On Amelioration

The philosopher John Mulaney tells us that “It is so much easier not to do things than to do them, that you would do anything is totally remarkable.” I think about this a lot these days. It is summer and I am unemployed and out of school. I have projects I am meant to be working on, but I struggle to muster up the energy to work on them. I sleep for hours. I watch YouTube shorts. I eat oatmeal and beans. Solid proof that it is bullshit when, in the course of more regular life, I say I would do ambitious things if I had the time. Now, with nothing but time, I am not writing the Great American Novel. I am not reading Moby Dick. I am not re-learning the tenor saxophone.

Last week, I was disgustingly ill. My throat was so sore that it was basically useless. Drinking water was a herculean effort, so was swallowing my own spit. One morning, when I woke up feeling better, my joy was almost uncontainable. I was overflowing. I felt high as a kite. Brewing up my huge pot of beans I couldn’t stop laughing. What an amazing thing those beans were. That I had the energy to make them, that I would be able to eat them. I gabbed with my roommate, went to the climbing gym, felt correct. I made way too many beans, and I’m still eating through them. They aren’t terribly good, but I did make them. I also made a curry. It was too good, so its already gone.

Making is hard because so much of what we make is immediately unmade. The effort often feels incommensurate with the results. In some sense everything that we make is eventually unmade of course, but a scarf lasts much longer than a curry. Some of the most intense pleasures are the most transitory. I think of Mrs Dalloway, throwing her party. A very brief bulwark against the encroaching entropy of life, an act of bringing together. In that novel Virginia Woolf says, “As we are a doomed race, chained to a sinking ship, as the whole thing is a bad joke, let us, at any rate, do our part; mitigate the suffering of our fellow-prisoners; decorate the dungeon with flowers and air-cushions; be as decent as we possibly can.”

That more or less nails it in my opinion. Ayn Rand said that the sacred word is EGO. Which is pretty stupid. If there is a sacred word I think that word is AMELIORATION. Leaving something behind that did not exist before, something in excess of what simply needs to be. Baking challah. Crocheting a scarf. Writing a poem.

So much of life is homeostatic. Sleeping, eating, laundry, dishes, work. Fighting to keep things from falling apart, holding it all together against the centrifugal force of the world. We are desperate grovelers on an infinite muddy slope, clawing toward the light, crawling away from the abyss below. It will eventually claim us. We will get tired. In the meantime though we may be kind. We may not only refrain from doing harm, but we might even make things that delight one another. We may get off the couch and tell those we love that we love them, maybe even with a plate of cookies in hand.

I am reminded of Jane Eyre when she helps a stranger with a sprained ankle to get back on his horse: “My help had been needed and claimed; I had given it: I was pleased to have done something; trivial, transitory though the deed was, it was yet an active thing, and I was weary of an existence all passive.”

I feel like Jane a lot. A bit high on the fact that I’ve done some unbelievably small thing, like make beans. That’s the essential stuff of life though, at the end of the day, amelioration.