Fuller Wiser

Better today. My wife and I are talking, which hasn’t happened in a normal tone of voice for a while.

However, she was taken aback by my revelation that I was tossing the creative work into the hobby bin. That may have even been the domino that tipped her defensiveness over, as quickly and quietly as she responded. She doesn’t think I should drop it, and yet my continuing to pursue it is one of the many things keeping our operation in chaos.

In a fit of martyrdom, she suggested that I quit my job and just stay at home making music. It pains me to say it, but my heart leapt. My poor old emotional, idealistic heart doesn’t know a lot of things that my mind does, and in truth, that has always been the case, thus my need for therapy.

But I pause, count to 20, and of course realize that there is no way in hell we could afford such an arrangement. We both have aspirations which need financing, and we’ve got this kid to feed. No, my facts are still straight: Education over art.

Unfortunately, in the heat of Monday morning’s breakdown, I emailed my mother. And a distress call from an emotional son activates the Mother Alert System, which cannot easily be silenced.

As I’ve documented here before, my mother and I have a very close and honest relationship. She has no purity and perfection expectations of me, and vice versa. We both understand that we are grown adults, with all the frayed ends and dented fenders entailed therein. Nonetheless, as a parent, I can understand the protective reaction if you sense your child is in danger. I will surely retain it well into my son’s adulthood.

So we’re getting together to talk, just her and I, this Friday night. Knowing us, the conversation will last well into the wee hours. This talk will be slightly deeper than most, though, because one of the reasons I’m seeking out her advice is that she’s been in a troubled relationship with my father for most of their marriage. I’m not entirely certain what I will uncover, but maybe there are parallels I would do well to be aware of.

The most alarming part of my current marriage crisis is how similar the battle lines are at their core. It’s not necessarily about the arguments, but about two different approaches. My wife on the side of heedless hope, and me on the side of watching our step on the tightrope. We both started out on the former side, but age and impact craters have driven me further over to the latter. Which, incidentally, is my father’s approach.

For someone who’s spent a large portion of their adult life rejecting the ideology of his father, it’s maddening to find myself out on the battlefield in his old suit of armor, brandishing his coat of arms against wayward over-optimism. How the hell did this happen?

More frustrating is that it doesn’t have the effect of bringing me much closer to my father. We get along better than we ever have, but that’s mostly because he knows he can’t tell me what to do anymore, so he doesn’t.

Unfortunately, I have only recently started to notice that in our joint complaining sessions (what passes for conversation between my dad and I), there is an occasional glint in the old man’s eye and a satisfied smile when I assess the hopelessness of a given situation. I’m trying very hard not to believe that my dad is subliminally telling me, “I told you so.”

Upon examination, a good deal of the clashes between me and my father in my youth involved my outspoken rejection of pessimism. At the time, I would rather have described it as an embrace of optimism, but my attitude was just as much, and possibly more, about not being something as being it. Anytime I held forth with why I was going to do something, my father’s predictable riposte was that it was unrealistic. My retort to this brand of attack was seldom humble, often lengthy, and if I could get away with it, a bit condescending.

My brain at that time reflected many of the themes addressed here at various times: What should be is more important than what is. Right is right and must never yield to pragmatic go-along-to-get-alongism. Everything would be all right if everyone just ____.

Invert those statements and you get my dad’s positions, though with qualifications: What should be would be nice, but it’ll never happen, so deal with what is. Right may be right, but nobody cares, so you have to go along to get along. A lot of things might be all right if everyone just ____, but it’s impossible, so why bother?

I recognize those positions. To a large degree, I now hold them. My mother talks a lot about creating your own reality, but that’s precisely what I’ve been trying to do for nearly two decades. The problem is that reality already exists, and doesn’t give a damn about the reality I’m creating to compete with it, and being the actual reality, is able to just ignore me and go about its business, leaving me standing in the road with my little pie chart full of dreams that live only in my head, and increasingly not even taken seriously there.

