Consolations

Good Friday is the day of the greatest tragedy, when the Utterly Innocent was murdered. Though I am not particularly familiar with these writings, it is my understanding that theological history records a longstanding debate whether, ultimately, the Fall was a Good Thing because it allowed the Resurrection, or whether the world would have been better off without it. I am not attempting to answer that question in the following essay, rewritten somewhat from an unpublished entry of January 6, this year, but it addresses the question, I think. For those of you who think the topic ill-suited for today, I apologize; I think I am approaching it in an acceptable manner. For those of you who detect a dwarfish, misshapen quality to the essay, I think you are probably right. It was going off the rails a bit when I stopped it originally. I’ve tried, with a half-hour of effort, to slap it into some sort of readable shape; I hope I’ve succeeded:

It’s the confounded and confounding everlasting refrain of my life: “what if I had just ….” Over and over again I stare wisdom in the face and tell her to sod off. I seek for her and her sister beauty in a desultory way for awhile, then lay off and take what joys I can find in pleasure or in idleness or monotonous busyness. The one wisdom I refuse is the wisdom of routine, of duty, of doing what I ought to do when I ought to do it.

What if I had graded five tests last night? What if I had graded five tests each of the last five nights? What if I had refused to entertain myself with political and football blogs while at school, and done only work instead? Politics and football I ingest like pornography, shoveling them down my maw or rejecting them as their tastes seem congenial enough or too complex. No investment of love and time and routine and boredom and duty and thought and sacrifice in them – all the things that are necessary for love – nothing but the slightest approaches to a deeper connection with the subjects, the slightest entanglements with profundity, nothing more than the slightest gasp that the naked woman degrading herself is truly beautiful, before boredom sets in, the mouse button is clicked, and I’ve moved on.

Not that I can invest myself in these subjects, at least not all of them. I can invest myself in political discourse, though more on the policy or philosophical level; I grow bored with the tactics of politics fairly quickly. But I usually read that with which I agree – I get too annoyed reading the opposition, so I often decline in favor of more flattering material. Football is truly more difficult for me to enter. I am not an athlete, and so I cannot play the game at any level, plus I am thirty-four, and so past any possible prime. Nor can I see football – by “see,” I mean, understand what all twenty-two parts of a football scene (the eleven offensive and the eleven defensive players) are doing simultaneously, and thereby figure out why a particular play did or did not work at a moment, and whether it will continue to do so. I instead respond to the beauty of the athletic moment: the artistry of a reception, the irresistible, thuggish power of a back bulling his way through a tackle, the mayhem caused by an offensive line making six simultaneous blocks with absolute precision, the violence of the perfect tackle stopping motion cold, the inexplicable passion of the students rushing the field. Except for the last, however, I cannot participate.

The primary problem with pornography, of course, is that one cannot – indeed, must not – participate. I do not mean, here, to say that it would be better, acceptable, were one allowed to participate; I am not trying to say that the orgy is moral while the photo is not. I mean instead that what one sees, the naked body, is meant to be the reward for (and a cause of) love, but that true love is precluded. Love is more than feelings, more than actions; it is a combination of these, and one cannot fully love the girls in the photos and films because one can never be with them, and because what they are doing in order to gain their watcher’s attention is bound to destroy whatever connection might arise were they together.

Of course, here I run into the objection that certainly there are men who have loved women who have degraded themselves. And certainly there have been Bud Whites, and Lynn Brackens, people who have overcome the degradation they’ve endured. But Bud White’s knowledge that his “knowing” of Lynn Bracken is not exclusive, even worse, that it was in fact widely shared and purchased, must harm him somehow; the special quality of their union must feel somehow stunted or amputated; they are not each other’s as completely as they could be. Perhaps Jacqueline Kennedy still loved Jack, and truly mourned when he died, but was her love as deep after his betrayals? was she unwounded? It is the miracle of this world that in spite of all the corruptions, we still find and make beauty, but that is a consolation, not a perfection.

My frustration, my sin, is that I never enter truly and deeply into anything, it seems: my teaching, my reading, my writing, my thinking, are all shallow and dilettantish, marked with moments of happy success, but marred by lack of genius and lack of determination. If I have a vocation truly followed, a task where I have given my all, exposed my full self and invested my full self, worked full days and gone to bed exhausted but happy with my effort, an artwork to whose detail I have given full and thoughtful attention, a competition where I have risked injury and loss and come out on the winning side, it has been in my marriage. There is my greatest happiness, the joy from which my soul does not hide, the risk I have dared most willingly. There, I hope, I will win salvation – if win it we can, and if I am not told, like the hypocrites will be, “Truly, I say to you, [you] have received [your] reward.”