Gray Haskins

What’s good?

Getting up again. 

Failing

and getting up again.

Embarrassing yourself

and choosing

again

to get up

and try.

What’s good?

Feeling pain

and choosing

all the same

to try

again.

What’s good?

Feeling embarrassed

and trying again.

What’s good?

Choosing to go on,

feeling your pain,

and choosing

to accept it there,

not hating it,

or feeding it,

but going on

and trying as you can.

That’s true.

So 

you are

where you are.

So 

you’re not perfect.

So 

you feel unhappy.

So 

you know

it’ll pass.

So 

you know

you’ve felt this before

a thousand times

and it’s passed

every time.

And so you know

you play your part,

and,

if you want,

can help yourself

in not aggravating

the pain,

but accepting

its presence

and,

if you can,

distracting

yourself

from it

with what you love,

work

you enjoy,

or looking

at the sky

and moving

on. 

It’ll pass,

you’re okay.

So you can imagine

whoever it is, 

who you think 

perfect

or happy.

You can think that. 

But you know

it’s illusory,

a convenient excuse

to worsen your pain,

to make it seems just,

reasonable,

as if you don’t decide,

or have no choice here,

(or that those you imagine

don’t either);

that happiness

falls on you

or it doesn’t;

that we don’t make

our happiness,

that it’s something

out of our control;

but you know 

that’s false,

and you’ll suffer if

you believe it. 

So you can think

anything at all;

so you can think

about what

hurts the most,

imagine what you desire,

the people you think

enjoy these things

as if obvious,

going of itself,

excitement,

fun,

purpose,

and the rest;

you can think that;

but you know 

it’s false;

fuel for 

a vain fire

you make.

You control

what counts. 

You control

what makes you 

you.

You decide

again 

and again

who you are

in resisting 

the worst

ideas 

that tempt you.

You decide,

and the rest will come. 

You decide 

what counts.

Do you think

having what you desire

is 

what counts?

as if it was 

just received

without work,

without courage?

Every moment

you choose.

You can think anything. 

You can think 

what causes you pain,

or you can think 

what brings you joy,

a desire to work

and to dare.

You choose.

The painful thoughts 

are easier 

and they work

because they spare us

the difficulty 

of daring,

of working,

the difficult work

of hope,

the risk

of giving. 

What’s easy

attracts

but spoils

quickly. 

What’s difficult

reveals

what we know 

already

but fear

because hard,

imposing.

We evade

to no end,

preparing 

our punishment

blindly.

Work saves

(the work

that’s love,

the love

that’s work).

(The silent

and immobile

too;

where there’s

resistance,

difficulty,

courage,

love.)

No doubt

there are always

happier, more love-filled lives ;

but the love that saves

is born in the solitary heart ;

that is, 

you decide ;

you

where you are ;

you 

who cry 

and live

alone ;

the love you give

and,

when it’s hard,

swear by,

act on,

that love,

that forgives all,

saves 

and decides

your life. 

*

What you can’t change,

how do you meet it? 

Do you fear it, 

covering your eyes and,

if not, 

shooting glances,

either resentful

or self-pitying?

How can you love

what makes 

your prison?

And if you did

what then?

To say,

‘I see you.

I see you.

I see where I am. 

I see where you are. 

I see. 

I feel my pain. 

And I wonder:

what?

What… 

What if I’m wrong?

to fear,

to hate?

What if what

I feel as a weight,

a punishment, 

a curse,

I make… 

I –

I make last

in hating,

in fearing,

in not knowing how to look in the eye,

what if I

in refusing to love

blind myself

to my own trick,

the key out

the whole time

in my hand?

*

Don’t waste your suffering.

You fall and you get up. (Or you don’t. But you decide.)

What if 

you, 

after falling,

forgave yourself

promptly,

fully,

seriously,

and moved on?

La plus courte façon 

d’arriver à la gloire,

ce serait

de faire pour la conscience

ce que nous faisons pour la gloire. 

