost you.”
— Don Henley
There’s a lot of it being bandied about these days. Change, that is. Mostly in the realm of the Politics of life. Despite all the hand-wringing and introspection that goes on in this area, I’ve come to believe that the Politics of life are easy. It’s the Poetics of life that are tough.
Changing your politics by either softening or hardening or completely reversing your positions on issues is such a simple intellectual feat that almost anyone, even politicians and lawyers, can manage it. At bottom, it is mostly a matter of viewing or “re”-viewing your internal map of how the world should be, and taking up those positions or opinions or policies that you believe will lead the world from “what it is” to “what the world should be.”
Thoughtful and engaged citizens of the nation or of the world continually assemble and reassemble their political beliefs to resemble their visions of the world and its continual becoming. All of which implies, to a greater or lesser extent, some individual control over the creation of policies which determine — to some degree — political outcomes.
Politics is the great game of our globe. It is now and always has been the only blood sport played well by both warriors and wimps. This is as it should be since blood or treasure must often be spilled to obtain any one of many possible outcomes. In all this, change may be for the better or the worse, depending on where you stand, but change will come, have its way and send the butcher’s bill.
And the butcher’s bill will always be more than you imagined you would have to pay. In blood and in treasure, the stakes are fates.
All of that is hard and difficult and, more often than not, splits parties, factions, families and friends right down to the living bone. It is played in real time and with live ammunition. But none of it is mysterious. In the end, it involves only the process of politics and, while the rules may be at times obscure, they can still be described and codified.
Not so the changes in the darkest realm of our lives; that realm we know only dimly but tell ourselves, in our error, that we know well. This is the realm of the human heart; a place where change happens more slowly than wisdom accrues and it lurks below our conscious minds like a deep slab of Pleistocene salt into which we have drilled, down into the bedrock of our lives, our wells of love and our wells of hate.
We recognize and celebrate the abiding wells of love within ourselves. So much so that we invite others, be they strangers, friends, or lovers, to drink from them; to refresh themselves, and thus know us as the kind of human being that can love and love deeply; that can make the deeper vows of love in life and, despite setbacks, still cling to them and draw strength from them. To close down, to shutter, to backfill one of these wells we once opened in ourselves to another is still seen — even in this deluded age of no-fault for anything — seen as a large failure in, and a waste of, life. This is as it should be. Deep love is known, by all who have had it granted to them, as the rarest of all moments of grace to be had in this world. Nothing can buy it and nothing replaces it. One can only nurture or squander it.
We toast the couple who has made it to fifty years of marriage. We are, indeed, amazed these days when even half that measure is achieved. We admire the parents who have a challenged child and yet stick by and raise that child into all the happiness of which that child is capable. We honor all those who spend their lives in service to humanity and even, when that service passes all understanding, raise them up as Saints, holy or secular.
The water from our deepest wells of love runs clear and clean. It refreshes the soul. Like all the great waters of this life, it carries within it no taste at all other than that which is pure and which is true. Tasted once we carry within us forever a ceaseless thirst for more of it.
Then there are ( because we are only human and caught halfway up the stairs between beast and angel) the darker wells of which we do not speak, but which run just as deep and just as ceaseless within our hearts.
These are the wells of the black and bitter water that we drink from at that awful hour of 4 AM in the soul. It’s that hour when the bad phone calls arrive. It’s the hour when the arguments and the accusations twist in the soul when nothing is satisfied and sleep is a whisper and the dawn delays.
Nothing good ever transpires in an argument carried past 2 AM, and it grows almost lethal as it winds on until 4. It doesn’t matter whether or not the argument is with another or just with oneself, let it run that long into the night and you will know — cold and stained — the darkest secrets of the self. And you will drink them down as night after night and year after year they are drawn up from the heart’s core. And the water will be dank and false and carry an ever-increasing taint of poison into your soul. Tasted once, you will have a ceaseless thirst for more of it.
I’ve been drinking my dark bitter glass from my secret well of hate in the dark hours on and off for what is now going on twenty years. That’s a strange measure since it marks just about the same length of time that I loved the woman and was married to her.
But I’m no addict. I’m no alcoholic of hate. No, not me. [continue reading…]
Gerard Van der Leun
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