In the Clouds

I have a fascination with the lost subtlety of adages. It seems to me that our common wisdoms have come to be regarded as merely common, rather than wise; we recite the words to eachother, but we've forgotten their meaning. They are like paintings in the hallway; passed every day with a glance, largely ignored, but every so often they catch your eye and you stare at the thing, seeing splendour and subtlety and nuance that you'd never noticed before. Likewise, every now and then I'll be lost in thought, groping for the truth of something, when I realize suddenly that I've arrived at a conclusion I've heard spoken a thousand times, but never understood.

It's the repetition that kills them, I think. Taoism holds that Truth (of the cosmic, objective, capital-T variety) is ineffable, that it cannot be expressed in the words of any human language. I think that's true, but it's worse than that; not only is Truth inexpressable, but the act of trying to express it actually makes it harder to understand. When our great thinkers come to understand something and try to share it with the rest of us, we have a tendency to boil it down to a sentence or two, something we can remember easily, as if such ideas could possibly be so simply put. Then we recite them, over and over, a hundred times in our lives, until the meaning is dead and we have only the words. The meaningless, empty, dead words, less than shadows of the Truth they were spawned from.

Today, my thoughts were on the increasingly sorry state of American politics. Elected officials don't seem to think they're subject to law anymore, corruption and deceit are taken as a matter of course, and we've all become apologists even for the ones we choose. "Yeah, he kind of sucks, but he sucks way less than that other guy." How did we get here? Have our leaders always been this selfish, manipulative and short-sighted? Have we always held them to such a low standard? Did we actually used to uphold some kind of higher idealism? How did we lose it? How do we get it back? I got to thinking that maybe this was all inevitable. We may not have been garaunteed this particular course of self-destruction, but I wonder if this country was always bound to fall apart somehow, eventually. Maybe all empires fall, by virtue of having been an empire; Mongolian, Roman, American.

And then I remembered the adage: power corrupts. It tends to make us think of individuals: parents, bosses, politicians; people who have power over other people, and sometimes have a hard time resisting the temptation to abuse it. But there are kinds of power other than authority, and kinds of corruption other than abuse. Physical power can corrupt a young boy's respect for others, turning him into a bully. The power of luxury can corrupt our sense of duty to the world and to the future, leading us to squander our resources. Maybe America's influence over the world -- economic, military, political, social -- has corrupted her as well. Our growth as a nation and a people has been incredible, but maybe it has also been cancerous. Maybe it will devour us yet.

I tried to imagine what could hold the corruption of power at bay, and all that came to mind was love -- for who we are, for who we want to be, for what we want to accomplish and share, for our cultural friends and neighbors, for strangers, our ancestors and descendants, for life. Life, most of all; life, in the unified, collective, Rasta sense of the word. "Love life," says Slug. Love it like your mother. And Le Guin: "Love doesn't just sit there like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new."

And some unnamed voice of the collective mind: "Your heart is a muscle the size of your fist. Keep loving. Keep fighting."