Lost in a thingy, yet vacuous world
On continents adrift, looking for rock, sun, or maybe even a rainbow
Feeling lost once again in the present, I decided to examine my lostness in the past. I thought perhaps clues to where I had been lost in the past might be found in the books I sucked in at the time with a desperation and urgent need like coming up for air after being held too long underwater. When I was nineteen, my society of literary compatriots were raw, subversive writers like Edward Abbey and Jim Harrison. In particular, I recalled being overcome by A Good Day to Die to the point where it was the first book recommendation I made to potential paramours for a solid four years after first reading it. Thus, perhaps my lingering singlehood. What had I found in this novel that had eased my sense of desperate bewilderment at the world and myself in it? Over the past two days, I reread it to find out.
The novel is introduced with a Rilke quote emphasizing the lost and deprived inherent state of humankind: “Each torpid turn of this world bears such disinherited children to whom neither what’s been, nor what is coming, belongs.” Next, in the prologue—which traditionally serves to introduce central themes—the main character and narrator, (whose name we do not learn until well over 130 pages into the novel), Bernard, wakes up in his boat, hungover again and lying next to a woman whose physical appearance is desirous enough but whose attractiveness withers as her intellect “grew progressively dense after so much laughter.” He only wants to fish and is annoyed at her questions and indeed at her presence as she complains about his driving too fast, about making her cold, and even about going the wrong way as he attempts to travel to a desired fishing spot. With no choice but to return her to shore, Bernard speeds back to the marina where they hop into his car and drive back to her motel. There, the woman gets out and quite specifically “flounces” back to her motel room door—the image of her spasmodically flailing and prancing in exaggerated movement burns into the reader’s brain—before she enters “without a backward glance. Oh well.”
Oh well. Oh well could be one of the motifs of the novel or perhaps Bernard’s most defining character trait. He laments the inevitable dullness of reality and yet finds the “too real” (such as the skin flick he and the two other main characters sit in the first row watching far too close up) nauseating. He has left his wife and daughter because of some mental breakdown whose details are only sketched out in vagary and is bumming around Key West fishing which seems to be the only thing in the world that incites some kind of enthusiasm in him. At a bar one evening, he happens to mention to a scar-faced vet that they have built or are planning to build a dam on the Colorado River. Tim, the Vietnam vet, is at first curious and later more and more enraged at the possible destruction of the pristine nature of the Grand Canyon and before Bernard knows it, he has agreed to go with Tim to blow it up. The morning after this strange new alliance and ill-advised mission as he packs a bag for the trip, Bernard wisely reflects: “I should question my motives but found that I had none.” Indeed, he asks again and over again and in so many different ways, what is this life, “Where are the principles of order on earth?” and what do the hours, days, weeks, years add up to but decline and the unfolding of one accidental occurrence after another:
I looked long and closely in the mirror for signs of incipient age and decay. Twenty-eight. Four times seven. Your life is supposed to change dramatically every seven years they say. Who says. The stars of course. We’re in less intimate contact I think. My throat hurts from smoking and my head from drinking and my ass from riding and the rest of me from Sylvia. My interest in life weakened again at a rapacious rate. It disappeared in fact while I brushed my teeth.
The only things besides fishing which seem to bond Bernard with any excitement to life are drugs and alcohol, Sylvia (Tim’s girlfriend), and—as the tension builds towards the very real possibility of intentional destruction—sabotage. But fishing is a momentarily immersive diversion and Sylvia an ultimately unfulfilling (and achingly impossible to fulfill) fantasy. Likewise, drugs and alcohol induce nothing more than sober regret. As Tim and Sylvia regale the group with humorous or rousing stories from their pasts one night, Bernard ruminates on a startling recognition—that the others seem to be continuous and logical products of their own histories whereas the only meaning in his life seems derived from a pathetic contradistinction to other people, other choices, or other deceptive “essential” truths, “the ‘we are one thing because we are not another’ sort of confusion.” For Bernard in his passive reactive agency, the only option is not to become a legend but an anti-legend, to invert his pathetic life into a single and perhaps liberating act of resistance, fulfilling the perverse non-achievement that has defined his life up until now: “at fourteen his heifer took last place at the fair; at twenty-two he had difficulty staying awake; at twenty-six his wife asked him to leave but to please not take the car; at twenty-eight he climbed his first mountain and made a smile.”
As Bernard faces down and, for the first time, questions the essential truth of his own life—that at least he is honest—even that facade falls away as delusion. We can convince ourselves of so much for so long despite our best intentions. And this denuding of his prior guiding plan on earth leads him to conclude that perhaps the only truly committed and potentially “good” thing he can do in this life “might be to let a few miserable fish swim to that higher, cleaner water where they were surely meant to spawn, as surely anyway as we are meant to die or vote or drink or screw out our torpid days.”
