(don't say) goodbye to all that
It is in the nature of beginning that something new is started which cannot be expected from whatever may have happened before. This character of startling unexpectedness is inherent in all beginnings. Hannah Arendt.
No beginning ever happens against a completely blank slate. It would be nice if it did, and we could always play in pristine snow. But we can’t. We are all already-written on pages, smudgy with past loves and loss. January 1 catches us wherever we are, awkwardly mid-reach. We blur: we might as well dance and kiss into the calendar’s turn.
These are Inauguration thoughts. Once every four years we get together and decide to begin a new era, that the world we woke up in won’t be the one we dozed off to the night before. Lest we get to giddy about this transformation, there are always people who take it upon themselves to remind that the world is as it always was, that every fresh start is a act of wishful thinking.
But that’s the point. The best beginnings are in history, not escapes from history. They are written in pencil or pen on what already came before, with hardly an eraser anywhere in sight. That’s what I found so moving about Joe Biden’s election. His wasn’t a fresh face, but a creased and weathered one that had waited for its time in the sun long after anyone thought it would ever arrive. He reaches Ithaca as an old man.
The country badly needs to move on from the wounds of the last four years, what Biden called our “(un)civil war.” The Inauguration was the latest in a series of wild Wednesdays, preceded by Insurrection and Impeachment. The sacking of the Capitol was visible everywhere, brutally underlined by barricades and camouflage. Ours is not a carefree and joyous Republic but a wary and anxious one taking deep breaths.
I think that is a wonderful, precious thing. For centuries, theories of aesthetics have argued that the beautiful is always unstable and ephemeral, glowing under threat. Think of a chord of music that stirs you, or a painting that seems to shimmer even as you look at it, or a moment of intimacy that seems to be in the past even when it’s happening. The gossamer thread of a connection with a friend, or a professional breakthrough. How easily it could have been otherwise. The counterfactual spotlights the gorgeousness of what we have, even if it is already running away.
Beginnings lend themselves to beauty: the flags are starched, the coalition has not yet cracked, everything is congruent. But in both the personal and the political, I want to recover the staggering beauty of the (re)beginning. To start again, anew. That means holding experience but refusing cynicism. It means not being deaf to the pleasures and torments of constraint but continuing to insist that everything is possible. It means listening in hard to what Elizabeth Bishop hears in The Moose:
an old conversation not concerning us,
but recognizable, somewhere,
back in the bus:
Grandparents’ voices
uninterruptedly
talking, in Eternity
But we also have to dive in to those conversations that do concern us, about how we live now and how the shape of the world flirts and frustrates the shape of our desires. When we want to be new, and how badly we crave age.
It is those who have seen worlds end that are most committed to trying to rebuild and restart. Hannah Arendt, quoted above, fled a continent in flames and developed a whole philosophy built on beginnings. Eli Wiesel wrote Night, but he also penned Dawn. There are untold people who use their own pain and struggle to make lives better for others.
What does this mean in practice? It means embracing the reality that so much is broken and frayed right now, and responding in two ways. The first is to try to mend things, however you can. Every crisis asks a series of hard questions. Be an answer, or at least part of one. Talk to friends about how the world can be better. Launch projects and brainstorm visions to help. Collaborate on something new with someone new. Commit to being friends or loving someone you disagree with on a deep level. Lead with your heart. Make a bet on someone, and then double down.
The other key is to embrace this idea of re-beginning. America needs a second chance right now. It needs to be foolishly loved again, with its flaws in full view. Its culture needs to be reimagined, its tagline shifted from decline to renaissance, seamed and marbled with flaws. How lucky is a second chance, what incredible grace it requires. It is the alchemy behind repentance and forgiveness, the technology that allows us to say that we’re sorry, and for those words to land safely in another heart.
But that’s true for each of us as well. At this confluence of a new year and a new political era, I’m excited by the potential for re-beginnings at every scale. What would it mean to see our friends, our family, our boyfriends and girlfriends, with truly fresh eyes, to wonder again at who they are and what they would like to be? What if we kept the scars in the portrait? I don’t think we’ve yet realized how free we are, or how beautiful we are when we are bold. As the New York Times art critic Michael Kimmelman writes, “a life lived with art in mind might itself be a kind of art.”
That’s what I want.
When I think of (re)beginning, I think of it as an essential tenacious stance. It is looking at things with a poet’s sense of the possible and a wrestler’s sense of what needs to be done. Somehow, we need to convert the quicksilver nature of beauty into something forged and strong.
I am trying to be the person who decides to stay, not to leave. To look at the glass I am holding, even if it feels battered and chipped, and see it as the first one of a glorious night that still stretches ahead of me, pulsating into the watery light of early morning. To believe that the people I fall in love with can grow with me. That the faith any of us grew up in still holds a space for all of us.
The poet Hart Crane crafted a verse that has always sung to me:
And so it was I entered the broken world
To trace the visionary company of love, its voice
An instant in the wind (I know not whither hurled)
But not for long to hold each desperate choice.
It’s all here: the brokenness of the world. The imperative to find your people, the visionary company who you want to re-begin with and alongside. The all-importance of choice, the lives we choose and the ones we don’t.
The best (re)beginners don’t leave the visions, the virtues, or the vices behind. We never know what we’ll need or who we’ll be when we get where we are going.
They-we-I-fall down, and fall in love. It’s hard to know the difference, sometimes.
A