This week I am reading “All the Pretty Horses” from Cormac McCarthy. A short ways in Rawlins asks John Grady, “How the hell do they expect a man to ride a horse in this country?” John Grady replies, “They don't.” This was after the war in the 1940's when it was becoming more and more difficult to ride cross country on a horse. Some pages later the following exchange takes place:
“You ever get ill at ease? said Rawlins.
About what?
I don’t know. About anything. Just ill at ease.
Sometimes. If you’re someplace you ain’t supposed to be I guess you’d be ill at ease. Should be anyways.
Well suppose you were ill at ease and didn’t know why. Would that mean that you might be someplace you wasn’t supposed to be and didn’t know it?”
This discomfort, this feeling out of place, has only gotten more and more so in the decades since. I don't believe we were meant to be fenced in or out by so many property lines. That said, if we could be freed from the yoke of bureaucracy, I also don't believe we were meant to have the dominion we are inclined to, and that we often claim as a right and enforce upon those with less power. And if you're going to start quoting the Bible, don't forget the parts about replenishing the earth and breaking the yoke. Within my limited knowledge, I interpret dominion as a challenge for us to be responsible stewards. Today, we are not only irresponsible, but due to the obstacles constantly being placed and flung and stacked before us, at us, and on us as individuals, not a one of us can find our own way. I believe I am meant to be on my own path, but the powers that be, (both human and systemic), do a very good job of convincing me that clearing their path is my path. So, I am constantly ill at ease and most of the time I don't know why. And worse, I can’t explain it. And because of this lack on my part, because I refuse the scythe (when I can), for practical purposes I am merely seen as mean and surly; a curmudgeon to be largely ignored.
It is sad that our collective imagination is not allowed to extend beyond the entangled web of property lines, boundaries, borders, parameters, that has evolved from a spiritual connection of shared rights on a peopled land, to the commodification of land as dictated by power and wealth, to today's systemic political favoritism / oppression dynamic that is a (not so subtly) biased byproduct of capital-driven property rights. Though it is argued that virtue is not attainable without property, am I naïve to suggest a flexibility, a relaxation, perhaps even an erasure of some of the more entrenched, unjust, disheartening lines? I do not believe all of these lines are indelible and I do believe collective virtue is more and more possible with each passing day. Now if we could somehow bolster our collective imagination; soon...