Empty Spaces

It was just a conversation, one of those eating-dessert-by-the-fire, reading-after-the-child's-gone-to-bed conversations. I was re-reading A Return to Love and my husband was paging through Scientific American. I don't remember what we were discussing, only that his point was that most people don't realize how ruthless evolution is, that the underpinnings of the universe aren't compassionate whatsoever, that competition is the engine that drives human life, all life. And it is a vicious thing, messy and lacking in aesthetics.

I told him to stop talking, that he was screwing with my spirituality.

Later, I was able to understand that what he was saying bears no relation on my spirituality whatsoever. Evolution is a bloodless machine, yes, and competition is its hard wiring. You cannot look for love in it -- it grinds out all love, all emotion, all spirit. It has a cold efficient beauty perhaps, in the end anyway. A breathtaking effectiveness certainly. A glorious watchmaker precision that runs on error, is fed by all that goes wrong -- such a concept, almost exploitive in its brilliance, like something Enron would think up, to drive the glory at my doorstep. The autumn leaves, the winging geese, the swirl of gold in the water bowl that is our pet.

But -- as I muse on my swing, lulled by the back and forth, the heartbeat of the universe -- I realize that what I am calling ruthless is in fact neutral. Competition is a word I judge, but it's really just a giant values sifter. I think of competition and I think of little girls not pretty enough for beauty pageants, crossing the finish line last, losing the big game. I bring to it the memories of an also-ran, of a sidelines girl. I invest it with psychic baggage. But it is neutral -- it brings to the top what we ask it to. If the values that we select for are compassion and consideration and -- yes yes -- love, then they will rise to the top of the machine as efficiently as ruthlessness.

Such is evolution as well. There is no poetry in it, only an equation. But perhaps that is poetry as well, even if it is an icy sort.

This is a conversation I had on my swing, with myself. My husband is not particularly interested in such musings. He will listen patiently -- a skill that has kept us married for fifteen years -- but it is the patience of an engineer who knows that if the wing strut is not adjusted just so, the whole thing crashes and burns. It is mumbo jumbo, like a Tom Cruise movie. He is not offended by my searching -- he doesn't tell me I'm a deluded wishful-thinking traitor to logic and reason, even if he thinks it. He tolerates my individual search for meaning. But it is very much an individual search.

My best friend tells me I think too much. She is Catholic and very happy being so, but she feels no need to conform to that playbook. She tells me I use too many big words. She says her conservative husband doesn't want her hanging around me anymore, that I'm a liberal nut job who's just gonna whack up her thinking too. She laughs when she says this because she doesn’t take him seriously.

My other best friend isn't speaking to me anymore; he's never said why. We used to have these long talks on faith. He was an agnostic who really wanted to be an atheist but couldn't quite pull it off. We debated whether religion was primarily a biological or socio/political construct. We discussed whether someone like him could maintain a relationship with a fundamentalist evangelical Christian girlfriend, a person who thought he was hot, yes, but who also thought he was going to hell. We told each other stories, like I'm telling stories now, and he listened this way too, with his full attention. I am guessing that in all that talking and listening, he finally ran up on something he couldn't say, that he couldn't have me hear. But it's all a guess on my part, an attempt to make our narrative into an arc that makes some sense to me.

Here is my point. I think we make stories to express a truth. But all truths -- even the kind that keep airplanes in the air -- have holes in them. My husband knows this -- he learned it at Georgia Tech in a class called differential equations. There are some values you cannot solve for -- you have to know how to fill in the blank and move on. In my world, a more right brain world than his, stories help us find out what might go in our empty spaces. They span them, like bridges, with their own rules of physics. They help us connect stars into constellations.

Because we talk of stars, of drinking them in. Starshine, stardust, star stuff. We adore our stars, make love to them with sonnets and telescopes. They define our nights. But in reality, if you stand outside and look up up up, what is chiefly visible is the darkness.