We wouldn’t be surprised if it never stopped snowing. Rendered catatonic by the fact, sure, but not surprised. And the more we think about how unsurprised we’d be the more we begin to suspect that there isn’t much that is happening or might well happen that would well and truly surprise us. The tall building far away quaked to a twenty degree tilt? Humdrum. The deliberate murder of aid workers without hope of being held to account? Tell us something new. The microplastics circulating around our system have coagulated into a superplastic that soon will seize our central nervous system and pilot us around pharmacies according to their own shiny, synthetic whims? Another Thursday. We are hard-pressed (though no one in particular is pressing us very hard) to point to a possible worldly event - natural, unnatural, or otherwise - that would well and truly shock us into standing up and taking a fresh look at just what the fuck is happening everywhere out there and revising long-and-slowly-baked worldviews.
Now, of course, we know that not only is it maybe not snowing where you are but also that you might still, somehow, be capable of or willing to allow yourself to experience surprise. You might be constantly shocked - living out your days between gasps and seeing everything through wide eyes under ever-elevated eyebrows. Is that nice? The surprise? It probably means that, at base, the fundamental view you carry around of things is fairly tidy, orderly. Cause and effect probably fit together neatly and make ready (enough) sense. Two wrongs don’t, for you, make a right and two rights still make half a square. It doesn’t sound much better than what we’re dealing with. Or much worse.
We’re not convinced that one’s capacity for shock is a matter of sensitization or willed disposition. We don’t count the surprised naive, the unfazed wise. To our eye, they’re just different way of going about processing things or rather different ways of preparing oneself to process things. Just two ways of trying to digest really quite indigestible stuff. Neither better nor worse. One’s vulnerability to surprise - to be newly shaken by the news that, say, a food conglomerate has pumped all their caged animals full of toxic pink dye to improve their post-mortem appearance - doesn’t suggest an ideal disposition. One’s refusal to even feign surprise that, say, a government has OK’d and downright encouraged luxury condo developers to use the ground bones and viscera of the unhoused and/or psychologically suffering as building material is not a sign of a great disposition. Both positions seem simply like ways of sorting out or living with all the uncontrollable stuff hurled in our direction. Due to habit or experience, we find ourselves in the latter camp. We are unsurprised more often than not by almost all of the many things that come into view via outside sources. Snow in April or worse, we’re kind of whatever.
That said, we’re not wholly incapable of surprise. Not quite dead like that (yet). Last night, for example, an old woman - solid, hunched, wearing countless layers, wild-eyed - was waiting at a bus stop as we walked by. She asked for the time. We offered it and she spat out a string of uninterrupted curses. Given that her hunch already made her relationship to standing precarious, we worried briefly that she would topple over with rage and we’d not be strong enough to stop her fall. She teetered, but didn’t tip. She apologized after what may have been the third “bastard motherfucker.” She had, she explained, been waiting for some time and had, earlier that day, fallen down on the side of the road. She was in pain and just wanted to get home and the bus just wasn’t arriving. She asked us to check the schedule, see when the next bus would arrive. Seven minutes. More curses followed and another apology. The rain was turning to snow and it got heavier. The wind immediately felt worse. She asked if we were rushing somewhere. We weren’t. Asked if we’d mind staying and talking while she waited.
Each part of this was a small surprise.
She told us how she fell only an hour or so before as if for no reason. Just tumbled right onto her back. It hurt. Took two men to pick her up. She was worried they wouldn’t be able to, that she’d be stuck “like some fucking turtle” on the sidewalk. And she laughed. We laughed, too. We asked if she was OK, if she wanted us to call someone for her. She was fine, she said. “At least I’m not skinny anymore. I bet I have a bad, bad bruise. I’m not worried about broken bones anymore. Strokes. Strokes scare me. I don’t want to have a stroke.” We don’t want to have a stroke either, we said. We asked again if there was anything we could do to help. She ignored the question. She told us of all the errands she ran before her fall. She had to pick up her medications because they’re still at this one pharmacy over on Queen Mary even though she moved way out West some time ago, but the prescription hasn’t been transferred to a different pharmacy. She cussed out the doctor and hospital that’d left her waiting for months - months - without a diagnosis or treatment or really much help of any kind. Did we believe it? Sure. “Fuckers,” she called them and made eye-contact. We nodded. No argument. But she was healthy, she insisted. Just cold now. Annoyed. “Some April.” She paused for a beat. She asked us if we thought she’d be OK to get home. Hefted a grocery bag into our hands to judge its weight as if, having judged it, we could say that “Yes, you’ll manage that load just fine” or “No, no, you’ll stroke out before long.” We don’t know how to judge these things, so just offered to hold it until the bus arrived. She didn’t want us to “fuss.” She started to tell us about how she went out of her way to get a particular kind of cookie today because they don’t have it everywhere. She laughed at herself or maybe at the cookie or the cookie’s availibility. We don’t know. We also don’t know where the cookie part of the story was headed because she then saw, up the road behind us, a bus. As excitedly as she cursed out some “bastard motherfucker” earlier, she now thanked God and Jesus. Her head tilted up to sky as if she couldn’t believe her good fortune. A bus. And early, it seemed. Things were looking up. We handed her bag back to her and saw her onto the bus and it drove off and we had to remember just what it was we were meant to be doing next or what we’d been meaning to mean to do next. It took a moment.
So while the world - as it figures at some remove from our direct experience - persists and continues to offer no surprises, our day-to-day somehow still allows for the unexpected. It might never stop snowing, sure, but what will happen with and to and alongside us as we trudge, back in our winter boots, through 15-25 cms of April snow is still entirely - for better or worse - up for grabs. It is, now that this’s written out, odd that we’re inclined to hold such a sour, cynical view of the world-at-large while also maintaining (nurturing even) such a doe-eyed, open view of our regular, grounded affairs. You’d think that one would affect or infect the other, that our sense of how it all works would rhyme with how our average days go. But no. Or at least not now. For whatever reason. It’s somehow still possible to look with dull nonchalance at the brutal indifference of those with a power to curb environmental disaster, corporate malfeasance, and government-sanctioned terror while also laughing genuinely and feeling something like small joy at the unexpected idiosyncrasies of strangers or dumb beauty of fallen snow. Call one view protective and the other preservative. Would that, of course, we needed neither protection nor active preservation - but what’re you going to do?
P.S. We were listening to this while we were writing the above. Nothing surprising here, maybe, but also maybe a little and enough.
" (...) now that this’s written out, odd that we’re inclined to hold such a sour, cynical view of the world-at-large while also maintaining (nurturing even) such a doe-eyed, open view of our regular, grounded affairs. You’d think that one would affect or infect the other, that our sense of how it all works would rhyme with how our average days go. But no. Or at least not now." good/bad and right/wrong -
Glad to hear the pharmaprix on Queen Mary is ubiquitously hated