Jay Elias | You can take it with you

"I have wasted Time, and now doth
Time waste me"
- Richard II

2002-07-04- 1:10 a.m.

Where Do We Go From Here?

I’d like to think that there is some greater reason for me picking this as my subject today; that perhaps I am at a point where I am ready to take stock of my life, or perhaps because it is time for the country to have a birthday. But Stef knows that the truth is that the UPN reran the musical episode of “Buffy” this week, so here we are, looking towards the future.
In T.H. White’s The Sword In The Stone, the wizard Merlin is cursed by a particular twist of fate: he lives his life backwards. He begins at the end of his life, only to have to go and live out all the circumstances that led him to that place. He knows his own future, but his past is what is new to him. He knows his victories and failures before he knows what brings him to them. What a cruel twist, I thought reading it for the first time as a child. In the end, though, I know wonder if it is truly any more cruel than living as we do, knowing every action and inaction from our lives, and indeed many lives of others before us, will come back to haunt us.
It is the past and the future, I suppose, that are my obsessions. I’ve never been good at coping with the present. It is a difference, perhaps, between the pragmatist and the dreamer. The present holds only its own inexorable possibilities, while the past is open to interpretation and the future is bound only by the limits of imagination. In high school, I used to mock people who had “Carpe Diem” scrawled on their notebooks. To live only for today, I claimed, is to dismiss the idea that you have a future.
Which of course, we all do. The fact that the United States turns two hundred and twenty-six years old today proves it.
Time is a funny thing. I think that was the point of T.H. White’s characterization of Merlin. Looked at from a certain perspective, American history is full of progress. Time does in fact march, like the filmstrip says. Back in the beginning, in 1776, a person had to be a white male landowner to vote. As time passed, all white men gained that right. Then the slaves were emancipated. Then suffrage was granted to women. Within my father’s lifetime, there was the Equal Rights Amendment, ending the era of Jim Crow. And now, after the debacle of the 2000 elections, we can hope to see further progress towards the intention of the founding fathers of America, that all of us should be included in the fundamental process of having our voices heard when it comes time to elect our representatives. Progress has been made; we have learned from the past in order to try and make a more ideal future.
But looked at another way, we haven’t learned much at all. Right after the birth of our nation, we saw the passage of the Sedition Act, which made it a crime to speak out against the government. It was repealed, but we have rediscovered it again and again. What was HUAC? What was the “Political Correctness” of the 1990s? And what now is our urge to condemn anyone who criticizes our government’s policies in the war on terror as “unpatriotic” but a means to replace the Sedition Act with a code of conduct we enforce on ourselves? After Pearl Harbor, the last attack on Americans on our on soil by a foreign power, we saw the internment of Japanese-Americans, without trial or lawyer. No one now disputes that this was a tragedy, but today we call out for racial profiling of Arabs and accept the confinement without trial of Muslim-Americans.
Looked at from a great height, infrastructure can appear cellular in nature. Superhighways of concrete tear through the great plains of North America, spreading through state after state. These strips of concrete and girders spread into Europe and Asia, infect South America, and today pave over the north and south of the African continent, rushing to meet in the middle. From above, it seems like a cancer, spreading through the world, devastating the natural order of divergent ecosystems and unifying the appearance of the world with asphalt. From above, it resembles the great glaciers that grew perhaps out of the Columbia Icefield and grew to cover the globe in prehistory. Yet, from the surface, with the aid of research and statistics, we know that the spread of superhighways is the spread of civilization as we know it; with miles of pavement, following behind it, looms truckloads of medicines and manufactured goods and what we call progress. As with all things, it is a matter of perspective.
In 1958, Primo Levi wrote this in his memoir Survival in Auschwitz: “If there is one thing sure in this world, it is certainly this: that it will not happen to us a second time.” It took him less than thirty years before he changed his mind; in 1986, forty years after the Nazi Holocaust, Levi wrote: “It happened, therefore it can happen again: this is the core of what we have to say. It happened, and it can happen everywhere.” Now less than sixty years have passed since the end of the Holocaust, and we see synagogues burned in France, Jews attacked in Russia and Poland, and the century-old “blood libel” of Jews using gentile blood to make matzos revived throughout the Arab world. We see the Genocide Convention signed by the victors of World War Two to ensure that no such event would happen again disregarded in Rwanda in 1994, where no less than eight hundred thousand were exterminated in one hundred days. To say we have learned nothing is almost true; what we have learned is that no event, no matter how egregious, will ever be the last of its kind. We do not need to forget our history to be doomed to repeat it.
What is true of the political is all the more true of the personal. Earlier this week, I reiterated to Wee my feeling that my life is traveling in lazy circles. What I meant by this is that my own narrative feels full of repetitions. As this segment of my series draws to a close and I look toward pending unemployment once again, I’m filled with a familiar desire to find something new, a different project and group of people with whom to work, and the even more familiar feeling of panic at the prospect of a tomorrow that bears only a modicum of resemblance to today. In my personal life, I find myself yet again trying to reconstruct my relationships with friends of many years, friends whose invitations I declined and whose numbers I forgot to call for months, until I found I needed them again. In my romances, I find myself making the same relationship-breaking errors I have made before, mistakes I vowed would not ruin my future loves.
And I find myself doing the same things I always do, looking always at the past to try and glean wisdom from my errors, and to the future, filled with the possibilities of actions I have not taken that will somehow disrupt the pattern, and bring these threads filled with mistakes and recriminations to a close. I need to understand how it is that I managed to get here. I want to make a plan for where it is I want to go, and to map that route. But I’m starting to think that maybe I need to take a good look around at where I am. Maybe I need to look at my travel plans in terms of what the very next step is.
Robert Frost came to a road that diverged in a wood, and he, he took the road less traveled by. But no road diverges only once; each leg of the journey ends in a choice. I wonder, did he choose the less-traveled path each time? Because if he did, then his choice was easy, because he only made it once. Each day is another choice to make, another future to fashion. Each today is another tomorrow come.

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Doesn't Take Much and That's Messed Up - 2004-03-15
Like Water Under Bridges - 2003-09-08
Jesus On The Dashboard - 2003-08-13
An Administrative Announcement - 2003-08-11
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