Anatomy of a Bad Idea
I just finished Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, one of those books where I find myself folding down page corners every few minutes because it’s filled with thoughts I want to return to. Here’s the one that caught me up this morning, the passage that feels like it was aimed right at me:
“Involved happened over a long period of time, pulling you in like quicksand…Involved is neither good nor bad. It is just a consequence of living, a consequence of occupation and immigration, of empires and expansion, of living in each other’s pockets…one becomes involved, and it is a long trek back to being uninvolved…and one didn’t do it for one’s health. Nothing this late in the century was done with health in mind. Alsana was no dummy when it came to the Modern Condition. She watched the talk shows, all day long she watched the talk shows – my wife slept with my brother. My mother won’t say out of my boyfriend’s life – and the microphone holder…always asked the same damn silly questions: But why do you feel the need…? Wrong! Alsana had to explain it to them through the screen. You blockhead; they are not wanting this, they are not willing it – they are just involved, see? They walk IN and they get trapped between the revolving doors of those two v’s. Involved. The years pass, and the mess accumulates and here we are. Your brother’s sleeping with my ex-wife’s niece’s second cousin. Involved. Just a tired, inevitable fact. Something in the way Joyce said it, involved – wearied, slightly acid – suggested to Alsana that the word meant the same thing to her. And enormous web you spin to catch yourself.”
What is so entrancing, so entrapping, about a bad idea? What is it that pulls us, magnetic-like, against our own good sense, against our own logical arguments, against our own better judgment? How do we become involved in precisely those situations from which we know we should turn and run 180 degrees in the opposite direction? I don’t know if it’s a longing for self-destruction, an obsession with the fire so deep that we can’t help but step into it….or if it’s the ultimate mark of ego, this belief that we, and we alone, can play around in this situation without becoming involved. That we and we alone can make this work. That we and we alone can pull water from this rock.
Do we always know right away that it is a bad idea? Do we know from the beginning and simply look the other way (or look right at it, knowing it and even embracing it for the poor decision that it is), or are we fooled? Tricked into thinking “well maybe it’s not so…” and “yes, but…” until we can’t see the good from the bad, the right from the wrong, until there is no one right course of action, until everything is muddled and messed and any movement we make inevitably results in unbearable consequences.
This, in my mind, is the calling card of a bad idea. When the inevitable progression of events springing from an idea leads you to a situation where your ability to choose a good outcome in hampered. When you are backed into an alley from which you cannot possibly escape unwounded. When, as Smith writes, you are trapped between the revolving doors of those two v’s, and there is no getting out without a few scrapes to your soul.
I sometimes think I am so fascinated by shades of gray that I lose myself in them. I bury myself so deep into the infinite grayness that I’m left without a black or a white to cling to. No up, no down. And of course no blame – for when right and wrong are constantly shifting things, when any conceivable action leads to both pain and pleasure, when there is no scale that can measure one action against another and come up with a quantifiable difference, how can you be blamed for choosing one path over another? How can I be blamed for making the “wrong choice” when there is no objective criteria by which to judge wrong choices from right? There is no need to face your own weaknesses when it’s clear that no one else, regardless of what strengths or weaknesses they may posses, could find a better way out – because there is no good way out.
It’s such a postmodern thing, almost clichéd, really, this refusal to believe in immutable truths and unshakeable values. This obsession with seeing the gray in every situation.
And so we don’t make decisions, per se. We don’t acknowledge the choices we make along the way, rather choosing to believe in circumstance, in situation, in uncontrollable forces. In a lack of culpability. And we become involved, without realizing it, without knowing it, without definitively choosing it, until it is far too late in the game to back out now. Involvement becomes both the anchor we cling to and the tangled web we wish to escape.
“Involved happened over a long period of time, pulling you in like quicksand…Involved is neither good nor bad. It is just a consequence of living, a consequence of occupation and immigration, of empires and expansion, of living in each other’s pockets…one becomes involved, and it is a long trek back to being uninvolved…and one didn’t do it for one’s health. Nothing this late in the century was done with health in mind. Alsana was no dummy when it came to the Modern Condition. She watched the talk shows, all day long she watched the talk shows – my wife slept with my brother. My mother won’t say out of my boyfriend’s life – and the microphone holder…always asked the same damn silly questions: But why do you feel the need…? Wrong! Alsana had to explain it to them through the screen. You blockhead; they are not wanting this, they are not willing it – they are just involved, see? They walk IN and they get trapped between the revolving doors of those two v’s. Involved. The years pass, and the mess accumulates and here we are. Your brother’s sleeping with my ex-wife’s niece’s second cousin. Involved. Just a tired, inevitable fact. Something in the way Joyce said it, involved – wearied, slightly acid – suggested to Alsana that the word meant the same thing to her. And enormous web you spin to catch yourself.”
What is so entrancing, so entrapping, about a bad idea? What is it that pulls us, magnetic-like, against our own good sense, against our own logical arguments, against our own better judgment? How do we become involved in precisely those situations from which we know we should turn and run 180 degrees in the opposite direction? I don’t know if it’s a longing for self-destruction, an obsession with the fire so deep that we can’t help but step into it….or if it’s the ultimate mark of ego, this belief that we, and we alone, can play around in this situation without becoming involved. That we and we alone can make this work. That we and we alone can pull water from this rock.
Do we always know right away that it is a bad idea? Do we know from the beginning and simply look the other way (or look right at it, knowing it and even embracing it for the poor decision that it is), or are we fooled? Tricked into thinking “well maybe it’s not so…” and “yes, but…” until we can’t see the good from the bad, the right from the wrong, until there is no one right course of action, until everything is muddled and messed and any movement we make inevitably results in unbearable consequences.
This, in my mind, is the calling card of a bad idea. When the inevitable progression of events springing from an idea leads you to a situation where your ability to choose a good outcome in hampered. When you are backed into an alley from which you cannot possibly escape unwounded. When, as Smith writes, you are trapped between the revolving doors of those two v’s, and there is no getting out without a few scrapes to your soul.
I sometimes think I am so fascinated by shades of gray that I lose myself in them. I bury myself so deep into the infinite grayness that I’m left without a black or a white to cling to. No up, no down. And of course no blame – for when right and wrong are constantly shifting things, when any conceivable action leads to both pain and pleasure, when there is no scale that can measure one action against another and come up with a quantifiable difference, how can you be blamed for choosing one path over another? How can I be blamed for making the “wrong choice” when there is no objective criteria by which to judge wrong choices from right? There is no need to face your own weaknesses when it’s clear that no one else, regardless of what strengths or weaknesses they may posses, could find a better way out – because there is no good way out.
It’s such a postmodern thing, almost clichéd, really, this refusal to believe in immutable truths and unshakeable values. This obsession with seeing the gray in every situation.
And so we don’t make decisions, per se. We don’t acknowledge the choices we make along the way, rather choosing to believe in circumstance, in situation, in uncontrollable forces. In a lack of culpability. And we become involved, without realizing it, without knowing it, without definitively choosing it, until it is far too late in the game to back out now. Involvement becomes both the anchor we cling to and the tangled web we wish to escape.
posted by Melissa at 11:33 AM
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