"I Dare You to Move..."

“But she cannot help feeling that she has been betrayed irreparably by the disunion between her way of living and her feeling of what life should be, and at times she is almost contented to rest in this sense of grievance as a private store of consolation.” These words of Katherine Anne Porter in her short story “Flowering Judas” spoke to some ache inside me. Modern poets and writers recognized this ache and often tried to capture some piece of what we as humankind are missing. Porter’s words remind me of Eliot’s “The Wasteland,” that “mixing of memory and desire” in the “cruel month of April.” We seem ever navigating the dream of April—the promise of bloom and the stark reality of the nakedness of winter. In “Flowering Judas,” Laura speaks of a homelessness, the sense of being a wanderer without a physical or spiritual home. She is caught up in the throes of revolution, probably drawn to the ideas of progress and freedom and being involved in a bigger cause. Her disillusionment is founded in the discrepancy between the reality of the ideals of revolution and the gritty way revolution often manifests itself in the hands of self-serving men. She aches in the chasm between how things should be and how they really are. Unlike other eras of literature where art became a way to escape the ugly real or glorify the beautiful, the modern writers stared at the emptiness and called it countless names, examining this quiet despair under the microscope of metaphor. Postmodern writers still sense this need for meaning and the tension between how it is and how it should be. The contemporary band Switchfoot beautifully describes this ache for more in their song, “Meant to Live”:

Fumbling his confidence and wondering why the world has passed him by
Hoping that he’s bent for more than arguments and failed attempts to fly
We were meant to live for so much more.
Have we lost ourselves?
Somewhere we live inside; somewhere we live inside
We were meant to live for so much more
Maybe we’ve been living with our eyes half open
Maybe we’re bent and broken
We were meant to live for so much more.
Have we lost ourselves?
We want more than this world’s got to offer
We want more than the wars of our fathers
Everything inside screams for second life

Laura’s dilemma also reminds me of Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Prufrock is stuck in an empty succession of comings and goings, all the while sensing there is something more for which to live. I believe Laura would greatly identify with Prufrock’s rather bleak statement: “For I have known them all already, known them all—have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons, I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.” Laura too has measured out her life with coffee spoons, with pills given to ease someone’s pain, with secret messages and half truths, with compromises and nights of listening to putting on a pleasant face while Braggioni poorly strums his instrument. What I find tragic about Laura and Prufrock is not the ache they feel for more. Modernists beautifully described this hollowness that numbly begs to be filled. This ache of modernism, of a people who have seen senseless death and felt certainty crumble in world wars, seems an inevitable part of the human condition. But Laura and Prufrock both stay stuck in their emptiness. Rather than pushing them into a pursuit of the real and meaningful, the hollow is allowed to grow. The yawning emptiness dims the light in their eyes. Laura often thinks of how she should leave this place, this revolution, this go-between position with no glory and all hardship. Yet she never runs. Does she dare disturb the universe? The band Switchfoot also wrote a song called “Dare You to Move” that I would love to sing to Laura in the hopes that she will finally run.

I dare you to move; I dare you to move
I dare you to lift yourself up off the floor
I dare you to move; I dare you to move like today never happened before
Welcome to the fallout; welcome to resistance
The tension is here between who you are and who you could be
Between how it is and how it should be

“Denying everything, she may walk anywhere in safety, she looks at everything without amazement.” Laura has numbed herself to the potentials both of pain and of wonder. Modern writers seem for the most part devoid of wonder. Perhaps they were rebelling against the exaggerated wonder and awe of the Romantics and transcendentalists. But in making literature spare and pared down, I think the modern writers somewhat overlooked the elements of life that cannot be explained in reasonable, short sentences. Though their styles were certainly a product of the world situation and an artistic statement, I personally find many of the early modern writers too “bare bones.” They aimed to present life “as it really is,” in all its raw pain and fragmentation and displacement. But I believe in doing so they neglected other elements just as real and as much a part of life. Some things in life are straightforward and easily described. But the average human being must often resort to metaphor, to analogy, to descriptive language to try to wrap one’s mind around elements and moments in life that cannot be shaved away into telegraphic sentences. Often the smallest moments, such as the sun’s first tentative peeking each new morning, require sentence after sentence to capture and still fall short.

I also found Richard Wright’s story, “The Man Who Was Almost a Man,” intriguing. I found the main character, Dave, to be more complicated than simply an adolescent desiring to move through a rite of passage. This is more than a coming of age story or an initiation narrative. Although shooting the mule was an accident on Dave’s part, I think he is showing signs of a darker inner process. His preoccupation with the gun seems rooted in a desire for power. Wright would have been interested in this as the product of a sick society mistreating and misguiding black males in a destructive way. When he holds the gun, something almost primal in Dave surfaces. “In the gray light of dawn he held it loosely, feeling a sense of power. Could kill a man with a gun like this. Kill anybody, black or white. And if he were holding the gun in his hand, nobody could run over him; they would have to respect him.” I wonder whether this thinking is at the root of many acts of violence, an attempt to gain power and respect while feeling safe from the consequences.