Brutal are the reminders of our creatureliness, our frail nakedness.
Failed technology. Failed technocracy and politics. Forgetful of biological and ecological necessity, that fate more ancient and stronger than any engineered security, we suffer our sicknesses, our mutating viruses. And now we are cold.
It wears upon us, our bodies and minds. The “Real” is what psychoanalysts call it. A frightening existential space wherein we desire life because we’re afraid of death, it’s the fear that follows threatened security; it’s what comes to mind with cough and cold, when the thin veil of our mostly illusory safety is torn asunder. To feel and fear like an animal our “Unfriendly, friendly universe,” as the poet Edwin Muir called it, is a sublime experience, beautiful but terrifying.
Underneath the anxiety of scattered impromptu planning, heroism and failure, altruism and cowardice, is this visceral truth of things. That we are indeed quite mortal and that we belong to the earth, not the other way around. Creatureliness, terrifying creatureliness. Historically humiliating too, it’s fear reminding us we will be unceremoniously lined up alongside all our failed ancestors, those too who could not conquer the earth; who too, equally mistakenly, likely thought themselves exceptional. When, of course, neither they nor we are.
This is the lesson, brutal as I said. And it’s been the lesson for us all the better part of a year. The uncountable tragedies of COVID, long-haul sickness and death, social and personal devastation, and even those small pampered banalities taken away, those inconveniences we’re embarrassingly addicted to; and for us in Texas, now a bitter deadly cold betraying bad engineering, bad planning, and an even worse politics, these are the humiliating lessons of our creatureliness, that all the lies we tell ourselves are pathetic, merely the parroted rhetoric of politicians and the retweeted rationalizations of a weak, adolescently decadent and much too complacent citizenry.
This, and not what any politicos tell you, is what’s brought us low. Our fundamental disease has always been spiritual, our writhing before an indifferent brutal cosmos. A Hobbesian tragedy in a sense, our conflicts are beginning to mirror more clearly the warfare of nature. We are being stripped as a people; which should give us pause, some to pray and others to think. For another word for creatureliness is mortality, and that’s what, in our beautifully screened and air-conditioned world we’re being forced to remember. Almost as if there’s an eternal justice after all.
And despite misrepresentation, it is a religious lesson. Such is Hebrew wisdom, that we are part of creation, that only after sin were we divorced from nature, becoming by tragic default nature’s exploiters and the constant killers of each other. This, of course, is Christian wisdom too. By a willful moral failure, St. Augustine said, came “all the wear and tear of the world.” That’s why, for Jews and Christians, at least those spiritually alert, none of this is surprising. It just makes watching the world today like watching some needlessly sad play, our present social search for an impossible secular joy. But, of course, this is a matter of faith.
Which, at least for me and for many, is the secret wisdom of the ashes of Ash Wednesday, the secret too of the ascetical disciplines of Lent. “Remember that you are dust,” we begin the season; it is a reminder of creatureliness.
This year, our lives better reflect this liturgy than in years past. It doesn’t take much to think what this means, to recall we are dust. You needn’t even be religious to understand at least this much. We’ve learned hopefully, most of us, just such frailty. The only question is whether we’ll remember it if or when these storms pass: our creatureliness and the beauty of being gentle.
This column originally appeared in The Dallas Morning News.
