There's a rusted out M4A4 Sherman tank still sunk in shallow water off the tropical island of Tarawa, its turret twisted backward for one last shot, much photographed over the years. Jerzy Kosinski described it in the novel Cockpit as a symbol of a man still armed and on guard long after the war is done and the enemy gone. Of time and love wasted and regretted.
I thought of that, and went to the shelf for the book, and it was gone. I must have culled it in one of the book purges I do when I run out of space. This gave me a small, sharp, sense of loss. Why did I toss that one? It was thin, hardly a burden on the lifeboat. Damn. Was dumping Cockpit a mistake?
Fear of regret. I don't find that one on the phobia lists. Why not? There are words for fear of chickens (alektorophobia), cheese (turophobia) and no bars on your cell phone (nomophobia), but not for fear of regret. But who's not a little afraid of regret? You? I am. It is a pervasive inhibition and limits my life.
I have too many things and I'd like to shed a lot of them. Remember when all I owned was pants, shirt, sandals, cap, jacket, and a bedroll? I don't kid myself that I'd go back to sleeping by the road, but when this job is over in fifteen months - if I make it that far - I'd like to be able to move my stuff in one medium U-Haul. Hell, in the back of my Metro. But when I start counting off what I can do without, I run into that phobia. Just one instant of that blade of sorrow would outweigh the benefit of divesting. Hey, I dumped "Ancient Evenings?" That's...sad! I'd probably never read it again, but...
There are three or four main orders of regret. One species of regret affects the identity, the vision of yourself you use to get things done in the world.
Fights I backed out of. There are a couple of those. It would have been worth getting pummeled in public to have stood up and stepped in. Existential gold, Mailer called that. The guy in the laundromat, I just chickened out. I didn't even have to strike the first blow, I could have just lifted his folded clothes off my own, where he had with his shitty little smirk put them. Now I run that event through my mind with different endings, over and over. It drains color from the inner portrait.
That mythical hero within? Worthless. Forget what you ever did or didn't do. Reach into yourself where you stand now and what you need is there or it's not.
Opportunities to fill your existential pockets, that's another.
Girls I inexplicably and to my own wonderment turned away. They were pretty, lovely, some of them, warm and willing, my personal valence put us together there and then. Why did I pass them by?
Maybe my inner eye saw something the outer mind didn't. There is this directive that says "Get Everything You Can, never pass up a chance to piss, sleep, drink, or fuck." I don't have to obey. Maybe it was truer to myself to make an intuitive choice.
The life you leave yourself with, after all the choosing, that's a third. The price you pay for being you is being you. Times I work when I could walk out under the sky. Times I lazed when I could have built.
Once here I reclined at the open north window, bare heels on the sill, musing on what my kid self would have made of what I've become, on the broken promises to the ten-year-old. How I just let time run through my fingers like smoke. So I considered, what was it, actually, that I had wanted from myself when I grew up? I ran the surviving film-clips of those peak moments, the ones I bookmarked for now, let them run through and distill, and I had to laugh. I did laugh out loud. What I wanted most as a kid was free time. Time to burn, to waste, squander, time for myself. No chores to do, no garage floors to sweep, cars to help fix, arithmetic to learn, work to do. No empires to build, mountains to climb, no Satisfaction from a Job Well Done. That's what I wanted from my grown-up to be. And that's what I gave myself. It's what I did, and what I have. And since there are no grownups to feed and house me, and I have to do those things myself, the forty-hour week is the least intrusive way I know. Much less work than selling art, doing business, or charming benefactors, and far less enslaving. Just between you and me, it comes pretty close to drifting through a summer's day.
See now, the point is, gazing out that window bathing in self-reproach, I turn a key in myself, that opens a door, that lets in light, and whuff! The regret is gone. It was always illusion. I had good reasons, for doing as I did. So I think, for all the remorse that still remains inside, is there a key? Can I turn it, and one day just walk out, feet on the earth and head in the sky, and let all that foolish weight evaporate, just let it go? Say, like Edith Piaf, no, I regret nothing. What is the point in looking back in sorrow? When all the sorrow exists only in that act?
