it is what it is...and what it isn't

The other day I was at the gym, rather absent-mindedly watching the news. A political analyst was discussing Al Gore's sale of Current TV to Al Jazeera and the possibility (reported by The New York Times) that he was avoiding higher taxes by completing the deal before the start of 2013. This particular commentator clearly disapproved of Gore's latest business move. It was not hard to see that, in her eyes, he was damned no matter what he did. After some disparaging remarks and an attempt to remain above the fray by not confirming that she thought he was a hypocrite (as he had supported higher taxation on the wealthy and now seemed to be shirking that duty when it got personal), she threw up her hands in a gesture of futility. "It is what it is," she said and shrugged.

The phrase, 'it is what it is,' has always bothered me. Why though? It is a phrase that is overused to the point of abuse. Because of that, it is used in different contexts to signify different meanings. In the case above, it feels like someone saying "I give up." The political analyst might as well have said "whatever," the pithy teen-age phrase which is spat like profanity in the face of anyone who 'just doesn't get it.'

In most cases, though, I don't find anger to be motivating the utterance. Rather, it is a sort of pessimistic forsaking of the case, the cause, the result, the remains. It is what it is. It is pointless for me to act or to try to change it. This attitude of jaded despondency is what bothers me.

I have seen people giving up earlier and earlier. Already high-schoolers lack a belief in their own limitless possibility. When I used to teach, I read Savage Inequalities with my 9th grade honors classes. As this unit fell close to the end of the year, I let groups of students lead the class, directing the discussion as they desired using particular chapters as jumping-off points. If you are not familiar with the age group, 9th graders tend to be an optimistic bunch. Yes, they play with irony and sarcasm and other familiar detachment techniques of our day. For the most part, though, they still believe. They believe they can be anything when they grow up. They believe there can be a pure politics. Many of them still believe in Santa and magic. And they believe in possibility and change. Or that is what I had found... until it seemed it was disappearing. Usually when I read this book with students, they would open a discussion of all the ways in which education and communities could be improved. They had ideas and they believed they had the power to put them into action. My last class was different. "We can't do anything," one of my brighter students remarked. "It sucks for these kids who have terrible schools, but there isn't anything we could do to help." This sentiment was echoed by her classmates despite my encouragement (with examples) that a single person can often incite great change in the world.

They never said the words, but what I heard was "it is what it is... and there is nothing I can do to change it." It was very disheartening.

Some of my favorite writers have always been those who embrace ambiguity and multiple meanings -- Borges, Vonnegut, Neruda, DeLillo. In high school, I was lucky enough to have a teacher who introduced me early to Joan Didion and her essays. Though she seems to write it like it is, she readily admits that she does not know her own thoughts...until she writes and discovers them. Even self-knowledge for a person this introspective is incredibly tricky. Is 'it is what it is' just an escape-hatch from the difficulty of trying to unravel this complicated world?

It is what it is? Not quite. Yes and no.

When I was in college, I interned at Earthwatch, an organization that sends educators and other 'ordinary' people to conduct research alongside prominent scientists. Rather than a stipend or course credit, what I earned while I worked was credit towards an Earthwatch trip. With a burgeoning interest in biology, I finally settled on a volunteer excursion to Alaska to document changes in migratory songbird patterns.

The week before I was set to leave, I got a call from Earthwatch. A young biological fieldworker, not much older than I, had gone missing and was most likely dead. They surmised that he had probably sunk into the mudflats while walking across the edges of Mother Goose Lake. With the lake being a creation of glacial melt, the water was so cold, it would have immobilized him immediately.

I was frozen. I had been nervous anyway. The Alaskan wilderness seemed to me a frightening place for a young woman to go on her first solo trip far away from her family. There would be no comforts of home -- no plumbing, no running water, no heat, no showers, no electricity...no connection. The lack of connection was the most frightening part of it all. I would be living for over a month in a small cabin on a lake, arriving by float plane (along with supplies). It was likely that most of the steps I took were over land that had never been touched by another human being. I had already been scared of going. Now I was terrified. The wildness of the place seemed confirmed. I was risking my life to go. Perhaps this all sounds ridiculous, but it felt very real to me. This was a dangerous place where I could die just out walking, I believed. It was what it was, in my mind.

I fought myself very hard. I think this was one of (if not the) first times in my life that I didn't give in to my own fears. I went and the lesson has stuck with me. I now try to face fears head-on because I know that, it usually is not what it is. And my experience was not one of death. Nor was it, as was my other fear, one of tragedy blanketing the beauty and awe out of a place. The people who had been close to the missing boy were resilient, as all people are. Nothing about the experience was what I could have envisioned in my smaller mind, my mind previous to the journey.

Instead, I wandered a vast tundra and entered into an emptiness that opened up my name. I lost my hold on myself and thereby embraced a greater sense of meaning. It became a place that resounded inside of me, and still does to this day. It is a place that changed me, definitively, forever.

Though we think we know, we really have no idea how much change lies ahead of us in our own future. This "end of history illusion" plagues us all and perhaps contributes to the tendency to throw up our hands: 'it is what it is.' If those who say this intend it as an admission of a general inexplicability of things, then I can accept that. If, on the other hand, it is a dismissal of the endeavor, a sort of tired apathy for all that makes life difficult (but worthwhile), then I am saddened. It is what it is. And from there, we tend to go nowhere. Or as Sartre explains in the context of love in Nausea: "It's quite an undertaking to start loving somebody. You have to have energy, generosity, blindness. There is even a moment right at the start where you have to jump across an abyss: if you think about it you don't do it." And more broadly: "I suppose it is out of laziness that the world is the same day after day. Today it seemed to want to change. And then anything, anything could happen." It is what it is...until we change it...and change with it.

