The ad campaign is presented as a sop to the public conscience, an effort to persuade the consumer that this energy company is acknowledging conservation as a worthy goal.  Featuring sundrenched, smiling people of ambiguous ethnicity, the ads are one-line pledges to do various things to save energy.  These statement, however, are so aggressively general that they would hardly pass muster on a list of New Years resolutions, let alone on an inspiring call to action.

“I will unplug stuff more,” vows this striking redhead.  “I will use less energy,” volunteers a droopy-eyed greybeard, in a pledge so amazingly generic it could only be surpassed by “I will do more good things and not so many bad ones.” But the one that really revs my engine is the bold stand taken by the dude who will “at least consider a hybrid.”  Go on at least considering, my friend! If we all at least consider, long enough and hard enough, we might do more good things, and not so many bad ones!

Now perhaps I’m doing more harm than good by mocking what is part of a step in the right direction.  At Least Considering A Hybrid is by most lights a better message to be drilling into stupefied commuter eyes than You Deserve A Hummer. But I was in the art store the other day, and came across a clip-art book of World War Two posters. I was struck by two things - how similar their messages are to the conservation-oriented ones we’re getting today, and how much less mealy-mouthed about it they were.   Do with less! Use it up! Don’t demand heat 24 hours a day! The bloodspattered glare of the soldier may be a bygone image, but the exhortation to join a carpool is as current as ever. And can that be a staycation that this gentleman is advocating? If this lady were to return to her place exhorting the public, she’d not only be saving wear on tear on tires, but fighting the public health menace of obesity!

Share the meat! Stretch your sugar! (Can you even imagine what would happen if someone suggested that eating meat was dangerous and unpatriotic? I think it would be hilarious and some public agency should try it.)

But I’m not trying to get all Greatest Generation on you, nor trying to imply that we have lost our capacity for making demands on our citizenry. I’m just advocating for a little creativity (and maybe some acknowledgement of tradition) in our approach. Come to think of it, perhaps you Hulu watchers have noticed the ads from the Ministry for Public Morality (I think it calls itself the Ad Council?) advocating such civic virtues as Moderation, Prudence, Temperance, and Discretion?  That’s awesome as far as I’m concerned, but I think that they should take to just popping up some of these posters.  Come on, it links conservation with fighting Nazis!  Who doesn’t want to fight Nazis? Or take the good things of today (sunlight, ethnically ambiguous models) and pair them with the good things of yesterday (full-throated appeal to civic duty, practical exhortations) and see what we get.

PS. If Obama supporters decide to take up Yes, we Can, I would die happy*.

*and possibly of botulism.

Well, now that I find myself doing to others what I hated to have done to me, I have a few things to explain to myself.  It’s not that I’m rejecting your overture of friendship, I’m accepting that overture of friendship and taking it as a license to make demands on you.  It’s not that I deem you unworthy or incapable of understanding my woes, but wrestling them into a form where I can express them and you can react to them in the way that you want to be able to would take more energy than I am currently able to muster.  Excusing me from my social obligation to relate to my companions is an active favor you are doing me, analogous to sparing me the obligation to cook by bringing me a meal.

(OK, universe, I’ve found the life lesson, you can cut it out now.)

If they had made courage the watchword of their ticket the way Obama made hope the watchword of his.  If they, instead of playing on an uneasy mixture of fear and a sort of nervou, grasping independence, had called upon the voters to display courage and fortitude.  If they had cast themselves as bold leaders of a brave populace instead of as protectors of an unhappy nation menaced by shadowy and incomprensible threats.  If they had actually issued a moral challenge to the people they wanted to lead.

But they didn’t challenge the electorate.  Is there a word for the opposite of challenge?  And that - character aside, policy aside, even leaving aside questions of truth and lies - is why they deserved the response they got.

Falling asleep in the cold
In hunger, in pain, the morphine of sleep works in stages
And I lose the sorrow before I quite lose the knowledge
of sorrow; never I sleep quite so deeply
as when the cold holds me, waiting outside the walls.
Falling asleep at a party
Like insect choruses, like rain on the roof
the words fade to sound, the meaning twists into dream.
My feet press up again the couch’s arm,
wrapped in music and noise and a coat from the stack in the hall.
Falling asleep on a train
Sweet mother metro, rock me to sleep
Sing me your lullaby, steel and chrome
Borne in your strong arms, on pleather and rails,
Sweet mother metro, carry me home.
Falling asleep at a lecture
How sweet, how sweet the will’s failure!
Of all my sins, none easier than this-
Just for a minute; I’ll think better with my eyes closed;
I’m on the verge of seeing, seeing clearly-
Falling asleep in the sun
It seemed to me I walked through burning fields
From light to light.  It seemed that I was clothed
in robes of flame, I walked through fire
unwithered.
Falling asleep at a hotel
The mattress has a chemical smell
the drapes, a chemical hue
Joyfully I give myself up altogether
to the comfort of the utterly unfamiliar.
Falling asleep on the road
When one radio station is overwhelmed by another
there’s no struggle, really, the car simply
carries you out of one power, into another.
The horror comes later.

