I am told that good coffee and good beer ought to taste like they smell, aroma copied into savor, scent transubstantiated. A good life in America, I think, is supposed to be something like driving a car -- lives are things piloted, driven at high speeds along grooved ways, while one looks out the window at things in front of them and (fleetingly) at everything going by at the side, the trees in uneven rows.
(Funny. I grew up rurally enough that I had a whole forest, across the road, that invited exploration, where there were precise lines of pines hidden amongst more erratic underbrush that always amazed me as a kid, then chalked up to some kind of miraculous meticulousness. I still don’t know why they are there. I suspect logging companies over geometer dryads, but I’d love to be wrong.)
[ / digression ]
Occasionally this picture is doubted, and control is ceded to sources divine and mathematical. It makes me mad. Sometimes I think of my will as fist: drawn tight, thrown against obstacles. I’ve got this big Buddha belly and buttery body parts, but I still sometimes think, You ought to have been a soldier. Drawn tight, and thrown against obstacles – and if you’re a very good soldier, thrown against the biggest obstacles, you’ll be eliminated before the inevitable unraveling that accompanies all exercises of will. The Dark Knight always makes me feel that way, particularly at that penultimate scene where Batman runs from police dogs. 'Helplessness Blues,' by the Fleet Foxes, expresses the same sentiment with the kind of lyrical complexity that Donovan aspires to.
But I find myself at an open-handed point. To abuse the automobile metaphor – at a crossroads. They say, Do good. They say, Any choice is better than not choosing. They say, Just by living as a wealthy white woman you are standing on some thousand backs, you are already costing something, to do good you must do such good that your privilege is nulled. They say, Compliments are not enough to live on. They say, Think carefully and proceed rationally. Less powerful mental voices suggest that I should do whatever makes me happy, but my Calvinist upbringing rejects that ought of hand. It occurs to me that I just should begin accumulating those things that I would most want on my tombstone – to be able to shoot a gun and sew a dress and to have a PhD and a daughter with my father’s name (‘Terry’ is so wonderfully unisex) and a footfall on every continent and a working knowledge of diesel mechanics and calculus and a novel and a dog who will lie on the grave until he starves.
It’s times like these that I wish Hitler would rise from the grave or a beautiful girl in a bower would scream (within earshot). Surely villains seemed insurmountable before, yes? I’m sure Churchhill shook in his boots.
They say, Do as much good as you can.
Once Becca complimented me, saying, “You’re so strong for a girl,” after I lifted a rubber tub filled with books. I demurred, because frankly, I hadn’t even countenanced the counterfactual – I had assumed that I could do it, and carried on, ignorant of alternative possibility. When I forget to estimate, I am boundless. And so if I forgo a hard look at my personal abilities, I feel that whatever ails the world could be shouldered by yours truly, that I could do so much good. But education pounds into you your limitations; you are made very small, the size and complexity of everything around you glassy, leviathan. You know less when you learn more. It’s one reason I can’t take compliments without flustering, because it strikes me like a static judgment. "You-are-good-at-X," fullstop, when I am painfully aware of how much I lack in that variable province, regardless of what it is. And I have an unforgiving fist where my heart should be, that says, You are responsible for everything you could do, for what you fail to prevent. It says, If it must be done, then you must be able to do it. It says, Ought implies can. (Forget the contraposition, babe!) Where there’s an ought, there you ought to be. You should be able to do it all, and any lesser judgment on your abilities is a crutch, laziness, or daunted dallying in the face of black facts, you are quailing, akratic, dog shit. So much must be done, and none of it will get done if every agent takes bite-sized tasks, thinking, "This is enough, this is good enough," as if The Good were proportionate, or statistical, or, gasp, a Korsgaardian kind of relational.
I have a lot of work to do.
