What follows is the second version of this essay. The first ended on a harsh note that slapped my face and made me ask, "Where does this bitterness come from?" Part of the penultimate and the full ultimate paragraph give you the flavor of the first try:
...Most people do not live their individual days as a quotidian form of "the end-times" and so believe they have a future in which they will have enough time to unknot what has tied them into myopia and self-doubt and excuses and wastage. A lurching van in front of Macy's can crush that presumption in a flash.
Harsh, I know -- and I feel it as I write it, and it is not a welcome harshness, no comfort in such Calvinistic judgments (self and otherwise) and the calling down of plagues. But I have even less confidence now than I have ever had before that any degree of shock or pain or brutality or blood sacrifice will make this species more compassionate or peaceful or self-deprecating or humble, both in the actions of individuals and in its social structures. I find nothing exuberant in the madness attendant on the dropping of electrified balls and the sluicing of alcohol. People don't need to forget -- they're forgetful enough as it is. They need better and better memories buoyed by more and more humility and a thorough scouring of their spirits. Rather than believe that the click of the clock at midnight means anything meaningful for the future, they should chant, "Today is my last day," chuck out their spirit's garbage (including all patriotic slogans and prejudices called principles), and brace themselves for the pain (gift of being a member of this species) that will be the only way, paradoxically, to measure just how much the passing time turns into a meaning and truth that has a meaning and truth worth knowing.
Too scorched-earth, too "pox on all your houses." Gavel-pounding, doom tolling -- not where I wanted to start or end, even if doing so did express a marbling of the spirit that has happened after September 11 in this city, that atrocity and its follow-up travesties threading all the way down to the genome.
No, this was a time for something else -- thus, version two.
* * * * *
I usually find "end-of-the-year" ratings and musings annoying, but not for curmudgeonly reasons (do not image a face skewed in a hum-buggian rictus, ragged baritone in jeremiad tones: "Can you tell me what is the proper standard for rating the billows of crap that outflow during the year?"). No, they annoy me because they seem like so much energy devoted to assessing something beside the point, the "point" being the sharp business-end of Life that keeps jabbing us in the soft body parts (brain included) with a stinging, "So, what does it all mean, anyway, huh?" Arbitrary inventories taken at an arbitrary division of the figment called "time" do not add much to answering this question.
In fact, the whole of what is called "the holiday season" often melancholies me because it smells of whistling past the graveyard and trying to put a bright face on a dark night, and I am filled with that "still sad music of humanity" as I watch people struggle to make something untattered and cleansing from the many tatters and jeers that pass for their daily existence. Their efforts to make something permanent from the impermanent, something beyond-the-self out of a savagely self-centered culture, fills me with alternating currents of compassion and dismay.
Ever since I can remember asking myself "So, what does it all mean, anyway, huh?", I have tried to live by a corollary to what I call the "Breaker Morant Rule Of Life." In the 1980 movie by Bruce Beresford, Breaker Morant at one point advises (and I am paraphrasing here), "Live every day as if it were your last -- because one day it will be." My corollary says this: "Every day is your last." I try to live without the hedging "as if," without the carbonation of hope, the hydraulics of optimism. Like the monks respiring in their coffins, I try to steep myself in mortality and dissolve, breathing a cold astringent air (like Camus' Adulterous Woman), each fuming out-breath (like a cartoon balloon) an unraveling, a passing-by, which I also call (with a minimum pretension and a maximum self-doubt) "my art" -- my art, my art, nothing more and nothing less than deliquescent words coined outward from the soft heat of entropy.
And why do I try to live my life this way (note the italics to emphasize "attempt," which is also a kind of theatre)? Because it is more productive for me, more comforting and generative, to act as if life has no meaning, no greater purpose underlying the fluxing surface, no sum greater than its parts of pleasure and pain. Because in such meaninglessness I find freedom; such meaninglessness, without any resting places of certainty, requires me to authenticate my life with each breath. It is working without the net of faith and fundamentals, high enough to make a fall perilous, not so high up as to induce emperorish thoughts.
So, the "year end" ends nothing special for me because every day for me begins and ends as the last day of my life. If I make it home to my wife and we fall asleep after feeding each other aromatic foods -- if I churn out a sentence that sings, a metaphor that turns crystalline for me -- then I am lucky, like the monk who, upon waking, gives thanks that he gets one more day to think clearly about how fleeting all such days are, and how such transience fills him with purpose, how the ephemeral makes him feel more solid and deliberate than ever.
©2002 Michael Bettencourt
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Continued thanks to his "prime mate" and wife, Maria-Beatriz
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