She sat at the bottom of a long flight of stairs. I was standing near her and looking up. The brick building we were next to echoed the impressive brick chapel at the university here. Only this chapel was not out in the open under the sky, but in a very dark, dingy place. High up on its brick walls, water pipes and gas pipes were attached to it. Attached though, on the outside. And very precariously attached. Most of the mounts to the pipes were missing, so that segments hung crazily down and bent and zigzagged across the bricks. The whole infrastructure serving the place with water and gas looked ready to fail.
“Why did you take away the mounts?” I said to my sister. I was angry with her.
“It didn't seem like they were necessary.” I noticed she was not wearing her leg brace. Maybe that was why she was sitting on the stairs and not standing. I said nothing about this. I woke up with a pounding heart, not exactly afraid, but nervous. I lay awake for a good half hour pondering the dream.
As any regular reader here knows, I'm a fan of doing without. Or at least with less. But it's important to choose wisely what we try to do without and with less of. Certain mounts and supports in life are necessary, or else the pipes give way and break. And my conviction is that what we've done, in modern life, is taken far too many of the wrong things out of our lives. Almost out of spite. Out of some abstract rage to rid ourselves of the hallucinated succubus of dependency.
We fear economic dependency, and so we put off marriage and parenthood until we've established ourselves in our professions, and maybe have a house. But if love and relationship takes second place in our hierarchy of values, or third or fourth, how will those relationships, in the end, work out?
I think they will tend to collapse.
A teacher tells me about the creative writing students she teaches, who, out of a fear of being influenced unduly, as a rule do not read books. To me, this is like trying to work out in the fields all day without feeding yourself a meal. But again, “This creation is all mine!” we want to say. “Nobody else helped me to make it.” Forget the fact that language itself is a mutually created artifact! That not a single word can be traded with understanding, that exists apart from social collaboration!
Or consider humanity's relationship with the earth. There we are every bit as allergic to the idea of dependency as can be. We can fish the fish out of the sea and still have fish, right? We can fill the rivers with toxins and still have water to drink, right?
Or consider suburbia, perhaps the purest built image of social doubt. Everyone with a separate property. Fences between houses. Very few who really know their neighbors. Here the friendship pipe is broken. You have to drive elsewhere to talk to someone you love or care about. Or of course you can go into your house and keep in touch (often by means of machines) with people you know. But less and less of this interaction is face to face. We don't really need that after all.
Which brings me back to my sister. When she was alive, she had a few people she could count on, but given the depth and tenacity of her troubles, maybe not enough. She had kind neighbors, as we, her family discovered after her death, but these neighbors did not really know her while she was alive. She had family, but we were reachable only by phone, and were often too busy, or so she believed, to talk. And whenever something went wrong with a relationship with a friend, rather than repairing it, she often retreated. "I don't need that person. No, what feeds my soul, can feed me without her."
“Why did you take away the mounts?” I said to my sister.
“It didn't seem like they were necessary.”
But they are. They were. They always will be. Or we wither and die. And our real brothers and sisters find us only in their dreams.
HB
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