Dwell

It is no secret that I value the past, and that I think we as humans benefit from knowing where we come from so that we have a better understanding of who we are.  Christopher Beha has a brilliant (if brief) article in Harper's about how our future-facing predilection does us no favors as a society:

“For most of human history, time was understood to proceed in cycles—the annual cycle of seasons; the generational cycle of life; in a longer view, the civilizational cycle of ‘ages’—each returning us to where we’d begun. For better or worse, people could be reasonably sure that a year from now they would be doing the same thing in the same place, just as a lifetime from now their children would be doing as they had done. There was still plenty of uncertainty—mortality rates were high, natural disasters arrived without warning—and a desire to manage that uncertainty through divination. But the occasional flood or fire or plague was ultimately just another link between the future and the past. The obvious cost of this regularity was fatalism, summed up starkly in Ecclesiastes: ‘The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.’
 
“If you wanted to put your life into a larger context that might give it meaning, you looked to the past—the age of heroes, the age of gods, the time of the covenant, the time before the flood or the fall. It was then that some lasting standard had been established against which your own life could be judged. You related your present circumstances to history by telling stories about it.
 
“I’m engaging in just this kind of narrative work here, so you’ll have to excuse some oversimplification. Of course, a linear sense of time has always coexisted with the cyclical one. And periods of great economic, political, and social disruption have seen surges of apocalyptic thinking, when the focus shifts from origins to endings. But in most places at most times, the emphasis has been on continuity, on the regular rhythms of life, and meaning has most often been found in the past.”

~Christopher Beha, Future Sense, Harper's, December 2020 issue (accessed online, 11/18/20).

Last week, I read a bit more in Kate Davies' Wheesht, and the chapter on making within limits was particularly interesting to me.  Like people who fetishize post-apocalytic futures, there is a certain impetus in makers to work outside limits, break boundaries and rules as a kind of freedom from creative constraint.  Kate points out, however, that true creativity is often found in placing firm lines about what you make, and creating within the sphere of what has been established.  Or to put it another way: you can't break the rules unless you learn them in a deep way to start out with, and perhaps you can reach greater heights on a tether than drifting aimlessly, without an anchor to the ground.

This morning, an e-mail reminded me of Paul King's excellent book, The Antimodern Condition, in which he argues (essentially) that to be modern is to live without history, without limits, without tether to place or time, which sounds freeing, but in reality is very anxiety-producing.  I don't think anyone would argue with the idea that ours is anxious age.   

Writes King, 

"Anxiety is inherent to all forms of modernity and is indeed a product of it: modernity creates anxiety and this is because modernity demands change.  Anxiety is the flipside of flux and transgression.  Modernity cannot accept the world as it currently is, and so we are anxious for change.  But then the effect of change is to make us anxious about our futures and our place in the world.  So we are anxious to create change and anxious because of change.  It is not, we might say, a question of status anxiety, but of anxiety as status" (51, emphasis mine). 

I suppose the message of these three things coming together this week is that I must make peace with the world as it is, and take things as I find them rather than as I would wish them to be.  Moreoever, I must work within my limits, something that is admittedly difficult for me.  I am ever-prone to trying to exceed myself physically, and collapse from the strain eventually.  Yesterday, after dropping off my kids at school, I began to think I might start writing again at long last, and mused which of the in-progress stories I should pick up first.  Or perhaps set to formatting the finished novel for possible independent publication?  I was torn.  It felt like picking up the strands of a weaving that I had let fall off the loom when we were locked down for six months.

My musings turned to ash in the afternoon as I received word that the next few months will be punctuated with (thankfully) short bursts of remote schooling for my kids starting today.  (No soup for you).  Piglet will be learning from home through December 4, with the rest following after Thanksgiving.  Piglet is the most independent of all my kids, and has done quite well, but today has still needed quite a bit of help from me to navigate the technology, so my morning has been very punctuated.  For some reason, when my kids are schooling at home, my brain turns to absolute mush and I can't manage to do anything at all.  I'm just stuffing things into the cracks to keep everything running before we drown.  I struggle to feel like a valuable member of society or even of my household, shuffling from task to child to meal preparation and back again, doing everything, but doing nothing particularly well.

I suppose that is the limit for me in this time, and perhaps for all time.  To accept the world as I find it, my children for who they are, and work within those limits.