Actually, I haven't done much that I hold against myself, and most of that is through doing too little. But that's a choice I've renewed numberless times. To leave the world alone. Cross the river without leaving a ripple, walk through the grass without bending a blade. Nobody fucks things up more than people who do things. Stop it. Now.
Well, that's just me, friend. It's not for everyone. The categorical imperative, like the golden rule, requires nuance in application.
Another type of regret is simple consequence. Do I want to wake up somewhere without the Aubrey-Maturin series? Sharpe? Flashman? Can I dump the old drawings, thirty-five years of journals? That forty pound Epson printer/scanner there? If I throw them out, would I be sorry?
Jerzy Kosinski's tank rusts in that tepid foil-blue lagoon, salty as tears, off Tarawa telling him that he waited too long to let down his guard, that he could have climbed out of that turret and walked barefoot to the beach a long time ago. Too bad that he didn't. He pictures that Ozymandian relic of past war pointed at torn coconut palms and shattered bunkers, deserted, a minor-key melody for bamboo flute. But that's not what's there.
Now that little island is one of the most intensely populated places on earth. Thatch and corrugated bungalows knitted together by informal footpaths house people in lava-lavas, cargo shorts, tank tops, tinted sunglasses; fifty-percent unemployment among the youth, but not squalor or misery - the guy who drove me to the airport up the island chain told me that you can always go out on the reef for fish, pick fruit or coconuts off the sand, nobody starves. So far. There's no sign that the people envy developed nations or would like to move to San Jose. They don't care about the war, they don't honor the dead. The pillboxes and shore batteries are covered with graffitti and littered with toilet paper and plastic bottles, the Japanese strong point at Red Beach One is the garbage dump. You don't want to walk in the water. They're not a war metaphor, they're organisms peopling the planet, living.
Point: everything regretted is past and everything past is mirage.
What is the function of regret? Am I missing something? Will it show up at my door later tonight, with a summons?
One thing - there is a price for giving up regret; with it you surrender your hoard of triumphs - the glory of fights where you did stand your ground, all the spoils you have brought here for yourself, the lovers won, now on display in your museum.
Well, this is a long, screwy entry, isn't it? Not the most lucid. If I publish, will I be sorry?
Alea iacta, Ace
There is also, BTW, a fear of giants. FeFiPhobia.
I thought of that, and went to the shelf for the book, and it was gone. I must have culled it in one of the book purges I do when I run out of space. This gave me a small, sharp, sense of loss. Why did I toss that one? It was thin, hardly a burden on the lifeboat. Damn. Was dumping Cockpit a mistake?
Fear of regret. I don't find that one on the phobia lists. Why not? There are words for fear of chickens (alektorophobia), cheese (turophobia) and no bars on your cell phone (nomophobia), but not for fear of regret. But who's not a little afraid of regret? You? I am. It is a pervasive inhibition and limits my life.
I have too many things and I'd like to shed a lot of them. Remember when all I owned was pants, shirt, sandals, cap, jacket, and a bedroll? I don't kid myself that I'd go back to sleeping by the road, but when this job is over in fifteen months - if I make it that far - I'd like to be able to move my stuff in one medium U-Haul. Hell, in the back of my Metro. But when I start counting off what I can do without, I run into that phobia. Just one instant of that blade of sorrow would outweigh the benefit of divesting. Hey, I dumped "Ancient Evenings?" That's...sad! I'd probably never read it again, but...
There are three or four main orders of regret. One species of regret affects the identity, the vision of yourself you use to get things done in the world.
Fights I backed out of. There are a couple of those. It would have been worth getting pummeled in public to have stood up and stepped in. Existential gold, Mailer called that. The guy in the laundromat, I just chickened out. I didn't even have to strike the first blow, I could have just lifted his folded clothes off my own, where he had with his shitty little smirk put them. Now I run that event through my mind with different endings, over and over. It drains color from the inner portrait.
That mythical hero within? Worthless. Forget what you ever did or didn't do. Reach into yourself where you stand now and what you need is there or it's not.
Opportunities to fill your existential pockets, that's another.
Girls I inexplicably and to my own wonderment turned away. They were pretty, lovely, some of them, warm and willing, my personal valence put us together there and then. Why did I pass them by?
