Commerce and Trade

One night in bed Bruce and I were talking about World War II and why the U. S. had entered (romantic, eh?) He said it had occurred to him that we really did it to preserve our trade routes and trading partnerships more than for any military reason. So I asked him the question that’s been on my mind so much lately – is trade and commerce all there is? Is this what life is about? It seems so in America, where everywhere you look is an advertisement. But even in Tanzania, everywhere I went, people were selling food – holding it up to the windows of buses slowed down in traffic –oranges, symmetrically peeled with knives, roasted field corn, sweets. And then there was the market where people sold baskets and dyed cloth and vegetables. There was a woodcarvers market where I bought carvings to bring back for people and I bought myself a lovely Zanzibar chest. But then I gave it away the following Christmas. Every now and then, like right now, I have a moment of mild longing for it – the beautifully carved top, the secret drawer inside – but then it is gone.


We are always wanting something. Meaning that we are missing something. We lack. We want. And people seem to always be selling something to fill that lack. I shop in thrift stores because I love to shop. Is there any place else where I can actually buy just about everything that I like? And then if I decide I don’t like it after all, I can just give it away and not have really lost anything. It surprises me to hear myself say that I love to shop, but it’s true. I do. I love going to Tucson, thrift store heaven, with an empty suitcase, and coming back with it full.

Clearly I am not the only one who loves to shop, or the parking lots at malls would be empty. But is that what life is about? Trading my time and skill for money so I can use that money to buy stuff? Nations make deals for ships full of grain and rubber tires. People make deals for a new skirt, a frosted cake, an iPod Touch. Black Friday is news, and it started earlier this past year. Stores opened on Thanksgiving Day. This was shocking to the media (they were shocked, I tell you), but it had to happen. The public must have its shopping! On sale! Between Thanksgiving and Christmas! It’s the shopping season! And let’s not forget Cyber Monday. This too is news, especially back when it first started happening. But that was when people only really had computers at work. Now we have them everywhere, so there’s no real cyber Monday anymore. Now it’s buy, buy, buy any day at any hour from anywhere. So what’s with Black Friday again?

Last year was the first time I noticed that between Thanksgiving and Christmas, instead of “How are you?” I would hear, “Did you get your shopping done yet?” It occurred to me what big assumptions are made with that question. The biggest one is that Christmas shopping is a universal activity that everyone does. Another is that everyone wants to finish as quickly as possible, because the question isn’t “Are you enjoying your shopping?” or “Are you finding good gifts this year?” No, it’s “Did you get your shopping done?” Everyone must do it. And we must at least pretend we don’t enjoy it and just want to get it done. But maybe we don’t enjoy it. After all, we’re supposed to be buying gifts for others, which is rarely as much fun as buying things for ourselves.

 

On December 28 I was on a bus from New York City to Albany. Store after store, mostly big boxes, lined the highway: Staples, Best Buy, Mattress Warehouse. How is it possible that we can buy enough stuff to keep so many stores in business? (Which makes money for their owners/employees, so they too can buy stuff at other stores.)

                        The world is too much with us late and soon.

Getting and spending we lay waste our powers

What are those powers Wordsworth writes of? And if we shouldn’t get and spend, or at least not do so much of it, what should we be doing?

We are surrounded by the riches of a stupendously beautiful world. One winter afternoon Bruce and I walked on the field next door in a brisk sunny breeze. Clouds of powdery snow were blowing around us. I was glad I wore snow pants and mittens against the cold. I looked down and saw three quarters of a perfect circle traced on the surface of the snow. It was not just one line but three concentric curves, the outer two close together and the inner one a bit further apart. This startling pattern was caused by a thin broken stalk of dead grass, with part of its seed head still intact, being blown in circles by the wind. I can’t do it justice in words, the perfection of that drawing on the snow, and yet it was the work of one piece of grass. What about the cathedral-like colors of a walk on the Moose Pond trail in September, with the sun shining through leaves of red, yellow, and fluorescent orange, making the entire forest glow? What about the sparkle of sun on the surface of Oregon Pond on a late summer afternoon, as if I’m gazing out over molten silver?

One of our powers is that of awe, of opening up to absorb the intense beauty of the world, not that most of us are adequate to it, at least I’m not. But we open as far as we can. Then we have to do something. Mark Halliday wrote in his poem “Venus Pandemos” that part of his problem with a beautiful woman is that he feels like he has to “do something about her beauty”. “Is it a defining quality of beauty/ that it won’t leave us alone?” And when I read that for the first time, I thought, yes, that is exactly what beauty is, what makes it different from prettiness. Pretty is good enough. It’s good in a comfortable way, an attractiveness that we are adequate to. Beauty is more than that. We are not adequate to it. We must do something about it – paint a picture, write a poem, sing, or, if it really gets under our skin, maybe even destroy it. It’s why the tourists at the Grand Canyon take so many pictures. They are simultaneously trying to do something with the overflow of beauty and also, as Walker Percy writes, trying to avoid a direct encounter with it because they are so aware of their own lack of capacity to absorb it.

E. F. Schumacher writes about the principle of adequatio in his book A Guide for the Perplexed (a wonderful book!) In order to perceive something, our senses must be adequate to the task. Without vision we will never be able to perceive color. Yet even with our five physical senses intact, there are things beyond our ability to perceive, let alone comprehend. Such as God. Beauty is on the continuum between color and God. Like color, if we have vision, we can perceive visual beauty. But like with God, no senses are tuned properly to fully comprehend it. “For this, for everything, we are out of tune,” says Wordsworth.  And yet he also writes, elsewhere,

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,

Hath had elsewhere its setting,

And cometh from afar:

Not in entire forgetfulness,

And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come

From God, who is our home:

When we are born we are adequate to it all – we perceive and comprehend beauty, God, everything. We see it all with awe. “The sunshine is a glorious birth”, but then the “forgetting” comes, and we realize that “there hath passed away a glory from the earth.” We lose our capacity to open to the beauty, and it “fades into the light of common day”.

But the light of common day is what we have to work with. “Tomorrow’s gonna be another working day, and I’m trying to get some rest. That’s all, I’m trying to get some rest,” sings Paul Simon, and yet, in the same song, “I dreamed I was flying. I dreamed that my soul rose unexpectedly and looking back down at me, smiled reassuringly. And I dreamed I was flying.” Nothing to do with getting and spending, just living – working, resting, and the occasional dream that opens you up like a flower, like a firework, those temporary beauties. If we stay closed maybe we can stay alive forever, but if we don’t open are we even alive at all?

Beauty opens us, painfully, with a screwdriver wedged between the tiles of our protective shells, forcing them apart. We are not adequate to it; we can never quite open enough to fully comprehend it. And it is almost always temporary. Perhaps that’s why when we see something beautiful, we want to buy it, to pin it down and keep it forever. Thank goodness for all the stores, all the commerce, all the wars that have kept the trade routes open. We shall never want for anything. Buy it and that glory will never pass away from the earth.