Many years ago on a late winter afternoon, I was at the gym rather absent-mindedly watching the news. A political analyst was discussing Al Gore's sale of Current TV to Al Jazeera and the possibility that he was avoiding higher taxes by completing the deal before the start of 2013. This particular commentator clearly disapproved of Gore's latest business move. It was not hard to see that, in her eyes, he was damned no matter what he did. After some disparaging remarks and an attempt to remain above the fray by avoiding stating that she thought he was a hypocrite (having supported higher taxation on the wealthy and now appearing to shirk that duty when it applied to himself), she threw up her hands in a gesture of futility. "It is what it is," she said and shrugged.
The phrase, it is what it is, has always bothered me. Why, though? It is a phrase that is overused to the point of abuse. Because of that, it is often used in different contexts signifying different meanings. In the case above, it feels like someone saying "I give up." The political analyst might as well have said "whatever," the pithy teen-age phrase which is spat like profanity in the face of anyone who “just doesn't get it.”
In most cases, though, I don't find anger to be motivating the utterance. Rather, it is a sort of pessimistic forsaking of the case, the cause, the result, the remains. It is what it is. It is pointless for me to act or to try to change it. This attitude of jaded despondency is what troubles me.
I have seen people giving up earlier and earlier. Already high-schoolers lack a belief in their own limitless possibility. When I used to teach, I read Savage Inequalities with my 9th grade honors classes. With the unit positioned near year's end, I entrusted students with greater independence, having groups lead discussions using specific chapters as launching points. If you are not familiar with the age group, 9th graders tend to be an optimistic bunch. Yes, they play with irony and sarcasm and other familiar detachment techniques of our day. For the most part, though, they still believe. They believe they can be anything when they grow up. They believe there can be a pure issues-based politics. Many of them still believe in Santa and magic. And they believe in possibility and change. Or that is what I had found until it seemed it was disappearing. Usually when I read this book with students, they would open a discussion of all the ways in which education and communities could be improved. They had ideas and they believed they had the power to put them into action. My last class was different. "We can't do anything," one of my brighter students remarked. "It sucks for these kids who have terrible schools, but there isn't anything we could do to help." This sentiment was echoed by her classmates despite my encouragement (with examples) that a single person can often incite great change in the world.
They never said the words, but what I heard was "it is what it is... and there is nothing I can do to change it." It was disheartening and, well, heart-breaking.
Some of my favorite writers are those who embrace ambiguity and multiple meanings—Borges, Vonnegut, Neruda, DeLillo. In high school, I was lucky enough to have a teacher who introduced me early to Joan Didion and her essays. Though she seems to write it like it is, she readily admitted that she didn't know her own thoughts until she wrote and discovered them. Even self-knowledge for a person that introspective was incredibly tricky. Is it is what it is just an escape-hatch from the difficulty of trying to unravel this complicated world?
It is what it is? Not quite. Yes and no.
When I was in college, I interned at Earthwatch, an organization that sends educators and other non-scientist volunteers to conduct research alongside prominent scientists. Rather than a stipend or course credits, what I earned while I worked was credit towards an Earthwatch trip. With a burgeoning interest in biology, I finally settled on a volunteer excursion to Alaska to document changes in migratory songbird patterns.
The week before I was set to leave, I got a call from Earthwatch. A young biological fieldworker working with U.S. Fish & Wildlife, and not much older than I, had gone missing and was most likely dead. They surmised that he had probably sunk into the mudflats while walking across the edges of Mother Goose Lake. With the lake being a creation of glacial melt, the water was so cold it would have immobilized him immediately.
I was frozen. I had been nervous anyway. The Alaskan wilderness seemed to me a frightening place for a young woman to go on her first solo trip far away from her family. There would be no comforts of home—no plumbing, no running water, no heat, no showers, no electricity...no connection. The lack of connection was the most frightening part of it all. I would be living for over a month in a small cabin on a lake, arriving by float plane (along with supplies). I would have no way to contact family or loved ones other than postcards or letters. It was likely that most of the steps I would take were to be over land that had never been touched by another human being. I had already been scared of going. Now I was terrified. The wildness of the place seemed confirmed. I was risking my life to go. At this point in my life this all sounds almost ridiculous, but at the time it felt very real to me. This was a dangerous place where I could die just out walking, I believed. In fact, that had happened. It was what it was, in my mind.
I fought myself very hard. I think this was one of (if not the) first times in my life that I didn't give in to my own fears. I went and the lesson has stuck with me. I now try to recognize my fears and, when possible, to address them because I know that it usually is not what it is. And my experience in Alaska was not one of death. Nor was it, as was my other fear, one of tragedy blanketing the beauty and awe out of a place. The people who had been close to the missing boy were deeply pained, but resilient, as people are. Nothing about the experience was what I could have envisioned in my smaller mind, my mind previous to the journey.
Instead, I wandered a vast tundra and entered into an emptiness that opened up my name. I lost my hold on myself and thereby embraced a greater sense of meaning. It became a place that resounded inside of me, and still does to this day. It is a place that changed me, definitively, forever.
