It was in Slaughterhouse
Five, I think, that Kurt Vonnegut urged the absolute necessity of
forgetting the bad stuff in our lives and focusing on the good stuff. Doing so
was, he insisted, a survival mechanism, a way of protecting oneself against irredeemable
heartache and residual pain, and making it possible to enjoy even the simplest
pleasures. This has been a struggle I have waged for most of my life, for I have
an unconquerable tendency to remember all the bad things that have happened to me,
while forgetting most of the good ones. Hurts, insults, losses I have suffered,
stupid mistakes I have made, opportunities I missed even long ago, are all
as present to my mind as yesterday’s lunch, and assert themselves with stinging
ease and velocity if I allow my mind to wander even for a moment. The good things
which have happened, my successes, loves, achievements, works I have created, commendations I
have received, pale in comparison to the vivid recollection of sufferings long past.
For they are never really past, since I keep allowing them to bubble up from the tar pits of even my most distant memories into my current consciousness.
Now you will say that I am oversensitive, and that is
doubtless true. Being serious by nature, I have had a lifelong tendency to take
everything seriously, including slights, slurs, stupidities, and
cupidities which I ought to have ignored. And now the problem is exacerbated by the very modest level of notoriety I have achieved concurrent with the uncontrolled
mitosis of social media platforms. One will never know just how many pathetic
lunatics, how many mean, petty, venomous, bloody-minded people there are in our
society until one has started a website or published a book or written a film or run for public office, or in any
other fashion raised his head above the herd. For the moment you do so in our
society now, someone will try to cut it off.
Someone whose life has not panned out as he wished, someone
who, in prior eras would have been consigned to yelling at cars on street
corners or cursing at the TV or muttering in a stupor to a barfly, now has an
infinite variety of public platforms from which to vent his wrath, often in the
most scurrilous terms, at perfect strangers whose lives have turned out better
than his. These are the hollow driftwood of society, thrown up by tides of life
onto lonely beaches where they bake in the remorseless sunlight of regret. They
are despicable trolls who, in ages past, were consigned to mildewed shadows
beneath the bridges of our culture, but who now can find themselves in the
spotlight alongside the best that our culture has to offer. And the only way
such people have to retrieve some modicum of their shredded self-respect is
through trying to strip others of theirs.
I used to accept invitations to give interviews, and to
speak at seminars and festivals, and I once accepted comments on this blog. And though most people have been gracious, I no longer do these things, for I find that, no matter how benign the
subject, no matter how sincere my observations, the roaches of social media will
come scurrying out of the woodwork which they inhabit to take their putrid
potshots. I know, of course, that by making myself scarcer, I am
playing into their hands; but the fact remains that I have not yet
mastered Vonnegut’s life-skill of closing my eyes to the bad stuff and focusing
on the good. That is my own fault; another defect which I have yet to
correct.
Other people, people whom I know, have managed to harden themselves
to such vituperation, and I admire them for it and have endeavored to emulate
their insouciance. They just don’t care, they ignore the venom, they laugh it
off. But despite decades of trying, I find that, more often than not, I just can’t.
As I have said, it is my own damn fault, my own deficiency, and I live with the
knowledge of it. Oh, I know where it comes from, ultimately: it comes from that
place at the bottom of the ladder of consciousness which Yeats called “the
foul rag and bone shop of the heart.”
All of who we have become begins in childhood. That is why childhood, and the innocence which is its birthright,
are so precious, so delicate, and so in need of protection. There is no hurt or
neglect or cruelty which we suffer in early childhood which does not come back,
like Banquo’s ghost, to haunt us even in our most congenial moments. We are
like cuneiform clay on which the unfeeling messages of the world remain embedded. We cannot efface them, and so, unless we
learn to ignore them, refuse to read the inscriptions thereupon, and write
new scenarios in our experience, we will forever be victims of the past. And
that is wrong; that is a recipe for unhappiness.
Life belongs to us; we do not belong to it. Like any gift,
it is ours to do with as we please, as we think best for ourselves and others.
But that means living in the present, and consigning the past, with all of its
vicissitudes, to the past where it belongs. The past is past and
ought to behave. And the hurts and failings and losses we once incurred must not be allowed to
crowd our current consciousness with corrosive regret. We are creatures of the
present and creators of the future; what has happened must be finished, what
is gone must be left behind. Forget the bad stuff; focus on the good stuff. Close
your eyes to the sorrows behind you and open them to the joys that are present
and the wonders that are possible. Live now and in the future as you have never
lived before, and your spirit will be freer and your heart will be at peace.
