Commentary Essay I: Given

“The ornamentation of reality is the concealment of reality.”

—Marilynne Robinson

Overcoming Limitations

From one perspective, Human History is a story of overcoming limitations. Perhaps since the dawn of time, we have been toiling to transcend that which holds us back. Picture our ancient ancestors crafting rafts and boats to conquer the choppy seas, or inventing new languages and alphabets to expand the horizons of communication.

What, after all, determines the greatness of human achievements but the trials and obstacles they overcome?

We see this in the innumerable scientific advances since the European Enlightenment(s) and corresponding Industrial Revolution. For example, technological breakthroughs in travel and communication have defied many hitherto insurmountable human limitations, making possible novel forms of human existence. Friends around the globe are but a text away, and a flight from NYC to LA takes less than seven hours. Airplanes and cell phones were profound achievements precisely because they overcame profound human limitations—nothing less than space and time.

This seems to apply across all domains of human life. The most celebrated achievements in art, music, and sport are likewise those which defy the greatest odds. Michelangelo and Franz Schubert, Thelonious Monk and Michael Jordan: the greatness of these men lies in their indifference to limitations—or, rather, in their Promethean transcendence of those limitations, of human nature itself.

Furthermore, rejecting strictures and limitations is woven into the fabric of the American Dream. We even have a name for the people who give themselves to the unfettered pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness: Self-Made Men.

Self-Made Men

In his essay of that very title, former slave and American abolitionist Fredrick Douglass wrote that so-called self-made men are “in a peculiar sense, indebted to themselves for themselves.” They are not set apart by their privileges, but by self-reliance and good old-fashioned hard work. 

Douglass goes on: “If they have traveled far, they have made the road on which they have travelled. If they have ascended high, they have built their own ladder. From the depths of poverty such as these have often come. From the heartless pavements of large and crowded cities; barefooted, homeless, and friendless, they have come. From hunger, rags and destitution, they have come; motherless and fatherless, they have come, and may come.”

Douglass believed that necessity ultimately drives such people to construct better lives for themselves. “A man never knows the strength of his grip till life and limb depend upon it,” he wrote. “Something is likely to be done when something must be done.” As one who nearly lost his life at the hands of his malevolent slavers (literally), Douglass knew what he was talking about. In his autobiography, he narrates his heroic escape from slavery via the Underground Railroad and eventual rise among the New England gentry as a writer, activist, and abolitionist. It is a tale of death-defying odds; so far from accepting a tragic fate, Douglass forged a new legacy for himself by overcoming impossible limitations, and he still stands today as a paragon of the pull-yourself-up-by-your-own-bootstraps American Way.

“From these remarks it will be evident that, allowing only ordinary ability and opportunity, we may explain success mainly by one word and that word is WORK! WORK!! WORK!!! WORK!!!!”

—Fredrick Douglass

So, if both human progress and greatness necessitate transcending our limitations, it would seem that limitations inherently impede Life. That is, they only exist to be transgressed, and to the degree that they are, Human Progress marches on in glory. 

But then, you would be hard pressed to defend all human progress as necessary. Some steps forward are really steps backward (just ask the FDA.) And if it isn’t necessary, how are we to understand it? Here deeper questions begin to surface: What classifies an invention or a work of art as progressive or regressive? Are we better off respecting, rather than crossing, certain boundaries? Which ones?

Embracing Limitations

Even Douglass admitted that no man is truly self-made—or, put differently, that man does not enter the world as a tabula rasa and thereafter define himself through sheer acts of will. No, we all rely on the strength of others. Here Douglass is worth quoting at length:

“We have all either begged, borrowed or stolen. We have reaped where others have sown, and that which others have strown, we have gathered. It must in truth be said, though it may not accord well with self-conscious individuality and self-conceit, that no possible native force of character, and no depth of wealth and originality, can lift a man into absolute independence of his fellowmen, and no generation of men can be independent of the preceding generation. The brotherhood and inter-dependence of mankind are guarded and defended at all points.”

Douglass described individuals like waves of the ocean, distinct from one another, yet never detached from the whole: "We differ as the waves, but are one as the sea.”

The first release from Vanora explores what Douglass meant when he wrote that we have all “reaped where others have sown.” Its focus is not those limitations humans must overcome (in Douglass’ case, the unjust reality of slavery) but those which we might embrace in order to flourish—not that which we choose but that which we are Given. The axiomatic. The there. As such, the Given encompasses both the realms of nature and of Divine grace, for both lie beyond the reach of human choice. In the end, we do not determine who we are by nature or who we become by grace. In Saint Paul’s words: “By the grace of God I am what I am.” 

Our families and friends, language and geography, even our physical makeup as humans: all these fall under the category of the Given. Attending to the givenness of reality reminds us that we are only ever waves in an ancient ocean which long preceded us, which at every moment sustains us, and which, at the last, will supersede us as well. A wave which resents its ties to the sea has lost touch with reality. That is not a limitation to be overcome. It is not really a limitation at all.

To be sure, many facts of reality are cold, hard as nails. Douglass will be the first to remind us of that! Nevertheless, the three poems and paintings of this first series—Given—begin from the premise that life is not only given, but a gift given.

Explore "Given"

———

Sources

Fredrick Douglass, Self-Made Men (1872). http://monadnock.net/douglass/self-made-men.html.