Creeping towards a sense of mawkish sentimentality

Watching the national news last night and almost cried a little. Wisconsin farmer—married n decades to a half-baked loaf of a Midwestern woman named Marge or Barb or just an accented grunt meaning “female”—loses wife to cancer and plants sunflowers along a stretch of highway up around Eau Claire on land donated by sympathetic farmer friends.

A too-familiar type of story. Genuine warmth (from a bucolic setting, no less!) distilled into the verse-chorus-verse of a television puff piece: voiceover, B-roll sunflowers, hard tack platitudes of two or three farmers plus original bereaved, who has a cool five seconds in which to sum up a lifetime of devotion. Except cool five seconds is a cool five seconds. What gets me is his subtle ducking of the more obvious metaphors one might expect, considering the circumstances:

• Sturdy (“She warn’t too big on book smarts, but she was strong”)

• Handsome (“She warn’t no beauty queen, but she had a certain charm”)

• Faces the sun (“Our life warn’t no paradise, but she always found a way to look on the bright side of things”)

Instead, farmer sits on the steps of his porch and says something to the effect of “[Grunt] always made everyone happy wherever she went. She wasn’t showy [or whatever. This type of humble concession must always be made; it is as integral to the “aw shucks” ethos as overalls and drunk driving] but she was so beautiful.” Cut to picture of smiling wife. Cut to sunflowers bending in sunset light through a car window.

Cut to me feeling feelings; a horrible little tickle of my emotional uvula.

She was so beautiful.

Subtitled: fuck your exploitative bullshit, KARE 11, Minneapolis’ News Leader. She was beautiful, I loved her, I did this beautiful thing. The end.

And the poetry of it really sets in, then, with that momentary rejection of modesty. Remembering the Minnesota of my summers as a beautiful and colossally lonely place. Remembering those highways that, when you’re on them, are the archetypal “ribbons of:” blue sky, puffy clouds, pine trees; brief glimpses of empty, platinum lakes.

Thinking of the heartache—by no means belonging to this man alone—impressed on that unsympathetic ground, which even in summer is only capable of yielding a very measured joy; every bright spot rippled almost past appreciation with melancholy.

Feeling terribly old these days. Feeling eighteen and eighty-one within the same breath, looking back on a colorless life without any great accomplishments or great loves—just a binding sense of self-doubt swept by long stretches of powerful despair. Hard not to teeter towards the sentimental when feeling this way: glassed into profitless avenues in an office-park anus of a suburb where the friendliest voice is my own on the page.

Hard not to find a hint of something precious in the sadness, too. Working to find meaning in the not-quite suffering means reflection, means writing--means empathy, above all else. To roughly (and hopefully not too pretentiously) paraphrase Camus, there is only one class of people on this Earth: the privileged class: the living. The decision to live—humbly or no, virtuous or not—is one to be made with varying degrees of consciousness by everyone every day. While it is ultimately a decision to hold onto privilege, it is also a firm rejection of ease and comfort, as nothing is easier or more comfortable (if only in its inevitability) than dying.

And so I—on my honor as a cynical, un-spiritual, mostly un-sentimental East Coast youth—felt both enormous empathy for this bitterly enriched man and felt beneath him, too. I started watching his story with all the detachment that television news can conjure—absorbed, like always, like most people, in my perpetually bleeding ego (to wit: “why is everything so goddamn hard all the time? Don’t I deserve a nice, easy life?”). Here is a man, bereft beyond my understanding, who has done something more beautiful than I will ever do; who has reversed the channel of events working against him and added a golden note of devotion to what is, all told, one of the saddest places on earth.

Here is a man worth admiring. Maybe they’re everywhere—maybe people have value because they’re alive, and gain more with their contributions to the better living of others. Maybe that field of sunflowers is as great a good as any that has ever been done. Maybe I’m speaking with my brain and not my asshole—the world may never know.

I’m not positive that any of that makes sense. It’s late now; soon enough it will be tomorrow and I’ll be aloof to this second of (semi-) clarity and conviction. All of my Assuredness will stare down Doubt, and who knows what will happen next. The woes of an idle man grasping at meaning--for whom, and for what reason?--yass indeed. The struggles of living with endless time to think and no point to serve. Almost makes you want to learn a thing or two about planting a sunflower.

*Sunset behind a grain elevator

Plaintive Americana strains (whatever’s public domain)

Introduce Republican politician

Self-serving, cryptically xenophobic “Hi, I’m [blank] speech”

(Lies, experience, lies)

Paid for by [blank] PAC*

Silver Spring, MD 9/28/15