shaking through

We constantly try to put everything into a narrative. We think we know the way the story goes, and if we don't, then we will damn well frame it so it makes "sense." So it serves the function of a communication tool, be the audience few or many. We do it to make order out of chaos. To categorize and file away for future reference.

I wish we'd stop trying to do this all of the time.

Maybe it's just human nature to do so. But I think our evolution is running a lot faster than our narrative. It can't keep up. Just like our technological capabilities have outpaced our ethical constructs, our ability to discuss the rapid changes in our species over the last 150 years or so outstrips the need to turn everything into a narrative. Narrative has its place, but it cannot bear the full weight of such a discussion without masking part of it.

Somehow the above came out of thinking about my father's shaking hands this evening. Not shaking as in a greeting, shaking as he can no longer keep control of them all the time. Sometimes they shake, they tremble. Last weekend I watched my father, who has worked with his hands his entire life, who has built so many things with those hands, struggle to screw the top on a lamp. I tried to do it for him but he would not let me. Perhaps it was pride, perhaps embarrassment, but I saw it as determination, the same determination he's had his whole life. He sees a job through to the end.

"My hands sometimes shake now," he said. And then made a joke about operating tablesaws and growing old.

So tonight I was turning this incident over in my head, trying to turn it into some kind of comment on mortality and the cycle of life and how weakness can be strength and god knows what else. And then it hit me, like a bottle breaking over my head in some imagined bar fight: I was trying to force a narrative on it. If I could do that, it would be safe. I would be safe. The incident could be dissected and examined and theories proposed.

Fuck that. It's not that simple. My father's hands are shaking and that means one of the foundations of my life is shaking. It's dangerous because every moment is dangerous. My father could live many years yet, or not. I could get hit by a bus tomorrow. Seeing his hands shake unleashed a lot of emotions in me. They are not all processed. Perhaps some of them never will be. To process suggests an end date. A time when something is done. Filed away. Organized. Dead. Safely fit in a narrative.

I like beginnings, middles and ends in my fiction. Human life does not fit into this pattern so neatly. We can't say we have an end date or a start date when we don't even know what death is. We understand more than we once did...and even that little bit is enough to tear down human constructs that have provided the framework of our world for most of our existence. We live in the resulting chaos. And we understand very little still. What happens when we learn more, understand more? I am excited to bear witness, to think, to wrestle with it all. It will not fit into a narrative.

My wife--my beautiful, lovely wife--sent me this quote today: ""You're a ghost driving a meat-covered skeleton made from stardust, what do you have to be scared of?" I can't get it out of my head. Funny, truthful, wonderful. This entire post was an attempt to say just that. Sometimes I feel fear, but I'm not scared.

Our bones are filled with stars. May we be wise enough to allow our intellect to follow.