Evolution: Mistakes Welcome.

I often wonder what defines a man, what, long after the human image has burnt itself from the world, remains in the memory of those that knew him. For some it’s an act of bravery, or courage, or total self-effacement. For others it’s their tenacity, the resolve to climb yet higher. And others still are remembered for their wounds. We all know these men, these women, withdrawn and wrapped in the self-obsessions of chaos, conflict, and blame. And when these pictures, these glimpses, spin the carousal of my thoughts, I invariably conclude that I am all three. The brave one. The driven one. The bewildered one.

In the acclaimed American Western, Blood Meridian, the character of Judge Holden tells a story of a boy whose father was killed after he showed charity to a stranger (at least, this is how I remember it). How the son grew up in the shadow of his absence, a potential that he could never surpass, because it wasn’t really there. How the myth of his father corrupted him. All because he was never allowed to glimpse the human frailty, the mistakes, in the man that had made him, the God, the Patriarch. 

Being a maven of darker tales, I’m fond of saying that my father was the first ghost to haunt my life. I have glimpses of him—reading to me as he tucked me in the mattress on the floor, giving me quarters every time he cussed, drinking a beer in the slanting blades of late afternoon light, while I played on the floor with my toys—and these have become my yoke, my bit, the whips that snap above my shoulders on this race of life. Cause it’s a race, right? To the top? To the most?

It all sounds so gallant!

Most of us, however, play the role of donkey. The poor, disheveled burro that runs with a pole wedged beneath his saddle and a carrot dangling just out of reach. We run, and run, and run, sometimes stealing a good nibble, but most times only smelling just enough sweetness to harden our resolve. The carrot is a faceless thing, changing from person to person. Money, success, a writing career, sex, love, children and a family (or all seven). There’s nothing wrong with any of those. But the idea that knowing I'll achieve those things in the future can somehow help me become happy today?

Why, that’s the true myth.

You can believe that all you want. The idea that man is the supreme architect. That there is no question science cannot answer, and no theory worth attention that can’t be proven by an institution that has still not found a way to stop the children in other countries from starving to death. But I digress. This isn’t a moral crusade. I’m no Christian. A libertine, if anything. But one who’s been touched by things too providential to be chalked up to “static randomness”.

If history has taught us anything it is the incredible proclivity for man to make mistakes. We fill classrooms with the chatter of obscure theories long since proven as fanciful. We entertain ourselves with details from cultures that have all but dried to dust. We catalogue the cruelties writ in blood upon the pages of man’s march up and out of the black pit.

And yet we sit and grunt in the new darkness of our arrogance. At least, I do.

The truth of it is simpler, I think. The darkness and the flame, the mistakes and triumphs, the deaths and births, are all as waves upon a sea. They swell, crest, and fold upon themselves. Thousands. Millions. Billions. And who is impervious to the lull of the ocean’s break, the sound of gulls, the hiss of foam drying on the shore? Who can resist the urge to be still, be quiet, when crouched on a lone beach? 

The world is perfect, broken bones and all. It labors like some fool through the darkness, barking its shins on night tables and bookshelves and wicker ottomans. But how else will it learn?

And so today, I grant you full permission to own those fragments of your life you’d rather sweep beneath the rug. Take responsibility for your mistakes, your regrets, your “evils”. Pick them up and cherish them, like the artifacts so worshipfully beheld in the universities and museums of the world. They’re boards in a stairway, my pretties. Boards that can lead to anything you want. The trick, I am told, is to pull away from yourself just long enough to realize that the things you want won’t make you happy. That you were given all integral parts that day you came into the world, steaming from your mother’s womb. That the seeming suffering and agony of the world is a thing that happens, has always happened, and always will happen, but a thing that makes this reality no less beautiful.

It is then that we begin to love, when dreams begin to come true.

For after all, Mr. Poe, this life is but dream within a dream.