Tetralogue III: Expectation

To those who wander, lost and aimless; for the sleepless and the restless.

A continuation of the Tetralogue. Other parts are found here: Part I; Part II; Part IV.

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[F]or we all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them.
- George Eliot, Middlemarch

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To be a self is to live toward the future and to do so not only in the form of purposiveness, but also of expectation, anticipation, anxiety, and hope.
- H. Richard Niebuhr, The Responsible Self

What a glorious word this is. I do not remember when, precisely, I began thinking of it the way that I do now. But by AD 2019, I had begun to work out what I think it can mean; not what many may think it means, but what it—it itself—could potentially mean. Words are symbols—semiotic operators—and their magnitudes vary from recipient to recipient. Please, receive this, my now four-years-old consideration of this word. Were I not writing this for you under such grave circumstances, I might take the time to reframe, to renovate, my old writing to my contemporary stylistic choices. To rethink some old thoughts, even. But my aim is for this to find you sooner than later. And if not for these grave circumstances, I cannot imagine why I would give you this at all. Funny how the pen of Providence writes, after all.

So: we have levered Rage over the fulcrum of self, thereby passing through the vale of Suicide to the sun-splashed valley beyond. What to do now? Well, new Expectations must be set, framed, established. For expectations are so often the metaphors by which we live, and as we may act fatally thereon, we must get them right. What follows is a letter to two friends/coworkers, whom I sent many dozens of emails titled “Word of the Day,” in which I would discuss, well, a given word per day. I would always close with example sentences.

... [Discussion of my etymology of “expectation”] So we already know ex – “out of,” so what about “pectation”? Well: pectus, pectoris – chest. But, more importantly, it can be rendered as “heart” or “seat of emotion/reason.” The Romans thought of the heart as the seat of emotion and the soul, not the brain (hence our associating the “heart” with love etc.). Now, I originally came upon this putative etymology based on the verb form: expect. For in that context, ex-pect(us) is very easy to glimpse. And it would be a verb form of “out of the heart,” or “from the soul.” And an expectation would thus be that which springs out of the heart, out of the soul.

Should such an etymology bear out, it colors the word with a conspicuous gravity. A tremendous amount of emotion—of trauma and of delight—is wrapped up in expectation. I haven’t fully worked this out, yet, and I may never, but there is some truth hovering out beyond my reach. A close approximation is, “Unexpected things are beautiful.” But it’s not true—it’s incomplete—because unexpected things also compose those worst horrors, those starkest violences, which rend our souls and perforate our psychologies. But it’s partially true. Because if we expect something, does it have the same, the same essence, or efficacy, as the unexpected? If one hears a beautiful, ethereal piece of music, and one is then moved to tears—is it not unexpected? At least a fraction of that lacrimatory movement is due to the unexpected nature of the beauty. If you were to know exactly the emotions an article of reality should arouse from your heart—would it still arouse them? In some cases, of course, yes: if a certain hymn is associated in one’s mind with a funeral, one can, upon thinking of the hymn, know how one shall react if called upon to sing it. But this only further proves my hypothesis: because the gravity, the essence, of those emotions, springs from the association of the funeral, and death is always unexpected. Even when it is most expected, it remains unexpected, for we were not created to experience death. It is foreign to our souls; it is a pathogen, a parasite, an interloper. Death by definition is “out of our souls,” because it is outside of them. Utterly, indelibly outside of them: for our souls cannot die. And so of course deaths are unexpected, for despite all the sin and violence which wells up from us—for there is no health in us—our dim images of God have not the empty space for even the tiny reality of death. Death is too small a thing to fit into the heart of man, for the heart of man was created for Eternity.

And so it is less elegant a phrasing, but perhaps one might posit, “The most beautiful things and the most ravaging things are rarely expected.” And this might explain why some of our deepest pains are over such seemingly trivial things. Because an overwhelming preponderance of our experiences in life are not, as much as we would like to think, prime reality—no, our experiences occur at the intersection of prime reality and our expectations. When one’s friends gather for a party, but the host is one’s enemy, and thus one is not invited, two outcomes are possible: (1) Deep hurt at being ostracized from the group, and (2) Serenity and dispassion in the face of a social snubbing. Now, speaking from experience, I have watched myself incur both. Case 1 occurs when one expects— there’s that word!—to be invited. Prime reality, however, proceeds to not align with the expectation. That which sprung from the soul is smashed to pieces by the unyielding scepter of Reality. An unpleasant metaphor for an unpleasant lot. Case 2 occurs when one expects(!) to not be invited. Suddenly, that which sprung from the soul receives the blessing of Reality. How satisfying—for the instincts of one’s heart to be rewarded by alignment with Reality! There is no surprise, no shock; no beauty, no violence; really, there is effectively nothing. But there is a third case, actually. As well as a fourth. Because what if one is invited? Here, I shall resort to mathematics.

Let us define {-1,1} as the array of outcomes: -1 = not invited; +1 = invited. The distance between -1 and +1 on a number line is two units, right? +1 - (-1) = 2. Let us then define {-1,1} as the array of expectations: -1 = expect to not be invited; +1 = expect to be invited. So let’s look at the possible cases.

     1.     Expected not to be invited (-1) and was not invited (-1): difference of zero. As I said above, no shock, no beauty—nothing. Correct, but no fun.
     2.     Expected to be invited (+1) and was not invited (-1): difference of two. Expectation was +1, reality was -1: that is a difference of two units in the negative direction. Which aptly describes the smashing-to-pieces I described above.
     3.     Expected to be invited (+1) and was invited (+1): difference of zero. Nothing. Fun, but correct: life as usual.