*

[The shortest way 

of attaining glory

[esteem, admiration;

or, if you will,

status, success, popularity]

would be to do for our conscience

what we do for glory.]

*

Le prix de âme

ne consiste pas 

à aller haut,

mais

d’un pas ordonné. 

Ce n’est pas 

dans la grandeur

que s’exerce

la grandeur d’âme :

c’est dans

la médiocrité.

*

[The price of the soul

isn’t paid in going high,

[impressing everyone,

‘perfection’ and excellence in everything, etc.]

but going with a well-ordered step.

[human, your own;

alert and attentive

to its needs,

willing and ready

to pay its debts,

especially the small and inconvenient,

often embarrassing,

(because small and inconvenient;

or because small

and, in theory,

easily realizable

but, in practice,

actually very difficult

(more than the big ones)

because we recognize their smallness

but,

in the critical moments,

where we do the thing

or do not,

fear

and shame

menace

and overwhelm,

the small

too big for us,

the most important

the small things,

the most tempting

to forget

or ignore,

that make us live

or break us)

earning

whatever the cost

(at least as much at it can)

its peace

and calm;

gentle, patient, loving.]

Greatness of soul isn’t exercised in greatness

[popular, expensive exploits;

fame, fortune, celebrity, status, etc.]

but in mediocrity.

[small everyday human acts,

known and practiced,

experienced and faced,

lived

and struggled with

by all.]]

C’est une vie d’exception

que celle 

qui se maintient en ordre

jusqu’en son privé.

Chacun peut bien

prendre rôle

parmi les bateleurs, [acrobate forain ; ‘tumbler’, ‘juggler’, ‘buffoon’]

et représenter un honnête personnage 

sur le théâtre :

mais au-dedans

et dans sa poitrine,

là où tout nous est loisible, [permis]

où tout est caché,

d’y être réglé,

c’est là le point. 

*

[It’s a life of exception,

the one that keeps itself in order

even in private.

Everyone can easily

take a role

among the jugglers,

and play an honest character

in the theater:

but inwardly,

inside of yourself,

where anything goes,

and where everything’s hidden,

to be regulated

and well,

that’s the point.]

*

Le degré voisin, 

c’est de l’être en sa maison,

en ses actions ordinaires,

dont nous n’avons à rendre raison à personne :

où il n’y a point d’étude,

point d’artifice.

*

[The neighboring degree

is to be so in your home, 

in your ordinary actions,

which we don’t have to explain to anyone:

where there’s no study at all, 

no artifice.]

Le devoir, 

dans le sens plein du mot, 

suppose une délibération à part soi,

dont tout dépend,

sans aucune contrainte. [Alain]

*

[Duty,

in the full sense of the word,

supposes a deliberation apart from oneself,

on which everything depends,

without any compulsion.]

*

You are free to do or not do 

what your deepest instincts tell you. 

Failure is inevitable; 

but it’s a choice to still believe, 

and to try again, 

and to give again where it’s difficult to give, 

to risk a smile, or a word, 

to put yourself where you fear to go,

to dare

and to refuse to think,

but only to act what you feel. 

To look closely at the skin of your hand or at the texture of the wallpaper or at the small pieces of dust on the keyboard of your computer: an essential resistance to the age, to the implicit imperative of speed and performance; to slow your pace and the movement of your eyes, to take your time on something, to deliberately stop where you feel forces on all sides telling you to move on: to say no without a word, and linger, not looking for anything, not wanting anything, or expecting anything, but content, satisfied enough by being and seeing where you are. 

Passage du Poète de Ramuz, un extrait et sa traduction (la mienne):

    De nouveau, les mots lui viennent :

    — C’est de faire pour rien qui est beau. Même si le travail ne paie pas, parce que c’est de faire qui compte. Quand même je serais tout seul, et quand même je n’ai pas été gâté, quand même je sais bien ce que c’est, allez ! et on n’est pas toujours payé et c’est dur et c’est ingrat, et c’est toujours la même chose, mais je dis : « C’est ça qui est beau !… »

    Il a pris son racloir, il donne un coup de racloir. 