Though we think we know, we really have no idea how much change lies ahead of us in our own future. This "end of history illusion" plagues us all and perhaps contributes to the tendency to throw up our hands: it is what it is. If those who say this intend it as an admission of a general inexplicability of things, then I can accept that. If, on the other hand, it is a dismissal of the endeavor, a sort of tired apathy for all that makes life difficult (but worthwhile), then I am saddened. It is what it is. And from there, we tend to go nowhere. Or as Sartre explains in the context of love in his novel Nausea: "It's quite an undertaking to start loving somebody. You have to have energy, generosity, blindness. There is even a moment right at the start where you have to jump across an abyss: if you think about it you don't do it." And more broadly: "I suppose it is out of laziness that the world is the same day after day. Today it seemed to want to change. And then anything, anything could happen." It is what it is...until we change it...and change with it.
It could also be out of purposeful, exhaustive effort that we try to make the world—or at least our way of describing it—the same day after day. In 2012, Joshua Foer wrote an article in The New Yorker about John Quijada, a former employee of the California State Department of Motor Vehicles, who had shared his expansive idea for a hypothetical language called Ithkuil on a website. The effort to develop it had taken him years. His desire was to create a perfected human language, an ideal which would be able to push logic, detail, and expression to their highest realization. As Foer described, Ithkuil possessed:
“two seemingly incompatible ambitions: to be maximally precise but also maximally concise, capable of capturing nearly every thought that a human being could have while doing so in as few sounds as possible.”
In his quest for this most efficient form of communication, Quijada combined what he deemed best from various languages into one that he felt would "convey deeper levels of human cognition than are usually conveyed in human language." In a strange twist of fate, he was invited to some conferences in ex-Russian territories. These conferences, he later discovered, were populated by terrorists and other extremists who wanted to reunite a group of countries into a new Russia, one in which a greater human race would prosper. When Quijada learned that this was how his innocent language was intended to be used, he was stunned. He had been seeking an ideal, a utopia. He had been seeking a language with total transparency in which everything was what it was and yet, he arrived at something dark and more opaque. It wasn't what it was.
Even ignoring this harrowing outcome, I find his “perfect” language still lacks much. During the early moments of a talk he gave at a conference of fellow conlangers, he showed Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 and then shared the Ithkuil sentence he had written to describe the work. Translated back into English, it would be:
"An imaginary representation of a nude woman in the midst of descending a staircase in a step-by-step series of tightly integrated ambulatory bodily movements which combine into a three-dimensional wake behind her, forming a timeless, emergent whole to be considered intellectually, emotionally, and aesthetically."
Perhaps it is in the translation back into our deficient language that so much is lost, but, for me, the statement is dry and sad. Where is the evocative aspect of the piece? Where is the desiring and dynamic motion, the palpable carnality? I find there are many "deeper levels of human cognition" in a more ambiguous language, a language in whose words and phrases there is room to stretch...and thereby room to think. It is a beautiful thing to read English written by a student whose first language is Korean or Spanish. Or to read multiple translations of a foreign work. What you find are surprises in the phrasing, and thus a new way of seeing. If English were as efficient as Ithkuil intended to be, there may not be these new angles on an old picture.
It is true that the new angles revealed to us may be, well, angular. Painful, uncomfortable, disappointing, even terrifying. Turning towards what is can be as shocking as it is reassuring. There is a wide range of emotions being exhibited this week after a contentious election here in the United States. I have seen comments posted online from those who did not get their desired result that say something to the effect of ‘I’m tired of trying to save my fellow Americans from themselves. I’m out.’ What are you “out” of? Reality? Our country? Relationality? Condescension hopefully?
When people declare themselves “out,” it is what it is becomes a wall rather than a window. It is what it is, for such people, contains the despondency and the sense of futility I mentioned earlier. But it is what it is could instead pose an opportunity. Before I heard a similar sentiment echoed in Ezra Klein’s podcast piece of this week, I had thought something much the same and then said to my mother in a conversation early Wednesday morning that this moment is an invitation to be curious. She frowned at me in semi-disbelief. I get the frustration that the other side does not see what you see, but do you see what they see? Maybe it is what it is can be this invitation to see “what is” but from the other 359 degrees of reality that we aren’t familiar with. If we want there to be a future America in which all citizens feel seen, listened to, and safe in their daily lives, then the “we” used to talk about what happens next needs to be expansive. Why did people vote for whomever they voted for? What is the reality of their lived experiences? I, for one, want to understand these things because it is what it is and, because of this, I want to be a part of finding solutions that encircle all of us.
The existential lurks in it is what it is...perhaps. But I return again to Sartre for a rejection of the kind of distancing that it is what it is enables. Again, in Nausea, he writes: "Existence is not something which lets itself be thought of from a distance; it must invade you suddenly, master you, weigh heavily on your heart like a great motionless beast—or else there is nothing at all." In a final twist, if it is what it is, then sadly, there is nothing else at all.
In shared curiosity,
Katie