But now something magical occurs.

     4.     Expected not to be invited (-1) and was invited (+1): difference of two units—in the positive direction. Unexpected beauty. Glorious shock. Joy. Unexpected things are beautiful.

There are other cases I ignored: those with expectation = 0, where 0 would be an indifferent or blasé attitude. But such indifference, if one does the math above, leads to tepid joys or hazy malaise. But by controlling your expectations—by warping and swelling your expectations, scaling them to your environment—one can either: (1) receive no invitation, and be correct, but not hurt; or (2) receive an invitation, be wrong, and be surprised by delight. Of course the insulation isn’t perfect. One might always expect one’s lover to act in certain ways, for instance (to assume based on one’s notion of what a “lover” ought to do in x or y circumstance), and the heartbreak which results from incongruence between the behavior and one’s expectations shall always be a violent mess. But expectations allow us some measure of damage control in the face of a world determined to draw blood. Because what I said earlier is true: there is no space in the human heart for death. But the hearts of some are so small, so shriveled, that death has swallowed them up. And those men, and those women: they wander the Earth with sharp claws, and sharp teeth, and sharpest tongues of all. And they prey upon doves, and they gorge themselves, bones and all. And thus we must be wise as serpents. Off the top of my head... [sic]

     The solitary tear slipped off her cheek, plunging towards the sofa, breezily
     conceding to gravity’s demands. “But Mother, O Mother, he never—he never...”
     As the water slips into the fabric, her mother quietly comforts her. “We never
     think that we shall be a statistic, darling, but—” as the salt crystals harden,
     microscopic flakes on the—“I never expected, I never, I never, that he would—”
     but the dark spot was shrinking, the water adsorbing to the air—“but dear, the
     whole race of men, they’re all cheating good-for-nothings who—” and no more
     tears came, though her eyes were puffy—“but you’re wrong, Mother. Your
     husband was a good man. And I shall find one like him. Goodbye.” For hope is
     the air which every heart breathes.

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Shall we, ever so briefly, return to Kierkegaard? How does one effect the Infinite Resignation, much less then receive all in return via the movement of Faith? Well, I believe that a large part of that is the right channeling of expectations. More Niebuhr:

The God to whom Jesus points is not the commander who gives laws but the doer of small and of mighty deeds, the creator of sparrows and clother of lilies, the ultimate giver of blindness and of sight, the ruler whose rule is hidden in the manifold activities of plural agencies but is yet visible to those who know...”
- H. Richard Niebuhr, The Responsible Self

The Expectation, then, might be that God, in His Authorship, has wrought so innumerable a volume of plots and subplots as to leave us utterly bewildered and lost. And thus, what follows in Infinite Resignation?—the discharge of expectations. Let me, friend, put a very fine, even unto sharp, point to this. I have not heard from the _____ for, oh, at least a month. I call them; I text them; I write them; I pray for them. Nothing. That is enough to be very hurtful, but—I simply don’t care. I do care, of course—a great deal!—but I have no expectations. Rather, I expect nothing less: I expect almost nothing, now, from anyone. Because so often, I am met with, or given, or faced with: nothing. And so I expect just that, which is to say, nothing, from most people; and there is contentment there, because my expectations are aligned, clean and smooth, with the hard, jagged edges of reality.

The Expectation towards God? That I shall continue to wither and sear in His crucible. To burn, but not be consumed. [Remember the last fires of Purgatorio; and remember that there were four in the furnace.] I know not why—to what end—my senses were stripped away twenty months ago, why I lost almost every fiber of muscle in my body; why my mind and heart were shattered. But they were, plain and matter-of-fact. It was all there, clear as day, Written—Carved —into Reality’s fabric by the Loving Hand of God. For that Hand was pierced, remember; and the scar remains even now. The Expectation is very difficult to capture, without sounding horrifically cynical, or pessimistic, or, in its extremeness, God-hating or -resenting; but the Expectation is that I may only be a lily, but even lilies are cared for—and not even one lily is consumed by a wildfire’s crackling maw without the Loving Permission of the Father. The Expectation is that I must always cling ever more loosely to that of this world, in exchange for That Which is to come; but the paradox, which Kierkegaard shows, is that in doing so, my clinging to finitude—my care for that which is of this world—shall only further deepen. Because of course, it does hurt to be generally ignored by, well, almost all of my “friends,” until they need or want something from me—but it hurts because I have elected to care about them. The deeper the love, the deeper the possible injuries.

To be torn asunder, in one’s heart and soul, over matters of this world, is not an index of weakness, of carelessness, of poor piety. It is of Love; it is of heeding St. John’s words that we, Little Children, love one another; it is of being given the finitude by means of the Infinite.

But expectations, like all good things, are very hard. It can be best—or, the only thing yet possible—to start small. Very small. Even five minutes. I expect that God shall preserve me even for the next five minutes. And that which sprang for your heart? It shall find alignment in Reality. And on, and on, and on. Slow, trembling steps at first. You shall run again in time, friend.

There was a time when I didn’t at any minute have the slightest idea how I could reach the next one. Yes, one can wage war in this world, ape love, torture one’s fellow man, or merely say evil of one’s neighbor while knitting. But, in certain cases, carrying on, merely continuing, is superhuman.
- Albert Camus, The Fall