Slime jar
The contents of cynicism, and the antidote to its sludge green
When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Some time back I got myself into a messy, ill-defined relationship of sorts—the ill-definition giving way to all sorts of excuses for a lack of basic decency—and the post-mortem left me reeling for longer than the relationship itself warranted in depth. People can leave an absence more felt than their presence, and the one I observed after he left was not the shape of any particularly redeeming qualities but simply the stunted outline of a familiar male ambivalence, wanting proximity without the requisite cost of dependability, that had loomed over my formative years, a lurking sinkhole to the past time and again.
In the aftermath of that mess I held onto the stinging injustice for longer than I should have, allowing the rash to fester long after exposure. Each time it looked like the wound might heal over I scratched at it again until it flared up anew. I discovered I was not as gracious as I had fancied myself. I thought myself pretty smart, but apparently not smart enough to figure out how care could be met with such carelessness, nor how I got myself into a situation that was so “one-sided,” as he told me shamelessly towards the end. So I fueled the itch, intention admitting gradual defeat to evasion, then waging determined counteroffensive, until a truce was finally called: where honesty does not see inside and out, it will not find peace.
-
The Great Gatsby didn’t hit in high school, and in hindsight I suspect that’s because it’s a book about principles, which were less crucial to living then. I recalled in fragments the extravagance, a car accident, and a famously vague line about careless people, though they did not come together to form such a clear, damning portrait of moral debility until a decade and some experience later.
It’s a love story for most of the book—the illusion is shot dead in the final chapters. Once Gatsby’s borrowed dream has been restored to its rightful place in the past there is little left to see... Gatsby himself is gone, with hardly anything to show for the towering yet hollow immensity of his life, propped up by that singular dream. A few others are dead too, victims to the crossfire of excess and moral indifference.
Nick Carraway recalls:
After Gatsby’s death the East was haunted for me like that, distorted beyond my eyes’ power of correction. So when the blue smoke of brittle leaves was in the air and the wind blew the wet laundry stiff on the line I decided to come back home.
There was one thing to be done before I left, an awkward, unpleasant thing that perhaps had better have been let alone. But I wanted to leave things in order and not just trust that obliging and indifferent sea to sweep my refuse away. I saw Jordan Baker and talked over and around what had happened to us together and what had happened afterward to me, and she lay perfectly still listening in a big chair.
So Nick—whether or not we take him to be a reliable narrator—supposedly overcomes the sprawling sea of indifference, returns to his principles, and makes his attempt to leave things in order.
My last year in New York had the sludge green of cynicism smeared all over. The mesmerizing potential had faded with infatuation, and when I paused to really notice the way of life around me I saw some things, equally clear and distorted, that made me queasy. I grew distasteful of the self-serving instincts that fueled the city and the ways they had rubbed off on me, and fearful, too, of what it meant that the aimless modern religion of self-worship was not only tolerated but so loudly celebrated. New York was the mecca of that religion, a spewing cauldron of impulse and desire on vain display, boiling over with entitled individualism and severed from any real accountability within an urban colosseum where, supposedly, no one owed anyone anything.
In between clear days there were months on end bled through with a grotesque color I couldn’t name at the time. It was the same color Nick Carraway had seen, one tainted with resigned condemnation. Jordan, laying in her chair, responds,
“You said a bad driver was only safe until she met another bad driver? Well, I met another bad driver, didn’t I? I mean it was careless of me to make such a wrong guess. I thought you were rather an honest, straightforward person. I thought it was your secret pride.”
to which Nick replies,
“I’m thirty… I’m five years too old to lie to myself and call it honor.”
For a while after the accident I struggled to find the stamina to move forward. After years of speeding when I finally pulled over to take a good look in the rearview mirror I saw the string of accidents I had left behind, and I felt reluctant to cause any more whether or not I was primarily at fault, if fault were such a thing. I saw dents in passenger doors with my fingerprints on them and recalled the times I’d crashed and driven off without really knowing what wreckage I’d left behind. I tried a few times to rise to forgiveness over this latest hit-and-run yet in the end still succumbed to waves of resentment, thinking that in the karmic ocean of time those who hurt us are eventually swept back to the exact shores they tried to escape.
After some time it became clear that I would not be able to out-row the debris of the past entirely. Some days the water is clear, and others it washes back everything that departed a ways ago.
Braked in the emergency lane off the highway, I deconstructed and reconstructed what had made that particular accident so paralyzing—history makes us more vulnerable to certain strikes, little to anyone’s knowledge or intent—and the culprits in hindsight far prior to the moment of impact: the way I’d always misinterpreted ambiguity as intimacy, the way long before that I’d learned to see half-heartedness as a tide to be turned, and the ways in which we’re always more blind to the past and its center of gravity than we realize, too undiscerning of its contents until it shows up disguised as something familiar that comes around determined to pull us back when we most want, and need, to be freed of it. We never fully escape. The careful learn to avoid the accidents they recognize but danger nevertheless awaits on the curved shoulder ahead, crouching in that dark subliminal space of things we’d assumed were behind us.
I have been toying with what weight principles still hold, a century after Gatsby, when morals have become outdated in place of self as the highest pursuit, and the ties between people are increasingly tenuous, broken with apathy and held together only by whatever fiber of character we recognize in ourselves. There is not really such thing as leaving things in order—after the crash the cops and ambulances come and the car gets sent to the body shop but order is never restored to its prior state. Why bother? Why collect the pieces and put the book back on the shelf when its passages have become obsolete? Why beat ourselves up over those objects in the mirror when the sea of indifference extends its warm siren song?
The bad drivers always meet and the past somehow finds its way back and when they do, there is no telling the impact. We can hardly point to the other person behind the wheel and say it was their fault, that they knew what they were getting into. At the end of the day after the damage is done, we only keep score with ourselves.
-
Getting back on the road after an accident is not so different from seeing that time is an impossible series of collision courses. There is no place of absolute safety, not even in the repair lane, and eventually we press gas again, tentatively at first and slowly building speed.
On recent visits back to the city the sludge green has mostly faded. I was demoralized for some seasons, quelled by all the reckless pursuits and the accidents waiting in ambush and the crowds who would more willingly let time sweep things away than do their part to put things back in place. I saw conflicting tendencies, good and bad, all around, and in hindsight I see that cynicism knocks when the good caves in and lets the bad bleed all over. As much as I want to believe in the light, some days all I can do is hold the ambivalence, thinking, maybe that’s how people are? Self-interested, and not always able to rise above that self-interest to a common high ground. Messy and unaware of our surroundings and leaving dents in car doors as we go. Unable to do right by others, though we try, but perhaps doing right by ourselves if we try hard enough.
Time rocks us forward and back and still we reach for the soft glimmer across the bay, determined to make it through the debris to the place where our score with ourselves is finally settled.