by Harvey Lillywhite
Inherent in the title of this small essay is the assumption that the practical and the ideal conflict and that one must be creative in negotiating that war. I mean, it wouldn’t be very practical to walk around all day being idealistic, nor would it be very ideal to walk around all day being practical. It occurs to me that we pick our battles depending on the risk.
Do you think we all have our own hierarchy of ideals? Those at the top just can’t be compromised; those in the middle, we might compromise on occasion but feel bad compromising, and those at the bottom, we compromise all the time and really just keep in our purses and pockets to make us feel better—part of the illusion of “I’m okay” we need to feed and water? Are all these ideals what Zizek calls our ideology—that waking dream we walk around in that substitutes for “reality”? Is “true reality” so frightening that, God forefend, we prefer to exist in the sweet delusion of our transcendental thoughts, judging and worrying away?
Of course there’s been a history of creative solutions for juggling the yin and yang of the practical and the ideal. Some spring readily to mind: turn the other cheek; do what you have to do; be a voice in the wilderness; get real; don’t back down; be nice; don’t rock the boat; speak truth to power; stand tall; semper fidelis; excuse me; just kidding; are you kidding; keep on keepin’ on; love thy neighbor as thyself; treat others as you want to be treated; damned if you do, damned if you don’t; six of one and a half-dozen of the other; make my day; do what you can; love the one you’re with…really, these go on forever. And they’re all perfectly good advice, especially my personal favorite, “Oh well.” (Or is it “Oh, Hell”?)
Hypocrisy is a pretty popular strategy for making the ideal practical and vice versa, isn’t it? No, it’s not that I approve of hypocrisy (who would?), but there is the question of one’s mental health and healthy self image. Though I drive a car, I feel compelled to exhibit bumper stickers admonishing everyone else to Protect Mother Earth, for instance, to Give Peace a Chance, and to Commit Random Acts of Kindness & Senseless Beauty. And, since I’m burdened with the penance of driving these bumper stickers around everywhere I possibly can so they might spread their influence far and wide, I feel the need to use lots of gas, drive badly, and honk, curse, and salute those who thoughtlessly get in my way. It is, after all, rather important that these ideals, these slogans, be seen and their influence spread—truly a clear example of thinking globally and acting locoly. (By the way, I was personally appalled the other day when I saw a mini-van sitting in the parking lot of Whole Foods with the following bumper sticker on the back window: “Losing faith in humanity, one person at a time.” That’s not a bumper sticker I’d parade around. In the moment, my third chakra enraged, I thought to myself, “That’s definitely a person I’ve lost faith in.” Then I caught myself in that teeny rage and thought better of that thought.)
And as for hypocrisy—I could talk about my guilty pleasures: don’t we all have them; aren’t they just awful and delicious all at the same time? (But I’ll save those for another issue.)—there’s my job, a college English professor, which I don’t believe in all that much but must continue—sorry, but the BIG BUSINESS of university education is no better, and often far worse, than any other BIG BUSINESS, so don’t even get me started. In fact, the ability to live with one’s hypocrisy is crucial to living a practical life. In fact, we should all take great pains to deny that we ourselves are hypocrites and keep vigilant in speaking out against the hypocrisy of others—the way good politicians do.
Any discussion of hypocrisy, quite obviously, leads to some consideration of rationalization—another nearly endless topic. I find myself thinking, “I had no choice, everybody does it, what can it hurt,” just about every day. For one, the list of all those things one should, or must in all good conscience, do is onerous. And you can’t please everybody, so you might as well please yourself. Really, if I didn’t do it, someone else would. Don’t fool yourself, nobody’s perfect. They had it coming. It’s their own fault. And it honestly hurts us more than it hurts them. It was the right thing to do. They’ll thank us later. If I don’t look out for myself, no one else will.
