So, I am sitting down to write this first blog and all I can think about is how many rasins my eighteen month old has shoved in to her mouth. I am trying desperately to find a topic that can act as a drawing board for what is to come, but all I have to work with are sticky fingers and the chipmunk mouth of one happy little girl. I work so much better when I have a moleskin journal and a black fountain pen in front of me.
Maybe a good way to start this would be to explain what my blogs name means. The phrase "Not with a bang, but a whimper" is the last line of my favorite poem "The hollow men" by T. S. Elliot. I feel like those words so correctly define the end of things, not just in death, but in life as well. We have this idea that things end in this spectacular way. We hope that we will either go out in a blaze of glory, or that our legacy will have some element of grandeur to it. We think that there will be an explosion in destruction, like some believe there was in creation. I feel like this poem offers a more introspective way to view the truth about death and destruction.
"Shape without form, shade without color;
paralyzed force, gesture without motion;"
It depicts a kind of hopelessness that I think we all feel at one point in our lives. You can say you have never experienced it, but it could be that you simply never recognized it for what it was. And why is that kind of hopelessness so bad? If we never feel it, if no one has ever felt it, would there be any need to seek for an answer. No, I do not think there would be. I would hazard to say that the most dangerous thing a human can find is self-fulfillment. If we have all we need than the only thing that there is to feel is complacency. Complacency leads to death, death before its time. Death of others while we stand and watch in our self-fulfilled content. That is the true danger. Not an emptiness, but a fulness.
I still have a bit in me that feels like my eighteen month old with her mouth packed full of yogurt covered rasins. She can not possibly fit anymore than what is already there, but she reaches out her sticky hands demanding more. I do not think this can be considered greed, that is a different force altogether. It is instead a need to see what life has to offer. A desire to find the good and bad in life and fill the natural hole that was created in us. We become individuals by what we place in that gaping space and what we do with it. I hope I am always left just a little bit empty, and that I always have the strength to seek for more.
