Muddling Through

May 2 2018

I think of the history

through which I lived.

Or should I say

the history that went on

as I lived my daily life.

All the cobbled squares

with their seething mobs

and flags and chants and tear gas,

the walls stained with blood

the dogs, set among them.

From the Majdan, to Tienanmen,

Tahrir to Charlottesville.

While I watched,

nose pressed against the glass

on some suburban cul-de-sac

somewhere in the outskirts,

or peering at a screen

where miniatures reprise

the time-honoured battles.

Even here

in the city where I live

where it's live, on TV,

I might as well have been

half a world distant.

And while I was tempted to mock

the portentous pronouncements

of the breathless importance of “now”,

rendering everything equal

and thus without meaning

in this solipsistic levelling.

And while once again

muttering plus ça change

as I despaired at our squandered chances,

one step forward

                                  . . . one step back.

But also wishing

I could have been in their midst,

those brave souls who marched

and fought

and persevered.

Yes, there is much to be said

for the average man

who tends to his garden,

the contented bourgeois

who is earnest, and harmless

and gets on with his job.

Accepting the fact

that he cedes the field

to those with conviction, self-interest, the powers-that-be;

the ideologues, the party of God,

the greedy

the venal

the sinful.

My inner idealist

who craves for meaning

will chafe at this,

even though he knows

there are seeds that must be sown

and plots in need of weeding.

That the ripe tomatoes

     —   sun-warmed and succulent, and blushing with red   —

must be held to the nose

and breathed deeply in,

the sweet snap peas

taken at their peak

and eaten fresh.

I haven't been so much Forest Gump as the guy who watched Forest Gump on TV. I think back on a lifetime as a diligent consumer of news, an earnest citizen who takes being informed seriously, and realize how pointless most of it was; how my sense that I was somehow involved and present and had any agency at all was a mere conceit; and how most of it merges into a vague sense of recent history, too approximate to even know exactly what or when.

How many articles can I read about the coming election being the most significant ever, before I yawn and turn the page? How many times must I recall that the guy who last week was all over cable news, the 24/7 focus of all those highly paid and breathless talking heads, is this week completely forgotten, and will not even merit the most minuscule footnote in history? When you live long enough, you end up with a lot more perspective and a lot less self-importance.

I do see progress: from mundane things like smoking and seatbelts and driving while drunk, to important things like human rights and spousal abuse and environmental awareness. But I also see reasons for despair: how, after the Holocaust, could we have gone on to Pol Pot, Biafra, Rwanda, Myanmar? To public beheadings and even more ethnic cleansing? And most of all, I see this never-ending cycle of bad behaviour and human perfidy, as if we haven't progressed at all, and my inner nihilist throws up his hands. The Trump administration is enough to make one give up entirely.

I've written before that as much as it is sniffed at, there is much to be said for the bourgeois sensibility: people going about their daily business, taking care of their families and affairs without great ambition, without ideological purity, and without doing harm to others. Most of the world just wants a modicum of prosperity and security and to be left alone (yes, a desire for security will trump freedom every time, despite our pious championing of individual freedom as the highest value); yet despite our great collective wealth and vast knowledge and increasing self-awareness, the itinerary of history is repeatedly hijacked by the fanatics and extremists, the demagogues and psychopaths.

So this poem is about the tension between the inner idealist and the inner bourgeois; between shaking your fist in the public square and tending to your garden, one tomato and one snap pea at a time. It starts big and it ends small. Which is usually where I like to be in my poetry: preferring close observation and microcosm over the big philosophical pronouncement and earnest platitude.