Giorgio Agamben notes the way in which “Those who govern us today try to organize the survival of humanity, that is, they try to transform the living into survivors.”
For Agamben “mere survival” is already a kind of surrender to the unreal. Survival, in other words, cannot be its own goal. Surviving can only ever be a means. I survive in order to do something greater than extend my biological instance into the future.
There is a lot of temporary power in casting living populaces as “those who are just trying to survive” —a common story, a common sorrow, a general state of liquidity (a willingness to do whatever in order to survive). This is how classic prison camps work: just keep your head down, do run too fast nor too slow, cast your eyes down, don’t make trouble.
But merely surviving does not last long as an engine for social cohesion or action because cohesion and action are things which draw us out beyond the crisis, beyond the survival, and ask us to do the thing that for those “merely trying to survive” is unthinkable: risk not surviving for something more important than staying alive.
People talk like prisoners or castaways around the middle of December: “I’m just trying to survive the holidays…” I fully understand the sentiment, I really do, it is a sentiment with which I am familiar because it presents itself to me (“after Christmas I take a week off… just get through the holidays and then its vacation with the family…”). But here I want to militate against it. Not only is it grim and robbing-of-joy, but it is also ironic and illusory: “surviving the holidays” is about the worst posture to have if you actually want to make it through into something richer than the dryness and exhaustion of mid-December. As Agamben suggests, “what survives is no longer alive” in some real way.
Instead, what if the holidays weren’t something to “get through”? What if we didn’t “survive” them? What if that’s just the point? What if we slowed-down, became truly present to the unsettling emotions and inner feelings which this season lays bare (fear, anger, frustration, loneliness, sadness), and encountered the Lord in the here-and-now of the difficulties?
“Lord, here I am, here and now,
in a body that is tired and worn-out;
in a moment in which I am overwhelmed and frustrated;
longing so badly to “survive.”
Help me instead to let this moment and other moments like it
wash over me, like breakers upon the sand at Waimea Bay;
Let me find you in the roar of these waves,
may all this-that-i-am-trying-survive instead be death-and-resurrection;
would these waters smash me on the Rock of Ages.
Amen.”