I suppose one way to measure growth is by the acuteness and intensity of the suffering we’re capable of.  I had had no idea what it was like to be so bitterly ashamed, I didn’t know that I could feel this bad.  I could not hold back my tears, and the teacher did not understand why I was crying.  This, of course, only deepened a shame already beyond my six-year-old ability to fathom.

Why was I crying, though?  What is shame? Was I, as the teacher suspected, being a baby, unhappy because I didn’t get something I wanted or because I had been scolded by an adult?   I think there was something more to it than frustrated desire or fear of having failed to please - both play into it of course, but there’s something in shame that unifies the two and is greater than both.

I hadn’t caused harm.  I hadn’t done something morally wrong.  I hadn’t put myself in danger or deprived myself of any pleasure.  I’d tried my hardest; why didn’t I take a sportsmanlike view of my defeat?

There are two levels of failure - there’s failure to be perfect, and then there’s failure to be acceptable.  From my current and somewhat skewed perspective, shame seems the least endurable kind of mental pain,* because there is no refuge from it into the comfort of being in the right.  You cannot retreat from your situation into yourself, for you are the situation.  The only retreat is through time and distance, and as I apparently demonstrate, though the shame of a particular situation may fade, the memory of that shame remains vivid and exact.

*exceeded perhaps by its cousin guilt?

I thought people only danced in the streets in books, you know, or at the end of movies, or when their country won the world cup.  Strangers were embracing.  One group would start up a cheer and have it be taken up by a whole block.  Cars rode past, beeping their horns and waving signs, their occupants high-fiving the passers-by.  People screamed and hallooed and cried and danced.  I’ve never seen anything like it.

This is the version of the country that I voted for.  Good leadership is providing people with the opportunity to be as good as they want to be.

I certainly look defeated at the moment.  I have bruises from head to toe (well, sternum to right quadricep) of the odd pointillistic quality that you only get from being repeatedly hit by corners of furniture.  My arms are shaking so that I can barely write. And yet, I have my prize! Who won in this encounter?  Who were even the combatants?  You shall be the judge.

I saw an ad on craigslist for chairs.  Now, I’d been keeping an eye out for free or cheap chairs for some time. Piece by laborious piece, I have been turning my basement into a habitation fit to bring guests home to.  I got a dining table.  I got a couch.  Now all I lacked were places for guests to sit around the table. When a “moving” ad popped up on craigslist and mentioned three chairs to be got rid of, it seemed ideal.  It was not far from the Columbia Heights metro station.  I’d biked there before from my house, the distance didn’t seem so particularly long, certainly not out of the range of a brisk walk.

When I got there, they threw in another chair and a set of kitchenwares.  “Sure!” I said, being conditioned to accept whenever someone offers me something. Hmm, four chairs, a set of plates, knives, forks, and spoons, and two baking pans.  “So, uh, you walked here?” asked the seller.  “Oh yeah,” I said, “it’s not that far.”  “You gonna need some help with that?”  I stacked the four chairs on top of each other, tucked the kitchenwares into the crevices, and hefted the whole stack, which bristled like a sea creature with legs everywhere.

“Oh yeah,” I said.  “This isn’t bad at all.”

It was to my credit, I suppose, that I had barely gone a few blocks before I realized that I was being a moron. Understand!  There are three things that I value in myself: creativity, cleverness, and courage, which I take to be not so much boldness as the capacity to endure. As long as I have my two legs to carry me, my two feet on the ground, I can face anything and go anywhere.  Dependence is weakness and weakness is shameful, and there’s no actual way I’m carrying these things all the way home, is there.  No, I thought not.  Pick up the phone and ask for help!

So I did; we were to meet at a place half the distance I had been planning to travel, just down the street practically!  With a renewed heart I hefted my stack of chairs, which seemed lighter in my arms for exactly one block.

At Harvard a man stopped and helped me.  He took a chair and the bag of dishes for as long as our ways ran together.  The relief was marvelous, but my arms shook when I tried to lift the stack once again.  “It’s the dishes,” I said.  “What was I thinking?  I’m in ceramics, I make my own plates.  Dust to dust, earthenware to earthenware!” And I left the dishes in the stack of random objects by a public trash can.  (I think it’s trash day tomorrow, more’s my luck!)

At U a woman stopped and helped me.  She took a chair and the baking pans for as long as our ways ran together.  Her presence gave me courage, for by this point I wanted to keep stopping to set down the chairs, and each time they would be harder to pick up. Having someone else there who lent me a hand kept me going, because if I kept lagging like that I would be admitting that I had bitten off too large a task for me, thus either demonstrating stupidity or a shameful reliance on society to bail me out of the mess that I had gotten myself into.  But I got rid of the baking pans at the next likely-looking curbside pile.