A good day to die. Which one of the ones we are gifted would it be? As if we could choose. The title of the novel, which Bernard tells us comes from a Nez Percé saying often yelled as they prepared for battle with the invading Cavalry, may actually be just another mischaracterized and mis-appropriated phrase—a phrase lost in translation from one culture to another. Indeed, despite the rallying ‘live free or die’ battle cry it seems to imply, it may otherwise have been an adage of acceptance: today I will accept what comes, even death, without resistance or regrets.
As I came to the pitifully tragic ending of the novel—where Tim dies as they attempt to blow up, not the Hoover dam which is still only a plan when they visit the as yet un-damed Grand Canyon, but instead an inconsequential dam on a rancher’s private stream entering the Clearwater northwest of Orofino, Idaho—I was met with the inane and useless nature of their entirely un-subversive act which makes no statement nor asserts any cause, where no legends or even anti-legends are made, where in fact someone dies but anonymously and not heroically so, and where Bernard accepts his complete lack of value in this world in which he desperately loves Sylvia and knows she deserves “to wholly love someone and to be loved as totally and faithfully in return,” but where—knowing this nonetheless—”if I had any qualities of kindness and mercy left, any perceptions of what I was on earth however dim and stupid, I knew it couldn’t be me.” And as I processed the pain, the hopelessness, the emptiness, and the smallness of this conclusion, I was left wondering: what was it this novel offered me so very long ago?
Now, I wasn’t a nineteen-year-old nihilist, so what did I find in this novel that so fervently spoke to me three decades ago? I think what I found was an unveiling of a kind of deprived life and desperate futility that I didn’t want to age into…where the hope for meaning in life—where hope itself—has become irretrievable. As painful as it was to witness, I was achingly glad to have such a reality shown to me in its fullness before its fullness became that of my own monstrously wanting life. I dreaded the kind of lostness where being adrift, stoked by time, devolves into a frustrating sense of uselessness that when probed, can then further devolve into a dysfunctional and misdirected rage—thus the appeal of sabotage. Might as well be pirates if the other option is to drown. I had sensed that so many seemingly promising paths led here; seeing the emperor with no clothes affirmed a gut instinct that the systems weren't working in our favor. Thus, the legion dead ends. A good day to die would be any of these wooden days.
I’ve often wondered about the strange curiosity of men (and sometimes women) taking selfies in cars and then posting them on dating sites. As I've been thinking about feeling lost, I’ve wondered if this tendency may come from the confidence generated by going somewhere, in this case quite literally—that motion-filled confidence boosting one’s sense of outward appeal and bestowing the driver with the ability to show that, yes, I too am on the move towards something, perhaps even something of significance.
Movement can feel like meaning, deceptively so. I know this all too well. As much as I loved the theoretical movement towards almost anything early in adulthood, I also loved the physicality of movement. I used to run quite a lot, sometimes up to twenty miles at a time. I was not training for anything. I merely found pleasure in the motion itself, the way you can stride away from all of your possessions and beliefs and thoughts…at least for a time…and the way that being unfamiliar in space can feel illogically home-like. Of course, becoming actually lost can undermine said veneer of comfort in freedom. True freedom, true untying from everything, is terrifying.
Once, while staying at the Bishop’s Lodge in Sante Fe with my family, I got up early to go for a run. An exterior door of my room exited out upon a trail leading towards Tesuque Creek. Less than a mile out this door, just about where the manicured trail of the resort disrobed its neatness into the raw and wild of true desert, you entered the Pecos Wilderness which, in the direction I was headed, leads towards the Sangre de Cristo Mountain range. Very quickly then, I exited the swanky grounds of the high-end resort and entered a signless, trailless desert region marked only by prickly pear cacti and sand sage and, here and there, a desert marigold. As I strode along, giddy at the stunningly alien landscape, I felt inexplicably confident that I could find my way back. Or perhaps more likely, I wasn’t even thinking about the return—it is quite possible the landscape overwhelmed me as Arches did for Edward Abbey who wrote in Desert Solitaire that “one breath of juniper smoke, like the perfume of sagebrush after rain, evokes in magical catalysis, like certain music, the space and light and clarity and piercing strangeness of the American West. Long may it burn.”
