Politics Born of Life

I can utterly relate to what E.D. is saying when he writes,

Sometimes I’m overwhelmed with this sense that all of this is an exercise in futility – that there is simply too much to know, too much I don’t know, too much I don’t or can’t understand.  My ignorance on this or that subject is laid bare by the revelation of some new fact, some history unearthed that changes the entire game.

A variation on that exact same thought occupied my mind to paralysis on Saturday night, rendering all attempts at writing useless. As is my way in those circumstances, I went on a late night walk to the river by which I live to try to clear my head out and place myself in a context of space larger than my apartment affords. The goal is to provide my thoughts with some room to stretch out and hopefully arrange into some kind of meaningful constellation that might offer something in the way of insight, instead of the clustered muck they appear prior. As I sat on a park bench in the chilled night, looking at the frozen-over river stretching windingly through the centre of the city, my mind calming with the sight of each frozen breath splaying out in front of me, a familiar frustration revisited my awareness.

When I was nine my father passed away. It wasn’t a prolonged and agonizing procession through one sickness or another, but rather a brutally abrupt and sudden occurrence. One night I went to bed and when I awoke the next morning my father was gone, lost to a heart attack. Looking back now with my thirty-two year old eyes I know that there were signs that something wasn’t right, but to the nine year old me those years ago his passing struck without any warning. When I woke up that morning, I remember being able to sort of sense that things were amiss, something about the air seemed heavy and thick. Descending the stairs and walking into our kitchen my mother sat puffy-eyed and distant until her gaze found my face. Crying out loud, she pulled me in as I noticed my grandmother’s presence in the kitchen, as well — there might have been others, I don’t really remember. I began to cry, primarily because my mother was crying as she hugged my brother, who had followed me into the kitchen, close as well. I was awash in confusion, more than tears.

My father’s death left me with an early feeling of dislocation from a linear sort of stability in the world. The lesson I quickly learned was that things, even the stalwart presence of a parent, change; circumstances, even the most important, are highly contingent. But we persist.

That lesson has followed me into my adulthood and informs much of current predisposition to eschew or at least look skeptically at hard and fast political affiliations. There have certainly been times in my life where I thought I had found the end-all-be-all answer to everything in a certain political and social outlook. But as E.D. notes, “suddenly the veil falls away, and the great big universe of doubt washes over me again.” I take that doubt to be a positive thing and a lack thereof to be the sign in political identification to more often than not indicate the futile exercise of intellectual empire building. All empires fall and often times there is much damage that is inflicted in the process of their construction.

But more to the point, the building of an intellectual/political empire strikes me as an inherently absolutizing endeavour, one almost never seeks to build an empire just so that one can discover its fault lines and generally chooses instead to ignore the cracks inflicted by the imposition of reality on one’s smooth edifice. In this way it worries me that too much of our political discourse is more about our own introverted, intra-tribal battles than it is about those spheres of life that politics deeply affects.

At the end of the day I can’t help but see all of us as shivering in the tide of a stunning sea of unknowns, engaged in a beautiful struggle to make sense of our lives, our world, and our very existence. The shifting contexts of that world are nothing if not a Sword of Damocles strung precariously above any hubris we might muster in determining that we’ve figured it all out, or that we ever will.  Our persistence in trying is not in this view to be considered folly or useless, but rather to be approached with the requisite humility about our capabilities in the process. The mystery of life is the dwarfing backdrop against all of our endeavours to categorize and compartmentalize, and our tendency to ingore that mystery is the palpable frustration I feel that renders me speechless and uncertain about the worthiness of saying anything at all.

So can we construct a politics whose trajectory is as much exploratory as it is proclamatory? Can we attentuate our efforts at figuring out how we are to live together to the stage on which those lives play out? Can we engage in this beautiful struggle in a fashion that befits the enormity of our task and cultivate in ourselves a respect for the leviathan we’re attempting to birth?

On nights like last Saturday I wonder and think that I’m simply asking too much of our politics. Perhaps that frustration is destined to persist, as are we.

Tagged as: contingency, doubt, humility, ideology, meaning, political discourse, struggle