Still Wrong

“The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That's how we know we're alive: we're wrong.”

From Philip Roth's "American Pastoral"

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Dear Kate,

So this is Sunday morning, and I usually don't write Sunday morning.  When you write in haste, you made mistakes, grammatical ones I can depend on you to pick up for me--or is it after me or, more like, around me, around and beneath and above this one big lump of getting-things-wrong that is me?--but the rest I'm not sure.

If Roth is right (I actually typed "write" just now and corrected myself; yes, Roth was one of the greatest writers in America, though I am not too sure if many Americans read him), we go to school and do research and talk things over and over and come to terms with our emotion and figure out all the bells and whistles on our body not to get ourselves right, but to learn how wrong we have been and grow in our understanding of the magnitude of our wrong-headedness all along and forever will be.

I might be wrong, but I think it is more like wrong-heartedness.

We try to pin things down because it is comforting and convenient to know what to expect.  McDonald's gets it right by eliminating the wrongs better than anyone else.  But when wrong happens as it surely does and will, our fragile façade of decency breaks down with the tenuous fabric of expectation.  A friend told me one time she drove 15 minutes back to a McD just to throw the bag of take-out in the face of the faceless workers to make a statement, that This shit ain't McDonald's.

It wasn't even about food quality: one item she ordered was missing.  She was most furious about the 15 minutes of time and gasoline unnecessarily wasted all because of "people not doing their job properly."  We expect people and things to be within our expectations, most adamantly and ruthlessly so when we claim to "love" them.

Of all the things we get wrong, we first and foremost get ourselves wrong.  This is a really hard one for us to swallow, breathing daily the zeitgeist of faith in continual progress and enlightenment.  The numbers need to go up by year-end or else something is wrong.  Investors are going to flee.  Interests are going to wane.  And our life will become an unsustainable enterprise, a breaking-down machine, death the only sure thing.

Do we get ourselves wrong because we don't know what is right, or do we not get ourselves right because we don't know what is wrong?

I resisted it but I am going to do it now anyway: a quote from Rowan Williams.  A long one, again.  You will see why.  I hope.

"To arrive at the point where the world can be truthfully named in its relation to God involves some grasp of the world as object of pointless, 'futureless' love; it must therefore involve levels of bewilderment, deep emotional confusion and frustration in the process, even a blurring of the boundaries between love and rejection (since we are frightened of replacing ordinary human affection with this radical and disabling love). And the recognition that the world can never be loved enough is bound in with the recognition of the 'hunger' at the heart of human identity: if ordinary food is consistently rejected as not enough, what is it that sustains that hunger? It may be a depth of emotional and psychological bondage and injury that has terminally disabled a person's appetite. But what if saying this so shrinks the actuality of such a person that it is also becomes a terminal disabling of any relation with them?"

Can you hear the music?  He goes forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and then I lost count.  This guy is too much.  Life is too much.  I am too much.  You are too much.

All because God is too much.

Yours, Alex

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Dear Alex,

You’ve chosen a hard quote.  Again.  I know you will post this letter.  I don’t want to be wrong.  Wrong in the throng of wrongs.  

I need to look good so others can get me right.  Write the right stuff to cross the rite of passage as the Wright brothers in flight.  I better watch my grammar.  

When life is good so far, how can I be wrong?

I have a home, family, families and even a dog for the picture to look more right.  Then there’s my job, my smart friends, my-self.  Just writing here, my time and effort in purging thoughts and questions, shows I am alive and aright.  

“On careful reconsideration.”  

I have been quite careful for most of my life.  I remember something you’ve written more than once: by being care-full, we are cared for.  I do care!  About people, planet, poverty, pets.  World peace.  I also care about “eating and traveling and shopping and eating and gossips and body shape and eating”.  I live in the light, Alex.  Light is right.  Ready for another day of sunshine even if the weather forecast does not get life right.

Last night my daughter came home close to midnight.  For the right reason of course.  She and her skiing team in training returned on a school bus from the local mountains.  The bus driver did the right thing by putting on chains.  All safe.  Curb the risks.  

Before she slept, she showed me her skiing videos and selfies with friends.  Good stories of her good life saved on her smartest smart phone model.  Snow in light and shadows at night.  White against black.  More white than black.  Benefit-risk ratio in check.

More blackness regressed in my early awakening by 4 am today.  Voluntarily.  I blame it on perimenopause.  Or light exposure from my daughter’s phone screen last night.  A few faces flashed in memory.

F/Case 1:  He was a star dazzling indeed.  Several postgraduate awards.  Not the shopping or shaping body sort of spirit.  I precepted him in a small retrospective study.  Small sample size, massive efforts, results inconclusive.  I was purpose-driven with a few competing priorities to impress a few big people.  He presented the research briefly at a national conference.  I was absent.  Our conversations soon stopped.  

F/Case 2:  A scream.  I was about 19 in college.  One early morning I was about to drive my sister to school before heading to the college campus for Chem lab.  I reversed the car on the driveway and paused without changing the transmission to “park”.  She opened the rear passenger door.  My foot shifted from brake to gas pedal.  All in 1-2 seconds.  She unleashed the most chilling cry I could recall.  The wheels had barely missed her shoes, legs, life and everything right and good.  

More faces square and bare are staring right at my face for me to face my wrong still in “what living is all about”.  More wrong to set me right. 

Yours, Kate