|
 Interrogations
By
Ophelia Benson
An
eclectic, literary challenge to everyday thinking.
Number
Ten: Weave a Net to Catch the Wind
The
simple truth about humans is that we're horribly complex. Sometimes
it seems as if the main result of the evolution of the human brain
is to make life difficult for us. To make sure that we live in a
great endlessly proliferating web of competing goods and incompatible
needs and unmeetable desires and unresolvable hostilities. There
is no possible way we can design a social or political or economic
system that will work equally well for everyone. Every problem we
solve creates a thicket of new problems, and if we solve any of
those, more again. But there is no refuge in passivity and laissez-faire
and abnegation, either, because we are so complex; for every one
of us who sits back to watch the parade or cultivate our garden,
a thousand others are out there scrambling and scratching, creating
problems.
Many
of our institutions are devices for throwing a net over this squirming
thrashing mob and getting it under control. Schools, prisons, hospitals,
factories, bureaucracies, armies, queues, traffic lights, courts,
uniforms, gangs, customs, approval and disapproval, guilt and shame,
guns and sticks, rewards and punishments, incentives and deterrents,
laws and manners, fences and walls, grammar and poetry. All there
to induce or coerce some uniformity on our behaviour, to get us
to form straight lines, to go this way instead of that, to make
neat patterns instead of running chaotically all over the place,
to establish clear edges and borders and boundaries instead of letting
everything blend and overlap and bleed into everything else, to
do things all at the same time in unison instead of whenever we
damn well please, to be quiet and sit still and look straight ahead
while we wait for the doctor/clerk/officer/judge/undertaker to get
to us.
And
a good thing too. We don't want everyone else running chaotically
all over the place, do we, so we have to give up our own freedom
as well. We have to learn what we're expected to learn. Not to talk
with our mouths full. Not to interrupt the grown-ups. How to get
a driver's license, a Social Security card, a National Health card,
a passport. How to arrange our faces in public so that people don't
try to sell us seats on the shuttle to Venus. How to behave at the
theater, parties, on public transport, so that we're not asked to
leave. It's all a terrible imposition and a curb on our freedom,
but happily it's a curb on everyone else's too.
So
we consent to being corralled and herded and directed, to follow
the yellow brick road, to move the knight two squares north and
one square east. But roads and lines, rules and categories, though
useful and necessary, also limit and confine and leave a lot out.
So we always want to escape them. To colour outside the lines, think
outside the box. To be not neat and tidy and rule-following and
patterned and polite but rather messy and chaotic and wild. Not
a garden but a wilderness. Not a minuet but a Dionysian frenzy,
not a planned itinerary but a wander. But then, because every problem-solving
generates more problems, often the wander results not in thrilling
surprises, undiscovered pretty neighbourhoods with flower boxes
in the windows, but a wasted afternoon trudging through dull streets
of warehouses and garages. The beaten path is often beaten for a
reason, and if we want the good things other people have found,
we have to do what everyone else is doing, follow the rules and
elbow the crowd.
But
all the same (and so often that's the only resolution we can manage,
not a good tidy one that's firmly on one side or the other but a
mushy woolly whine, 'well on the one hand but then again', add ballast
one minute and throw some overboard the next), all the same we have
to wander sometimes, even at the risk of wasted afternoons, getting
caught in the rain, a headache the next day. We have to abandon
the paved road to roam in the meadow, escape the pattern for a tortuous
pointless meander, ignore the rules and do everything the hard way.
No doubt the result will be floundering into a muddy bog, getting
bitten and stung and scratched, getting lost and tired and hungry
and thirsty, but that's the price of adventure. We have to pay it
now and then.
Ophelia
Benson is editor of Butterflies and Wheels - .
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Interrogations
will next be updated early March 2003
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