Oscar Wilde, Seinfeld, And Peace That Eludes

A belated Happy Thanksgiving to you all, at least to each of you American readers out there.

I had a truly outstanding conversation the other night, as my wife and I were driving homeward. It was about getting to know people, whether we really ever want to know a person, what he or she really thinks, what he or she really believes. My wife suggested that we don't, for true understanding and intimacy are too difficult, carrying with them responsibilities and obligations. She even suggested that we are afraid to really know another person because then we are forced to choose whether we really like, love, or at least respect that person. It is easy to be superficial, we agreed, because the surface is always safe. Are we not after all afraid of drowning below the fine line between sky and sea?

I am often amazed how thin the line is between civility and incivility. Propriety, mores, etiquette; these are often a cheap veneer concealing real animosity, even, sadly, real hatred. I have attended symposia that give lip service to community and understanding and peace, only to discover that such lip service means getting a fat lip should one question the agenda that drives toward said peace. What is peace, anyway, but a veneer, even an abstraction?

Two Friday nights ago, I attended a concert and poetry reading on the human cost of war. It was a peace vigil, of sorts, complete with a chamber choir that managed to achieve the supernal glory of angels. That the event took place in a Unitarian church full of people that would disagree with me on nearly everything hardly mattered: I thanked the performers and the conductor (a man who had injured me greatly) with all my heart. They achieved something wonderful; and I made my peace with a man who once wounded me deeply.

But in that event I heard two things about peace, two poetic images: One was of a soldier who suggested that each fighter on the battlefied instead should be home cuddling with a loved one beneath silk sheets; the other was a soldier's contemplation of the songs of birds on the edge of the battlefield. Odd that both images, in fact, all images of peace such as these, should bother me. Why? Because they are vapid and untrue. For surely not all men can cuddle beneath silk sheets, since such sheets are the privilege of the wealthy. Besides, not only does some poor sap need to make those sheets, not all men can be coddled, for someone needs to do the coddling. The image of the sheets in fact might be the very sort of image that causes wars, wars between those who have, and those who don't; between the coddled and the coddler; between master and slave. Indeed, I know metaphor, and the metaphor of silk bedding fails to evoke the proper sense of real peace, simply because it neglects the facts of life.

The second image, that of the bucolic and pastoral; of the plangent peel of bells, the lambent light of moon, or the swaying softness of long grasses in the wind; these and many images like them are invoked to elicit a peaceful heart. Look! There is no war in poppy fields, no struggle in winter's solace, no fighting on the edges of heather downs and sylvan streams. Look at the deer, the rabbit, the undulating flight of the pileated across the sun-stained sky!

Alas, any person with a smattering of knowledge knows that there is no peace in a meadow; there is no ease of life for the bird or bloom in the grasses. A deer is rife with stress; even its cousin, the moose, may have in its hocks the leeching mandibles of ten thousand ticks. The struggle of life, of prey and predator, of host and parasite, of disease and cold and wet and heat, that plays out in every single square inch of this planet gives no room for the romanticization of peace. An eagle on a branch is not a symbol of peace, nor is the owl hooting in the night wind. They are looking for victims, and are trying not to be victims themselves. Whatever one might say about the earth, peace is not one of its fundamental qualities. There is not a cell or fleck of soil that is not at war with something.

What then is peace but an abstraction of the mind? Why reify, why make concrete what is forever abstract? Why do we see peace in a calm sea, when we know that the ocean's surface conceals a violent surge of fin and fang?

***

You might recall a Seinfeld episode in which Jerry has a transformation, a sort of born-again experience. He is the new Jerry, the good Jerry. At one point, the new Jerry and George, his best friend, sit down for a heart-to-heart, with Jerry urging George to open up, to be vulnerable with his feelings. Later, when the camera returns to the scene, we find George on the edge of grateful tears and Jerry on the far edge of the couch, a look of horror on his face. He stands up, backs away, and says "Well, good luck with all that." In a moment of honest confession, Jerry gets to know his friend as he truly is, and he rejects him, put off by the enormity of the responsibility of intimacy: George's struggles would weigh him down, and Jerry is scared straight back into superficiality.

Oscar Wilde, a man imprisoned for his homosexuality and one of my emerging literary heroes (though not for that reason), wrote from Reading Gaol (where he served his sentence) that the "supreme vice is shallowness." Is he right? I think he might be. For we humans are shallow about what peace is, what it looks like, where it's found. We are shallow even about love, what it means, what it requires: sacrifice, grace, understanding, the carrying of burdens and the confronting of sin and its consequences, and the confronting of the sinful machinations erected to conceal human brokenness and guilt. It is easier if there is no sin, no guilt, no deep dark unknown beneath the veneer of our daily lives. It is easier for us if a loved one who ignores our warnings crashes to the ground and bounces up, like so many little children do, and declares "I'm alright!" It is easier particularly when we know that our loved one is not alright at all.

Someday, somewhere, I will learn how to live below the surfaces I polish daily.

Peace.

©Bill Gnade 2005/Contratimes - All Rights Reserved.