Discernment

Admit one limit.

Zoomorphic Couple (1933), Max Ernst

I had a dream last night that my friend had a device in her kitchen that she used to clean things. The device was a huge, made of shiny white metal, bigger than a fridge and a stove combined, with an oblong, pill-shaped compartment in the middle. There were pieces of fruit in the compartment. I was going to clean the fruit using the machine. But then some insects landed on the fruit — a very big mosquito and a fly and a few ants.

I didn’t know how to get the insects off the fruit. In the dream, I didn’t want to touch them, they were commingling with the fruit, under and over it, everywhere. I only had a fly swatter. So I killed the big mosquito. Now there was mosquito all over the fruit. Disgusting.

“Don’t worry, this thing will fix it,” my friend said, closing the clam-shell lid on the compartment. Her cleaning device could differentiate between fruit and bug and remove bug. Her device could sort matter down to the molecule. She didn’t explain this in the dream but I understood. I was skeptical.

She turned the machine on. It hummed and buzzed and vibrated like it was definitely for sure turned on. We stood and watched it hum and buzz for a few minutes.

Finally, the pill-shape compartment opened. There were several hundred pea-sized pellets inside. They were not the color of fruit. They were the color of bugs and fruit together.

I didn’t know what to say. I stood there thinking about the fact that this machine’s job was discernment. Its job was to separate without getting confused about the boundaries between one thing and another. It was meant to sort goop into categories so it could keep one category of goop and discard the other. It was assumed to know which category of goop you wanted and which category you didn’t want.

It didn’t seem to know what my friend assumed it would know. Maybe it didn’t even know the difference between a bug eyeball and a seed, the meaty forearm of a fly and a strand of mango.

The machine pretended to know the difference. In reality, it was a BLENDER. It broke down and rearranged and smoothed and combined. It mistakenly lumped different categories of matter into one sweeping category, and pretended that this was a success. It overgeneralized. It made assumptions and ran with those assumptions.

This machine pissed on your head and told you it was raining.

“Don’t worry,” my friend said, “It can learn from mistakes.”

“Yes, but will we learn from our mistakes?” I asked. “Because only a very stupid person would have something like this in their house.”

“There are tons of stupid people out there who’ll buy anything,” my friend said. She didn’t seem to think she was one of them. “Anyway it’s better with dishes than with fruit.”

***

This is how the world feels to me now. Trying to absorb something real or useful or reassuring through my phone or laptop lands me in the same place: I’m reading an article about some calamity, some tragedy, some sad turn of events, and I’m waiting for a long, low howl of pain to come from the author or from someone else in the story, I’m waiting for some acknowledgment, some hint that someone else knows how terrible it is, but it never comes. I keep waiting. Eventually I feel gaslit. “That’s all?” I think at the end. I want the horror or the despair to be marked and categorized so it can be processed and filed away appropriately. But instead, it’s another shrug.

It all goes into the blender and comes out uniform, smooth pellets of life that feel slippery and strange, we don’t know what it’s made of anymore, we can’t tell the difference between a good beach read and a toddler who died in the backseat of a hot car. I encounter a string of deadly tornadoes the same way I greet movie night on “Love Island”: Here we have screaming and splintered wood, here are waving arms and uprooted trees and accusations and tears. This town has been flattened. This dream is over. Who is acting? How do these words matter? Can words matter anymore?

Everyone out there seems young and forgetful or old and almost erased, there’s nothing in between. Either you are getting married at Madison Square Gardens or the woods behind your grandmother’s home are being chopped down to accommodate a new data center or you are William T. Vollmann, eating cubes of pork belly and waiting to die.

Did you write a masterpiece? I ask William T. Vollmann’s photo. The author of the profile didn’t offer an opinion about Vollmann’s book. Neither he nor Vollmann expressed a feeling or a sensation or a belief or a daydream or a fantasy in the entire piece. I liked the vibe but it ended with a shrug. Do these 3,400 pages include a long, low howl of pain? Are you taking big risks, showing yourself in spite of everything? Or are you just another man describing the facts on the ground, shrugging and mumbling instead of crying salty tears like hot summer rain?

