Students of logic immediately recognize the circularity of the statement. It's been argued to me, and I don't think effectively, that it's a phrase about acceptance. I flatly disagree. It's complacency disguised as wisdom. It's laziness and fear punched up to sound like some reasonable explanation about all for which you can't control. It's a smuggling phrase, like so many, meant to silence and move things along or provoke a communal head nod and shoulder shrug. It's pathetic, annoying, and extremely distasteful in its hubris.
We don't know what "it" is. We can't be bothered to ask. We don't imagine counterfactuals or challenges that would better define what it is we're trying to talk about. I've been griping across 3 blogs now about that being the sick broken nature of existence, to play along and dismiss that which doesn't conform or make you feel comfortable. "It" is a rotten core of bad habits, prejudices, oversights, and forms of denial. "It" shifts across whomever it is put in front of. "It" is infinite apologetics. "It" is submission.
And that's what I really want to talk about. When and why do you submit?
When you're sparring, you tap out when you might otherwise have a bone broken or are no longer able to breathe. The mutual respect and trust with your sparring partner ensures you're both able to practice and experience the reality of the martial art you're training. Submitting is an exchange of a shared understanding and sense of value for the partnership.
I think of war, where you might retreat, but never really submit. You might end up in a camp and bide your time indefinitely. The latest character I watched never submit was Furiosa from Mad Max. At the no-mercy of circumstance, you either maintain a fire in your eye and unyielding sense of direction, or not.
"Happy wife, happy life!" Submit your base and immature manly desires. Submit to a board for evaluation and oversight. Submit to the demands of the police. Submit to the dictates of what your culture finds acceptable in ways of speaking. Submit to your god, and every contradictory whim that suits your needed justification.
I like to believe I submit once I develop a reasonable answer to "why." Just because you tell me to do something, or say it's normal, or say it's good for me, or say everyone else is doing it means absolutely nothing to me. I submit to avoid retribution. I submit to acquire capital. It's honestly even hard to call it "submitting" more than "subverting." I undermine the fire out of my practical sensibilities. I haven't given up fighting nor am any less likely to bite if you leave your neck open.
I think it's about as negligent and dangerous as you get to not bother trying to understand what you're submitting to. By default, it's going to be someone or something that does not give a fuck about you. It's something that will probably kill you. It's something that, were your nose pressed right up against it, you'd pull away and explain how gross and uncomfortable it was trying to deal with it on your face. If you imagine the thing being pressed up on your face as a mole you were born with, okay, "it is what it is." If you imagine it's a giant bag of shit you've been pretending not to shit in for years, no, it's actually a bag of shit, and it smells, and we need to do something about it if we don't want to eventually be buried under so much of it we forget what it's like to live otherwise.
We've submitted to our algorithms. We've submitted to the the myopic nihilism of fascism. We've submitted to empty and ironic professions of values. We submit to narratives about power and how it works a thousand times before we even pretend to retain any agency or control when we're thrust out of the abstraction and performance. I see people submit their identities to their job, their sports team, their busy-ness, and their diagnoses. I'm regularly told, from client to colleague to friend, about how much we can't do.
I'm wired different. Even if I don't know exactly how "it" can be done, I have an imagination for it. So much of my experience is starting from a place of "how" or "what first" that I'm constantly having to maintain a level of awareness and enthusiasm for what feels like a perpetual solo vision. The more I offer concrete steps, the quicker I watch people pull away. I've felt compelled to tone down my goals and expectations, but at the same time, that proved to be an irrational "fix" to a problem I could only pretend to have control over. Parsing how to achieve versions of those goals or pieces of them that doesn't resonate antagonistically is an ongoing process.
This, by the way, is a good chunk of the meat about what's so tragic in me and Byron falling out. Two people moving forward in spite of whatever the messy details is a proper force to be reckoned with. I signed up for everything he was doing based on 20 years of being on the same page. That thread got lost or supplanted by what I would otherwise describe as "ho-hum it-is-what-it-is" until any real potential and sustained rational beliefs were snuffed out. "Life" is either a game of your choosing, or a meta-narrative undermining the silly dance and words you're using to pretend you have a grasp on it.
This is why you always return to the fundamentals. Who are you alone? What happens if everything you rely on dies or lies or just gets so lost it can either haunt you or show you something important? I entertain thoughts on loss constantly because it's a submission you can see coming and a reasonable thing to build into your framework for dealing with the world. I'm not served by pretending either of us can't die tomorrow. I'm not served indefinitely mourning a derailed train. There's so many ways in which your well can be poisoned. It's your choice to swallow.
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