We Lived Happily During the War, by Ilya Kaminsky

And when they bombed other people’s houses, we protested but not enough, we opposed them but not enough. I was in my bed, around my bed America was falling: invisible house by invisible house by invisible house. I took a chair outside and watched the sun. In the sixth month of a disastrous reign in the house of money in the street of money in the city of money in the country of money, our great country of money, we (forgive us) lived happily during the war.

Happy seven months (and new year)!

Little Eliot turned seven months last week. How time flies, and already that eternally repeating process of child-growing-up-and-parent-growing-old begins to grimly crank. But every day of this rowing toward death becomes delight -- a new joy that my younger self could not have comprehended.

Every day he grows in length, dexterity, and responsiveness. He plays, smiles and laughs, grunts and babbles and gurgles, uses his hands to grab and fists to pound.

Having a child makes one realize the essential simplicity of life (a happy thing) and our helplessness in it (a sad thing). To know that we cannot really, truly ensure or wholly safeguard the wellbeing of ourselves or our loved ones is profoundly distressing at first, but it is followed by a liberating resignation. Our fates are not for us to understand nor amenable to protest. What can we do besides each day doing our task and doing it well? To work to put food "on the family" (per the Bushism), to cultivate the earth, to raise children (or a cabbage patch, or books of essays or whatever), and at all times to be at peace with death.

Looking at Eliot, I am in awe of how a little over seven months ago he was but a fetus, and fifteen months ago he was but an embryo. And before that, he was outside of time and space. To touch his face is to touch the grandest philosophical questions, and to be confounded with no answer but a smile.

Embryonic stem cells are "pluripotent", capable of turning into all types of cells. At 18 or 22 my life certainly felt pluripotent. Now at 33 the options available to me feel significantly diminished. But I gladly trade my proverbial pluripotency for that of a new organism, fresh to the world and all of its possibilities.

In the British Museum are thousands of artifacts of bygone kingdoms and peoples. There have been roughly sixty-five generations since the fall of Roman Empire and one hundred eighty-six generations since construction began on the Pyramids (according to Reddit). How glorious to experience first-hand today one revolution of the wheel of history!

Not Repeating the Cosmic Crimes of Parenting

How to reconcile the condition of having children with the precepts of minimalism?

Consider that in most parts of the world children are no longer needed for their physical labor (or cannibal flesh). It seems that in the developed world people have children either because it is "what people do", or because it is the natural biological extension of their hoarding instincts, so finely tuned in this consumerist purgatory. In having children, they are quite literally to be "had", like the acquisition of perfect ornaments to complete the suburban mansion.

From this derives the litany of that ancient and cosmic crime: mis-parenting. The mistreatment of children by contorting them into extensions of one's own ego, to force a sovereign child to realize all of the frustrated ambitions of the parent, as though the child were a new life with which to replay a level in Mario Brothers, so as to acquire all of the trinkets one ineptly failed to acquire the first time.

As a new parent who was not that long ago a rebellious child, my mind is freshly imprinted with wariness -- and fear of the questionable motivations of parents. In that eternal rebellion of children against rules and curfews, I will always desire to take their side, cheering them on in the search for their own epiphany and the forging of their own path.

To me, the project for this life of parenthood is one of self-mastery, of resisting the siren call of selfishness disguised as love. How much mistreatment has been excused by the unjustifiable lie of "it is because we love you"? The question is how to leverage parenting as not the inevitable extension of the acquisitive life, but a touchstone in the intentional life.

If parenting is not spiritual practice, is not the daily act of devotion, is not the elation of domestic mysticism, is not the abnegation of pride, is not the hourly uttered centering prayer, then surely it is a deed gone to waste, a misuse of effort.

In this life (la lucha, the struggle, "the awful rowing toward God"), we desire nothing more than to have our experiences be witnessed, to create memories with loved ones and especially our children. How sad to lose sight of ultimate questions, to waste this gift on the futile jousting of tiger mother and fathers.

Long ago I strove to create masterpieces of writing, one mediocre blog entry at a time. In the domesticity of present, I have not forgotten those dreams. I wish to bring old intuitions to bear on this new venture, to raise a child intensely and passionately (the way I once desired to write). Not through the brute force of cram schools, but the sustained rhythm of a creative, playful, and intentional life -- in short, the institutionalization in my very own home an Enlightened Kumon.

The first month

Tomorrow marks the end of Eliot's first month in this world. The unfortunate paradox of a newborn's life is that the sublimeness of the occasion is so sadly juxtaposed with the exhausting drudgery of work, the POW-level of sleep deprivation, the seemingly infinite cycles of diapers, feedings, bathings, and soothings that resemble (to use an entirely inapposite simile) "an M&A deal that never closes".

Now that I am starting to emerge from the fog of exhaustion, and before memory of all this fades into oblivion, I want to set down in words a note of appreciation for my wife Sarah, who, with absolute tirelessness and courage; meticulous, PhD-caliber baby research; and, above all, a super-abundance of maternal love (and milk), gave our little Eliot a most loving welcome to life on this otherwise fraught and troubled planet.

---

Now, having freshly rubbed the sleep from my eyes, allow me to backtrack and recount that moment.

It was very much as Sylvia Plath describes it:

    Love set you going like a fat gold watch.

    The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry
    Took its place among the elements.

I shall never forget the way his body slithered out of the womb, silent and unliving in that second before his face touched air, and then, like a spark encountering oxygen, a sudden combustion and a piercing yawp as his lungs ignited into life! A moment so awe-inspiring that hospital rooms are suddenly seen not as a sterile, clinical place, but a vortex connecting the living and the non-living, a site of miraculous abiogenesis, and the literal River Styx upon which the recently deceased are ushered away and the newly born are brought hither.

