Tedium. By the word’s definition, you should not want to take part in my account of these tedious days, my ennui. But, my dear and not-so-dear ones, you know it, don’t you? All too well: life keeps going, going, with or without you.
We have all been caught in our own empty abeyances, haven’t we? Some call it laziness. Others, indecision. Others, another subtle or violent term of inaction. Regardless of the term, if you do not already relate, my thoughts are not for you. Please, stop reading knowing I admire you or perhaps think you self-deceived.
Rediscovering _______
As I sat on the porch steps of dreadful suburbia, letting the sunshine bathe my face, my arms, my questioning soul, I sat and enjoyed an unfiltered American Spirit, trying to ignore something. Something that was a more constant irritant than the metallic click click click of the katydids’ musicless call or the blind traverse of the fat, gray-black ant up and along my calf.
That afternoon on the porch, I was reading D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow, whose story made me think of a portrait by Rodney Smith, the late 20th Century photographer. The portrait in my mind is of a woman who is silent and dark, sitting back amidst a haze of smoke. You might think: of course she was silent; it is a photograph, silly. However, where you would be right you would also be wrong, for her very posture and expression speak only of her silence. I have often thought of that photograph and been drawn to it, especially when I first saw it. For that first moment and a few moments after, I was her — both violent and placid, blurred by a haze of what I knew and did not fully understand.
The silent woman’s expression was particularly relevant as I considered Fred Brangwen — a still developing character at the point where I was in The Rainbow, who is at once as restless as he is deliberate. Fred, in the story, feels on a cold, rainy night what I felt on that dry, hot afternoon:
Photograph by Rodney Smith (1)
This wet, black night seemed to cut him off and make him unsettled, aware of himself, aware that he wanted something else, aware that he was scarcely living. There seemed to him to be no root to his life, no place for him to get satisfied in. He dreamed of going abroad. But his instinct knew that change of place would not solve his problem. He wanted change, deep, vital change of living. And he did not know how to get it. (2)
Deep, vital change of living. Yes, this sounded good to my torpid soul in the still, dying summer of the afternoon. However, like Fred — whose name I amusingly identified with that orange-and-black-clad prehistoric cartoon — I did not know how to get that change either.
At a pleasant barbecue get-together recently, I asked a young fellow where he was going now: what college, degree, future was he planning for himself? Before he responded in word, I saw his answer: a deep violate hatred that emanated from a utter lack of a non-confused and truthful answer.
“I know, I know,” I told him. “I hate the question too, and I have no answer, myself.”
He relaxed and out of half a smile said he was considering a few options. Of course, he proceeded to relate options he was not actually considering. I responded in kind with my own polite lies. We smiled, and our intercourse was ended.
Our conversation could have lasted minutes or hours, but our falsity would have been the same. It was my fault. I dangled the first thread that we would weave together into a web, as Sir Walter Scott might call it. We mingled and met, like any friendly party-goer in the nightcap of an evening, but even amid the tinkling of glass against Formica, voice against voice, smile against eyes wide-shut to the society of our back-porch barbecue, we were spinning our lies, and I knew it. I knew and he knew, yet we persisted, and through the web of our converse I could see only one truth: blankness at the bottom of myself and of that fellow and of others. A blankness to revolt against or to succumb.
That was the real question that neither of us voiced, though we might dare to feel it, touch it, never lingering long. Back up in the air like the arabesques of friendly spiders, spinning our polite conversation. This person was doing that, that person going there, but still on the back of my tongue was a ____ at the bottom that no words can describe, like the acrid aftertaste of an emptied drink, which just made me want another to wash the taste away. Fat Tire, anyone? Whiskey sour? Yes and yes. Anything. Except, no PBR, please.
Back into the Cave
That persisting blankness was the same that Robert Frost found in the winter nights of his inconsolate hours:
Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast
In a field I looked into going past,
And the ground almost covered smooth in snow,
But a few weeds and stubble showing last.The woods around it have it–it is theirs.
All animals are smothered in their lairs.
I am too absent-spirited to count;
The loneliness includes me unawares.And lonely as it is that loneliness
Will be more lonely ere it will be less–
A blanker whiteness of benighted snow
With no expression, nothing to express.They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars–on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places. (3)
Yes, sometimes I scare myself with my own desert places. I remember reading this poem first during one of my young, rather bleak winters. It was after the holiday season and after my early-January birthday when the world seemed to slow down to a frigid stop. Maybe it was out of egoism that I perceive that time of year thus; nevertheless, in the wake of the full holiday season was an empty _____. A blank that cannot be filled with any word — much like what I identified in myself and the fellow at the barbecue.
During these blank days, time seemed to have no consequence. This was a worse mis-perception, perhaps, than its opposite, for time had not stopped. That _____ gave the illusion of cessation with the later realization of consequences, of continuance. O, those childish hours I wasted! Like a sailor in the doldrums, I began to believe that there would never again be motion. No wind, no waves, nothing to express.
On that afternoon on my porch, which I spent with D.H. Lawrence and my thoughts, I knew that time left empty was the not the darkest truth, however. As in Plato’s cave analogy, I, having been seared by the light of knowledge and experience, could not go back into the dark without fully remembering what I had seen and done. Those memories made the _____, the re-entering into darkness, seem a farcical purgatory. I knew there was more beyond the cave that I would one day see and experience again, and I was waiting for it, but I did not understand what I knew and could not forget. Would the world outside my cave never be fully knowable or at least more understandable?
Unlike Plato’s cave-dweller plunged back into the abyss, I felt that I had to stay in the dark against the wall because I did not know what to do with the brightness that I had known. I kept making my shapes against the shadowy wall, waiting for the time I would again pursue knowledge and supposed understanding.
There I was on my front porch, in the ripe summertime sun, in both the knowing and the unknown, considering these things and wondering where next. Where next? Until I knew, I had no plans other than to sit, to think, to consider…
Si le viol, le poison, le poignard, l’incendie,
N’ont pas encor brodé de leurs plaisants dessins
Le canevas banal de nos piteux destins,
C’est que notre âme, hélas! n’est pas assez hardie. (4)
C’est que notre âme, hélas! n’est pas assez hardie: It is that our soul, alas! is not brave enough.
Works Cited
(1) Smith, Rodney. RodneySmith.com/Portfolio.
(2) Lawrence, D.H. The Rainbow. New York: Modern Lib., 2002. (233-34).
(3) Frost, Robert. “Desert Places.”
(4) Baudelaire, Charles. Fleurs du Mal. “Au Lecteur.” 1957.
