Lee Russell:
Migratory berry pickers in temporary home
near Ponchatoula, Louisiana (1939)
[United States. Farm Security Administration]

"My sense of Impermanence gratefully proved impermanent itself."

A fundamental paradox of living involves the necessity of seeing the temporary as somehow permanent. Life is a wasting state, destined to end eventually, but living seems best served when presumed to be permanent. We don't take the temporary as seriously as we take the eternal; just a subtle reframing materially transforms experience. We live in a too-disposable era where many things come in single-use packaging. We've grown too used to discarding so that we too easily perceive even our precious, non-refundable minutes as somehow disposable.

When I was Exiled, my life seemed to go off the books. Once we'd left our home, we might as well have been marooned on some desert island, for all my time seemed to count. I shut up and started serving my sentence, tossing away my days as if they had been nothing more precious than pages torn from a calendar. Each more or less identical. Each as meaningless as the next. I prayed for the earliest possible secession of hostilities even though I subtly insisted upon the continuation of those very hostilities. I found no reason to love my life, so I began secretly despising it instead. I'd seriously disappointed myself and responded as any spoiled eight-year-old might have. I pouted plenty at first.

It seems I need to be up to something in order to feel as if I'm worth anything. In the early Exile days, I sensed only that I was missing something. I was most prominently lacking. I felt reduced to a shell with little material inside. I was like a plant who'd forgotten how to photosynthesize. I'd stare without seeing and read without understanding. I wasn't saving observations for later consideration. I wasn't plotting my escape or considering a future adventure. I was operating within a persistent trance, one which seemed incapable of acknowledging anything's importance. Everything became trivial, without depth, to be tolerated rather than savored. It was as if I agreed to attend the performance just so I could leave early to beat traffic home. Home, where my heart was—or so I imagined— seemed too distant to hold relevance. I felt adrift within an indifferent ocean, certain only of my unimportance and likely eternal Impermanence.

I learn better by studying worse. The inverse of my lesson often sinks in. A sense of Impermanence encouraged me not to take my life very seriously. I studied superficiality, hoping to earn a graduate degree in indifference. I felt hollowed out, more than half dead, unredeemable, worthless. The grandest lie insists upon our Impermanence. I can peer into the deep past and sometimes even convince myself I can imagine far into the future. I don't quite amount to a trivial blur on the scale of all the history that will ever occur. None of us do, but we seem to exist on other levels than the most obvious. Something about each of us rests in the eternal. When I'm able to acknowledge that permanence, my life works better for me and for everybody else around me.

I make it a point now never to take a day off. I suppose I overreact as a result of my early Exile experience. I lost a few dimensions when my life turned hollow and left me waiting for my light to go out. I had little to offer. My suppers turned uninspired. My writing suffered. I lacked material because I'd lost the facility capable of collecting observations. I was not paying attention, so I was hardly present. I was, as the old joke insists, absent at my own funeral. Called out on a play, I responded by taking myself out of the game. I wandered blinkered and lost for a few months before I became eternal again. The initial wound healed. The temporary housing started feeling like home. I found a horizon again even though I was in country without a single mountain hugging any horizon, territory where the horizon hovered about a half mile away on top of a haze-shrouded, low-hanging hill. I could almost see forever from there after feeling capable only of seeing the day before yesterday. I found a tomorrow, which eventually became eternal. My sense of Impermanence gratefully proved impermanent itself.
©2024 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Exiled, #PureSchmaltz