Friday, July 31, 2009

You Must Change Your Life

I need to change my life. I think about this problem as the day approaches for me and my wife to leave for Hong Kong, where I’ll be on a Fulbright Fellowship for a year. It’s the classic midlife thing; I’m increasingly dissatisfied with myself. Will one year in a completely new place offer me opportunity to change? And what do I want to change? I should eat better, for instance, and get more exercise. I should be more disciplined in my work habits and in my sleep habits. In my new environment I’ll have the chance to establish new routines. But these corrections don’t quite reach to the heart of the problem. What I really want is not an external discipline but an internal motivation. Where does that come from?

At the end of a poem called “Archaic Torso of Apollo” by the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, the speaker tells himself, “You must change your life.” The realization hits him while he’s in the midst of admiring an ancient Greek sculpture, a fragment, but a work so intensely alive that, even without eyes, it seems to look at him and to see through him. If you’re lucky enough to have been almost destroyed by a great work of art, you’ll know something about the experience the poet touches on. The conviction of the need to change is common, I believe. But in Rilke’s poem, the admonition comes from something external; the work of art judges him. It’s really the statue that demands the change, the statue that insists, “You must.” The poem is not a confession. It’s hardly even personal.

I must change my life: normally such a thought follows from an admission of personal inadequacy or unhappiness. You might say to yourself, I can’t stand my job or, I just can’t take living in Michiana anymore; but even if you’re consciously focused on external circumstances, you’re actually confessing disappointment with yourself. Privately we’re often blunt in our expressions of self-hatred. We wallow in regret. We say to ourselves, “I’m such an idiot!” or “Why did I do that?” We suspect that merely changing jobs or moving to a new region may not do the trick. We would, after all, drag our old self with us, the disappointing story of our life. We can’t escape ourselves.

Rilke’s poem hints at a different way, not focused on the self. It is possible that we only ever change against our will, not out of a desire for change. In fact, we don’t want to change. We do, but we don’t. I don’t want to hear the voice that cancels my self, to see the eyes that see through me. This isn’t to say that we’re helpless in our pursuit of change, because life – and especially art – presents us with infinite opportunities to open ourselves to something radically “other.” It’s just that the change given to us by the radically other, sometimes by force, always in some sense by force, is unpredictable. It isn’t the escape fantasy we’ve wished for all along.

You must change your life. The demand is persistent and inescapable, even if we’re mostly deaf to it, fleeing it. We’re crowded round by otherness, battered by the promising threat of change. In the midst of the storm we clutch to the sinking ship of what we’ve always known, which is, after all, nothing. So let me, in Asia, open myself to change.

The voice of otherness answers, Begin here. Today.

Broadcast by Joe Chaney on July 31, 2009 • WVPE's Audio Archive
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