PYRRHIC SUCCESS

I’ve never had a clear sense of how good is good enough and I’m not sure many other people do either. Is there such a thing as Pyrrhic success? A Pyrrhic victory means winning the battle but in a way that is discouraging. This is from Wikipedia:

“A Pyrrhic victory is a victory with devastating cost to the victor. The phrase is an allusion to King Pyrrhus of Epirus, whose army suffered irreplaceable casualties in defeating the Romans at Heraclea in 280 BC and Asculum in 279 BC during the Pyrrhic War. After the latter battle, Plutarch relates in a report by Dionysius:

“The armies separated; and, it is said, Pyrrhus replied to one that gave him joy of his victory that one more such victory would utterly undo him. For he had lost a great part of the forces he brought with him, and almost all his particular friends and principal commanders; there were no others there to make recruits, and he found the confederates in Italy backward. On the other hand, as from a fountain continually flowing out of the city, the Roman camp was quickly and plentifully filled up with fresh men, not at all abating in courage for the loss they sustained, but even from their very anger gaining new force and resolution to go on with the war.”

I hadn’t thought of it quite that way before looking it up. When I say Pyrrhic success, I mean something more like uncelebrated, or so expected as to seem unremarkable, or having success come too late to be useful or in the wrong way. Part of the problem is expectations, of course, and sometimes other people have expectations so much lower than one’s goals for oneself -- or so different -- that celebration is confused.

Looking back, eighth grade graduation was blunted by terror of high school. But high school graduation was a matter of having assumed it would happen. I’ve forgotten what “order” I was in according to my grade point average, but it wasn’t that high. On the one hand, I wrote our little program for the actual event -- on the other hand, it wasn’t that great and we were too distracted to remember it properly anyway. On the one hand I was Betty Crocker Homemaker of the Year, on the other hand it was almost accidental as I’d never taken Home Ec and was the least domestic of young women. College graduation meant leaving the people I cared most about, without any prospects for a job or new life. Even marriage was kind of a compromise. The love affair was NOT. It was extreme, impossible, romantic, and the marriage probably ended it by reducing the romance to obligation and exhaustion, Pyrrhic fashion. To turn this around a bit, how big a success did Bob Scriver have to be to justify the sacrifice of my personhood? I overheard an old lady from around here scoff, “Oh, Bob Scriver was never that famous.” (They judge mostly by money. Fame=fortune. I’ll never fit into that pattern.)

What have I done that has felt like a total success, a vindication? Getting this book, “Bronze Inside and Out,” actually written felt pretty good. Getting it published has been a series of compromises. Buying this house was like winning the lottery -- i didn’t expect it and now, just about at the ninth anniversary of moving to Valier, it is still a joy. But it was essentially a gift from my mother -- I bought it with my part of her estate. I didn’t earn it with writing, but it made my writing possible.

I had thought the ministry would be a validation, a success, but it never felt that way. Too many mixed demands, but beyond that I’ve about decided that a ministry has to be a lifelong vocation. One cannot just step into it in middle age and expect to be more than a sort of social worker. Done properly, it shapes the person as the person shapes the role: the two make each other. It’s like ballet or opera: a discipline that enables. This view is far too idealistic, I grant.

So what am I doing? Undercutting every success by raising my own standards? Both my father and Bob Scriver did that to me. If I brought home a report card that was all A's with one B, my dad would pounce on the B. If I could do something by stretching hard, that became my new standard and because improvement, growth, progress were values, then I must achieve more, better -- jump higher. Until I failed. My father never imposed that on himself, but Bob Scriver did and he went far because of it. In art or music or writing these values are part of the vocation: experience, practice, is expected to result in insight, control, and wisdom. And they do, mostly. Except that people age or become injured. Or bitter.

Or sometimes the world falls out from under your feet. Like the publishing world totally reconfigured by digitization. The higher the aim, the more vulnerable the success.

Bob’s solution was the rodeo cowboy’s mantra: give it an honest try. If you do that, it’s all you can do. The best you can do is all anyone can do. But there’s always that little niggle of thought that maybe you COULD have tried a little harder, maybe if you’d had more support, maybe if you . . . No way to know. Not many do-overs in a Pyrrhic victory -- who would want one? Is Iraq a success or a failure? Was Vietnam? Was WWII? Or WWI? Or the Civil War? Is a war any way to judge anything anyhow? How many wars are NOT Pyrrhic?

Is this biography of Bob a success or a failure? It will take years to find out. I might not be here long enough, so it will depend on maybe the grandkids or great-grandkids to decide -- if they care. Did Bob himself feel like a success at the end, with all his awards and shows and recognition? I think it stopped mattering very much. I think what mattered was the animals, the mountains and the few old friends who were still living. Maybe the judgment of success is always something that belongs to other people, so that it’s always necessarily Pyrrhic. But if success is meant to be the point when you say, “Okay. That’s good enough. I can stop now,” then Bob never reached that point until a week or so before he died. I figure I’ve got a long way to go.

In the meantime, there’s a dead branch I want to saw off one of the trees in the front yard. I’ll get at it tomorrow, maybe, and when it thumps to the ground, that will be a solid victory.