A Maker

There are very few written accounts of it by our most accomplished practitioners, joy. Joy or simple contentment. From my observations about their words on the matter, it seems these are taken as suspect, evidence of soft-headedness, tender-heartedness, so many indulgences. For the longest while I considered myself among the chastened. Was this me? I was but a humble maker, my name never quite aspiring to be writ among their own. Was I a dim-wit, naive for thinking these were among the more difficult, hard-to-reach corners of shared experience, the rarest, most fugitive of our natural resources? I have met and known people without these reservations. Their resolute faith in the primacy of happiness or joy did not seem to me willful ignorance on their part, unearned. Usually these were people who had felt the full press of fate’s weight upon them. They seemed to me to have every right to employ bitterness as a compass, to navigate the twists and turns of a life. But these people were rare exceptions, they held to a discipline more steadfast than ego could provide. They would not allow their enjoyment of what little was left of them to be taken away, for it seemed even the thieves would not benefit from such deprivation.

As I’ve grown older and subtly more deaf and blinder, I’ve become more inclined to listen to myself on the matter, less awed by ones who exercise authority through dismissiveness or the polishing of harsh absolutes. I have seen pits where the bodies of my fellow travelers have been thrown, decapitated, disemboweled. I have heard the testimonies, first-hand, of children forcibly disrobed and violated by elders they had every right to assume were their protectors. To my surprise I’ve even become immune to the dogmatism of self-styled decadents, the way they require valuation of pleasure above all other concerns, implying whosoever balks at following their lead into the next thrill must be a wallflower, unworthy of serious consideration. These are loud and busy times. Strong poorly-formulated opinions come from every direction, needle-sharp. Any single exposed consciousness first becomes a pin-cushion then an effigy, a comment-doll. The doll a smaller version of ourselves, though we’re the ones holding it. We’re the ones who orchestrate a chill from fence-sitters and passersby, who taste sharp and lasting pain when needle slips into mind. We can’t help ourselves; if handed a needle, we can hardly deny it a resting place in the head or leg or groin or torso.

Of course, of course. Horrors are plentiful as fruits in the produce section of a supermarket. I buy and eat my share. I do so knowing, yes, I’m no different. I feed my health consuming them. Moreover, I’m not so green as to disbelieve these arrived here in organized fashion of their own accord. They were seeded, nurtured, harvested. They were boxed and those boxes were stacked in trucks and in cargo holds of airplanes or ships, were transported from faraway locales to be unpacked by grocers, stacked, arranged in alluring poses that please and tempt the eye. The bright arrays of color, supple diversity of forms... 

Cursed with such a banquet, it’s not enough to attempt a fast, I’ve learned. To selectively starve oneself among abundance harms the abundance not at all. Nor does it cease toxic plentitude from arriving each day, accumulating and proliferating. 

To commit oneself in the opposite direction, then, to gorge oneself. Does that work? I’ve found this option even less useful. A distended abdomen, nausea, long nights of regurgitation: these are usually the outcome.  

Both options have been investigated at length by the more confident wholesale disparagers among my peers, and the efforts have only left them more resentful, more certain in their dim estimations of the herd. They sound uncomfortably similar to the religious fanatics of my youth, who I was raised among. Their view of human nature would seem to align with the rigid logic of original sin: we are damned and unworthy from the outset and must earn our way free from the ugly gravity of our inherent fallenness. More certainty. More pushiness. More reduction of messily contradictory phenomena such as people into concepts, tools for self-aggrandizement at the expense of others. Maybe this is an unfair characterization. Maybe I am illustrating the very habits I am warning myself against perpetuating unconsciously. If that is the case, very well then. I wouldn’t be surprised to find myself counted among the un-flawless. 

Like certain species of mushroom or plankton, it seems some people give off light; light that requires a consistently dark environment to be rendered visible. What evolutionary purpose does it serve? The attraction of mates? Protection from predators? Is it selfish if it’s written into genetic awareness that giving off light ensures a longer life and a more diverse, numerous family line? It’s what they know by habit, isn’t necessarily even something they consciously will or choose. They survive not by singling out or punishing others, though this is not to say many of their kind are not ruinous. Some release ruination into the world like spores, as if it were the most natural thing, as if it were written into their cells, an expression of evolutionary fitness no less elementary and clever than bio-luminescence. To take root in their vicinity is to suffer a temperament helpless before the demands of its own greediness. Ignoring them is no reliable tactic for surviving them. Though it might be for a time. Hiding is not full-proof either. Unsatisfied with themselves, often they will come looking. 