I ran on immersed and mystified, the movement carrying me not towards meaning this time but within it. All appeared saturated with meaning—whatever that was. Colors, both in the paleness of sage brush and in the frighteningly garish gold of the rising sun, spoke and laughed and told stories of their easy wax and wane and the games they played with light. The junipers of which Abbey had written congregated in groupings and the pinons stretched their gnarled limbs out towards an unending sky and froze in their strange, impossible poses jutting nearly horizontally out of hillsides. The beardtongues were just starting to bloom, and their glossy red flowers appeared even more plastic amongst the dry cracking desert sandstone and bumblebees hummed around the tall violet-crowned spike verbena. I was careful not to trip in the holes made by burrowing owls as lark buntings bubbled and trilled and cactus wrens fed their little ones nestled cleverly amongst the sharp spines of cactus thickets. On and on I went, further and further in a desert-induced haze of infatuation, a slow warmth pulling up on me from the east and a deeper warmth building as my actual temperature rose with exertion and as a welling up of home-ness expanded from my loins.
All until it had been nearly 45 minutes and I turned to go back to the hotel. I started along in the direction that seemed correct, but as the minutes wore on, the landscape grew less familiar and I realized I had made no mental note of passing landmarks or distant orienting landscapes. It’s amazing how quickly a sense of being lost can overcome you. All the comforts of a family vacation were useless to me now. I was utterly alone, utterly lost, and utterly uncertain of my surroundings or my future. I spent an extra hour out in that wilderness and, as with any outcome that ends with a person happily scarfing down scrambled eggs and brioche toast back within the safety of a warm dining room, the wild desert now merely an affable backdrop, it now seems silly that I felt so afraid. Being lost can do that to you though.
As much as being lost can feel like a speck in an ocean of immense foreignness, being lost is very often a sort of stuck-ness in life. In Lost in Translation, the 2003 film with Bill Murrary as film star Bob and Scarlet Johansson as recent college grad Charlotte, the lost feeling they both are experiencing is that of being trapped within their undesirable and sometimes unrecognizable lives. “I’m stuck,” Charlotte admits to Bob after their Tokyo-bound friendship has developed over the course of a couple encounters and a few wild nights out. “Does it get easier?” This was the very question that I was asking of Jim Harrison and Edward Abbey and Joan Didion and John McPhee and Tobias Wolff and all of the older and, I hoped, wiser writers who I consulted during the morass of my late teens and early twenties.
Bob’s response is “No…[long pause]...yes, it does get easier.” To which Charlotte responds, “Oh yeah? Look at you” for their entire bonding has been based on the unease of being anchored to the lives they have chosen and yet unanchored to the more they sense these lives could offer. They both see each other—that is the attraction—but what they see there is a mutual lost soul.
Early on in the film there is a humorous scene about all that is literally lost in translation and the lack of understanding that can ensue:
Director: [in Japanese] Mr. Bob-san, you are relaxing in your study. On the table is a bottle of Suntory whiskey. Got it? Look slowly, with feeling, at the camera, and say it gently — say it as if you were speaking to an old friend. Just like Bogie in Casablanca, ‘Here’s looking at you, kid!’ — Suntory time.
Translator: Umm. He want you to turn, look in camera. OK?
Bob: That’s all he said?
Translator: Yes. Turn to camera.
Bob: All right. Does he want me to turn from the right, or turn from the left?
Translator: [to director, in Japanese] Uh, umm. He’s ready now. He just wants to know if he’s supposed to turn from the left or turn from the right when the camera rolls. What should I tell him?
Director: [in Japanese] What difference does it make! Makes no difference! Don’t have time for that! Got it, Bob-san? Just psych yourself up, and quick! Look straight at the camera. At the camera. And slowly. With passion. Straight at the camera. And in your eyes there’s… passion. Got it?
Translator: [to Bob] Right side. And with intensity. OK?
Bob: Is that everything? It seemed like he said quite a bit more than that.
Director: [to Bob, in Japanese] Listen, listen. This isn’t just about the whiskey. Understand? Imagine you’re talking to an old friend. Gently. The emotions bubble up from the bottom of your heart. And don’t forget, psych yourself up!
Translator: Like an old friend. And, into the camera.
Bob: OK
Director: [in Japanese] Got it? You love whiskey. It’s Suntory time. OK?
Bob: OK.
Director: OK?
Bob: [nods]
Director: [to crew] OK!
The film not only brings up the challenges of communication, it explores the possibility of an antidote to lost-ness in foreign places and strangers, it aches through the way that so much of what we try to say is lost in the process of saying it. The above scene presents the obvious surface level of miscommunication existing in language and cultural barriers. There is a painfully beautiful parallel to this scene which echoes later in the film—a scene in which Bob speaks to his wife, Lydia, on the phone, time and space merely two among a multitude of disconnections between the pair.
