Off the Wagon: Fragility

It's my dad's fault.  

I'd been on the wagon for YEARS.  Had slipped just a little a couple of times, had even tried to jump off, but I managed to stay on.  

Now, because of him ... I'm writing again.  

He asked me multiple times to read "Dandelion Wine" by Ray Bradbury and, after he offered to purchase it for me, I decided it was important enough to him that I would do it.  So, I purchased the audiobook so I could listen at work.  It's a beautiful, beautiful book, beautifully written, the whole thing like a prose poem.  

It wasn't enough.  I just started it today and, before he'd gotten out of the introduction, I had to purchase the Kindle edition so I could highlight stuff that was already getting to me.  Like this.  People who remembered his hometown chastised him for not mentioning how ugly and depressing it was, especially the harbor, coal docks and rail-yards.  His response?

• I had noticed them and, genetic enchanter that I was, was fascinated by their beauty.  Trains and boxcars and the smell of coal and fire are not ugly to children.  Ugliness is a concept that we happen on later and become self-conscious about.  

Damn, that's good.  Reminds me of a quote from C.S. Lewis in his essay "Shelley, Dryden and Mr. Eliot" (I think):

• Men (and, still more, boys) like to call themselves disillusioned because the very form of the word suggests that they have had the illusions and emerged from them — have tried both worlds. The claim, however, is false in nine cases out of ten. The world is full of impostors who claim to be disenchanted and are really unenchanted : mere ‘natural’ men who have never risen so high as to be in danger of the generous illusions they claim to have escaped from.

Anyway, I knew I was in trouble when my mind was already spinning with ideas set off by a random sentence in the introduction.  Nevertheless, I kept listening.  

I made it to chapter 3 before I had to stop and start taking notes in the little journal that I had, fortuitously, just started carrying with me again.  So, here's what stopped me:

• The town was, after all, only a large ship filled with constantly moving survivors, bailing out the grass, chopping away the rust.  Now and again a lifeboat, a shanty, kin to the mothership, lost out to the quiet storm of seasons, sank down in silent waves of termite and ant into swallowing ravine ...
• It was this then, the mystery of man seizing from the land and the land seizing back, year after year, that drew Douglas, knowing the towns never really won, they merely existed in calm peril, fully accoutered with lawn mower, bug spray and hedge shears, swimming steadily as long as civilization said to swim, but each house ready to sink in greed tides, buried forever, when the last man ceased and his trowels and mowers shattered to cereal flakes of rust.  

This image of the town as a ship of survivors in a sea of nature-driven entropy absolutely captured me.  First of all, it is, in itself, the kind of re-imagining of a usually mundane thing that forever changes how you perceive the mundane thing.  A group of people band together and decide to, in the midst of hostile and implacable forces, build something.  But the something will never be permanent and always must be renewed, constantly brought into being in order for it to exist at all. 

However, although this particular image and application was new, I had heard similar things.  Just recently, I was talking to Josiah about one of his classes in which a sociologist (whose name escapes me) was theorizing that a conversation is a thing created and maintained by two (or more) people.  It needs attention and effort to bring it into existence and keep it going.  Once it is allowed to lapse, it collapses and exists no more.  It's one of the functions of small talk.  You use those small things to build a conversation which can cover more difficult topics.  

And it makes sense.  The idea of a conversation in which two people are actually able to communicate is something miraculous.  I have become aware of this as I attempt to communicate with Spanish speakers.  If we're talking about something at work, it is usually pretty easy.  But if we drift outside of that shared bit of  vocabulary and experience, things go awry.  Often, I just can't understand the words being said but, just as often I will understand every single word and yet not be able to make sense of the meaning of the person.  The two of us struggle to create a bridge of understanding and then something, some stray word or realization, will hit me and shines a light on everything that was said previously.  It is a delicate, fragile thing that can fall apart at any moment.  

In "Ballad of the White Horse," Chesterton rhapsodizes on the existence of the the White Horse of Uffington at all, meaning that it hasn't disappeared over the centuries.  Whoever made it initially, it continues to be made by pagans and then later Christians who maintained the Uffington Horse against the elements.  In this portion, his men are attempting to get him to fight the Danes again and drive them away forever.  

Then Alfred smiled. And the smile of him

Was like the sun for power.

But he only pointed: bade them heed

Those peasants of the Berkshire breed,

Who plucked the old Horse of the weed

As they pluck it to this hour.

"Will ye part with the weeds for ever?

Or show daisies to the door?

Or will you bid the bold grass

Go, and return no more?

"So ceaseless and so secret

Thrive terror and theft set free;

Treason and shame shall come to pass

While one weed flowers in a morass;

And like the stillness of stiff grass

The stillness of tyranny.

"Over our white souls also

Wild heresies and high

Wave prouder than the plumes of grass,

And sadder than their sigh.

"And I go riding against the raid,

And ye know not where I am;

But ye shall know in a day or year,

When one green star of grass grows here;

Chaos has charged you, charger and spear,

Battle-axe and battering-ram.

"And though skies alter and empires melt,

This word shall still be true:

If we would have the horse of old,

Scour ye the horse anew."

 The Horse exists because we make it to exist and not disappear.  

In the Beatitudes, Jesus says, "Blessed are the peacemakers ...".  The idea here is that peace isn't just avoidance of conflict, but something you DO.  You MAKE peace.  It's interesting because "pacifist" is derived from the Latin word used in the Vulgate translation of the Beatitudes, "pacifici".  But we tend to think of peacemakers and pacifists as just avoiding war.  You could, potentially, say that a soldier or a WMD is a pacifist as they create peace by their existence.  Actually, the Colt Single Action Army revolver was known as the "Peacemaker" (as shown in Back to the Future III).  

It's the same with a relationship.  It doesn't just happen.  If it is of value to you, it has to be constantly maintained.  Constantly renewed and remade.  The elements will encroach on it and it will die.  

Which leads me to what I was going to title this essay.  I changed it because it seemed too clickbaitey.  After the January, 6th 2020 "Stop the Steal" insurrection, I started hearing this phrase over and over.  "Democracy is fragile."  I don't know whether Democracy is necessarily good, but it is definitely fragile.  If it lies unattended, then the weeds will overrun it and it will disappear.  Like the White Horse and a conversation in bad Spanish.  It has to be made and remade, like a town existing in the midst of the wilderness or peace.  Or justice.  Or anything good, it seems.  Anything that you want to have be has to be in a constant state of creation and maintenance.  

OK, that's it.  It was just one time.  One essay.  I can stop any time I want.