You read poetry. Poems that ask you to consider the question, 'What will I do with my life? My one precious life?' You read the existentialists and Nietzsche. Read Iddo Landau and Martin Hägglund and Scott Barry Kaufman. Maybe you don’t. I do. I read and I think and I try to work out what this thing, this bread that isn’t quite rising in the way I thought it would when I mixed and stirred and added and kneaded, this life that’s somehow stunted and not shaping up as I think I life should, I try to work out what this thing could be.
You see, each day, for more years than there are fingers and toes, I’ve tended it in my way. Given it sustenance, such as it merited, and tried to educate it. I’ve taken it to schools, many of them, and university. I’ve sat it down with books, putting thoughts into its eyes, and plugged into its ears the buds to cast spells of knowledge. I’ve done all that and still it flounders.
I get out the paddles, ‘Charge! Clear!’ and bang – it shudders, threatens, like the monster made of copses, to rouse itself into a simulacrum of life. ‘Charge! Clear!’ But the stuttering start is a stammer. Life in scare quotes.
There have been times when I thought it had caught. Like a fire you’ve laid and the match flares and the paper burns fierce as fortune, singing its song of lust. And you think, ‘That’s got it!’ And you sit back on your heels to watch the flames. But when the paper’s gone, the kindling’s just smoking, embers you blow at with frantic breath. There isn’t enough that’s right to light it. There isn’t enough for its force to feel justified and the smoke, blue grey smears, soon cannot overcome gravity and sinks back into the crusts of charred sadness, fragments lighter than desiccated bone.
The project of existence is to find your ought. The thing that’s worth spending your finite time on. Is it this or that? Maybe the other? And why doesn’t anyone else seem to have this bother? Do their lives grow vaster than empires while mine is a skimmed stone sinking? Oh, it has skimmed, bounced on the surface once or twice, I know it has because the memories make my puppet limbs tremble, but now I struggle to see it beneath the murky surface of what there is.
Depending on our commitments, our joys and griefs will be of a different species. Courage rises only for causes, not as a general rule. We have, each of us, our own self-created bundle of needs and concerns. Each project and value is a plank in the making of the boat in which we voyage from here to the end of life's journey. No planks, no boat. Ship-wrecked lives on lost islands cut apart from meaning. What matters. Beyond staying alive, what matters? It can’t just be pleasure? Not just duty either. It can’t be what the world expects or what we decided at sixteen. No, it must be, it has to be, our own creation, our own repeatedly repeated act of creation, this plank removed and that new plank carefully filling the gap. It is our responsibility to find the one unique structure of concerns and passions that suits our soul. This is what is required to be a person, to have personhood, a life.
But I am a potter whose creations, in my desperate hands, fumble and flop into constituent clay. I cannot make the vessel of my being. I cannot mould it and fire it and glaze it and cast it into the world. There is, perhaps, no image in my mind of what this thing should be and I cannot act without a plan. I cannot free-form some trinket and pretend it counts. I want a life that’s worth living. Is that too much to ask? I think you may say so, but think: I, you, we, we have this miracle of existence and consciousness. A mind that can be awe-struck and wonder-bound. We have possibility – and how ungrateful, how thoughtless, how flippant to cast it away like a crisp packet, a chocolate wrapper, like yesterday’s news. This is our one most precious gift – can we, with any shred of integrity, spend it on semi-drunkenness and Netflix?
There was an old belief that bear cubs were born as unformed matter, licked into ursine shape by their mother. My mother tongue has shaped me into fragments and participles, but the sentence and the sense I yet strain for, I reach for, I yearn for, as a mute me in a hospital bed once fought for words…
The first I found were 'thank' and 'you'. The smallest sentence, the greatest meaning. And, recalling that, gratitude wells up, leaving me humble. This gift, this life. I will find its pattern, make it into something that matters. To me. Ah, yes. The echoes haunt me like Easter's bells tolling, tolling, telling me time rushes on. This is a promise I’ve made before. A frustration and a conclusion as familiar as breathing. But just because I’ve failed a hundred times, a thousand more, that doesn’t make the search less tenable. Possibility remains.
Mix, stir, knead. Charge, clear, bang. Light the taper, build the boat, shape the pot, lick my bear-cub-self into being.
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