    On a déjà raclé une fois ; on va racler une deuxième fois, une troisième, une quatrième :

    — Et, je dis, c’est justement ça, c’est ce manque de variété. C’est justement parce qu’on a une plus grande peine, parce qu’on risque davantage, parce qu’on a misé sur une chose, et une seule, toujours la même ; et ça c’est l’honneur… On ne se paie pas en argent, nous autres. On ne gagnerait pas un sou qu’on ferait ses vignes quand même. 

    Il racle. 

    — On ne peut pas être payé en argent pour un travail de ce genre-là ; on est payé seulement d’y croire, on est payé dès qu’on y croit… Nous, on est comme le soldat, le soldat se bat pour se battre. On est comme une mère, on est comme une mère avec son enfant : ça ne lui fait rien qu’il soit mal fait ; plus il est mal fait, plus elle se donne de peine pour lui, plus elle l’aime ; elle lui donne tout, sans rien demander. Parce qu’elle est payée de l’aimer.

    Il racle. 

    — Je dis que c’est comme ça ; l’honneur et l’amour. Et point d’argent du tout, s’il faut, parce qu’il resterait l’honneur, l’honneur et l’amour.

    Il racle. 

    — Et, quoi qu’il arrive, on garde ses vignes, et on crèvera dessus, nous autres, mais on ne les reniera pas. 

    Raclant à grands coups pour le bien montrer, raclant et c’est un travail d’homme une fois les pousses sorties, parce que si les femmes venaient elles risqueraient de les abîmer avec leurs jupes : 

    — Nous qu’on est de la vieille espèce, de la bonne espèce, de la vieille bonne espèce, et on est quelques-uns encore de cette espèce, alors hardi ! 

    Il racle. 

[    Again, the words came to him:

— It’s to do for nothing that’s beautiful. Even if the work doesn’t pay, because it’s to do it that counts. Even if I’d be all alone, and even if I wasn’t spoiled, even then I know what it means, ah, I know! And you’re not always payed and it’s hard and it’s mean, and it’s always the same thing, but I say: “It’s that that’s beautiful!…”

   He took his scraper and gave a strike.

   A strike had already been given once; a second would be given, a third, a fourth:

    — And I say it’s just that, it’s this lack of variety. It’s exactly because there’s a greater pain, because there’s more risk, because something is counted on, and one thing alone, always the same; and that, that’s honor… We over here aren’t paid in money. Not gaining a penny we’d still work our vineyards.

    He scrapes. 

    — You can’t be paid in money for work of that kind; you’re paid only in believing in it, you’re paid as soon as you believe in it… We, we’re like the soldier, the soldier fights to fight. We’re like a mother, we’re like a mother with her child; it does nothing to her if he’s not well; the more he’s unwell, the more pains she takes for him, the more she loves him; she gives him everything, asking for nothing. Because she’s paid in loving him.

    He scrapes. 

    — I say it’s like that; honor and love. And no money at all, if necessary, because honor would remain, honor and love.

    He scrapes. 

    — And whatever happens, we keep our vineyards, and we’ll die on them, but we won’t renounce them.

    Scraping in big strikes to show it well, scraping and it’s a man’s work once the shoots have sprouted, because if the women came they would risk damaging them with their skirts:

    — We we’re of the old kind, of the good kind, of the old good kind, and we’re a few still of this kind, so courage then!

    He scrapes.]

Alain :

« Le travail est la meilleure et la pire des choses ; la meilleure, s’il est libre, la pire, s’il est serf. J’appelle libre au premier degré le travail réglé par le travailleur lui-même, d’après son savoir propre et selon l’expérience, comme d’un menuisier qui fait une porte. Mais il y a de la différence si la porte qu’il fait est pour son propre usage, car c’est alors une expérience qui a de l’avenir ; il pourra voir le bois à l’épreuve, et son œil se réjouira d’une fente qu’il avait prévue. Il ne faut point oublier cette fonction d’intelligence, qui fait des passions si elle ne fait des portes. »

[Work is the best and the worst of things; the best if it’s free, the worst if it’s suffered. I call free in the first degree the work regulated by the worker himself, after his own knowledge and according to experience, like that of a carpenter who makes a door. But there is a difference if the door he makes is for his own use, because it is then an experience that has a future; he will be able to see the wood put to the test, and his eye will rejoice at a split that he predicted. This function of the intelligence can’t be forgotten, which makes passions if it doesn’t make doors.]

