My favorite thing about my sophomore year history teacher, Mr. Villicaña, was that he had a late seating policy. If you showed up to AP World History even a minute late, you’d find the door locked. He would let you in when there was a convenient break in class. Until then, you had to wait in the hallway.
Yesterday I turned 32. Well, no, when you read this I’ll have turned 32 yesterday. Today, while I write this, I’m turning 32 in two days.
Mr. Villicaña taught that all of history could be categorized as continuity or change. Every event in history was either a continuation of what that region had been experiencing or a deviation from it. Some events could be both continuities and changes, depending on which trend you were evaluating: the invention of money represented a continuation of a values-based barter system, and also changed that system completely by relocating the determinant of value from how the objects relate to each other, to how the objects relate to a systematized, totally separate, otherwise arbitrary object.
I was comically bad at remembering dates in that history class. I would get a quiz back and Mr. Villicaña would have noted that I had been off for a given historical event by like 500 years. I eventually relied on rote memorization to get the dates into my head — they still felt so random and unessential though. I remember feeling like, I know this was the change, from before to after! When did it happen? After the before! What mattered was how the events related to each other, not how they stacked up against this arbitrary ruler.
The continuity/change approach makes things make sense, if not in time, then relationally to each other. Things logically lead to other things, until at some point, something changes. And then that logically leads to other things, etcetera, until at another point, something changes.
This narrative-driven approach demystifies both global and personal history; in therapy, I often feel like I’m discovering the story of my life. I’m finding a narrative that makes everything make sense. Even the parts that don’t make sense, do, when I find the most coherent, expansive story.
Sometimes this is a lifeline — an invaluable, clarifying, affirming path through. These narratives allow us to engage with the past — whether personal or societal — so that we might be able to affect our present and future. They allow us to learn.
So what’s my fucking problem?
When fires burned across Los Angeles at the start of this year, a lot of people shared that graphic that said, “Climate change will manifest as a series of disasters viewed through phones with footage that gets closer and closer to where you live until you’re the one filming it.” On a personal level: continuity, continuity, continuity, change. On a societal level: continuity, continuity, continuity, continuity.
I felt strange and uncomfortable with (1) how quickly this quote was being shared and (2) how many people were sharing it. It took me a month or so to figure out why.
At 0% containment, we found the narrative. While people evacuated their homes, or worse, the desire for coherence pushed us to convert incomprehensible sights into comprehensible syntax. In a reality-rending moment, the online block found a sentence that deftly cohered the past, the present, and the future, in 167 characters: a hard-to-swallow, terrifying, depressing truth, but one that at least made fucking sense.
Yes, climate change — climate disaster — is real and here. Yes, we must engage with that. I know and believe that. Heck, apparently to celebrate my 11th birthday I took a group of friends out to dinner and then to see AL GORE’S AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH JESUS CHRIST!!! so yes, I know about the frog in the boiling water; I know we are the frog.
But in the race to make things make sense, not after but while they are happening, what do we lose? What do we miss by eradicating confusion as soon as we feel it?
Conversely, what do we unlock by allowing ourselves to feel fucking bewildered?
The thing is, maybe you won’t be filming; maybe you’ll be swimming. Maybe you won’t be filming; maybe you’ll be praying. Maybe you won’t be filming; maybe you’ll be holding a cat. Maybe you won’t be filming; maybe you’ll be hugging your mom. Maybe you won’t be filming; maybe you’ll be eating a sandwich in a temporary shelter. Maybe you won’t be filming; maybe you’ll be saving your friend’s life. Maybe you won’t be filming; maybe you’ll be running.
The possibilities are, for better or for worse, vast. The possibilities don’t fit into one category and are not coherent. The possibilities are beyond comprehension and maybe even beyond imagination.
Five days before the fires started in LA, I finished reading this book, I Who Have Never Known Men, by Jacqueline Harpman. In this book, originally written in French, a woman recounts her life: ever since she was a young girl, she has lived in this underground cage with 39 other women, observed and disciplined by a rotating cadre of male guards. The women have food, water, and each other, but are punished any time they show any kind of physical or emotional intimacy. They do things like boil cabbage and meat in water; little else is allowed.
(SPOILERS AHEAD BUT ALSO THIS ISN’T REALLY A PLOT-DRIVEN BOOK IMHO) Over the course of the taut novel, the narrator and the 39 other women leave the bunker, only to find an even less explicable surrounding. None of it ever really makes sense: why they were in the bunker, why they were able to get out, where they even are, what year it is, etcetera.
Of course I had to devour this book; the desire for an explanation is a strong motivator. The narrator, too, yearns for some kind of framework through which she can understand her current reality. When things don’t make sense, she is frustrated and sad, as was I.
In the absence of a personal, societal or cosmic explanation, the narrator keeps living. Guided by her confusion and her curiosity, the narrator learns about her strange world and the world the other women experienced before this one. She learns to track time, to read, and to write. She makes one very good friend. She makes small, revelatory discoveries and experiences bursts of joy.
The author of this book, Jacqueline Harpman, was born in Belgium in 1929 and fled to Casablanca, Morocco, with her family during World War II. Following her youth in exile, she worked as a psychoanalyst and a writer. As soon as I read this short biography on the back of the book, I thought, well of course she knows something about experiencing a life in which things don’t make sense! There I go again, finding a way for things to make sense, right away.
When we prioritize finding the narrative as quickly as possible, we take ourselves out of time. Sometimes you have to mentally take yourself out of time in order to survive; yes. But there are many moments when we reach for narrative because it feels like safety. In those moments, we say things like, “I knew that would happen,” because when you find the right story, things lock into place, and even the things that haven’t happened yet kind of have. We walk away, if not literally, then emotionally. I’ve done it. Have you done it? It’s hard not to.
Trying to do the right thing is confusing. Trying to understand people is confusing. Being alive is confusing.
I learned after reading I Who Have Never Known Men that it’s currently experiencing a resurgence in popularity since its original publication in 1995. People online are all over it. People all over the country and maybe the world are reading this book in which things don’t make sense, the narrator is largely not happy, and still, some kind of life continues.
In order to stay in love with being alive, we must find a way to embrace confusion. We are not gods or computers. We are animals, looking out for each other, loving each other, trying to do interesting things and trying to feel joy.
On this birthday, I want to seep in confusion. I want to absorb the fog of the past, the incoherence of the present, and the illegibility of the future. Both narrative and numbness are seductive, but I want to find a way to live in this middle muddle. I must. I am armed with my curiosity.
So let’s sing, let’s light the candles, let’s look at each other — if not on time, then in it.
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