Playing in the ruins

shipwrecks

What is the worst thing that could happen? When I was 20, it was being a mediocre writer. My whole existence was bent around the goal of being one of the greats. I was aiming for some combination of Samuel Beckett and David Foster Wallace. I wanted to impress girls carrying New Yorker totes and be interpreted by nervous scholars. None of that happened. I am now a mediocre writer, by some reasonable standards. The thing that couldn’t possibly occur, did occur. I’m not a David Foster Wallace. I’m not even a Scott Alexander! Astonishingly enough, I remain alive, and happy with what I do.

When this happens—when expectation breaks down, and you are living in a shipwreck of your expectations—a precious state of being can dawn, if you’re lucky. This is the state of Playing In The Ruins. You’re not seeing the landscape around you as something that needs to transform. You’re just seeing it as the scrapyard it is. And then you can look around yourself and say, okay, what is actually here, when I’m not telling myself constant lies about what it’s going to be one day. Who am I actually, in this fallen place, this actuality foreign to my hopes and dreams.

This also happened during my divorce. Listen: I do not recommend having an extremely challenging marriage. It’s not good that I went into a relationship with the expectation we would die together, and we ended up lasting four difficult years. But at the end of it, there was a moment that gleamed with horrible wonder. It was the moment of being completely done. We’d tried to build this relationship that was constantly falling apart, completely delusional about how we functioned as a human system. And then, in a moment, we hurled the relationship across the room, and it shattered like a glass ashtray.

I remember driving through the desert afterwards. Not happy, but thrilled, in a mood I didn’t recognize. Blissfully desolate, maybe. Look at this open sky, pulsing above me, despite the fact that life is over. And for the first time, though we’d been living in the desert for months, I really saw the place. Not the glamorous image, but all the grit and strangeness. The tangles of amaranth, the auto body shops clinging to life somehow. The weird white shacks in the yard built by the desert-dwellers, containing scraps and cans of gas, standing despite their dubiousness, waiting to be torn down. 

When this destruction happens enough times, what perishes is not you, but the ridiculous idea that any of this would conform to your napkin-sketch plans of the future. Your dreamed-of identity was a caricature. Your supposed path in life was a snare. All of your preconceptions were just a limitation you were placing on everything. And maybe there’s something grander than those preconceptions, it’s just a grandeur you wouldn’t have previously accepted as such. 

This is the cessation of a certain mental function that most humans have by default: this constant looking away from what is towards some ideal, this constant imagining that our real lives are about to start, that we will escape this mess. I used to think this was helping, for some reason. Now I know it was all a bunch of cheap tinsel. 

In retrospect, my dreams not coming true is fortunate, because I had meager dreams. Being a literary writer is, almost all of the time, really being a college teacher, singing songs to an intelligentsia that’s interested in certain fashions in vocabulary. If that’s what you want I’m not going to argue with you! But it likely would’ve made me comfortably miserable. I just don’t really fit in with that crowd. And as for marriage, my marriage with Cate offers a state of being that I couldn’t have expected previously. And I wasn’t actually ready for it before. I’m glad I didn’t meet Cate when I was 29, I wouldn’t have known what to do with someone so beautifully different from my impoverished pictures of who my wife would be.

What is the worst thing that could happen? That you are a little dumb, insecure, crazy? That your current existence is built, to some extent, on self-deception? That your reputation has been tarnished? What if it had already happened? Could it be okay? Could you muster some love, even, for that pile of grimy feathers? This isn’t sentimentality, it’s practicality. It has been noted, by people much smarter than me, that facing your situation is the only way you can hope to change it. When you acknowledge that 99.9% of what has happened has not been determined by you, the 0.1% becomes much more tractable, and there is a lot to this little slice of steerage.

When I was younger, I looked at people with interesting lives, who were, from the outside, the picture of success. And I imagined they’d all traversed a reasonably straight path, that they hadn’t fallen into a ditch somewhere along the way. Then I got closer to many such people, and I found out that they’d all encountered some sort of wreckage—if not in their career, in their intimate life, or their spiritual life. Meanwhile, the people I know who are doing what they’d imagined in childhood? Many of them are confused that it’s like everything they imagined, except for one thing: they’re not happy.

It’s not like I don’t believe in goals and planning, dreams and ideals. It’s just that I believe that they should drive you into the unknown, to the place where you are drowning and some part of you has to move. Maybe something else moves you—grace, or randomness, if they’re not the same thing. It’s not like I don’t believe in stories and personal mythology. It’s just that I think they’re another set of transient particles in experience, arising in awareness just like the tension in your face and the taste of your tongue. 

Photo credit goes to Daido Moriyama.