The Market Economy

It's hard to feel lucky in February. I think it's easier to feel that you're putting together a lot of the details that will make good things happen in subsequent months, things that aren't even noticed now but will soon come poking up like green shoots out of melting snow.

I spent a month working on a proposal for my 1/6 time job last September, and even though it wasn't accepted by the people I pitched it to, I've pasted an idiot grin on my face and continued to wave around the thick sheaf of paper describing it. Now another proposal is in the works--a bigger one which includes the first as an appendix--and it offers a chance that my job will be classified as at least half time in the next few years.

I thought I needed to give this work most of my attention for a year, to see if I can turn it into more of what it should be, but it's hard going some days. I think of my life in the village where I work as if I'm a character like Auden describes Brueghel's Icarus in "Musee des Beaux Arts," someone who is "not an important failure," but that's not the perception of the people I pass on the streets of the small town where I live. Their situation is a lot more like the one in Marge Piercy's 1977 poem "The Market Economy":

Suppose some peddler offered
you can have a color TV
but your baby will be
born with a crooked spine;
you can have polyvinyl cups
and wash and wear
suits but it will cost
you your left lung
rotted with cancer; supposed
somebody offered you
a frozen precooked dinner
every night for ten years
but at the end
your colon dies
and then you do,
slowly and with much pain.
You get a house in the suburbs
but you work in a new plastics
factory and die at fifty-one
when your kidneys turn off.

But where else will you
work? where else can
you rent but Smog City?
The only houses for sale
are under the yellow sky.
You've been out of work for
a year and they're hiring
at the plastics factory.
Don't read the fine
print, there isn't any.

Where else will you work? I keep asking myself that. Why did you quit commuting, with college costs looming over your head like a cartoon anvil? Suppose you get what you want--you get paid for working full time--and then you have to do this work for the rest of your life?

"What if" is a wearying game. It's easier to plod along doing the same thing every day without ever thinking about it, except then one day the snow is all melted and you realize that you're older without having gotten any wiser.

Jonathan Franzen is giving a talk at the college tonight, and I'm going to put on my insulated parka and venture out to hear it. You know the saying about ventures, don't you?