On Rubber Bands and Rejoicing, Dark Though It Is
So the rubber band that you wear to make you stop speaking useless words? – I can’t keep it on the same wrist for half an hour. I always wondered about that – why it’s so easy to tear things down and so much harder to stack them up. Why are the grim words the ones that draw laughter and why do we flock about the funny instead of crowding in around the kind? Why does mutual irritation bring strangers together when we all know it’s this very bitterness that’s bound to take us apart?
With all the other poor choices I and my kind make, I guess it’s no surprise that we keep getting this thing dead wrong too. But when we come down to it, the creed we hold to isn’t ambiguous or muddied enough to let us make up our own minds. Do everything without complaining and without arguing, it says.
This isn’t the first time I’ve tried for the twenty-one days. There’s this idea that words don’t only spill what’s inside but shape it as well – and someone who started thinking about this decided they had better start shaping up their talk. Because to be honest, on a given day a whole lot of us sound something like this:
Oh, me too. And someone who didn’t want to be a fountain of whining said something had to change. (We say it too. Again I will say it: rejoice.) So he put a rubber band on a wrist and every time he caught himself complaining moved it to the other. I moved mine ten times on my road trip Tuesday, driving home to celebrate the dawning of the happiest portion of the year. The goal is to bring that interval up to twenty-one days. Yeah.
I can’t deny that people can be cruel in a pinch or even on the other side of all your kindness. Yes, the highways are clogged with folks who shouldn’t be allowed off of their own driveways. And yes, the times are nightfall and the world riven right through. But don’t we believe that the Sunrise from on high has come to visit us? Don’t we believe in the sky split wide open with light and chorale?
Or do we? Because if we do, won’t it change things? And won’t it make wild sense to talk about this more than we talk about the sorry insufficiency of what’s around? I’m just asking because I wonder. And I guess I’m not the only one. Three thousand years back in our history, our greatest songwriter said let the redeemed say so, talk about it. We still sing it. Because if everything else falls away, we still have this. And in the bleak world that Immanuel inhabits, can't we be saying thank you and waving, dark though it is?
Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water thanking it
smiling by the windows looking out
in our directions
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks we are saying thank you
in the faces of the officials and the rich
and of all who will never change
we go on saying thank you thank you
our lost feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
we are saying thank you and waving
dark though it is
[W.S. Merwin]