Category: navel gazing

As a follow-up to my piece about warding off nihilism with gratitude, I’ve found this image, by Scott Sonnon. If you can’t see it well enough here, try this link for a bigger version.

Which in turn goes well with my piece about getting past irony, and in turn with this difficult piece called “6 Harsh Truths That Will Make You a Better Person” by David Wong. The writing is not great, but get past the first half’s neo-con aggressivity and get to his over-arching point: do shit, don’t talk about it or spend your time criticizing what others are doing, and remember that you are valued for what you do, not what you think about doing, and not, in some abstract way, about who you “are”. His Top 3 are especially worth reading: (3) you hate yourself because you don’t do anything, and (2) what you are inside only matters because of what it makes you do, and of course (1) everything inside you will fight improvement.

#2 especially. Being a good person doesn’t count for shit unless you engage it and can actually do things that people need done. There’s a lot of bad stuff out in the world, from the mundane and catty to the outright cynical and oppressive.

I have a lot more to write about; the past few years have been an almost crippling struggle for me, but I feel – finally! – like I’m coming out the other side, in some ways more deeply cynical but also absolutely re-committed to the work I want to do. Or, what Iggy Pop said yesterday here on my blog: I have less patience, and yet everything good and beautiful has 80 million times as much meaning.

Tomorrow I’m going to write a little bit about the company you keep. And maybe about the five cynical things I’ve learned the hard way which are invaluable lessons.

It is going to be a beautiful thing to let 2012 fade into history, and I didn’t lose my house or my stuff to Sandy, and I didn’t know those beautiful teachers and children who were massacred. But I do know that the world is getting harder – gun sales went up 300% after the Newtown massacre, not down – and that we are all probably going to need to be made of sterner stuff.

 

Sometimes hurting is a reminder that you can still feel — which is what it’s all about. To everyone who is angry, lonely, estranged from love, or disappointed – take heart from your heart hurting: you’re still alive to try again. Love to all of you who hurt today, or who have hurt this month; the holidays are a difficult reminder of what we want & don’t yet have, or used to have & don’t have anymore.

Mostly, though, I wanted to thank all of you who wanted a call this December, and who reached out via The December Project; the honest truth is that it did my heart more good to be an ear to others than it probably was for all of you to hear our voices.

& Yes, we’re still doing it, until this month and its demons are gone with the calendar page.

I was thinking recently, as a friend was posting her thoughts about Prometheus on Facebook while watching that movie, that I wonder if we have forgotten how to like things because they’re good.

I’ve been watching the British version of Sherlock lately, which is, in my opinion, startlingly good: the acting is spotless, the dialogue intelligent and funny, the visuals modern and hip. It is not unbelievable, transcendent art, but it is good.

And it’s struck me that there is so little that is.

But then – the hipster that still resides in me scoffs at my old-age earnestness. There is plenty of good art being made, all over the place. Still, we decide to like certain things for their badness, don’t we? I am tired of liking bad things because I’m supposed to: the Coen Brothers, for instance, leave me cold. So does Tarantino. In another time, they both would have been considered second-rate, but now, they are icons — all because they are masters of post-modern irony.

There’s a passage in Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, which I recently had the pleasure of teaching, where she cites two pre-war poems in all their idyllic sweetness and wonders if it’s possible that anyone could ever hum such things and mean them. And since she is the Grand Dame of Irony, I wonder if these sweeps in the ironic, the nihilistic, aren’t just a moment in time, and that perhaps we can get back to earnestness, and commitment, and creating beautiful things to be beautiful, and not as some statement about how full of crap beautiful things can be.

And they can be. I’m a punk still at heart, and deeply suspicious of what is handed to us as culture, and the canon even moreso.

But it wasn’t until reading this piece by Christy Wampole that located what I find most problematic about irony, and it’s its privilege. It’s smelly, snarky, all too diffident privilege:

Where can we find other examples of nonironic living? What does it look like? Nonironic models include very young children, elderly people, deeply religious people, people with severe mental or physical disabilities, people who have suffered, and those from economically or politically challenged places where seriousness is the governing state of mind. My friend Robert Pogue Harrison put it this way in a recent conversation: “Wherever the real imposes itself, it tends to dissipate the fogs of irony.”

First world problem, in a nutshell. For people who have enough, or maybe who have too much.

I have often joked that I am only ever misunderstood by people who don’t seem to understand how earnest I am; for a long time I have had difficulty communicating with some people because they don’t seem to speak without irony, or hear without it.

But Wampole has asked what I think are a good set of questions for anyone who intends to live with more actual earnestness, with enthusiasm and – dare I say it? – meaning.

What would it take to overcome the cultural pull of irony? Moving away from the ironic involves saying what you mean, meaning what you say and considering seriousness and forthrightness as expressive possibilities, despite the inherent risks. It means undertaking the cultivation of sincerity, humility and self-effacement, and demoting the frivolous and the kitschy on our collective scale of values. It might also consist of an honest self-inventory.

Here is a start: Look around your living space. Do you surround yourself with things you really like or things you like only because they are absurd? Listen to your own speech. Ask yourself: Do I communicate primarily through inside jokes and pop culture references? What percentage of my speech is meaningful? How much hyperbolic language do I use? Do I feign indifference? Look at your clothes. What parts of your wardrobe could be described as costume-like, derivative or reminiscent of some specific style archetype (the secretary, the hobo, the flapper, yourself as a child)? In other words, do your clothes refer to something else or only to themselves? Do you attempt to look intentionally nerdy, awkward or ugly? In other words, is your style an anti-style? The most important question: How would it feel to change yourself quietly, offline, without public display, from within?

And now I know, at least, in which direction my New Year’s resolutions will be pointing. Unironically, of course.

& He is still terribly missed.