The Futilitarians

  This skepticism wasn’t new, it’s something the species has been considering for millennia, but apparently we need to be reminded of it, often. Especially now that technology has exploded this “amusing chaos,” turned it inside out and given it corporately owned platforms. It was already so difficult to see anything clearly, and now a fire hose of pronouncement and conviction, fact and analysis, misinformation and marketing, is aimed at our consciousness every time we turn on a device. So, do we give up having opinions? Give up on religious certitude and give in to nihilism? Give up social media? No, Royce admonishes from the nineteenth century, fountain pen in hand, we are active beings who just need to work at these things, find the right approach. Then he lays out what he feels is the most honest starting point for the search.

  I admit that looking for truth implies a postulate that truth is worth the looking for, and a postulate that the world is such that it would be a good thing to know the nature of the world. Yet I still cling to my rule, and say, begin to search for truth by doubting all that you have without criticism come to hold as true. If you fail to doubt everything, doubt all you can. Doubt not because doubting is a good end, but because it is a good beginning. Doubt not for amusement, but as a matter of duty. Doubt not superficially, but with thoroughness. Doubt not flippantly, but with the deepest—it may be with the saddest—earnestness. Doubt as you would undergo a surgical operation, because it is necessary to thought-health. So only can you hope to attain convictions that are worth having. If you do not wish to think, then I have nothing to say. Then, indeed, you need not doubt at all, but take all you please for granted. But who then cares at all what you happen to fancy about the world?

  Exhilarated by this, I read the passage a few times. But then I doubted whether I could commit myself to such strenuous doubting. Did I even have the time for the required investigation, for that first step, the one that threatened to derail every project? I lay in bed and thought of some things that were making the end of 2012 so awful: my inability to let go of childish sibling tensions; a gridlocked Congress about to drive us over some fiscal cliff; the slaughter of twenty first-graders in Newtown, Connecticut, days before Christmas; my own first-grader building LEGO zombie-fighting forts, militarizing his mini-figures; and even the overplayed Mayan apocalypse, people we knew fleeing to the countryside just to be on the safe side, in case that ancient prophecy of doom proved right.

  I decided I was okay with ending my year headachy and foggy, with renewed commitment to doubt. Doubt was an invitation to the world, an openness to others, the same way that reading and conversation can be. The Royce quote seemed a signpost telling me we were on the right track with the ECRG. Through a full year of monthly gatherings and cases of wine, we’d built a perfect mechanism for creating doubt, for sustaining the search—a roomful of people willing to engage one another. Over the year, those who were searching for hard answers or group therapy had drifted away. At the December meeting, the twelve who’d remained decided the ECRG would continue on, excited about more opportunities to be inspired or challenged, ambivalent or confused. More opportunities to change our minds, to feel the pressure of the void on thousands of years of thinking. We’d continue on, to help one another out, to provide sustenance and comfort in the darker quarters of the unwalled city. That the ECRG had formed during a time of such grief and uncertainty for me was almost miraculous. All the words and ideas, written and spoken, nourished a deepening sense of what it means to be alive, to lose people we love, to think and feel through the loss.

  By evening, I had vanquished my hangover with champagne and companionship, though not drinking so much as to poison the first day of 2013. We built a small bonfire in the field across the street from our house, and were joined by neighbors, friends, some ECRGers. The existential plumber arrived with his wife and kids, all of us good friends, and split time between fireside fellowship and standing on the edge of the field by himself, working through some arcane metaphysical problem and making sure the kids didn’t run into the street. Case and Nina showed up together, reunited in what appeared to be an uneasy but affectionate truce, Nina bearing a goopy, delicious blueberry dessert and Case a subdued deference to Nina. No one pried, respectful of the special mystery of all relationships. Tristan passed around a voluptuous bottle of brandy, and we took turns warming our insides.

  The neighborhood had been exploding since dusk, and none of us gathered around the fire could recall so many fireworks being set off on one day. It was as though people wanted to obliterate 2012, drive it out with as much smoke and light and noise as possible. Brad said it reminded him of Cholula, Mexico, where we’ve visited friends a few times. In that town, fireworks go off year-round, night and day, accompanying processions and feast days celebrated by Cholula’s many churches. According to legend, Cortés wanted to punish Aztec sympathizers by building a church to replace each of their 365 temples, one for every day of the year, but he only ever made it to about fifty, still a lot for a town that size. In the late sixteenth century, the Spanish built a basilica on top of the town’s ancient pyramid, effectively merging native gods with Catholic saints. Sometimes it seemed like our apartment facing the main plaza was under siege, dawn often met with searing hisses and errant booms. When we finally asked a Cholulan, “Why fireworks? All the time?” he explained, “We’re trying to get the attention of the saints.”