I have a nasty habit of frequently watching the movie Contact. It represents very starkly the battle between idealism and so-called realism. And true to life, the only thing that stops Ellie’s SETI program from being crushed by the cynical climber Drumlin is A GODDAMNED SIGNAL FROM ALIENS. And though they conveniently show up just at the last minute in the movie, my own experience leads me to believe that if the aliens finally do contact us, we’ll be too busy watching American Idol and finding new reasons to hate foreigners.

Still, the movie reminds my heart of what it used to be. I have some nostalgia for my more hopeful self, the one that believed the nuts-and-bolts world could be overcome by the power of pure idealism. My observation is that cases where the ideal beats the animal are rare and perfect storms, attributable as much to dumb luck as effort. Far more numerous are the tales of I-fought-the-law-and-the-law-won.

And yet the old heart hasn’t died yet. I feel its tugging during, of all things, speeches by Mr. Obama. He is the perfect Ellie Arroway on the high seas of politics, damning torpedoes in the straits, calling all hands on deck to believe our way into making it, while people in the engine room are sweatily wondering what the hell we’re going to do when we at last reach hull crush depth.

Given my current leanings towards the pragmatic side, one would think I would vote against the Senator Of Hope. But in this one thing, I am allowing my heart’s voice to win. To believe that there is value in aiming high, in believing something can be done before you know it for a fact. A hidden corner of myself still believes that, and looks for ways to assert itself whenever possible, slipping past the guards I’ve put up near all the old hull breaches.

Could it be that I am not alone? That the national outpouring of support for this high-talking politician is representative of a hidden optimism in us all? Is our society built in such a way that hope cannot survive long in adulthood, and is pushed down, aided by the conventional wisdom of cynicism in all things, from politics to employer relations to human interaction? Is our whole country suffering from the same neurosis?

Obviously it’s not everyone. Theism is the preferred repository for illogical hope in America, and its gradual disappearance from my life has left me unprotected, caught out in the storm with no umbrella, much less a roof over my head. Many of those supporting the more pragmatic candidates have already tossed their hope into the Bank of God, and have no need of seeking shelter for their emotional assets.

This is actually one of the only stumbling blocks between my mother and I these days. In her life, she has made the journey from card-carrying Baptist to nondenominational spiritualist, admittedly a big leap. But having started near her spiritual endpoint, I have continued straight on into atheism, and thus far, it has been one bridge too far for her to go.

As I know from experience, the difficulty with being a general spiritualist is that the evidence is emotional, not empirical. You feel that something bigger is out there, you sense that you’re being pulled in one direction over another, you infer that a lucky confluence of events is engineered by a benevolent force. But nowhere is there actually any evidence of the invisible hand.

This makes it difficult when attempting to convince others. You can recount your own stories of feelings, senses, and inferences, but they will never match another person’s experience. And in fact, they may directly contradict another person’s feelings, senses, and inferences in similar situations.

It’s the kind of thing that makes my mom and I hit conversational brick walls. She can tell me all day long that she has a feeling that everything happens for a reason, but never is there a scrap of evidence to support such a stance, save for anecdotes of her own experience and the resulting inference. While for me, the idea of an omniscient being tossing vague little clues into the ether in hopes that people will interpret them as such has really drawn my vigorous ire for quite a while now. If there is a god, he is a colossal asshole. When I tell my mother this, she just nods and says, “Well, I can see why you might think that.” Then we drop the godtalk and return to the world as is, something she’s less comfortable with.

I’m inclined to believe that this disparate god/godless worldview is one of the chief pebbles in my parents’ marital shoe, but I’m curious to see if, as usual, it’s more complex than I realize. With my wife and I, the god thing is already out the window, though I arrived in the abandoned celestial railway station a couple of years before she did. But like me, her heart is perfectly capable of irrational hope without a magic conductor to drive the engine. Unlike me, she hasn’t locked her hope away in solitary confinement.

It will be an interesting Friday.