Poem: March 13, 2019

Edna's Limitations

Okay, to start I feel I need to say
that all of us deserve to be happy
and to realize our various potentials
in the forms that they reveal themselves.

We should, in short, be allowed
to let our freak flags fly,

except

that the selves we nurture don't come
with the guidance systems or good judgement
that prevent our private Hitler's from storming
into the Poland of our friends and family.

My high school dean put it this way:
You have the right to swing your arm,
but your right ends where my chin begins.

I think a lot about that.

I also think about Edna Pontellier,
a literary hero who woke to discover that life
can be confining (especially for a young wife
and mother in the early 1900's), and that
our efforts to realize our innermost desires
are not likely to be well-received if
our innermost desires will be disruptive
to the tranquility of those around us.

*I should pause here to point out
that I am no monster. I see the unfair conditions
that informed Edna's rebellion. I empathize with her
pain in a universal sense, while also recognizing
the privilege with which I make my observation.
Some of us carry more anchors than others.

Edna was disruptive, and society,
as you might guess, was not impressed,
and a modern reader might watch in wonder
at the many quiet ways in which the walls
of Edna's Victorian world closed in.

But are we so different? We have walls, certainly.

If, for example, I were to suddenly decide
that nudism and goat farming were essential
to my happiness, I would likely discover
that people have questions and concerns
that they are not likely to keep to themselves.

Or if you were to sell the Camry
and use the proceeds to launch a massage service
for children, you might reasonably expect
that there would be pushback from some quarters.

That's the rule of a functioning society:
It errs on the side of the many. It softens
our sharp and pointy bits.

But is society today more or less confining?

In Edna's time to cut against society's fabric
was to trigger a thousand subtle alarms-
the knowing glance, the disappearance
of opportunity, the nuanced conversation.
The stark choice of the artistic soul
was to conform or to walk out into the sea,
and either choice was suffocation.

Which seems unjust to us today, right?

In our world, we say, everyone's opinion matters
and can find its way onto multiple noisy platforms,
on which who we are doesn't need to be hidden.
We can always find an audience to cheer us on,
to knock down our walls instead of pushing them in.

I imagine Edna would easily find a sympathetic
audience today on YouTube or reality TV.
They would write in the comments or tag her
in their feeds. You be you, Edna. #YOLO!
And she would fly on her unclipped wings
and smile, affirmed in a silo of her adoring fans,
never refined by society's abrasive surfaces,
never forced to consider her life through
the eyes of her children, or the filter of her neighbors.

And yes, there would be the negative comments, too.

But how easily do we dismiss opposing views
as the voices of trolls, the nothing of fake news?

The slick surfaces of our lives ensure our freedom
from undo influence, and from the inconvenience
of confronting our blindspots and fallibility.

We all can swing our arms and soar
across our own empty skies.

We can fly so much higher and discover
for ourselves the places where the air,
like the water at the ocean's floor, is empty
and inhospitable to life.