Hemingway, Event, Morality

I can never, I think, be a man. I daydream, at times, of that Hemingway man. My son and I went to a car show in Chicago for his 13th birthday and stayed in Oak Park near where Hemingway lived in his childhood. I think about him there, often. I fantasize about his life, his tragic, simple, complex, beautiful, suburban, cosmopolitan world. I followed a blog for a while in the mid 2000’s that glorified that type of man. Shave with a straight razor. Drink whiskey. Fight a bull. Write poetry. There is something elegant there. Not if you write a post a day about it. But maybe one-article-elegant.

I suspect we would get along for a time, Hemingway and I. I knew a Hemingway once—a Hemingway adjacent. He was virile in a way I can never be. Charismatic with the best. I miss him like a Hemingway bromance. The mysterious friends in dark bars. The brooding. The unrequited depth. I think I meet them in their unrequited depth. I will always, at best, be the dank reflection pool in which the stag peers and finds, for a moment, a strange portion of his soul.

I will never be a Hemingway because the freedom to really live continually escapes me. The freedom to live is the freedom to destroy. To face the bull, the bull must die—or I. For fun. For the vivre d’être.

The math is right, I think. The bull must die. As far as I can tell, the psychologists agree. We must, to find that spark which makes us whole, stand before the bull and accept the elegant and chaotic destruction of life. Life cowers away and burrows deep when we deny the messy collision with the Other.

But I, instead, sit on the edge of a steep hill in Fraser, Colorado, overlooking a town. I push the toe of my shoes through the dirt while everything swirls in a haze. I try to focus on the landscape, but my inner landscape swarms, froths, blurs my vision with swallowed emotions, built over a lifetime, stealing the view from my eyes as the rest of my body flails on the losing end of its lifetime war of suppression.

I, instead, sit at a table in a tavern and notice my body as I type. The posture is wrong. The shoulders thin, collapsed. The clothes wrong. The whole virile demeanor I sometimes attempt to adorn is just a weak, pathetic costume. A shadow of the thing I had hoped to become. A not-a-man.

And it is precisely here—at this reflection—that the problem sits. To be a man, to fit the psychologist’s wet dream, you must let go. You must inhabit your body as is—the desires, the messy collision.

Also, there, are the Jordan Peterson’s of the world. Collecting, synthesizing, marketing the bull.

Even in Christianity. There are two Christian churches in the world. There is the one that believes in the bull, and the one with the gentle soul. There is virility and there is compassion. We have split the world in two. The curtain in the temple is rent asunder.

If you go back far enough, morality becomes incomprehensible for modern man. Today we think in systems or we don’t think at all. You can be a man or you can be an engineer. You can think about the consequences or you can live for life itself. We dress it up in many different ways, but it all ends up the same. But there was a time when you ran up against the Other and you just chose a path. God told you to sacrifice your son, and you just said “yes” or “no.” Now you say yes or no to the system thinking, with the guise of a yes or a no. But we all know—from the outside, which one you are choosing. Virility or peace. Chaos or love. You choose a system. The system or reckless abandon, or the system of empathy.

And those of us on the side of peace—we are now so thoroughly Aristotelian that we can’t see the Other at all.

I used to think that it was patience which allowed one to see the Other. But there is something more. The tweet-chair liberal is also missing something else. There is the bull. There is the collision. There is virility—and compassion.

And there is emotion. This is the problem: on one extreme there is the dignity of man, and on the other is the dignity of life. But maybe both are based on the assumption that emotion is a quantifiable thing. Some want you to squelch it down and power through. Others want you to respect it—to find empathy. But both want to quantify it—to compare it. But emotion is not a thing to garner or wield. Emotion comes upon us. Emotion is part of the Other. Ours and theirs. Emotion—our immediate gut reaction and whatever comes with her—wells ups from the Other within us. It tells us something about that part of us which can’t be reached. Emotion is the part of us—the happening to us—which is an event. As soon as we quantify, qualify, or compare the Event, we are lost. Somethings exist in the collision between the worlds of which neither of us is apprised. The Other is manifest—my other, your other, you as other, me as other. To systematize the collision is to take something essential away. Destruction is imminent. We are become Death—the destroyer of Worlds.

And there is perhaps something equally sinister in both sides of the quantification. On one, the loss of the neighbor as Other; on the other, the loss of the self as Other—as something at all. And the loss of the self is what I have found. If you are cognizant of the pain of others, and you continually compare, then eventually your own pain—your own emotion, your own Other-ness—begins to disappear out of obligation. Compared to the million-fold suffering of the other, mine is nothing. My event is a non-event. And we begin to push our toes through the Colorado sand and wonder whether we exist at all. And we see that we do not. Categorically.

Unrecognized by some Other, un-seen. We are not. We are the sand. We are the granule.

But I begin to see some other way. Not equality. Not equanimity. Just event. Just not dissolution. Just eyes open to the naked flesh—to the naked other within our Others.

And in the end, perhaps, we are simply here because our toes move the sand. We destroy because we move. We move because we destroy. To move is to destroy and re-mold and re-build and be a part. If we stop moving, we are just the rock. If we break apart the granules, we are the life within the ocean of life. We are the swirling haze because we swirl and we distort and, underneath it all, we are the beautiful, rolling countryside. We are the tectonic plates, and we are the mountains. We are the crushing glaciers, and we are the crushed yet fertile plains.