Saturday, January 23, 2010
For gracious sake. Living means more than surviving
Liza Field
Liza Field's column appears twice a month in Extra.
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"Well fuh GUNNess SAKE!" my grandmother Phyllis would often exclaim, marveling at a snowfall, a crocus, a mistake or anything gone haywire.
It was as near to swearing as she ever came, in my hearing, unless you counted its variant phrase, "For Gracious Sake!"
Either utterance expressed wonderment, often mixed with astonished mirth. It might lead to fits of giggles, high-pitched and two-toned as chimes and piglet squeals, accompanied by the stamping of her tiny, pump-shod foot, squinched eyes streaming tears and astonishingly unladylike snorts as she struggled desperately to inhale -- then gave way to a fresh gale of giggles and contorted stampings.
I, who had apparently inherited her total helplessness in the grip of humor, would by then be rolling on the floor in a writhing, oxygen-starved ball of hilarity, clutching my stomach, praying for air and trying fiercely to think of something dreadful and sad.
Afterward, we would sit up straight, sniffing and blinking, passing her box of Kleenex back and forth and wiping our red faces. Able at last to inhale, we would collectively sigh, "Hooooooo!" And then, struck by our own bizarreness, we'd add in unison, "GUNN-ess! GUNN-ess GRACIOUS SAKE!"
A lost expression
Why did we say this, I would occasionally wonder? Who was "Goodness"? Who was "Gracious"? And why was all this laughter and wonderment for their "sakes"?
I figured it all meant "God," who was supposed to be gracious and good. Moreover, all three words began with a "G."
It would have been considered rude to say "for God's sake" like gangsters on TV, and so these words were Southern replacements, kind of like "shoot" and "shucks," "fiddlesticks" and "oh foot" replaced other forbidden words in our mystifying, euphemistic diction.
These days, of course, Americans north and south sprinkle the word "God" liberally through their sentences (or merely text-message "OMG!" several times a day -- usually to express disapproval more than wonder). Cuss words likewise get dumped so indiscriminately into conversation flow, they have no more power to amaze us than the landscape trash or river contaminants we've grown used to.
Hence, people no longer have to say "for gracious sake." The ancient word "sake" is itself still in usage, but so embedded within automatic phrases, we rarely wonder what the solitary word means.
Yet "sake" -- a "purpose" or "end" -- is a timeless, perennial idea that brings up timeless, perennial questions.
For what sake is life? Why are we here?
Seeking life's sake
After my grandfather died, Grandma wondered why she existed. She learned to drive and maintain a car, figure out finances and cook for one. She still had giggle fits, fed the birds and made both kin and stranger feel valued. But for what sake she was living was often unapparent to her.
Over the years, I've heard many bereft widows and widowers express the same mystery. Likewise retirees and those laid off from work. Likewise schoolchildren wondering each summer why they are here.
Such emergent existentialists are usually told to "keep busy." After all, "for what sake?" -- although an ancient, spiritual question -- has constituted little more than an unproductive, unsettling hole within our recent centuries of Industrial-Age thought.
And before that, few humans had much time to ask. When people are struggling dawn to sundown for a meal, there's no spare energy to ask "why?"
When survival needs are met, the question "Why?" can emerge -- but only when there's enough time and silence to think.
While cramming for tests or meeting deadlines at work or on some endless track for more things, information and upgrades, we need not ask why. Often, it's assumed we're here to fill some obvious function, to make the grade, obtain money and reputation.
Nobody says, "You are here to giggle. To express wonder. To care about birds and turtles. To love your enemy; plant milkweed and oaks; pray for the world." Such purposes don't register economically or politically -- and so they don't exist as a "sake" in that narrow spectrum of reality.
This seems a huge waste to me, mainly because it makes no sense.
Surely, as psychiatrist Victor Frankl suggested, life's meaning is more than survival -- no matter how heavily and lavishly we define "survival" today. Existing in order to keep existing composes a circular gerbil wheel that throws no meaning out of its spin.
It seems to me that this void of meaning (or avoidance of meaning) is bothering people today, young and old. It even seems our evasion of the quest for meaning -- often dismissed as a dysfunction -- might point to one root of America's high depression and anxiety rates.
"For gracious sake!" you may saying with annoyance by now, "That seems like a stretch!"
Nonetheless, I'll discuss "why" next time!
Liza Field's column runs every other Saturday in Extra.