Lydia: [over the phone] Is this a bad time?
Bob: [pauses] No, it’s always a good time.
Lydia: The burgundy carpet is out of stock: it’s going to take twelve weeks. Did you like any of the other colors?
Bob: Whatever you like… I’m just completely lost.
Lydia: It’s just carpet.
Bob: That’s not what I’m talking about.
Lydia: What are you talking about?
Bob: I don’t know. I just want to… get healthy. I would like to start taking better care of myself. I’d like to start eating healthier — I don’t want all that pasta. I would like to start eating like Japanese food.
Lydia: [icily, with sarcasm] Well, why don’t you just stay there and you can have it every day?
Bob: [biting his tongue] How are the kids doing?
Lydia: They’re fine. They miss their father. [pause] Do I need to worry about you, Bob?
Bob: Only if you want to.
This time the translation isn’t from language to language, but person to person… and so much still remains lost, more poignantly so than the Suntory scene, its comic counterpart. For all of the times that we communicate effectively, how many more times do we miscommunicate? And is a sense of lost-ness embedded in the inherent miscommunication through which we desperately try to find each other?
I did a quick search on a well-known scholarly database for ‘misunderstanding’. What came hurtling back at me was over 143,000 articles, book chapters, and research reports about all of our confusions, wrong ideas, misinterpretations, misjudgments, and delusions. Apparently what we misunderstand is massive. We misunderstand literature, history, other cultures, scientific theories, economics, markets, politics, interpretation of these topics… the past, the present, the future, meaning itself. Misunderstanding is not just a loss; it's the space where intended and received meanings drift apart. It involves taking something in the wrong sense, oftentimes unknowingly. We misunderstand so much and so often that we may even lose sight of where we started—or perhaps misunderstanding is itself the space in which we situate our words, our connections, our very lives. In an article about the misinterpretations of economic behavior, Donald Katzner suggests as much in titling his 2002 paper, “What are the questions?”
What are the questions? Trying to identify the questions is a fundamentally important endeavor. We require each other for survival and thereby need to be able to communicate with each other. “No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine” wrote John Donne in the 17th century. But if we are not even on the same page to begin with, how can we successfully share space on the ‘Continent’? What if I don’t even know what continent you are on?
This uncertainty can lead to different kinds of holding on. My children live in a continent of thingy-ness. This thingy-ness is a different way of getting stuck, a kind of stuck that I believe children need in order to feel secured to our world. Like all children, my children love their possessions. Love actually isn’t the right word, though they do sometimes exhibit a kind of care for dolls or cities they have built, but they can just as easily toss the doll in the corner of a room or kick over a city they spent a week carefully creating. It is not even that the things belong to them, though there are plenty of fights over who moved whose thing or incited by subversive attempts to grab and run with the item of a sibling. It seems to me that it is more the maintenance of control over these items, the holding and lording over them and thereby the occupation of some of the wild, chaotic space in this world.
At a certain point, most people let go of this naive belief, knowing all too well that there is no way to assert their being over the chaos and, in fact, even if they could, would they want that? Nonetheless, the chaos can continually dislodge any notions of safety, of stability, of being itself. I distinctly recall being home during the lost period in which I was reading Abbey and the like and driving to the grocery store with my mother. As we drove down the highway, I was struck by the thingy-ness everywhere—banks and vitamin stores and chain restaurants, big box stores full of more things and eyeglass stores and stores dedicated entirely to fireplaces, billboards and street lights and parking lots and dull square brick office buildings, median barriers and telephone wires and left turn only lanes. And in the midst of this fundamentally human thingy-ness, I felt deeply lost.
I could not, though, for the life of me figure out why I felt so lost. What was missing? What was I lost in? On a recent Ezra Klein podcast where the host and guests explore what is dysfunctional about our current government institutions and processes and where a sledgehammer could be taken while still retaining fundamental principles like hiring on merit and the like, guest Jennifer Pahlka, a senior fellow at Niskanen, offers up a concrete example about the civil service in response to a question about where these values and actual processes diverge:
You have a system that is supposed to hire people on the basis of merit. But when you interpret that very, very rigidly, what you do is say: OK, we don’t want to have people involved in selecting candidates who aren’t familiar with all the ways in which we try to reduce or eliminate, really, bias in the process. And so what we’ll do to hire civil servants is we will have human resources people screen their resumes and look for—and I’m not kidding you—exact matches in the language between the job description and what’s on their résumé.
