Tonight, just a short while ago in fact, I finished watching the fourth season of Boston Legal on dvd. I enjoy the show for many reasons, not the least of which is that it glamorizes intelligent people rather than the mindless drudges of most reality television clogging the airwaves these days. It ended with a measure of finality I don’t recall the previous three seasons endings and I wondered if that was it for the show. I don’t watch live television so I don’t know, maybe that was the end. But as the credits finished and it cycled back to the dvd menu, the absolute silence left in its wake struck me, and the walls of my apartment seemed to recede.
There was no next episode to switch to. Nothing that naturally followed to fill the place watching that show filled. To be honest, the few thoughts I had seemed unappealing. And then I thought of that classic song referenced in the post title. “Big Yellow Taxi,” originally written and performed by Joni Mitchell* nearly forty years ago, and it still very much speaks to our lives. Even setting aside the environmental awareness in the song that coincides with the increasing awareness and concerns over the coming ecological disaster of over-industrialization and poor resource management, you have those wonderful lines that, I’m sure, have been spoken before: “Don’t it always seem to go, you don’t know what you’ve got ’till it’s gone…”
I think about that often, how it seems to be spaces, the holes things leave behind, that gets attention, rather than what we have, be it material or not. The illusion of safety shattered by the fiery ruin of two buildings**, the illusion of democratic government revealed to most people as a lie during the 2000 elections. I doubt anyone can seriously hold the idea of politicians as a class of people with integrity.
That seems to be the attention getter- the lack. It’s world hunger, it’s power and water shortages. Granted, sometimes too much is a problem (greenhouse gas emissions), but a lack seems to be something of which we are viscerally aware, and overabundance seems so much more abstract.
I have a book, picked up as humor quite some time ago, Seduction by the Stars: An Astrological Guide to Love, Lust, and Intimate Relationships***, that has a section for each astrological sign prefaced with a generally humorous note about that sign. The Sagittarius section (which I fall into) begins with this:
Without the negative, we would have no capacity to differentiate the positive, so that the negative is a necessary precondition to the existence of the positive and our perception of it. So it follows absolutely that one is compelled to take a positive view of the negative. Ipso facto, the negative is positive due to its positive effect in allowing us to discriminate the positive from the negative. Therefore, the negative is positive. So stop whining, shut up and think positive.
Reluctant as I am to admit this, I do think that view is reasonably accurate. And I don’t think it’s a rare view at all. Don’t twelve-step cults begin with the first step of admitting you have a problem? After all, you can’t recover if there is nothing to recover from.
But it just seems so tragic, that we need this sort of contrast. Like eyes left in darkness or light for too long, we adjust until wherever we are seems normal. And it isn’t until the lights are turned out that we notice how dark it can be. Wouldn’t it be better if we could learn to appreciate light before it’s gone? Somehow, I think we, as a species, cannot. And because of that, it will have to get very dark indeed, before we find light again.
*Interestingly, and perhaps indicative of age more than anything else, my first thought of this song is Amy Grant’s version, then the Counting Crows version. I was not really aware it was Joni Mitchell until I looked it up for this post. I’m sure I knew it, but I didn’t know it.
**A terrible tragedy and the waste of so many lives both in the event and the aftermath. Venturing off topic, I can only say that it would be nice if people as groups, especially governments, could act better than children in a schoolyard scuffle. The costs are so much higher.
***I don’t believe there is truth in Astrology, only vagueness. However, the book was amusing.