I almost skipped over a recent article in The New Yorker about John Quijada and his creation of the perfected language of Ithkuil. In his quest for the most efficient form of communication, he combined the best of various languages into one that he felt would "convey deeper levels of human cognition than are usually conveyed in human language." (Joshua Foer, "Utopian for Beginners," The New Yorker, Dec. 24th and 31st, 2012, pg. 91) In a strange twist of fate, he was invited to conferences in ex-Russian territories. These conferences, he later discovered were populated by terrorists and other extremists who wanted to reunite a group of countries into a new Russia, one in which a greater human race would prosper. When Quijada learned that this was how his innocent language was being used, he was stunned. He sought an ideal. He sought a language with total transparency in which everything 'was what it was' and yet, he arrived at something dark and more opaque. It wasn't what it was.

Even if you take his language out of this unusual context, it still is lacking so much, I find. He wrote a brief phrase which was intended to describe Duchamp's "Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2." Translated back into English, it would be: "An imaginary representation of a nude woman in the midst of descending a staircase in a step-by-step series of tightly integrated ambulatory bodily movements which combine into a three-dimensional wake behind her, forming a timeless, emergent whole to be considered intellectually, emotionally, and aesthetically." (Foer, pg. 94) Perhaps it is in the translation back into our deficient language that so much is lost, but, for me, there are much "deeper levels of human cognition" in a more ambiguous language, a language in whose words and phrases there is room to stretch...and thereby room to think. It is a beautiful thing to read English written by a student whose first language is Korean or Spanish. What you find are surprises in the phrasing, and thus a new way of seeing. If English were as efficient as Ithkuil intends to be, there would not be these new angles on an old picture.

It is what it is sounds existential...perhaps. But I return again to Sartre for a rejection of the kind of distancing that 'it is what it is' enables. Again, in Nausea, he writes: "Existence is not something which lets itself be thought of from a distance; it must invade you suddenly, master you, weigh heavily on your heart like a great motionless beast - or else there is nothing at all." In a final twist, if it is what it is, then sadly, there is nothing else at all.

Sweeping away time

I don't think I'm the only one who would like to erase the past, or parts of it. Certainly, we all have regrets that haunt and pain that lingers on. This notion structured the film, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, wherein two ex-lovers had medical procedures to erase the memories of their relationship from their minds. Of course, it wasn't so easy or "clean." Erasing someone else also means erasing part of your own personal history and self-construction. Love is not just about giving and generosity and otherness. It is about desire and memory and projection and hope and self-reflection... and perhaps a sort of self-deception. I don't believe this cheapens love. I just think we shouldn't fool ourselves that love is pure.

Except perhaps in the case of parent-child love. I do believe that purity exists there, if nowhere else in the world. And what if this is the relationship you want to erase? This much more fundamental relationship? In my case, I would like to erase my father from my memory. I know this sounds horrible and indecently cold. My past with him, though, seems like a lie. Or worse, a trick of the mind. And I would like to get rid of the dirty feeling that is sterilizing the warmth and richness out of my childhood and family history.

I've been having awful dreams again. Dreams that I had when my father first abandoned our family just about a year ago. Dreams where I am kicking, punching, violently attacking my father... and all the while, screaming at him "Leave us alone. Just leave us alone." I am not a violent person by nature. So what is going on? Seems clear enough. I want him erased.

I don't find the anger to be therapeutic. I find it to be a poison that begins to infect the rest of my life, my other relationships. My secure childhood translated smoothly into a trusting way of being in the world. Now I feel like Pi when the ship carrying him and his family to Canada sank. "The men were nodding vigorously at me. When they took hold of me and lifted me in their strong arms, I thought nothing of it. I thought they were helping me. I was so full of trust in them that I felt grateful as they carried me in the air. Only when they threw my overboard did I begin to have doubts." (Yann Martel, Life of Pi, 105) My family was thrown overboard and I have begun to have doubts: doubts about my current relationship when there is no reason, doubts about the strength of the bonds within my remaining broken family, doubts about anything except being completely alone.

And doubt in crisis becomes fear. And fear, according to Pi, is often acted out aggressively. The animals who kill one another in the lifeboat. Similarly, my dreams of rage against my father. But I do not want to be a person raging against the world, raging against the world within my own mind, raging even against the chimerical world in which I attempt to rest.

"Anecdotes sweep away time," writes Roger Angell in his reminiscence of his dead wife and how the passage of time separates him from her at ever-increasing speeds. (Roger Angell, "Over the Wall: A change of plan," The New Yorker, Nov. 19, 2012) My family anecdotes are frozen, not in time, but in the space of some otherworld, a world that I cannot enter, a world -- it seems -- of which I have never been a part. I want to sweep away this time, sweep away my past, my lovely childhood memories that are now so tainted and stained with the blood of a family cut in pieces. I want to sweep away time so that I can create time... and space. Just as Roger has already had his gravestone placed next to his wife and carved with his name and birthdate ("it only lacks the final numbers"), I want to create a space, a permanence that my own family (my husband-to-be and my young son) can count on, one which they can return to again and again knowing that space is a marker of meaning: as Roger knows, one of his trips back there will be final and that is "only keeping a promise." I want to build a space that houses a knowledge of security and deep warmth. I want my loved ones to return to our space. I want to create a space that holds a promise. I want to keep promises that were not kept for me. And to do that, I want to sweep away the past that seems inhabited by others, for that is the best way I can think of it now. The alternative is that my dusty past is inhabited by deception and lies, loss and pain. A past that handcuffs me to sadness and does not let me choose, as Pi would say, the 'better story.' I want to choose the better story.