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Dinesh / Photos

We must Struggle ~ Kay Ryan

encouragement.ghost.io/kay-ryan-why-we-must-struggle

Kay Ryan's first three lines of "Why We Must Struggle" paint a picture, though they do not formally illustrate anything. She cuts right to the question of why struggle, why failure, why pain, taking on the challenge of "Is any of this worth it?" "If we have not struggled / as hard as we can /at our strongest"opens her poem. There are no details to note, nothing specific to envision. But everyone reading this knows those who work horribly long hours in miserable conditions for a few dollars. We know why things like the "prosperity gospel" hold sway. A culture which shames everyone for everything, which assigns guilt for the thought things could be better, begs for grift as relief. "Struggle" can be a vicious, classist concept for the creation of subservience.

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3 comments

Dinesh said:

We can push the problem of class a little more, though. I always find myself reflecting on a teacher saying that the purpose of education is to enhance your life. Most of those he taught were well-off, from established families with explosive wealth. They had property, they had the means to buy more property, and what they had would not allow them to go broke. I guess if you are guaranteed to sit on an expanding pile of money, education can "enhance" your life.

But then there's the struggle of what an education actually is. Why Aristotle would call it "pain." It can't just be coaching, say, that makes you better at a game. It has to be about why you want to win in the first place. It has to be about why you would want to struggle at your "strongest." Not like going to the gym because Reddit and some viral videos said so, but why you might fight hard on a losing team. Why you would try to connect with family who want nothing to do with you. Why you'll do good things you know you'll be blamed for.

Why would we struggle at our "strongest"? Ryan gives three answers. If we don't, "how will we sense / the shape of our losses / or know what sustains / us longest or name what change costs us." Again, what's at stake: "the shape of our losses," knowledge of "what sustains / us longest," the cost of change. This is not how struggle is sold to us. We're told it is about proving ourselves. We show we are worthy, deserving.
2 weeks ago

Dinesh said:

We're told it is about becoming tougher, putting ourselves in positions where we are less affected by the world. We're told struggle is about empowerment. At times like this I am enormously grateful for poetry. I don't have to think too hard to know how much serious political and philosophical thought runs on the assumption that struggle has a set, positive value. And here's Ryan blowing that all up. What does struggle teach? I'll just focus on the words hitting the hardest at the moment: "the shape of our losses."

I love watching sports and athletes of all sorts routinely achieve the amazing. But it's worth thinking about what a limited idea of "loss" sports has given us. Is life about championships, posing on a magazine cover, a career in the broadcast booth? None of that stuff is real, and that's what you get for winning. What are losses, truly? When you introduce the full scope of what Ryan invokes, winning and losing seasons count for nearly nothing.

I worked a lot of jobs I would never do again unless I was absolutely desperate. Movie theater, cleaner for a church, gas station attendant. That time could have been better spent doing anything, If I had gotten better at strategy gaming I would have been more productive. That time was lost, but there were some deep lessons. In each job I got to see people who were barely hanging on. In the movie theater, older people who needed extra income had to work long hours. They deserved so much better. A lot of regulars who came into the convenience store stopped coming in at some point. You knew why they died before old age. Every day, you could see the visible toll on their health from the jobs they needed. While cleaning at the the church, this one guy came in daily to pray for hours, fighting for every inch of his sobriety.
2 weeks ago

Dinesh said:

A brief reflection on the shape of a minor loss reveals how much more loss there is. You realize how unnecessary struggle is; it does destroy lives. This is, in a strange, contradictory way, life-affirming. Fanny Howe put it this way: that since life is not worth living, it is worth living. This is, to be sure, a rather Nietzschean idea. He'll speak about his philosophy being life-affirming as opposed to life-denying, but then glorify war, violence, and hierarchy. It does seem he's wrestling with how the value of life cannot be stated outright. It has to be discovered. And this means some people will never truly live. I don't say that to judge. There are so many who believe that doing violence to children for a paycheck is a justified matter of survival. I would be lying if I said they were actually living. They are merchants and servants of death. At some point, the world is in fact a moral order, because it cannot be otherwise.

I'd like to close these remarks with Ryan's last words: "how loss activates / a latent double how / we can feed / as upon nectar / upon need?" The puzzle is how loss gives birth. The self splits, as she says, and one part of you comes to the rescue of another part. Where was that person all along? Where were you to yourself? It isn't clumsy motivational rhetoric. Going back to the question of how a genuine education is a struggle, it becomes abundantly clear that what only "enhances," never transforms, cannot possibly be a human experience.
2 weeks ago
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