  For a moment I tried to connect this to Dad’s pyrotechnic ebullience—what was he trying to get the attention of? The cosmos? The neighbors? After he would arrive home with the fireworks, it would take forever for the sun to go down so we could crowd the end of the driveway with glowing bamboo punks in hand, or clenched between teeth, Clint Eastwood–style, and start the raucous, sulfuric display, the only such one on our block of modest mansions. All eight of us would be out there, picking through the bags for our favorites. Roman candles, bottle rockets, garlands of firecrackers. Every year, we marveled at some novelty, like the spinning wheel nailed to the telephone pole that erupted with little Chinese lanterns, and every year some dud disappointed us, did not live up to its dramatic packaging. Mom would occupy the porch with Rebecca and Rachel—always littler, always apart—guarding them from the activity of the older kids, which was extra chaotic in the flashing dark and smoke. Dad alternately directed from a chair on the lawn or lit the Glorious Flower Fountain himself in the middle of the street while we looked out for cars.

  Like me, he was probably just after some ephemeral, semi-dangerous fun, a semi-harmless spectacle. Whatever it was, for a few hours he kept us all attentive to the fuse, the spark, the payoff. Kept us looking up at the night sky in anticipation of blue green red glittering showers and down at the sidewalk for some small, bright transformation. Kept our ears open to the booming and crackling air. All of us together, a family in the moment, futureless and happy. In the morning, shreds of charred paper would litter the lawn and black starbursts would constellate the concrete. We’d be sent outside with a broom and a dustpan, fingers combing the grass for the night’s debris.

  As our neighborhood assaulted itself that New Year’s Eve, Brad and some other dads, having inherited the tradition, experimented with the best lawn furniture to launch bottle rockets from. They dragged the gleaming chute of a broken playground slide from the back of the field, upending it to line up rows of rockets on its sloped edge and shoot them off together, like flaming arrows sent in unison from a castle parapet into the darkness, their smoky skeletons drifting afterward in the breeze off the Mississippi. Heavier ordnance like Black Cat’s High Tower, Battle Star, and Fiery Fiesta fountained from the middle of the field. We armed the children with contraband sparklers, tiny cardboard tanks with wonky plastic wheels whose artillery sputtered weakly when lit, and tiny cardboard chickens shooting flaming “eggs” from their backsides. We pitted the chickens against the tanks; both sides had come all the way from China, where they’d been cheaply printed with the nostalgic hues of old hand-colored postcards—soft turquoise, yellow-ora
nge, chartreuse, and dusty pink. In the battle of futile sparks and jerky, tentative movements, they were equals on the pavement, neither winners nor losers. In the smoke and the cold, we followed the directions on the boxes: did it all under adult supervision, found a hard level surface for our silly skirmishes, lit the fuses, and got out of the way.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  First, thank you to my fellow dark wood travelers past, present, and future, who made this book existentially possible—Brad, Chris, Susan, Ellen, Tristan, Kevin, Sara, Nate, Michael L., Christine, Michael D., Case, Nina, Tom, and Kyle. Susan, especially, for her relentless and indispensable note taking.

  Much gratitude is owed my astute and generous readers over the years—Pia Ehrhardt, who made this book possible in many, many ways, Michael Jeffrey Lee, Chris Chambers, Mark Lane, Shawna Foose, Chris Lane, Sara Slaughter, John Gisleson, who was overly interested in my use of commas, and especially Lara Naughton and Andy Young, who kept me on track. Over the years, Ed Skoog, Eliza Borné, Roger Hodge, Jarret Lofstead, Joe Longo, David Rutledge, and Scott MacLeod all shared pieces of this work with their readers, giving me glimpses of light and hope along the way. Also thanks, Julia Leyda, for the life-changing invitation and lifelong friendship, and Michel Varisco, for taking me along and broadening my view.

  The institutional support I received from the following was invaluable: the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, the NOCCA Institute, Press Street Antenna, the Ragdale Foundation, the Rib Room (thank you, Soren), and Faubourg Wines (thank you, Cat).

