The Last Word On Nothing

I wrote this October 1, 2018. I was thinking about getting older and how that meant getting stronger or more concentrated or something; and of course life imitating art as it does, this particular coffee shop morning conversation happened at the same time. I was also thinking about the Kavanaugh hearings and the extraordinary anger they provoked, especially in women.

And now, almost two years later, I’m still getting older and still impressed by the depth of women’s anger. But mostly I am more than ever aware of the need for strength and concentrated will, not only to help myself to keep going but also to help everybody around me who needs help and one way or another, everybody does. The big difference between two years ago and now is that the atmosphere is in every way already on fire.

One morning in my usual small coffee shop with the usual people, a young woman walks in, long straight hair of varying colors, flannel shirt, ill-advised leggings, you know the look.  An old guy at the table of regulars – the regulars tend to have been living in the neighborhood for generations – says to the young woman, “How ya doin’, hon.  You look tired.”  Hon flips back her hair and says, “I am.  I don’t want to go to work.”  The old regular looks up at her and says, “But ya gotta.  Ya gotta go to work.”  “I don’t want to,” says Hon.  A woman, back-combed maroon/pink hair and heavy on the eye liner, sitting next to the old regular and coeval with him, says “I know, hon.  But it don’t get easier.”  The old regular agrees, “No, it don’t.”  “It gets harder,” says the older woman.  Hon looks disbelieving.  I, not sitting with the regulars but coeval with them, can’t keep my mouth shut:  “You’ve gotta be strong,” I yell across the room, “you’ve gotta build your strength up.”  The older woman nods her head at Hon, says, “You’re gonna need your strength.”

I want to tell Hon about the scientist who told me what her father told her:  “It’s a great life if you don’t weaken.” 

I want to tell her about the old Anglo-Saxon king, dying at the Battle of Maldon:  “Mind must be the stronger, heart the bolder, courage must be the greater, as our strength lessens.”

I want to tell her — my, but I want to tell her — how I know all about weakness. I know exactly where my weaknesses are, how they have and have not changed with time, how fast my strength and faith can disappear, how easily I can cave in and fall down, how I can find nothing to hold on to, nothing to say that I’m not nothing.  Crack, boom, that’s it, I’m gone. 

Then I want to tell her, never mind.  Because us old regulars (those of us without clinical depression) have decades of practice at getting through the cave-ins, building up our strength, keeping the faith, going to work regardless.

I don’t say any of this because I figured the regulars already had it covered.  Hon sighs and says, “Guess I gotta pull myself together.”  Yes indeedy, Hon. Now and forevermore.

And after a few decades of pulling yourself together and going to work the best way you know how, in spite of lessened or lessening strength, you’ll notice your mind and heart and courage are strong and bold and great.

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The Battle of Maldon is real; my use of the quote is misleading. The Anglo-Saxon was not exactly a king, he was whatever an ealdorman was. And he didn’t say that line — which is over 1,000 years old and still famous — because he’d just been hacked to death.  His followers said it, giving each other courage to keep fighting.  But this quote was written by a poet and you know what poets are like: they make shit up.  So who knows who actually said what, and anyway I think that the quote works regardless of who says it.

That is, let’s be purist and say the king wasn’t telling his followers how to live; let’s say his followers were trying to hold themselves together against being outnumbered and frightened and ready to die. In that case, though, I’d have to have written not about Hon but about the private school frat boys and old cynical Congressmen, the needy, entitled President and his opportunistic enablers, ramming through their power and privilege, and the extraordinary strength of the extraordinarily deep anger against them.  I have never seen anything like this anger.  It’s not generic internet-anger, it’s mostly in women, it’s less political than partly-frightened and visceral, like the king’s followers; and paraphrasing the excellent Laura Helmuth, it’s enough to ignite the atmosphere.

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replica of an Anglo-Saxon helmut found at Sutton Hoo, by Ziko-C via Wikimedia Commons