Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [74]
Don’t we require, finally, a place in our thinking for fortune, or destiny, or whatever we choose to call what will happen to us, how the avalanche will break over us? Contingency is somewhere near the heart of things; we edit and oversimplify the world if we deny it. How much simpler and smaller the universe would be if we controlled it—or if things merely went on their course without us, fatal and arbitrary. We live in the dialogue between what we can influence and what we can do nothing about. Do what you will, realities swim into view like planets. Jim says the world’s entirely in my control; Bob says it is completely uncontrollable. Neither feels true, finally, to the ambiguous, shifting, complex field of human life. Sometimes we seem to see the whole; sometimes only details, the welter of incident. Things cohere, things fall apart. We make decisions; things are decided. We choose our parts; we enact scripts written elsewhere. To insist either that we are in charge or that we are helpless seems equally wrongheaded. Both perspectives insist on certainty, because they refuse to grant the unknowable. They offer, like any sort of fundamentalism, certainty, a system of reliable answers. They allow the suspension of painful and confusing ambiguities, and offer us a chance to give up the difficult, frustrating work of living on that dizzying, live edge between affirmation and despair.
My hair’s been gradually vanishing for years, my face moving toward the semblance of my father’s. In the body, in particular, the firmest exercise of will is humbled by processes out of our hands. I can struggle against the loss of my hair—through prayer and meditation, drugs, or through measures ranging from Dynel to, God forbid, the Hair Club for Men—but my scalp retains its identity; its motion toward baldness is slow but ceaseless. It’s probably true that I could speed it up by hard living or stress, perhaps true that I could slow it down with antioxidants or perhaps visualizations, but control what happens to my hair? The reality of our relationship to our bodies is a shuttling dialogue; we effect some changes, other changes are visited upon us, and we could no more shape them than we could decide where a meteor will fall.
That arrogance which says I alone bear the responsibility for my body, for my fate, can suspend compassion. What are we to do, holding these tenets, when people we love fail to stay healthy? What if we “fail” to be well ourselves; mustn’t that then be a moral or spiritual failure? And if we ask for what we get, if all our suffering and illnesses are brought upon ourselves—cancer from repressed anger, AIDS from wounded sexuality—then what is the role of compassion? Just last night, at a benefit, a man who’s lived with AIDS for more than a decade was applauded by the crowd. He said he owed his life to the love of his partner, and the love of his friends and family; I found myself cringing inside, even though I’m glad the guy who said this is alive and well and feeling loved. But so many men who are dead were deeply loved, too, and finally this statement erases them, denies the validity of their real passions, of what was felt by and for them. We would like to think the dead could have helped it, because if they could, we could. But a virus cannot be loved away. Jim isn’t alive because of his attitude; Bob isn’t dead because of his.
We trivialize pain if we regard it as a preventable condition the spirit need not suffer. If we attempt to edit it out, will it away, regard it as our own creation, then don’t we erase some essential part of the spirit’s education? Pain is one of our teachers, albeit our darkest and most demanding one.
If I am more tolerant of Bob’s fatalism here, it is because he was already ill; I can somehow find