The night came on.  I rolled down my coat cuffs to protect my fingers from the bite of the edge of the chair-rail.  I stopped every block and shifted my grip, trying to find some sector of muscle that still had some strength in it, like the last guest in the washroom searching for a dry spot on the towel.  I was going to put on the radio to distract myself from my ordeal, but NPR was in the middle of its pledge campaign.  And let me tell you, the only thing that Sisyphus lacked, as he toiled with his boulder up the sad and weary slope, was the staff of WAMU 88.5 encouraging him to renew his pledge of support.

I shifted the stack of chairs onto my hip, then onto my back.  Only two more blocks to go!  Then a block of sidewalk dropped a little too precipitously, I tottered, and the top chair fell of the stack and smashed in half.  Fortunately I was beside a corner grocery store, who put up no objection to my disposing of the broken chair in their dumpster.  There I was, three chairs, what I had originally bargained for, and now finally at the rendezvous point with the friend who was to bear me the rest of the way home.

Was this a defeat for the stubborn pigheadedness that in my younger days would have refused any help at all?  Was this a defeat for the good sense that I keep hoping I’m developing, which should have known better than to try to carry all that on foot? Was this a defeat for the materialistic culture that tells me that convenience trumps all? Was this a defeat for my crunchy hippie independence that says I can live without the help of motorized transport? I don’t know, but it was a victory for you, my friends, because now, when you come over to dinner, there will be a place for you to sit.

I’ve been unjust, but never been unkind,
I’ve been unsound, but never been unfair-
A muted reason rises in my mind.

Too late I learned that bandages can bind,
What some call prison others call repair,
On such a night, what shelter will I find?

He travels best who travels nearest blind;
Why am I going, when I don’t know where?
A muted reason rises in my mind:

The road to hell is lit and clearly signed
And if I would not seek my billet there,
On such a night, what shelter can I find?

There is no space that has not been defined.
Why have the skies gone starless, broad and bare?
A muted reason rises in my mind,
On such a night, what shelter need I find?

Footnote: There are two things that I do while waiting for a bus at night: I call my family to say hello, or I write verse.  On this occasion, it was far too late to call my family, and so I pulled out my notebook, gnawed on my pencil for a while, and then produced this. I wrote it just as a piece of doggerel, but looking back on it I think I was actually writing about the anxiety that attended my move. It’s dated by the ‘August’ reference, you see.

In Which I Solve My Housing Crisis

It got down to the wire.  It was the week before I would have to move out, and I did not know where I was going to go.  A horror seized me.  It was not simply worry and stress, although that was part of it.  It was most closely akin to the horror of moral failure.

‘I know you have an overactive guilt complex, Katherine,’ I said, ‘but this is ridiculous.  You have not sinned in not being able to find yourself a house, and in fact the more time you waste writhing in this sense of culpability, the less able you will be to actually deal with the situation, which in case you haven’t noticed kind of needs dealing with.’

But there it was anyway, moral failure, something I was ashamed to admit to those I knew and yet at the same time felt compelled to advertise to protect against their finding out about it on their own.  All over not having found a place to live!  Why?  Surely if living overseas taught me anything, it was that things will work themselves out and it doesn’t do any good to fret over them?  I think it’s because I feel a moral obligation to live life successfully and independently.  And, as if adulthood were an exam where I have to show my work, at any point I have to be able to demonstrate my ability to take care of myself, my plans for the future and the means by which I intend to attain them. 

And I love my new apartment.  I didn’t expect to, you know.  It met only one of the criteria that I’d established.  I took it out of desperation.  But every time I walk through my door, every night that I stretch out on my bed, I feel this pang of delight. I love my bedroom with its windows and its built-in bookshelves, I love the narrow stairs and the small sitting area outside, I love the kitchen and its earnestly-trying shelves, I love the little nook where I have set the table and where, when I get chairs, I will put them.  I love the huge living room, dark as it is.  I love the stains on the carpet, I love the grills on the windows, I love the water pressure in the shower, I love the front hallway, I love it all!

Part of it, doubtless, is that it’s my own.  There’s no getting around it, I’m an introvert, and I find renewal and energy in having my own space.  And there’s the little-kid thrill of “Mine!  All mine!  My very own!”

But what I feel about it is more than mere delight.  I loved my interim place as well, and it had everything to please the eye, it was a good situation.  But I love this place even more.  I don’t think it’s a better place.  But I feel toward it an attachment I didn’t feel in my love for the interim place. 

I feel for this house what I feel for people who have shown me kindness: a love and a loyalty and a gratitude that informs the very way I understand them.  Because this house spared me from the horror that plagued my mind, I react to it in the same way I react to a person who helped me when I was in desperation, to a person who showed me kindness.