As Falstaff says, “Well, 'tis no matter, honor pricks me on. Yea, but how if honor pricks off when I come on? How then? Can honor set to a leg? No. Or an arm? No. Or take away the grief of a wound? No. Honor hath no skin in surgery, then? No. What is honor? A word. What is in that word? honor. What is that honor? Air. A trim reckoning? Who hath it? He that died on Wednesday. Doth he feel it? No. Doth he hear it? No. Is it insensible, then? Yes, to the dead. But will it not live with the living? No. Why? Detraction will not suffer it, therefore, I'll none of it. Honor is a mere escutcheon, and so ends my catechism."
Honor, Shmonor, right? Hypocrisy and rationalization, such time-honored dodges, are first cousins of the simple lie, a creative art if ever there was one. Doesn’t one often feel, deep down, that a huge part of the very world we live in is a lie or that one must be a lie to live in this world? Let me ask you to read that last sentence again because I think it’s important. The way the world works (sometimes we’re in on it, sometimes we’re not), isn’t it shocking? Really batteringly, bruisingly, horrifically surprising? How tough and thick our skins must grow to survive in that tumble, and to succeed? You better be ready to engage in some down and dirty hand-to-hand black-and-white thinking: good and evil, us and them, my way or the highway, good guys/bad guys, either you’re part of the solution or you’re part of the problem. All lies we better be packing.
Consider the quiet spider in my basement. Every morning I sit on the floor—I have no idea why since I admit that I’ve given up all hope. In a near corner, a spider has built a tangled web. There are the little round white egg sacks waiting to burst. I know I should sweep away the cobwebs and squash the spider. But every day it’s there (male? female?) sitting in its web. And it just sits there and sits there. It’s inspiring really. But one morning I saw a cricket get a leg stuck in the web. Like lightning the spider struck. In a few seconds the cricket was wound up like a papoose, and in another few seconds the spider had administered its paralyzing bite that left the cricket motionless. It was awful to see. I like crickets. I’m not that fond of spiders. But who am I to judge? The spider’s probably not that fond of me either.
Every September, crickets leap into the house. They, too, have been known to sit with me in the morning and sing while I’m busy giving up hope. When I can, I scoop them into a cup and put them outside in the garden.
But spiders don’t sing. They kill. As a kid, I was terrified of spiders. Over the years, I raised my tolerance for them somehow. And I’ve been known to catch them in my hands and take them outside (where they can kill crickets without my knowing about it). But I hate the big, wooly, dangerous-looking spiders. I keep a stout broom handy always. And for spiders in the bathtub, nothing works like scalding hot water from the tap—a practical tip.
I lived in the country when I was growing up, and our garage had black widows. In fact, a kid in first grade got bitten by one, nearly died, and was out of school for a couple of months. I remember my dear mother venturing into the garage, her over-sized reading glasses like nerdy Ninja goggles making her eyes look twice their size, holding an everyday wooden clothespin, which she pinched open and caught a fat black widow in its jaws. I vividly recall the jet black body and the bright red hourglass marking on the underbelly. It was beautiful and dangerous at the same time—thankfully squished.
For that matter, there were rattlesnakes where we lived. Our dog was bitten by one. And several times on hikes I stumbled across them. The deadly coil of snake with its tail raised, rattling a warning—even as a kid I found them utterly fascinating. But there were rattlesnake roundups where lots of people came out with shovels and shotguns, axes and hoes, herded the snakes into a killing field where they were chopped and diced amid hoots and hollers, the occasional gunshot, and general laughter. Some of the rounder-uppers took snakes home to eat. (I hear they taste like chicken.)
So, as this spider dispatched the cricket so ruthlessly right beside me, I realized what is totally obvious: Feeding happens. Isn’t it hard to be an idealist in a world of snakes and spiders?
Stop for a minute and think about that. Everything is feeding on everything else (or trying to) all at the same time. How lucky we are at the top of the food chain—the ultimate feeders. No wonder we need hypocrisy, rationalization, lies, and the rest. It’s hopeless, isn’t it? And to live in America? The top of the top of the food chain? Oh what spiders and what crickets….
