A hurried look at my MacBook Pro calendar discloses a number of events planned within the upcoming ten days: a Pre-op at the Queensway Carleton hospital, Bose® headphones ear cushions from UPS, my brother-in-law’s 70th birthday, month end deposits from pension plans and our financial advisor, a routine visit from our housekeeper, annual ultrasound imaging of my partner, my erstwhile legal assistant’s 40th birthday, a nuclear injection followed by melanoma, wide local excision and sentinel lymph node surgery for me. And finally somewhere in that bewildering mix, the United States of America presidential election.
My point is, notwithstanding the pressing allure of the US presidential election (and all its related pundits and competing predictions and entertainment platforms), life for the majority of us is not a question of who is going to win or lose the American election. Life rather is far less withdrawn than the election result and far more proximate as the necessities of getting out of bed in the morning, addressing one’s ritual customs and habits in the midst of creeping arthritic pain and contortion, fathoming the latest price of groceries and fuel oil, questioning the division of universal internet connection, coping with bad drivers on the highway, answering the imponderables from children, documenting the settlement of one’s estate and wondering about it all. We might even include a debate concerning headstone or monument for ourselves and the propriety of cremation or burial. But whatever it is that preoccupies our piffling thoughts throughout the majority of the day, it is not how the majority of Americans are predicted to vote.
Indeed so ubiquitous is this condition that my employment of the American election is illustrative only. My thesis in any event of the day or time is that life is governed by immediacy and imperceptible triflings which unwittingly persuade our evolution. Even the circumstances in which we were born will dictate a seemingly inviolable strategy of behaviour. Whoever it was that said “I am a part of all that I have met” was sadly mistaken to have overlooked the weight and governance of bloodlines, ancestry and culture. I say this not to contradict the learned author; instead to highlight what is frequently the misunderstanding and misapprehension of the hardness of the crucible into which each of us is born. Regrettably that lack of knowledge not unlike the deprivation of any other studied intellect corrupts the ultimate growth and improvement of the body into which we are born and from which we as regularly draw not only our first breath but many more subsequently thereafter including the nutrition of the identical environment whether cultivated or not. Bluntly spoken, “You is what you is!”
This apparently fundamental and inescapable observation is nonetheless riddled with disease and unpremeditated violation. Its obstinacy is its own innocent border to improvement. For example, 50% of the agricultural servants of the Texan dairy industry are undocumented migrants; similarly it has been proven that compared to undocumented immigrants the likelihood of violence or crime is greater from the native population. The extension of comparable details when war is involved is equally unsettling and awakening (such as that which currently exists between Palestinians and Jews). The one theme however which survives throughout all these contradictions is that bloodymindedness is no answer.
Ulysses
ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON
It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Match’d with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.
I cannot rest from travel: I will drink
Life to the lees: All times I have enjoy’d
Greatly, have suffer’d greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone, on shore, and when
Thro’ scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vext the dim sea: I am become a name;
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known; cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honour’d of them all;
And drunk delight of battle with my peers,
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.
I am a part of all that I have met