Does humanity just suck? Do *I* suck?

Mulls while gripping the steering wheel

i. Lament

Hector in the Iliad: “No man can get away from destiny, first set for us at birth, however cowardly or brave he is.” 6.662 and “Glorious gifts/ that come from the gods, that they themselves have given, must not be thrown away - although no human chooses them willingly.” 3.81

I have a newfound sympathy for parents of tweens. The people who have apologized to me for absence or being too busy to ever say yes. The ones who say their entire life is now driving their kid around. I always said sure, I get it, but I don’t think I ever really got it. My kid to be driven around is just my husband, and I only really have to pick him up from work a couple of times a week: he can make do with public transit, generally. Picking him up means I have to co-ordinate work, writing, and shopping for groceries or stopping at the library to fit his time schedule rather than my own. It’s a little like trying to put two feet into one sock. There is a possibility of resentment. But there is also opportunity for humor. Relationships are like this, generally.

It’s amazing how a few drives across town eats time. The whole day shrinks to a piddiliness. It’s amazing how irritable I can get if I'm waiting there for more than a few minutes. He happily salutes me while opening the car door and I seethe, thrumming my fingers on the wheel. The discord is ridiculous, so I try not to do this. Instead I bring a book. It’s still The Iliad. I lug it’s heaviness around. To say I “read” it is hardly right: what I do is something more like drink. I chew. Happily, I can appreciate any spare moment if I’ve got a book. Problem solved. I’m no longer seething. Now I’m holding up a finger to bide his salutation until I reach the end of a line. Then we chatter all the way home, the how was your day honeys that we used to do differently. Sometimes I make him go to the market with me, and that is oddly fun. Shopping together, there’s a decided tendency to buy what we love, or can’t identify but want to give a go. This is how I learned I like lemon plums, which come from Chile. Their skin is a sharp yellow. Within days it becomes a libidinous red.

But sometimes it’s just hard, being alive. It’s hard having to do things in this dirty world.

Alice Oswald, poet, wrote a book length poem called Memorial: a Version of Homer’s Iliad. It’s a list of names, followed by similes of death. The similes are repeated twice. Names flash like a shout half heard in the wind. Like a shout half heard in the wind, they are gone and you can’t touch them for anything. The names are the same names mentioned in passing, as they die, in Homer’s poem. Often the action is the same, or maybe the wound. Oswald’s similes are related to, but distinct from, Homer’s epic lyricisms. Anybody might wonder. We could easily question the value of grimness. Why watch them die again? After the first name, PROTESILAUS, Oswald writes: “but that was long ago/ He’s been in the black earth now for thousands of years”.

Even after thousands of years, I think a translucence results.

Classic poetic elegy comprises three stages: lament, a hymn of praise, and a note of solace.

Here is the lament: it is almost - so close but not - spring. I am fusty. The U is on spring break, so when I’m waiting for G at end of day the campus is empty of students, but also empty of snow, and also empty of bloom or color of any but trash in the gutter and winter salted graffiti kinds. There is the aforementioned pressure or loss of time involved in being, now, a commuter, and sundry news items in which the absurd, the violent, and the sad trump each other over and over again. And finally, a rumor or gossip that comes to me fifth hand, about U of M boys in Florida for spring break, posing with an Only Fans wonder in their school colors. She has promised to pay the student debt of the man who pleases her best out of the hundred she’ll sleep with that night. She holds the world’s record for sleeping with 12,000 men in a 24 hour period.

I squirm. I am unhappy. I’m not terribly happy with the narrative that some shiny and morally superior American institution is at stake - I don’t think we’re that special or ever were that good - but if this is what democracy looks like we’re screwed. An unhoused man bends at the waist to pick up a crushed cigarette butt, brushes dirt off of it and sticks it in his mouth. Is this, then, what we’re good at? Plastic flitting around in the empty street? Extremities of porn? Is this what college is for? Or how we deal with student debt? Is this what human communication, the wonders of the internet, leaves us?

“Do human beings just suck?” I ask G as he gets in the car. I mew like it actually hurts. I mumble something about wanting to read Tolstoy, wanting to read poems, wanting to get home, needing fresh air. I push the down window button a little furtively. Dust blows through the car. Folks are running or walking their dogs in shorts, which is stupidly optimistic given the actual weather. Their skin, after months under winter clothing, is pallid but casts a glow, like something exposed to radiation. The Mississippi, in this light, is brown.

A thing happens: self loathing always follows the query of whether humanity at large is just plain rotten. I can’t help it. It’s like an arm flung out to break a fall, a natural surmise, an inevitable consequent or Hegelian therefore. I don’t know what this is, but it’s as irreducible and as hard as instinct: if I look too long at the grotesqueries of human beings, I inevitably start in on hating myself. I feel as if nothing I do matters. As if everything lovely and kind turns out to be a failure or a foolishness. As if the mere idea of beauty was a mistake on my part. I was stupid.

Maybe self-loathing is simply familiar; triggered by external circumstances, a mode flipped on by a smell or some likeness in the light.

Maybe self-hatred is easier than the feeling of a doomed world, being a same old tune.

Like when a mother is rushing

And a little girl clings to her clothes

Wants help wants arms

Won’t let her walk

Like staring up at the tower of adulthood

Wanting to be light again

Wanting this whole problem of living to be lifted

And carried on a hip

Like when a mother is rushing

And a little girl clings to her clothes

Wants help wants arms

Won’t let her walk

Like staring up at that tower of adulthood

Wanting to be light again

Wanting this whole problem of living to be lifted

And carried on a hip. -Alice Oswald