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Faith is a tough word for me.
Given that I have none.
Or very little.
When you grew up as I did, the product of entropy, what Heidegger might have ascribed to "thrownness" (geworfenheit),
you grow up alone, without the pillars of family, love, tradition, caring, rules, protocols, regimens, discipline, trust.
When you grew up as I did in a world ruled by a missing father and an angry, borderline mother who hit with a closed fist, not an open hand, faith--KNOWING--that something is there to help you out, is absent.
I'm 67 and for 67 of those years, that missing-ness, has been a major part of my prevailing gloom.
Lugubrious they call it. If, like me, you're still studying for your SATs.
Perhaps the most deadening fact of faithlessness is even when something or someone shows up that you can have faith in, something that proves itself to be faithful, you think instead that it's got some ulterior motive and will fuck you in the end.
The practitioners of the psychiatric arts rarely get this because devoidness is often not in their cosmology or makeup. Once I read this description of life, which if you don't get you don't get: "Suppose you're up to your neck in shit and someone starts throwing baseballs at you. What do you do, duck?"
For many, especially men, of my generation, their world view--for worse, not better--is tied to how work is going. Like me, they have little beyond work, so they rely on it inordinately for their succor, identity, and ballast. They have no "work-life" balance simply because work is life.
When you are stripped in your 50s or 60s of your workplace or profession of 30 years or 40, you are left bereft. We coddle all sorts of people and give them biographical "free-passes," owing to the hardships of their backgrounds. We don't do the same for the thousands of people who are tossed into unemployment and made to feel useless because of their age and the modern drive to force experience and cost out of every system.
Simply put, cutting costs means cutting the elderly, which can lead, sadly, to cutting wrists.
But, then a light comes in, somehow, like Sandburg's fog, on little cat feet.
Someone is there when you're sure no one is.
Someone else takes some pressure off.
Someone, somehow, somewhat inexplicably shows they care, in a little ephemeral way.
Maybe a client calls with a tranche of work.
An old client, a new client, a borrowed client, a blue client. A sixpence in your shoe client.
Along with those arrivals are inklings. People who affirm who you are who see things in you you can't for your cosmic myopia. Your soul.
Someone wrote to me, a veritable stranger:
"Beyond the sharp thinking, there’s clearly a beautiful soul steering the ship. "
Someone else, "I'll never leave you, till I'm dead."
Someone else, I haven't spoken to since 2008, "George has been the genuine article from the first handshake."
Someone else, an old account person. "You always knew how. And you always made it fun."
Someone else, a young producer, "People stay with you forever."
A funny thing happened on the way to this post. I'm not making this up.
I cleaned my Mac and the "S" key became recalcitrant, you know, stuck. I'd type on it and it wouldn't imprint.
That's not good if you're a writer, on deadline as I've been for those aforementioned 67 years.
I not only watch my S, I need my S.
In the gloom of my faithless brain, I marked my broken S as a ymbol. A symbol, I mean of my demi e. Demise.
But like Macs and life often do, somehow, the universe repairs. I think of rivers and lakes and people given up for dead. Then comes the force that through green fuse drives the flower.
Those voices above helped.
My stubbornness too. Not giving up when I felt worse than forlorn. Not when I feel five-or-even-six-lorn.
And my S began again.
It's still tentative.
Not consistent.
Sometimes I have to backspace and hit it again.
I do.
Ever-so-slowly, ever-so-death-defyingly, I find it.
Faith.
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