Human After Y’all

Slouching toward Shake Shack

Our time is out of joint: disease, famine, and disaster portend imbalance with the natural world. Amid economic uncertainty and social turmoil, destabilizing political conflict threatens outright chaos. Each faction, claiming the mantle of the common good, acts only for its own advancement. Yesterday’s champions of the downtrodden bend today in service of the powerful—or worse, become themselves the persecutors. Order is purchased at the expense of justice; corruption is frankly rampant. Every wealthy man is himself indecent, heedless of creed and custom; he seeks still greater wealth, forever denied rest; what law exists is his servant. His quarrels crush cities underfoot; he’ll mortgage lives of soldiers lest rivals gain advantage. The poor, too, fight amongst—thereby against—themselves, with drink as tragic solace. Religion, for its loudest adherents, appears the vainest costume. What passes for popular entertainment is an indictment of both entertainers and the entertained; rumor, conspiracy, and gossip drown all rational discussion; voices of moral courage and artists of original vision are alike in their obscurity. One thing only is by all agreed: “community values” don’t mean what they used to mean.

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The paragraph above is your time machine script. No matter when you end up, past or future, these sentiments will pass for wisdom.

I guarantee it.

That these feelings are perennial does not entirely discredit them. Corruption is as contemptible as it is inevitable. As sayings are repeated, do they gain force or lose meaning or neither? What is it to resonate? John Ashbery describes the background scenery of a play:

Yes, friends, these clouds pulled along on invisible ropes / Are, as you have guessed, merely stage machinery

Then the poem gives voice to the artificial clouds:

And the funny thing is it knows we know / About it and still wants us to go on believing / In what it so unskillfully imitates, and wants / To be loved not for that but for itself

Having changed, in this way, my life, Ashbery lovingly details the theatrical setting of what must be a school play:

The murky atmosphere of a park, tattered / Foliage, wise old treetrunks, rainbow tissue-paper wadded / Clouds

Rainbow tissue-paper wadded cloud that I believe in or wish to believe in, and which I love, not for that, but for itself.

And why, John, artificial clouds?

So we may know / We too are somehow impossible, formed of so many different things, / Too many to make sense to anybody.

And the future, John.

Some manageable, cold, open / Shore of sorrows you expected to reach, / Then leave behind.

Is that all?

And changes build up / Forever, like birds released into the light / Of an august sky, falling away forever / To define the handful of things we know for sure, / Followed by musical evenings.

Shy, terrific colors, magnificent and horrible

Take a minute and reflect on your last five years.

Your plan to achieve some semblance of stability… hasn’t panned out exactly as you hoped. God knows you’re not perfect. But think about it: you’ve made progress in areas where you’d once despaired of even trying. You found a way to balance that pesky desire for approval with the stubbornness—the courage—to take a stand when it matters. Meanwhile, surprises had surprises of their own: setbacks became opportunities; opportunities became painful, priceless growth.

Somehow, while you were hardly conscious of it, the kind of life you’d both feared and dreamed of became entirely routine—though you’re far from ready to call yourself successful. At the risk of sounding like an influencer, the truth is simply that you know who you are now. Funnily enough, you’ve managed enough forward progress to… well, to create new things to worry about. That which used to paralyze you, at this point, makes you laugh. That’s cause for celebration in itself.

Strangest of all, now you are the person being asked for advice. Mostly you want to tell them, “Honestly? Don’t do anything I did.” Yet despite everything, what you find yourself saying is,

I don’t know if it’s helpful—but I wouldn’t change a thing.

UNTIL FRIDAY, DEAR FRIENDS.