November 10: Bleeding to Death, Narrative Arc, Hallmark Christmas Movie

Merton finds himself empty . . . 

Here I was, scarcely four years after I had left Oakham and walked out into the world that I thought I was going to ransack and rob of all its pleasures and satisfactions. I had done what I intended, and now I found that it was I who was emptied and robbed and gutted. What a strange thing! In filling myself, I had emptied myself. In grasping things, I had lost everything. In devouring pleasures and joys, I had found distress and anguish and fear. And now, finally, as a piece of poetic justice, when I was reduced to this extremity of misery and humiliation, I fell into a love affair in which I was at last treated in the way I had treated not a few people in these last years. 

This girl lived on my own street, and I had the privilege of seeing her drive off with my rivals ten minutes after she had flatly refused to go out with me, asserting that she was tired and wanted to stay home. She did not even bother to conceal the fact that she found me amusing when there was nothing better to occupy her mind. She used to regale me with descriptions of what she considered to be a good time, and of the kind of people she admired and liked—they were precisely the shallow and superficial ones that gave me goose-flesh when I saw them sitting around in the Stork Club. And it was the will of God that for my just punishment I should take all this in the most abject meekness, and sit and beg like some kind of a pet dog until I finally got a pat on the head or some small sign of affection. 

This could not last long, and it did not. But I came out of it chastened and abject, though not nearly as abject as I ought to have been, and returned to the almost equal humiliation of my quarts of ice-cream. 

Such was the death of the hero, the great man I had wanted to be. Externally (I thought) I was a big success. Everybody knew who I was at Columbia. Those who had not yet found out, soon did when the Yearbook came out, full of pictures of myself. It was enough to tell them more about me than I intended, I suppose. They did not have to be very acute to see through the dumb self-satisfied expression in all those portraits. The only thing that surprises me is that no one openly reproached or mocked me for such ignominious vanity. No one threw any eggs at me, nobody said a word. And yet I know how capable they were of saying many words, not tastefully chosen, perhaps, but deadly enough. 

The wounds within me were, I suppose, enough. I was bleeding to death. 

If my nature had been more stubborn in clinging to the pleasures that disgusted me: if I had refused to admit that I was beaten by this futile search for satisfaction where it could not be found, and if my moral and nervous constitution had not caved in under the weight of my own emptiness, who can tell what would eventually have happened to me? Who could tell where I would have ended? 

I had come very far, to find myself in this blind-alley: but the very anguish and helplessness of my position was something to which I rapidly succumbed. And it was my defeat that was to be the occasion of my rescue.

When Thomas Merton set out into the world as a teenager emancipated from parents and financial worry, his goal was simple:  to, as Thoreau said, ". . . live deep and suck out all the marrow of life."  He's done this now.  He has indulged every hedonistic whim that has rippled through his body without a single thought of consequence.  Merton has tried, as I've said in previous posts, to fill a great hole inside himself.  Like most university students (and I've met my fair share of them in my 25-plus years of teaching), he has no idea how to fill that hole--how to find real fulfillment and happiness.  It is a God-sized hole that Merton is trying to fill, infinite, and no amount of material things or experiences will satisfy the longing that he feels.  In this particular passage, Merton seeks his happiness in a female companion.  

We've all done this at one time or another.  Tried to find happiness in another person.  Because that's what society teaches us.  Just watch any television commercial if you don't believe me.  In order to make the woman you love totally happy, buy her a diamond ring from Kay Jewelers.  That, in turn, will insure her love for you, and that love will stamp your passport to nirvana.  Total fulfillment.  The end.  You live happily every after.

Of course, that's the plot of a Hallmark Channel Christmas movie.  And I don't know about you, but my life doesn't star Danica McKellar or Lacey Chabert or Candace Cameron Bure.  Don't get me wrong.  I love a good fairy tale as much as the next person, but that ain't real life.  (Yes, I just used the word "ain't" to sound folksy and down-to-earth.)

Real life is more complicated than that.  And plotless.  Often in my film and literature classes, I discuss narrative arc--that camel hump of rising action-complication-climax-falling action-denouement or resolution.  We've all had English teachers who've diagrammed it out on a chalkboard.  It usually looks something like this:  

Of course, most people's lives don't look like that.  Instead, they look more like an EKG--a series of ups and downs, peaks and valleys:

That is the normal rhythm of life.  Periods of peace interrupted by moments of crisis.  If you're lucky, this rhythm follows a steady and fairly predictable pattern.  No real surprises.  If you're not so lucky, it may look more like a seismograph registering an earthquake:

Small tremors building up to a huge, earth-shaking event followed by aftershocks that last for weeks or months or years.  That earth-shaking event could be almost anything--death or divorce or desertion or Trump election or pandemic.  The results are the same:  PTSD waves that stretch on and on and on.

I would say that we are currently in an earthquake time.  In Michigan alone today, we had 6,473 new cases of COVID.  To put that into perspective, the entire country of Peru recorded 2,507 new cases today.  Now, this is not a scientific comparison.  Peru's population is around 32 million people.  Michigan's is around 10 million.  So, with one-third the population of Peru, Michigan had three times as many new COVID cases today.  By any account (scientific or not), those are earthquake numbers.

I don't know how the plot of this Hallmark movie (Corona Christmas) is going to end.  I would like to say that a handsome doctor is going to ride into town, discover the cure for COVID in Christmas tree sap, and save the world, as well as win the heart of a single, struggling mother of two who teaches impoverished second graders.  That's the fairy tale.

Reality:  faith in something bigger than ourselves is what saves us.  For some people, it's faith in science.  For others, faith in God.  Still others put their faith in the inherent goodness of people, as Anne Frank said:  "In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart."  That's what fills up the bottomless holes in each of us.  We are infinitely empty, and we are also infinitely capable of hope and compassion and belief. 

Because I am human (like Thomas Merton and anyone reading this blog post), I experience mountains and canyons, tidal waves and earthquakes in my life.  I live in a broken world where happy endings are sometimes only on TV or in books.  Yet, when I look inside myself, into that vast unending universe, I see the face of God looking back at me.  Reminding me that--through science or art or poetry or charity or miracles--I will be alright.  

For that infinite possibility, Saint Marty gives thanks.