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We are an impossibility, and yet…
My heart bleeds for the forlorn underdog, the kicked and forgotten huddled in dark corners of every city, every soul, every fleshy tenement. My soul cries slowly when I see the awkward happiness of the outcast presented with a crumb of acceptance. Who is this human monster? This devil that eats the apples of my eye.
I once walked down a street where two beggars begged. One an old woman in a wheel chair who sat alone near the brick face of an empty building, camouflaged by her humility and made invisible by their shame. Another was stumbling drunk, his arms browned by the work of the sun, his hands dirtied by the manual labor of pulling himself resignedly from the gutter when the street gets crowded with fat and happy shoppers. The woman said nothing, she sat silently with a sign at her feet. The man buzzed like a fetid fly around the doors of fast food joints and shops bearing useless things for useless people trying to inject some rented meaning into their lives. As I watched the man’s pockets grew fat like stumbling shoppers. Full but empty, overflowing with money but void of purpose. The woman was still invisible. If only she had stunk, or blocked people’s paths, or cried and sung a song of sorrow – putting on a show for the cosseted children of bored parents. But she did nothing.
I gave her five dollars. It was all I had to give. I let it drift like a dead leaf into her lap and she glanced up at me and said with a croaking bullfrog voice. “God bless you.” To which I thought. “God bless who?” For it struck me, you see. I deserved no blessing from this downtrodden woman, I prayed to whatever faceless ghost inhabits that cloud city of legend to bless her for once. To bless all like her, to stop paying greed and lining jealousy’s palms. To succor the thirsty and feed the hungry for a change.
The next day there was a flood. Some innocent people died, but the rats which clawed their way onto floating garbage survived to give us more rats. The good people are always best in memory, because in life they fail. They become sacrifices, and victims, and lessons to us all for why we should fear strangers and defend our freedoms. We call him hero whom dies for a colored scrap of cloth, but him whom kills for money is criminal. Unless that money is wrapped in a colored scrap of cloth and used to arm more like him.
I have never understood my people. I have never wanted to be like them, yet I have. I have wanted to be like them so much I have injured myself in the attempt to contort into their box. To stay blinded even though my eyes burned with sight. To keep my heart calm and subdued when I see the old woman with no money, invisible to the masses who pay the nuisance off. The nuisance will survive. Humility is self defeating. To dream the impossible dream. The human dichotomy of life. We are all quixotic beasts chained to pragmatism and self interest, yet possessing the spark of bigger purpose. The small flame of art, the light of truth which flutters sleepily like a candle in a curtained room. Dark for no reason, and empty save for the light we are. We are an impossibility, and yet… that’s all we are.
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“Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles.” ~ Annie Dillard
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