The trite (when put in words) but powerful (when experienced) thought that: if only everyone on earth experienced, truly and deeply, the wonder of their child coming into the world, they would cease all designs for inflicting death and pain. Like carnivores who lose their appetites in seeing whence their meat came, so murderers must pause if they observed this ordained mechanism for the coming-about of life and what would be entailed in its undoing. 

Gazing into a newborn's face is like watching clouds pass in the sky. The newborn is the only kind of homo sapiens that is capable of living purely in the moment, whose expressions are unmediated by thought and anxiety. Their little faces are unfiltered windows into their every sensation, changing like weather or the passing of seasons, leaving no trace of the past. Newborns evince the Original Zen of essential humanity. Original Sin, in contrast, does not seem so original after all (arriving later in the kindergarten era, perhaps). 

As readers of my previous blog will understand, I had spent much of my life fighting that fear of "being ordinary", that aversion to thinking ordinary thoughts, that disdain for living an "ordinary" life. Suffice it to say that fatherhood (among other events) has finally and irrevocably puts those fears to rest -- more to come on this later.

Now, a simpleton animal myself, I ape my creature offspring who is pure instinct, and I pray the simple prayer of Khalil Gibran, that great prophet of Hallmark greeting cards (whom I am no longer embarrassed to quote):

    You are the bows from which your children

    as living arrows are sent forth.

    The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, 

    and He bends you with His might 

    that His arrows may go swift and far.

    Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness;

    For even as He loves the arrow that flies, 

    so He loves also the bow that is stable.

---

    

Starting again

Ah, how to start again? It has been nearly five years since I last wrote. The desire to write has been weighing on me. I have been happily married a year, I am in a new city, and I am soon to be a father.

The last three and a half years of wandering in the Great Desert of Capitalism has reset my mind, wiped it clean -- and maybe not in a bad way. In 2014, I was still in school, and my mind was still horribly addled with pseudo-intellectual bullshit and bad poetry. But it was already mid-2014, and all that was quickly ebbing as I inexorably drifted toward a corporatist career. Fast forward five years, and the waters of my mind have indeed dried up, like the Aral Sea. 

I can't write anymore (or at least it is very difficult). I can only draft. I am a draughtsman of instruments of conveyance, bills of sale for small imaginary quanta of ownership over things too contrived to be real if they were not so contested. 

Yet those long days and nights of plodding work, the agonies and anxieties of the billable hour -- they have, to my astonishment, endowed my life with rhythm. From my office in a tall building, I watched the sun dawn (actually, very rarely) and set (often), I observed cars crawling on their concrete routes like ants. And that mundane procession of sun-up and sun-down somehow engendered a much belated realization: the fact of mortality, not an abstraction but the fact, at last fully and acutely felt, that we live now and one day in a finite number of days shall die. Against the backdrop of this fact is presented the dazzling wonder of the eternal question: why is there something and not nothing? 

Lila, as usual, says it so well:

“You still waste time with those things, Lenu? We are flying over a ball of fire. The part that has cooled floats on the lava. On that part we construct the buildings, the bridges, and the streets, and every so often the lava comes out of Vesuvius or causes an earthquake that destroys everything. There are microbes everywhere that make us sick and die. There are wars. There is a poverty that makes us all cruel. Every second something might happen that will cause you such suffering that you'll never have enough tears. And what are you doing? A theology course in which you struggle to understand what the Holy Spirit is? Forget it, it was the Devil who invented the world, not the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Do you want to see the string of pearls that Stefano gave me?"

It is ironic that, of all possible inspirations, a "boring" legal career was what lifted the veil, was what made me see the fire, the lava all around us in this awe-inspiring Reality. 

Set against Lila's agnosticism (but perhaps not contrary to it?), Thomas Merton writes a beautiful prayer in New Seeds of Contemplation: 

Keep me from loving money in which is hatred, from avarice and ambition that suffocate my life. Keep me from the dead works of vanity and the thankless labor in which artists destroy themselves for pride and money and reputation, and saints are smothered under the avalanche of their own importunate zeal. Stanch in me the rank wound of covetousness and the hungers that exhaust my nature with their bleeding. Stamp out the serpent envy that stings love with poison and kills all joy... This then is what it means to seek God perfectly: to withdraw from illusion and pleasure, from worldly anxieties and desires, from the works that God does not want, from a glory that is only human display; to keep my mind free from confusion in order that my liberty may be always at the disposal of His will; to entertain silence in my heart and listen for the voice of God; to cultivate an intellectual freedom from the images of created things in order to receive the secret contact of God in obscure love; to love all men as myself; to rest in humility and to find peace in withdrawal from conflict and competition with other men; to turn aside from controversy and put away heavy loads of judgment and censorship and criticism and the whole burden of opinions that I have no obligation to carry; to have a will that is always ready to fold back within itself and draw all the powers of the soul down from its deepest center to rest in silent expectancy for the coming of God, poised in tranquil and effortless concentration upon the point of my dependence on Him; to gather all that I am, and have all that I can possibly suffer or do or be, and abandon them all to God in the resignation of a perfect love and blind faith and pure trust in God, to do His will. 

As my dear friend the Catholic Lawyer often says, the sole purpose of these arduous billable hours is the mortification of the flesh. 

For now, at least, the work is my plot of farmland in the tundra. My mind is not yet thawed out -- but patience. 

How loathsome my navel-gazing while the world burns!