Why “So Sorry”?

Caryn says a student askes her why the “so sorry” is in the title of the second chapter of our film, The End of the Male Narrative, So Sorry.  Is it intended as sarcastic?  I tell her to tell her student that no, this “So Sorry” in the title is not meant to be sarcastic.  For me the words are more a recognition of what is passing.

I was born into the final, perfected-if-going-to-seed flowerings of our inherited narrative tradition.  I have, on occasion, found comfort in its tales, am attached to its grand gestures, its rescues.  I have a fondness and (if I concentrate and am left alone) can follow its last, brilliant flame outs of often cynical and almost always lonely expressions on being and existence.  I have learned and still hold on my bookshelf many of the stories of this narrative inheritance, treasuring them as fond ancestor relatives, even as their care is burdensome.  I have a habit of running my fingers along their spines and from time to time pull one or another out for a re-read.

And if I could have found for myself definition and meaning in that tradition, I would have gladly worked within it, tried to make my contribution.

But I cannot.  I am in the same challenging and changing place as everyone else interested in trying to honestly perceive this life, forced by the evidence of our lives to reluctantly resist what meaning remains from our inherited narratives, tender remnants, mostly counterproductive.  And although I, like any other human, have difficulty letting go of the familiar, often reassuring parts of what we once told one another about one another, I find myself now turning away from those privileges.

Because at end this narrative inheritance has no place for me, nor what keeps coming to surface as mattering to me.  Nor, I think, for the being we go toward now, what we are becoming.  I feel the loss of it.  And with this, as with all loss, bits of self deeply laid chip off, fly away.  And this, I am in fact, so sorry to say.