Far be it for me to tender advice to anyone. If you want to live a better life, follow the counsel of truly spiritual advisors, those who’ve been properly vetted over the centuries: be the change you seek; turn the other cheek; let my people go; see the cause of suffering, put an end to that suffering and stop it for others as well; transform illusion; God is One; surrender to the will of God. Forgive me, but this advice too often gets turned into more feeding: I’m right. I know or have access to the Truth—you don’t. Do it my way, our way, the right way, or be gone. Why do I see more crickets and spiders here?
While I’m admittedly hopeless, or at least aspire to be, I also am highly suspicious of words, all words. I’ve always been less interested in the voice in the wilderness than in the wilderness in the voice, so to speak. So my very humble inclination is to look at a word many are suspicious of: LOVE. A simple four-letter word. It’s as good as any other word, right? And since we’re supposed to be talking about creative solutions for practical idealists, why couldn’t that word be a solution (although we know there are no solutions)? Love is, I suppose, an ideal, but not in the way I mean it. I’m thinking of it as something that exists, like the wind, something that seems invisible when it’s calm and seems overwhelming when it blows up a storm. It’s practical, I guess, in the way that the wind is practical. Can it be harnessed? I’ve heard that it can, though I’m no genius there. Can it destroy? I’m not sure about that, but it’s my feeling that it can’t.
It’s certainly a word that’s bigger than any definition of it could possibly be, and that’s a good thing. It’s a vast territory without any substance you could put in a bottle, a wide canvas on which to draw out our dramatic little lives that can seem so meaningless at the same time they’re all the meaning we have. Ah LOVE, ah wilderness. But I do have some sense of what it is. That is to say, I feel it, when it’s not a word, not something to think about—when it just is. We know we need air to breathe and water to drink. We need food to eat and shelter to protect us. These are the practical things. But I feel the need for LOVE as well. It’s not a winsome, figurative need either. It’s a truly physical need, which, if not fulfilled, becomes a constant craving (apologies to K.D. Lang). And I’m not talking just about sex, but regular, every day LOVE, unselfish and unadulterated, whatever it is in the moment.
So here’s the bottom line, at last, from the world of crickets and spiders, from a romantic hopeless guy trying to round up his thoughts about creatively solving the problem of how to counterpoise the practical with the ideal (honestly, it’s like herding cats and coyotes): LOVE. Sorry to disappoint, but that’s the crux of it, that big word LOVE. Let me admit how nearly impossible it is to live with someone else. Can love survive among such competing needs, among such feeding, such desperation and craving? Love is the ideal, hacked at, stormed, lied to, lied about, stolen, protected, nurtured, coveted, praised, dismissed, purloined. But luckily it seems to have a life of its own, like the wind, and doesn’t rely on our feeble and heroic efforts to keep it going. Sometimes we touch it, or it touches us. But it exists, as was said, within us and without us.
It’s the laptop, the fingers, the heart and soul and brains, the sun and moon, the Milky Way, the snickers and knickers, the look in my baby’s eyes. It just is. Take notice. Maybe slow down—way, way down. See it? Don’t bother trying to catch it; it’s no firefly. It’s your anger and your sadness, your lust and tenderness—I feel it in my tears. It’s your fear and envy. It’s common as dirt. It is the dirt. Practically speaking, in an ideal world, we’d find creative ways to enjoy it. That’s all—a big country-western song, an opera, a little hip-hop, a prayer, a curse, a cry to arms, whatever. Okay then, can we all just go on about our business now?
Every morning
sitting in the infinite
and absolute wonder of what is—
Today, flash of lightning, the thunder,
and heavy downpouring rain—
from below and from above
the gentle word belovèd.
And have a look at my newest bumper sticker: Honk If You Love LOVE.