Dolls, fruit, bio-luminescent mushrooms. The round of forms and transformations that drive the issue bring me no closer to the main point, which I have held onto, kept to myself, thinking secrecy would protect me. Now that I’m free and present and held in confidence by the passing moment, it seems I’ve forgotten what once had seemed of such importance I had no choice but to express it. Take this, maybe, as a comment on the value of expressiveness in general. It is not what is said about what is done, so much as what is done in lieu of saying. Talkers such as myself have for the longest while flattered themselves with the presumption that utterance was akin to action. I think here of certain people who have made a place for small kindnesses without need for commentary. The commentary would have called attention to the kindness instead of how it had brought together, briefly, two people who could have easily continued along on separate ways without witnessing a part of themselves in the other. Witnessing this, appreciating it, both are honored by a gesture of modest decency. It is less important they describe the exchange than they carry it along through the next moment. 

Now and then I have forgotten to count myself among them. In my foolishness, in my enthusiasm at coining yet another fine phrase, I mistook self-inflation for an honest measure of my size and suffered, as I should have, a string of embarrassments as a result; when I caught sight of the shadow beneath me and was ashamed: how shamelessly it aspired to be larger than what it purportedly cared for. Every youth should be allowed its indiscretions. Embarrassment was useful, it served me well. But since youth is over I’ve found it equally useful to set it aside. My instincts have been educated; behaviors are somewhat clairvoyant; before potential mistakes can reach me, now I can anticipate them, sidestep them not with grace or pride but with observant carefulness. These mistakes arrive equally from the past as from the future. I apologize for indiscretions by not committing them. The rest is given over to common life, like rotting banana peels and used coffee grounds to a compost pile. Something unforeseen might grow from it, months from now. If it does, it would be improper for me to take credit. Consider me a man without a mouth who can still muster a disarming smile. What I lack lays the foundation for what I can offer. This being the defining quality of a maker who blends himself into an upwelling of lasting or impermanent forms through self-effacement. It’s not the name I have, or the name I could become, but the distance between the name and what transpires beneath the ice of its fixedness. It’s my hope one day children will take their parents out on it for a skate. The ice is firm, the flow below now solid. Here is a safe place to carve curlicues from movement and free play. What’s a name worth if it can’t provide that? 

This last transformation has brought me back, I see, to my original point. The underrepresented dangers of joy and contentment, even among the comfortably embittered. Is it the case what a maker gives must inevitably be taken from others? If I made myself, then, what does that make me? To come good on what I have borrowed, to ensure foremost it has been borrowed and not stolen. Is it skillfully made? Does it unsettle expectations? Does it please the mind? Does it break confidence in the mind’s make-believe sovereignty? Does it move it to be less than certain? Does it move it beyond what it aspires to control and account for, towards a generosity that frightens it slightly for leaving it at the foot of others slightly more vulnerable and informed than it was before? Who would come along, if it did? Who would pick it up? Would they be a person of quality, trustworthy? They wouldn’t know until they were taken in hand and carried along. Until they felt with a certain helplessness what kind of purpose they were put towards. What they brought into the lives of others, as servants of their whims or tools. This is if they are lucky and are picked up at all. The rest will be abandoned where they are waiting. Half-fearful at who might come along and admire them, the remainder fearful of who might not come along, leaving them to question whether they are worthy of being noticed or ignored. Joy is not caring. Contentment is freedom from not wondering why it would matter. There is a difference between the two, rendered subtle so it can later become obvious, then once discerned, available to be forgotten once again, returned to its native subtlety. Like grass given meaning by its near vicinity to a headstone. Mowed by groundskeepers, it sheds its symbolism and takes flight briefly, then lands elsewhere where its brethren lay equally shredded. One blade keeps another company, drying in the sun. Crickets nearby sing without knowing.