Sort this input carefully. Most vibes are just shrugs in disguise. If you keep your phone too close to your heart, bad weather and bad restaurants and bad men all seem about the same. Does any of this matter? Do we still matter? We wake up from a dream every few days and wonder: Do I look like the hairless aliens on Instagram, smooth and slippery, or do I look human and therefore repulsive?

What about you? Do you still deserve to dance? Are you too ugly to move your body? Do you still deserve to hydrate or use body lotion? Are you too unimportant to hear Jimmy Page sing “I really oughta know” and feel the same way you did decades ago?

Put your phone in a paper bag and hide it in your sock drawer like a handgun. Don’t think about it, don’t look at it. Forget it. Let them come for your jewels, your livelihood, your dignity, your beauty, your secrets. Tell them to take everything, you just want to live.

***

Discernment isn’t simple or easy. I’ve been confusing very different forms of matter and misreading categories for decades now, mistaking friends for lovers, mixing up allies and enemies, confusing strangers for soulmates. I trusted myself too much and then not enough, back and forth, formed sweeping theses and wrote one-size-fits-all treatises, overgeneralized and undertested, underperformed and overinvested.

Instead of separating the good from the bad, the wanted from the unwanted, the wise from the foolish, the loyal from the traitorous, I blended and mixed and pureed disparate resources into a smooth and disgusting amalgamation.

Everything together adds up to nothing. You can’t connect meaningfully with a mob. A crowd that includes dear friends and anxious strangers and aggressive creepers and equally confused randoms can’t be processed by one oversized, underdeveloped machine. You end up with a mess on your hands.

Discernment is earned. You watch and listen and sigh. Take a breath and see how things settle. Wait for the ants to crawl away from the mango slices, or consider eating something else entirely.

***

I can’t breeze over the details like so many other people can. I can’t make my eyes go fuzzy. I am always focusing somewhere. I need to see the fine details, I require texture: the divots in the sand, the crab that looks lost, the horsefly supervising the breeze, the sea birds gliding low over a mirrored morning sea, flat and sparkling. Don’t look up the name of the birds, don’t check the temperature, don’t wonder about your heart rate, don’t open Find My Phone, don’t track them on the freeway, don’t recheck the weather, don’t dip into that fucked up Next Door post about a dangerous dog, never ever ever ever ask anyone what heart rate variability is.

Those aren’t the fine details I need. I need the granular universe that surges up around me when I admit my limits: the edges between my glorious story and my compromised reality. For years I’ve been slow to acknowledge what I can and can’t do. I wanted to stay inside the fantasy that I’m capable of anything at any time.

Grip that notion tightly and despair rushes in. Force it and exhaustion sinks you.

Surrender is the only way forward. Admire your limits. Limits are a form of discernment. Honor what you can’t do and meaning rushes in. Vulnerability is letting your pores open again, to welcome these molecules of sadness and hope into your system.

Remember what’s true: You’re trash and you’re the next in line for the throne. You’re an old clown and no one is listening. The world is ending and it’s summertime. Put on a bikini and marvel at how stupid you look, ridiculous. Now dance, you absolute clown, you sexy fucking beast. This is discernment.

Like sea birds gliding low over liquid glass, we aren’t here to be perceived. We’re here to focus. Perfect focus brings grace, warm air ruffling our tiniest feathers, gentle ripples of saltwater kissing our toes, don’t look up the right word for a sea bird’s claws, don’t look it up, you don’t need it, stay here, sliding over the sea, low over liquid glass, shadows and sparkles and tiny fish, this moment, this sweet morning.

Swallow it whole. We won’t learn from our mistakes. Clouds gather every single afternoon, my knees sound like crinkled plastic coming up the stairs, my aunts don’t come to the beach anymore, it isn’t even discussed, we’ll never learn, the kids walk on the beach without us now, sipping beer from green bottles, long limbs and laughter, I feel left out, I feel forgotten, alone in the backseat, do you remember me? Swallow it all, loneliness and grief and desire, a highway back to you, at least I’m dreaming again, restless and disgusting, at least I’m dancing again, overripe and repulsive and perfect. We miss you, I wrote to my favorite aunt, then clarified: I miss you. Shadows and tiny fish. You know the difference. Use your words.

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