In part 1 of “A Fist Full of Water” I painted a rather bleak picture of life as we chase these desires for satisfaction. Is the picture always so bleak? No. Many days are pleasant enough. A ceasefire between the warring parties of our desires and the fragmentation is temporarily instituted. A peace holds the inevitable battles at bay. Sometimes, to our great relief, the sun shines so brightly that we wonder whether a permanent peace treaty has been signed. Sometimes we actually get along with ourselves. Sometimes we even get along with others. There are days when failure’s moldy finger doesn’t come close to touching us and we feel like the stars are aligned. “Look at me now,” we call out, capering over the rocky ground of this world like a mountain goat. All angular obstructions are ours to overcome. Ours. On really good weeks we’ll caper with ease for several days in a row, but sooner or later the stones rise up and bite the heel. One phone call, one mistake, one dead battery, one migraine headache, one bank statement, one blood test result, and we’re pedestrian again, dragging through the wastes and wondering why the shaded spring-water and happy palm trees vanished. No peace treaty. No ceasefire.
“Mirage,” whisper the blinking stars. “Illusion,” says the pale moon.
Illusion: a false perception of reality.
My dad used to practice sleight of hand for hours. He had this tiny, hand-carved stick with two red dots on one side and nothing on the other side. He could make each dot disappear and reappear with a simple flick of the hand. Maybe I was easily impressed, but I was baffled and overawed by what I perceived to be magic in my dad’s fingers. “My dad’s a magician!” I told my friends. Illusion. A more experienced eye would catch the trick. Another illusionist, even a B-level conjurer, would spot the trick a mile away. My eyes were colored by fancy and I confused magic with sleight-of-hand.
Like my childhood self, I still fall for the world’s sleight-of-hand. I willingly believe the mirage on the landscape of this life because I so desperately want it to be real. I trust and, therefore, envy the happy faces on the advertisements. I lean in when they show me a shiny new tinsel gadget that will surely make my life happier: I can order it online and not move from my spot on the couch. All is bright and beautiful and clean and easy and within reach. The vinegar of disappointment is not yet in my eyes. The milk has not yet soured in my mouth. I am Eve, dissatisfied and desperately wanting to believe the airy promise, the illusion, of happiness found the easy way. I am Adam, flippantly following the fad of popular opinion. I ignore the wormhole and bite the apple.
Like our Israelite fathers before us, we are desert wanderers who desperately clutch after happiness. All effort is made to barricade unhappiness from our lives. We claw and grasp and refuse to admit any negative, unhappy thoughts onto our mind’s property. With all due diligence, we set dogs at the gate and sentries at every wall. We lay the barbed wire and set up the video surveillance. How tragic, then, to re-enter the house and find unhappiness sitting quite comfortably on our favorite chair, wearing our robe and soiling our slippers.
So many of us are too often like Thomas Wolfe’s protagonist, Eugene: “Caged in that little round of skull, imprisoned in that beating and most secret heart, his life must always walk down lonely passages. Lost. He understood that men were forever strangers to one another… Caught in that insoluble prison of being, we escape it never, no matter what arms may clasp us, what mouth may kiss us, what heart may warm us” (Look Homeward, Angel, p. 31).
And then we hear the preacher’s words in Scripture, saying, “the crooked cannot be made straight, and what is lacking cannot be numbered (Ecc. 1:15). And although I did not keep any pleasure from my eyes and I did not withhold from my heart any pleasure, all was still vanity and grasping for the wind” (Ecc. 2:10-11). We grasp after happiness and it slips through the hand. We live and breathe and make love in a spiritual wasteland where fulfillment is fleeting, where the heart, like a desert traveler’s tongue, is scarred, swollen, and heavy. We taste pleasure like drops of water on the tongue because God’s creation is good, just as he said, but lasting happiness remains evasive. Let the Pollyannas of the world preach their gospel of positive thinking; regardless, the hunt for happiness remains persistent and often desperate. We keep running full throttle into dead ends. The soul, “like some heat-maddened summer fly, keeps buzzing at the sill” (Theodore Reothke, In a Dark Time).
Lost. Exiled. We bumble from one mirage to another “and of all the years of waste and loss…these are blind steps and gropings of our exile, the painting of our hunger as, remembering speechlessly, we seek the great forgotten language, the lost lane-end into heaven, a stone, a leaf, a door. Where? When?” (Look Homeward, Angel, p. 4).
Why?
Why the loss?
Why the exile?
Why the restlessness?
Because we traded in a garden for a wasteland. Well, our father and mother did. Genesis states it quite plainly: we inherited a thousand acres of sand and ninety years of futility. Eve bit first and Adam followed, as he is wont to do, leaving generations stranded somewhere between a garden and a city, wandering bewildered through a desert of unsatisfied desire. Nobody wants to say it out loud, of course, lest they spoil the illusion. Nobody wants to point out that people are parading through the wasteland, filling their mouths with sand and licking the dust. Somebody should run to the front of the line, throw up her hands and yell, “Stop!”
“This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man’s hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star1.”
Stop!