Thoughts?

Here is the thing about failure: Once it starts, once that ineffable losing streak begins to weave its path into your day-to-day fate, you never again regain the sense of invincibility that you once had. Every teenaged boy is a bristling ball of security. No matter how abused or down-trodden, no matter how self-conscious or needy in most respects, no teenager ever thinks of himself as anything other than invincible and eternal. Sure, there are the death fantasies and there are the moments of horror about complexion or school-yard cruelty, but the fact remains, hope and life are still intertwined in inexorable affinity.

There is a point however, usually sometime in the mid-to-late twenties, when the inherent flaws and perfectly honed responses that family, friends and community have built into the individual, when failure begins to raise its ugly head. There is no way to avoid it totally. Some people can manage to make it into their thirties; usually they have money or phenomenal looks to back them up, some magical charm that keeps them safe from the inevitable, without facing up to the evil visage of their own self-defeating nature.

When it comes, it crushes. There is nothing like a true failure, a failure in career, in love, in friendship or general denial of the boons and graces that life has granted hitherto. It is the end, quite simply the end of childhood. It is not the beginning of adulthood, merely the end of the previous, grace-filled state. Failure doesn’t make one a man. Failure can hone a person’s manhood, but it does not create, ex nihilo, manhood.

That is what failure does not do; let’s talk about what it does. It steals, even if you give yourself to your failings, even if you have granted failure every possible advantage and license, it still steals the sense of value that you had a right to. It steals it away and while you may regain this or that sense of self, or this or that sense of worth, you can never regain the sense of value, inherent value and pride that you held beforehand. In some cases this is a good thing. Inflated sense of worth is a negative attribute and failure is the comeuppance of the arrogant soul. But it is a cruel lesson learned.

One might find, as I confess to having found, that later in life, after the failure of youth and after the hard won and oft referred to struggle to regain self-worth, that any minor failing, and minor falling out or disagreement, any minor ruffle in the otherwise placid surface of day to day life causes me to question everything I hold dear. I am not a man, I am not of value, I am not capable, I am not intelligent, I am not worthy or worthwhile. I am merely a failure.

Each time I reach this conclusion, each time I fail, I have to re-fight the battles of my nature and my upbringing and regain the sound footing that tells me that I am a man, that I have value, that I am capable, intelligent, worthy and worthwhile. But each time, that victory, once won, is less sweet. It is tinged, each time, by a greater and greater knowledge of how tenuous, how easily lost the ground is. The battles are less difficult to win, the points less difficult to score, because in each battle I better know the ground recovered. But that makes the ground worth less and less. And I am not becoming MORE of a man, etc. each time. I am remaining, sustaining a manhood. My value does not increase, but the value of holding onto it decreases. It is a losing battle, in the face of failure.

Just as pain is a supposedly necessary part of physical existence, failure is a necessary part of the emotional makeup of a man. But just as pain is also attached to destructive forces and the deterioration of the body, so failure is the anathema of success. And it is a poison that once tasted is forever a part of the self.

Too Clever By Half?

The Bodies Exhibit, Washington DC

The exhibit is held at the too-modern for words Newseum at The Dome in Rosslyn. The locale is extremely futuristic as befits this post-modern, post-moral, post-mortem. The rather stark entrance-way leads directly to the stark-raving coat-check fellow, who rambles semi-coherently about flash photography. Then up the stairs to the Will-Call window and a quick stop at the trivia-festooned bathrooms. (Hint: Toes is the correct answer.)

The exhibit itself: It starts out with a whimper. From behind a small partition you emerge into the soft light of a scapula and the first of the eerily standing corpses. The lighting is subdued, bringing out the brown of the epicanthically-folded, oddly taxiderm-ish eye on the plasticine'd cadaver. The initial reaction is one of stressless shock. It hasn't sunk in yet that there are former human beings posed around. You still have your vaguely clinical detachment, as you move to the second room, noticing that the trivia motif has continued, that the lighting now shows anatomic structures on the walls and that your mind insists that they are only patterns. That's when two things strike you, hard: the flesh is shiny, wet-looking, too biological to be detached from; the second is the tiny, blood-red bug trapped in the case with the sagittal section of the brain and skull. It's moving about, Escher-like, with the maggot assurance that there is food somewhere. You insist to yourself that it is old-fashioned, archaic, to be grossed-out. You try as hard as you can not to imagine it eating anything... That's when you enter the room of the disembodied flesh and your gorge starts seriously to rise.

If you've ever seen the Texas Chainsaw Massacre II, there's an immediate reference, but it sends you reeling into horror terminology and becomes one more thing to repress...

Past partition after partition, past the respiratory system, some grisly hearts and the absurd anti-smoking section, you stumble half-heartedly. The question of the participant's willingness keeps rearing up, but it's not till you move downstairs that the force of it shocks, literally shocks your system.

In a series of jars, preserved like berries at Grandma's house, are succeeding stages of fetal development. All questions of willingness, voluntary participation or free will dissolve at the recognition of the miniature fingers, toes, eyes and hearts. The increasingly manic trivia proclaims the beginning of the heartbeat and the helpfulness of the placenta. To be fair, you can side-step this room, but it doesn't make the room not exist and you no longer have any desire to be fair.

The final room contains a lab-coated museum worker to offer a scholarly benediction, to point out the scientific value and natural wonder of what you have just seen. Like an apologist at an abattoir she directs your gaze around the dissected Asian bodies that haven't already shocked you. A stronger stomach than yours would have been quaking by now, and you are feeling sick to death of it. The crowd around her, in a religio-scientific rapture excoriates our, "insane morality," for holding us back from performing this act on our own. And one can't help but reflect on the other horrors that have been encouraged in the name of science.

If this seems a breathless, or an over-excited review, it is only because perspective has not yet been reached. It is an artful exhibit, well set up, cleverly controlled and brilliantly propagandized, but one can't help but lose perspective in the host of unanswered moral dilemmas that no one in the room seemed even slightly bothered by.