We are all Vaclav Havel, and we are all up to our necks in shit
Hope, meet absurdity
It’s March 31st. The winds have been blowing here in the Pacific Northwest and the days careen between gorgeous and bitter. Fourteen years ago today, my mother died. The sun was shining—it was windy that day, too. Two burly dopes in baggy black suits came to our house, put my mother’s body into a gray body bag, zipped it up, and then humped her out of the bedroom (my sister’s room back in the day) through the dining room, out the door, down the stairs, across the driveway, and into a black hearse. Off to the embalmer. When your mother dies — what is there to say? Nothing and everything.
We are getting crushed. So many people, so many families, mothers and fathers, daughters and sons, brothers and sisters…strangers and friends are being ground into dust. Hearts are breaking and before this is over, an unbearable, an unfathomable number of our fellow humans will die or be broken, and those left behind will try to somehow salvage what is left. To navigate the infinite sorrows before them. Most of them will not be there at that last breath, as I was when my mother died. We all gathered around and watched her go.
I saw this the other day on Twitter. It’s from someone who truly knows.
“Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.” ~ Louise Erdrich
“Words are all we have,” said Samuel Beckett, who also said, “When you’re in the shit up to your neck, there’s nothing left to do but sing.” He sounds more than a little like Vaclav Havel, a fellow writer who tacked back and forth across the wild gray chop of human absurdity. And who knew something about shit.
Vaclav Havel is somebody I reach for when I’m feeling overpowered by forces bigger than me, when I feel a murderous rage at the gaslighting, the lying, the criminality, the thuggishness, the cruelty, the worship of entropy, the disorder and chaos. The cruel jokes. No, I’m not going to say his name. He has a dozen names and we all know what they are. So I reached for Havel, a man who saw the story all the way through and came out the other side. It may or may not surprise you to learn that Vaclav Havel was the son of a successful real-estate developer. His father and grandfather were celebrated developers in Prague. He was born well, became a widely admired playwright, a dissident, and the president of his country. He spent four years in prison. Havel possessed true courage. He said “no.” He preached hope.
So I reached for Vaclav Havel the other day, and this is what I found. A famous essay titled, Never Hope Against Hope. Do you like the opening? I love it.
“Allow me to tell you a little story about the nature of hope and absurdity.”
Havel goes on to describe an event that took place a few months before he became president. He was in the country with some friends, and after a feast in front of a bonfire, he walked through the darkness to help an inebriated friend back to his room. On the way, Vaclav Havel fell into “a black hole surrounded by a cement wall.” He’d fallen into a sewer and he was literally up to, or very near, his neck in shit. Panic broke out up top. There was lots of shouting in the night. Pieces of clothing were tied together and lowered for him to grab onto, but nothing was working. Thirty long minutes passed.
“I could barely keep my nose above the dreadful effluvium and thought this was the end, what a way to go, when someone had the fine idea of putting down a long ladder.”
And because Havel is Havel, he goes on to say that the most striking thing about the experience was how hope had emerged from hopelessness, from absurdity.
“I’ve always been deeply affected by the theater of the absurd because, I believe, it shows the world as it is, in a state of crisis. It shows man having lost his fundamental metaphysical certainty, his relationship to the spiritual, the sensation of meaning — in other words having lost the ground under his feet.”
He then references his book, Disturbing the Peace in which he describes “a man for whom everything is falling apart, whose whole whole world is collapsing, who senses he has irrevocably lost something but is unable to admit this to himself and therefore hides from it.” That I think I can understand.
That might be all of us right now. Yes, everything seems to be falling apart. Yes, the whole world seems to be collapsing. Yes, something has been lost—although I’m not sure we really know what that is yet. Maybe for me, it’s the belief (how bonkers is this) that I could somehow stand outside fate. I would stand outside of time itself. A global pandemic wouldn’t come for me. No autocrat would come to disturb my dreams, poison the rivers I swim in, pollute the language I speak, torch the ideals my country has tried but mostly failed to live up to, murder my fellow citizens, and with all that, claim to be sent by god. Me? I believed in institutions. I thought they could protect me. But none of us can stand outside time or fate. I’ve tried to hide from that one for years. A constant refrain I’ve heard again and again in the past three plus years: institutions will not save you. I so wanted to believe. I still do.
“Complete skepticism is an understandable consequence of discovering that one’s enthusiasms are based on an illusion. This skepticism leads to a dehumanization of history — a history drifting somewhere above us, taking its own course, having nothing to do with us, trying to cheat us, destroy us, playing out its cruel jokes.”
As many times as my wife has tried to tell me this, (over and over and over again tbh) I still haven’t fully grasped or understood this deep and real and profound truth.
“History is not something that takes place elsewhere; it takes place here. We all contribute to making it. If bringing back some human dimension to the world depends on anything, it depends on how we acquit ourselves in the here and now.”
I don’t know how hopeful I am right now. Not very is the honest answer. But I’m going to have to do better. A lot better. There are so many courageous humans showing us how to be in the world right now. Vaclav Havel the artist, the writer — faced the world as it was, told the story as he saw it, and went to prison for it. I am here to tell myself—and to ask you—to hold onto Vaclav Havel’s words about hope.
The kind of hope I often think about (especially in hopeless situations like prison or the sewer) is, I believe, a state of mind, not a state of the world. Either we have hope within us or we don’t. Hope is not a prognostication — it’s an orientation of the spirit. Each of us must find real, fundamental hope within himself. You can’t delegate that to anyone else.
Hold your big loves close. In your mind, in your heart, in your memories, in your arms. Find hope. It’s everywhere. Tell yourself you tasted as many apples as you could.