Maybe my inner eye saw something the outer mind didn't. There is this directive that says "Get Everything You Can, never pass up a chance to piss, sleep, drink, or fuck." I don't have to obey. Maybe it was truer to myself to make an intuitive choice.
The life you leave yourself with, after all the choosing, that's a third. The price you pay for being you is being you. Times I work when I could walk out under the sky. Times I lazed when I could have built.
Once here I reclined at the open north window, bare heels on the sill, musing on what my kid self would have made of what I've become, on the broken promises to the ten-year-old. How I just let time run through my fingers like smoke. So I considered, what was it, actually, that I had wanted from myself when I grew up? I ran the surviving film-clips of those peak moments, the ones I bookmarked for now, let them run through and distill, and I had to laugh. I did laugh out loud. What I wanted most as a kid was free time. Time to burn, to waste, squander, time for myself. No chores to do, no garage floors to sweep, cars to help fix, arithmetic to learn, work to do. No empires to build, mountains to climb, no Satisfaction from a Job Well Done. That's what I wanted from my grown-up to be. And that's what I gave myself. It's what I did, and what I have. And since there are no grownups to feed and house me, and I have to do those things myself, the forty-hour week is the least intrusive way I know. Much less work than selling art, doing business, or charming benefactors, and far less enslaving. Just between you and me, it comes pretty close to drifting through a summer's day.
See now, the point is, gazing out that window bathing in self-reproach, I turn a key in myself, that opens a door, that lets in light, and whuff! The regret is gone. It was always illusion. I had good reasons, for doing as I did. So I think, for all the remorse that still remains inside, is there a key? Can I turn it, and one day just walk out, feet on the earth and head in the sky, and let all that foolish weight evaporate, just let it go? Say, like Edith Piaf, no, I regret nothing. What is the point in looking back in sorrow? When all the sorrow exists only in that act?
Actually, I haven't done much that I hold against myself, and most of that is through doing too little. But that's a choice I've renewed numberless times. To leave the world alone. Cross the river without leaving a ripple, walk through the grass without bending a blade. Nobody fucks things up more than people who do things. Stop it. Now.
Well, that's just me, friend. It's not for everyone. The categorical imperative, like the golden rule, requires nuance in application.
Another type of regret is simple consequence. Do I want to wake up somewhere without the Aubrey-Maturin series? Sharpe? Flashman? Can I dump the old drawings, thirty-five years of journals? That forty pound Epson printer/scanner there? If I throw them out, would I be sorry?
Jerzy Kosinski's tank rusts in that tepid foil-blue lagoon, salty as tears, off Tarawa telling him that he waited too long to let down his guard, that he could have climbed out of that turret and walked barefoot to the beach a long time ago. Too bad that he didn't. He pictures that Ozymandian relic of past war pointed at torn coconut palms and shattered bunkers, deserted, a minor-key melody for bamboo flute. But that's not what's there.
Now that little island is one of the most intensely populated places on earth. Thatch and corrugated bungalows knitted together by informal footpaths house people in lava-lavas, cargo shorts, tank tops, tinted sunglasses; fifty-percent unemployment among the youth, but not squalor or misery - the guy who drove me to the airport up the island chain told me that you can always go out on the reef for fish, pick fruit or coconuts off the sand, nobody starves. So far. There's no sign that the people envy developed nations or would like to move to San Jose. They don't care about the war, they don't honor the dead. The pillboxes and shore batteries are covered with graffitti and littered with toilet paper and plastic bottles, the Japanese strong point at Red Beach One is the garbage dump. You don't want to walk in the water. They're not a war metaphor, they're organisms peopling the planet, living.
Point: everything regretted is past and everything past is mirage.
What is the function of regret? Am I missing something? Will it show up at my door later tonight, with a summons?
One thing - there is a price for giving up regret; with it you surrender your hoard of triumphs - the glory of fights where you did stand your ground, all the spoils you have brought here for yourself, the lovers won, now on display in your museum.
Well, this is a long, screwy entry, isn't it? Not the most lucid. If I publish, will I be sorry?
Alea iacta, Ace
There is also, BTW, a fear of giants. FeFiPhobia.
