I don’t even know why I would bother with this, being that the sink is full of dishes for the third time today. Which I’d like to be mad about, but the kids are home from school for summer and this is the last summer home from school for one of them. One day soon I’d be thrilled to be washing his dishes instead of thinking about them piling up in his dorm room, and him, charming someone else into not holding his messes against him..
It’s an awfully long way from here to the desk. Plus, the laptop is probably dead and the aforementioned child is forever taking the charger somewhere else and leaving it.
OK, fine. I’ve been thinking lately about the essay I read about the Weather Underground, and about Daniel Berrigan’s response to them. I’d like to add to that conversation somehow, though I’m not sure where to start.
Wading through all the muck to arrive at having something to say is going to take forever.
Earlier this week I had a strong idea about how to write for the Fourth of July. I talked myself out of it. Got scared. What if it comes across as weak or pathetic or just boring? I let it go, and then another grumpy middle-aged man published something similar and was rightly praised for it.
I would have written it better.
Instead I was chickenshit.
Two days ago that child told me he had read a couple of my old essays published on my website. He made sure to laugh at me about a couple of the things in them. He also had a little twinkle in his eye that let me know he was proud of himself for reading all that, and of me for writing something he wanted to read. Dammit. I hope he calls me to tell me that if something like that happens next year.
The Pope excommunicated those priests, and they have to handwrite a letter to the Pope expressing their apology to get back in. Incredible. I hope he cuts JD Vance out, too, in the most humiliating way possible.
And makes him read his apology on live TV.
If Annie Dillard was here right now she would tell me to just go sit down at the desk and do the work of observing and turning words into sentences in the world. Sit there, she’d whisper. Or maybe she would shout. I don’t know. She’d probably shout: Shut up until the desk starts to fly across the room and over the house, in and out of days and nights. Vomit a few words and smear them across your little page and see if you can make them true. Which you probably can’t, but you’ll try again tomorrow.
I could write about needing less friction in my life. Why is everything so hard? You can’t even change channels anymore, you have to go between apps and it takes nine times longer to get from one program to the other. Two-factor authentication. Minor personal conflicts growing into major, losing-sleep-at-night issues. A damned robot taking orders at Bojangles. The twisty-turny line snaking through the grocery store to pay for second-quality produce that I have to bag myself. Car needs repair, bike tire flat, bus don’t go there. Why can’t you just buy a plane ticket anymore without being knocked over the head for $50 here and $50 there? Have you tried to get a person on the telephone lately? Every single thing is harder than it needs to be, and more expensive.
Is it possible for words to make the world explode? Can they catalyze a movement, or only drag it into nitpicking inertia? Can you write a sentence good enough, or a paragraph or a page, to justify the idleness that it takes to write it?
I’m passing on word and world to these children. They are receiving now this fragile gift, ever crumbling and always worth putting back right. They are both heirs and caretakers of the “dear opening” between what is and what could be.1 It is so hard to explain to them why their forebears have so little to show for our lives, and why they will not either. I’ve tried many times, and failed in equal measure, to tell them that this is a source of hope and not despair. (I’m trying to convince myself.)
I should like to talk to them about the world in a way that is not just rage or frustration or grief or contempt. They would like it, too, if I was not so shrill. If they’d listen, if it would matter, I would recite for them what has shaped my consciousness since the world was handed to me: the unexplainable violence against Bosnia; the unexplainable violence of Columbine; the unexplainable acceptance of the unexplainable violence at Columbine; a presidential election settled by the Supreme Court rather than the ballot box; terrorists crashing into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon; George W. Bush telling the country to channel our grief by going shopping; unexplainable war in Afghanistan; Colin Powell lying to the United Nations; unexplainable war in Iraq; the largest anti-war mobilization in history, ignored; torture sites; Guantanamo Bay; the first Black president, whose legacy is also the drone president; Black Lives Matter, in and out of vogue; Trump, Trump, Trump; genocide in Gaza; cowards scared to say “genocide”; the unexplainable violence in Venezuela, in Iran, in Yemen, in the ocean, in Sudan, in all the places I’ve forgotten or not even known about, in Donald Trump’s soul.
I would like them to hear, on the inside of my tirade, a yearning to stay soft–to stay in love with neighbors–to be available for wounding and healing.
Baldwin to his nephew: “Well, you were born, here you came…, and though your father and mother and grandmother…had every reason to be heavyhearted, yet they were not. For here you were, Big James, named for me–you were a big baby, I was not–here you were: to be loved, baby, hard, at once, and forever, to strengthen you against the loveless world.”
Mohamed Mbougar Sarr: “We didn’t write for the romanticism of the writer life (now a caricature of itself) or the money (that would have been suicidal) or the glory (an outmoded currency to which the modern age preferred celebrity) or the future (it never asked for anything) or to transform the world (it’s not the world that needs transforming) or to change life (it never changes) or to make a difference (leave that to the heroic writers) and not as a celebration of free art either (which is an illusion because art always pays for itself). So what was the reason? We didn’t know, and maybe therein lay our answer: we wrote because we knew nothing, we wrote to say that we no longer knew what to do in this world except write, without hope but without facile resignation either, with obstinacy and exhaustion and joy, our only goal to finish the best we could, meaning with our eyes open: take it all in, don’t miss a thing, don’t blink, don’t turn a blind eye, even at the risk of pulling an Oedipus, try to see everything, not the way a witness or a prophet sees, no, but in the way of a sentinel, the sole, trembling sentinel of a run-down, doomed city, who nonetheless continues to scrutinize the shadows from which the flash of lightning announcing his death and the fall of his city will shoot forth.”
Perhaps I should get started. This stall is not going to muck itself.
Some Household News: It’s been an exciting month in the Jarrell household. We celebrated two graduations in June. First, my oldest son John Tyson graduated from high school. He is headed to college in the mountains of North Carolina in one month.
Then, my beloved spouse Helms Jarrell graduated from her Doctor of Ministry program at Union Presbyterian Seminary. Her project created a catechism for radical faith communities. She’s a whirlwind of ideas, which she managed to pack into a really sharp project that we’ll now starting shopping for publication.
One Last Note: I’ve listened to the new Paramount Quartet record a half-dozen times in the last week. It features one of my favorite guitarists, Julian Lage, and the legendary tenor saxophonist Joe Lovano. It’s instantly one of my favorite Lovano records, and calls back to the great Lovano-Frissell-Motian trio. I’ll be listening several more times in the next few weeks.
1 I’m borrowing from a Wendell Berry poem called “The Farm,” published in his poetry collection A Timbered Choir.