Because that’s—if you’re taking things very literally—an indicator that they have the exact, right skills for the job. And then once you’ve found all the people who were great at cutting and pasting, then you send them all a self-assessment questionnaire. Because it’s safer to have them self-assess than it is to have, say, if it’s a programming job, have programmers interview them—where they might bring their own biases to the table.
And then you’ve down-selected twice on the basis of their ability to copy and paste, and then essentially lie about their skills. Because if you don’t put “master” on every single level of the self-assessment, you don’t make it to the next cut. And then we apply veterans preference, and that’s the certification that gets handed to the hiring managers.
And that is not consistent with merit. You really are then hiring people just who know how to work the system. That process that I just described, where we rely entirely on self-assessments, is how 90 percent of competitive jobs are done in federal government. Ninety percent we do not assess independently.
I was unemployed for 8 months this past year. I am very in touch with the excruciating pain of being unemployed, of trying to “sell” yourself to people who very often discard you without a further thought, of feeling not only aimless and rudderless but useless and invalidated and I can tell you that hearing Pahlka describe the process of gaining a federal job—to which I applied for numerous during my unemployment—made me angry. And, although it might seem like this anger is entirely unrelated, I recognized that it was directly related to my feeling of lost-ness in the past and in the present. I had a friend recently suggest that I was naive about much of the corruption and ugliness in the world. Maybe I am. But I think it is more likely that I see it, I see it everywhere—in the systems that you have to “work” in order to work for you, in the fact that we humans have to function primarily within such systems that seem designed (whether inadvertently as suggested in the Klein podcast over time or intentionally) to dehumanize and disconnect us, where we are all practicing the distancing techniques of shaming and humiliating others because somehow distance has become preferable or at least more comfortable than the mess of closeness. Yes I feel lost. I feel lost every day and all the time. I feel lost when my life is a confusing mess and I feel lost when I have a wonderful, purpose-filled job, three incredibly compassionate and hilarious children, a stable living situation and a boundless belly full of hopeful optimism that I cannot seem to tamp down no matter what I see or know or predict.
This morning I happened to be driving in the right place at the right time while pouring rain fell outside my right and bright sun streamed in from my left and I thought, there must be a neat little rainbow forming somewhere. And then I turned into the parking lot and it was right in front of me—a fully arcing rainbow with each color of its stream distinctly glowing, wrapping itself across the sky from one edge of the far-off receding horizon of trees to another edge of the world where small buildings seemed to drift off the earth. I have written about awe here before and I was certainly having an experience of witnessing a “vast mystery” which wasn’t really the rainbow per se but the fact that we live on a planet capable of producing something so stunning and so fleeting. I don’t know if others noticed it, but it appeared everyone was just going on with their routines. I was gobsmacked. Why weren’t they all hustling out of their cars to try and capture it in a photo like I was…not for the memory, but merely to send to someone else in order that the amazingness just experienced could be witnessed and shared by the only other thing I know of in this world that could appreciate it—another human. Otherwise, it hardly seems real. Otherwise, its disappearance is just that—everyday, routine loss.
One of the clear attractions between Charlotte and Bob in Lost in Translation is their ability to remove facades and connect in authenticity. Otherwise, both of them seem caught in play-acting where even sex, a crucial way to intimately connect with another, is an opportunity to act, a forced coercion from Bob. “Lick my stockings," demands the prostitute sent to his room. But he hears “lip my stockings” and, in fact, what she actually turns out to be saying is “rip.” The forced intimacy becomes increasingly hollow and, as the scene collapses under its own artificiality, even resistance ('let me go') is just another coded invitation ('come closer'). Was Bernard’s desire for resistance also just a last grasp at intimate human connection? Alas, even the genuine connection between Bob and Charlotte is ultimately untranslatable outside of their protected few days in Tokyo.
In another section of Desert Solitaire, Abbey mourns the loss that isn’t a loss, the loss that is actually a sort of aching dream:
The earth remains, and the heartbreaking beauty where there are no hearts to break....I sometimes choose to think, no doubt perversely, that man is a dream, thought an illusion, and only rock is real. Rock and sun.
The rock from which our primordial ancestors found their way out of will long outlast us, the love that we offer another will inevitably misfire and miscommunicate, the systems and societies in which we live will be built of a material we suddenly don’t recognize and yet will not free us if we smash them all to pieces. This is my lost-ness: the slippage of being in a world not made for being, the knowing that everything and everyone we love will be lost and even so—even with this momentous knowledge—the way we must remind each other constantly to center care, and the holding on to promise knowing full well it is just a disappearing arc of light in the sky.
In dreams of rock and sun,
Katie