*

My eye landed on this propos of Alain’s this morning, as I was sitting down for breakfast. That last line struck me the most and I tried to memorize it before making my breakfast. 

I think of this a lot these days. How susceptible I am! And how frequently, how regularly I suffer from my imagination (or my untethered intelligence) day after day after day! I sit down at work and, what I have to do not occupying my mind at all, the work being mechanical and mindless, my mind flies and creates a thousand thousand problems out of thin air, the nightmares becoming reality and I sitting there quite still in my chair… 

I’m so used to this, it’s so everyday, so bound up in my experience of life, —it’s fair I think to say that it’s the source of most of my problems today—, that it’s a little bit embarrassing to say it at all. I’m not alone I know. 

‘We all live in our dream’, as someone’s said somewhere, or Shakespeare’s (isn’t it?) ‘we are the stuff of dreams’. [I looked it up: ‘we are such stuff as dreams are made on’, Prospero in The Tempest.] This is obviously true. 

There are many of us who believe in the news, (of course among every individual there being infinite degrees of variety in these beliefs, in intensity, in depth, in direction and variability), there are many of us who believe in sports or music or streaming shows (every individual with an absolutely unique and personal fandom, subject to change with every mood and every hour); no one believes in anything the same way; and, as it’s good to remember, we change all the time, all of us in our feeling for everything (for ourselves and for our work, for where we are and the world around us, the people and the ideas we pass our days with, etc. etc.) caught up in between ‘the being born and the passing away’ (as I recently read somewhere in French, in a book on Montaigne; ask me about it if you’re curious). 

I love that phrase (I don’t have the French text near me): ‘the being born and the passing away’; we can think here simply of mood, of the objects of our attention and desire (and our feeling for them), what we feel bound to thinking about or getting done; it isn’t the same in the afternoon as it was in the morning, or at 6pm at as it was 5pm; it’s flux, or constant change, and nothing more (and for all of us the same, to the very end).

Sanity supposes patience, and a sense of limits. You can’t do everything at once. You would work and relax at the same time, but you can’t. 

Knowing when you’re tired, and seriously responding, is important. Knowing too when it’s worth surmounting, or necessary to surmount, the desire to stop working, that matters too. But it’s true that there’s no rule here but feeling. It’s in you or it’s not. Sometimes there’s a push from you don’t know where; sometimes there’s not. 

Life drags. And then suddenly speeds up. Flux and no more; back and forth, again and again; in infinite degrees. 

Il faut vouloir

que la vie soit bonne ; 

et d’abord 

il faut vouloir

qu’on puisse le vouloir. 

*

[You have to want

life to be good;

and first of all

you have to want

to be able to want it.]

*

L’optimisme n’est point de fait ;

il est de volonté. 

*

[Optimism isn’t a reality;

it’s all in the will.

(It’s all in wanting it,

an optimistic view of things,

of the things of your path, your life,

an optimism your own,

and seriously applied and practiced,

made a reality

by and through this practice.

Alain says also:

c’est la foi même qui est Dieu

[Faith itself is God];

believe

and work and give and act

on this belief

and there you have it (voilà)

realized,

absolutely real.]

*

L’orgueil qui méprise 

n’est que vanité. 

*

[Pride that scorns [disdains, looks down on, mocks others]

is only vanity.]

*

S’observer,

c’est se changer,

se remettre en bon ordre, 

chercher ce qu’on veut, 

le trouver,

l’approuver,

le faire. 

*

[To observe oneself

is to change oneself, 

is to put oneself back in good order,

is to look for what you want,

find it,

approve it

and do it.]