  I am crazy grateful to my wonderful agent, Emma Parry, for going out on a limb with this book and to my brilliant editor, Ben George, whose meticulous intelligence, energy, and faith strengthened the limb. I’m a little in awe of the assiduous Betsy Uhrig and Deborah Jacobs, for making everything as right as possible. Much, much thanks to everyone else at Little, Brown and Janklow & Nesbit for the thousands of decisions and actions that help put books into the world.

  Finally, and always, Brad, Silas, and Otto—my boys, my heart.

  APPENDIX: WORKS CITED

  January: All Is Vanity

  A Concise Dictionary of Existentialism. Edited by Ralph B. Winn. New York: Wisdom Library, 1960.

  Epicurus. “Letter to Menoeceus.”

  James Joyce. Dubliners. New York: Random House (Modern Library Edition), 1993.

  King James Bible, Ecclesiastes.

  February: World of Stone

  Simone de Beauvoir. “Selections from ‘Towards a Morals of Ambiguity, According to Pyrrhus and Cinéas.’” Translated by Jay Miskowiec. Social Text 17 (Autumn 1987): 135–142.

  Tadeusz Borowski. This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen. New York: Penguin, 1976.

  George Cotkin. Existential America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003.

  William Shakespeare. King Lear.

  March: The Belly of the Whale

  1882 Annual Report of the Louisiana Board of Health.

  Arthur Koestler. The Act of Creation. New York: Macmillan, 1964.

  April: The Last Suffer

  Georges Bataille. Erotism: Death and Sensuality. San Francisco: City Lights, 1986.

  Louise Glück. The Seven Ages. New York: HarperCollins, 2001.

  Vivian Gornick. Fierce Attachments. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1987.

  King James Bible, Gospel According to John.

  Chuck Palahniuk. Fight Club. New York: W. W. Norton, 1996.

  Shel Silverstein. The Giving Tree. New York: Harper & Row, 1964.

  May: The Dark Wood

  Dante Alighieri. The Inferno.

  Hot Tub Time Machine (movie, 2010).

  June: Voices over Water

  John Cheever. The Letters of John Cheever. Edited by Benjamin Cheever. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988.

  . The Stories of John Cheever. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978.

  July: The Least Dead Among All of Us

  Alan Clayson. Jacques Brel: La Vie Bohème. New Malden, Surrey, England: Chrome Dreams, 2010.

  August: The Metaphysical Hangover

  Kingsley Amis. Everyday Drinking: The Distilled Kingsley Amis. New York: Bloomsbury USA, 1994.

  Franz Kafka. The Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony, and Other Stories. New York: Schocken Books, 1948.

  September: The Walled City

  Walker Percy. “New Orleans Mon Amour.” Originally published in Harper’s, September 1968. Reprinted in Signposts in a Strange Land: Essays. New York: Picador, 2000.

  October: The Unwalled City

  George Moore. Memoirs of My Dead Life. New York: D. Appleton, 1906.

  Leo Tolstoy. The Death of Ivan Ilyich. Introduction by Ronald Blythe. New York: Bantam Classic, 1981.

  November: Nineveh

  Elizabeth Bishop. The Complete Poems, 1927–1979. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1983.

  Stephen Dobyns. Velocities: New and Selected Poems, 1966–1992. New York: Penguin, 1994.

  Louise Glück. The Wild Iris. New York: Ecco, 1993.

  Marie Howe. What the Living Do: Poems. New York: W. W. Norton, 1998.

  King James Bible, Book of Jonah.

  Everette Maddox. I Hope It’s Not Over, and Good-by: Selected Poems of Everette Maddox. New Orleans: University of New Orleans Press, 2009.

  Theodore Roethke. The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982.

  December: Sharing Bread

  Clarice Lispector. Selected Crônicas: Essays. New York: New Directions, 1996.

  Benjamin Moser. Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.

  New Year’s Eve: Tanks Versus Chickens

  Josiah Royce. Fugitive Essays. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1925.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Anne Gisleson’s work has appeared in the Atlantic, the Oxford American, the Believer, and the Los Angeles Times, among other publications, and has been selected for inclusion in several anthologies, including The Best American Nonrequired Reading. She teaches in the creative writing program at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts and lives in New Orleans with her husband and their two sons.

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