THE GARRET

THE GARRET

It’s where everything happens. It’s my sanctum, my mirror, my protector, my arms and legs, my palimpsest, my nurturer. The four walls record the accounts (paid and owed) of my life and measure their growth-lines not unlike that of a child growing up. Each year and place designate a noteworthy experience, some of which still elicit new responses. All things still significant earn another line and number. The garret is a record (and story) of my life.

I forget its importance until I get home each day. Then magically it becomes my heart and lungs, filling up with blood and air ready to exhale the day’s events. And almost instinctively I disgorge all that the day had forced upon me, the day’s final stamp. Most often I simply “unload” as a gesture to that space of gratitude to have arrived. Other days I lean over and scream with anger, frustration, and regret, and my walls seem to understand. On still others I surprise myself with nothing to report. On those days there is no “writing on the wall” because all went reasonably well. My inner world aligned peacefully with the outer and I managed to maintain an air of amicability with everything. On those days I’m rather surprised at myself and then try to understand why there aren’t more of them. The garret then accommodates a space for self-examination and reflection.

The garret has a rich history which, when applied to my home, transforms it into what it was for so many others. Originally meaning “watchtower” or “place of protection” (garite in Middle English and Old French), it stands to reason it would later refer to an attic or loft. “Garrison” is another derivation. Not surprisingly, the military connotation never meant to imply a place of comfort or leisure, and modern garrets have lived up to their reputation. Cold, drafty, no water or heat (cold water only when running), leaky roofs, small and cramped, often shared by more than one person – they were the poor man’s flop. Or the student’s. Which both together common translated to “the artist.” What furniture existed usually belonged to persons unknown, clothes found and reclaimed were left by previous renters, and the rent itself was paid usually to third-parties who knew the landlord, who knew the owner – precursor to the “slumlord.”

The wonderful thing about having a garret is that it invites that part of ourselves which can’t surface anywhere else. It summons the creative voices and feelings deeply hidden and promises no interruptions or moral condemnations which blindside us otherwise, before even having a chance to make a sound. It is an empty canvass telling me it’s ready to be painted over. And nothing is permanent. The oils disappear unless I wish to record them (on the wall). For most artists historically the garret was so uncomfortable that it was barely habitable, and they would go elsewhere (cafes mostly) to do their work. I’m fortunate in that my garret furnishes me with the comforts of “home” – such as it is. And it invites me to stay nearly full-time. The only anxiety it fosters is the unavoidable problem of monotony, then boredom. As much as it tries, it cannot duplicate the ambient sounds of the cafe which keeps me focused and alert. I get cabin fever and simply must leave.

In the 1820s Balzac had cabin fever. When he felt trapped with nowhere to go, he would “imagine” his garret to be something totally different from what it was in design and furnishings. Given little more than a table, bed, and a chair by the landlord, he dressed the room up in words – imagining a chair “over there,” a sofa “over here,” and expensive painting and drapes in adjoining rooms that didn’t exist. He would leave notes in places saying “ottoman & chair” or “fireplace.” On one wall he inscribed, “Rosewood paneling with commode.” On the opposite wall, “Gobelin tapestry with Venetian mirror.” And over the fireplace, “Picture by Raphael.” (After becoming rich and famous he filled his own apartments with “reminders” – Venetian mirrors, rare porcelain, original paintings). – This was the best he and others could do during the lean years. When without, be creative … use the “watchtower” of escape to escape again.

The marooned feeling is a familiar one, but in my case it encompasses a wider radius. It’s about being in the wrong city, in the wrong culture, in the wrong country. Mentally I paste notes on places that don’t exist, or, if they do exist, I imagine my garret being somewhere else. In the city where I currently reside, I have but one cafe to offer the kind of atmosphere needed to keep me creatively focused and “out of the house.” Not to sound like a postcard, but it has wonderful espresso, great food, an impressive used bookstore (very important), a friendly staff, and (depending on the time of day) even nice music – all conducive to the requirements of creative writing. If it weren’t for Poor Richards, if for some reason it closed, it would literally be the final straw which led me to sell and find another garret in another city. Such as it is, thankfully, Poor Richards has become a landmark business. Too many people depend on it.

Poor Richards and the very small inner-city enclave surrounding it – a marginally “leftist” neighborhood – reminds me of an inner city arrondissment encased inside much larger arrondissments which are (by contrast) anything but artistic. It’s like an oasis surrounded by a rigidly conservative and religious population, three military bases, and a kind of mass-consciousness that wouldn’t know an espresso from a Dr. Pepper – as someone rudely announced, “caffeine is caffeine, so shut up!”

Predictably, the ambient theme of this city is one of “toughness” – in every way imaginable. Reflection, silence, ambivalence, smallness, femininity, softness, understanding, forgiveness, and so forth are all forms of “weakness.” Male machismo is paraded daily either in the form of large trucks and big engines, deafeningly loud motorcycles, killer dogs, guns, prison “tatts,” and of course the ubiquitous military uniform. Voters are “manly” on everything, and while the city’s jails overflow with “tough people,” the city council doesn’t know what to do with them all. It seems unable to connect the dots between the attitude of intolerance and the repercussions of intolerance. Alan Watts called it the “law of reversed effort.”

Hence, the absolutely essential garret “of the mind” within an almost intolerable environment, without which surviving here would be impossible. In the few years I’ve lived here (don’t ask how I landed here in the first place) I’ve practically worn a path between garret and café. Two paths actually, both about equidistant. Walking is the preferred means of travel, as city driving is an additional nightmare. Arriving either home or at the café brings as sense of welcomed relief, but the commute elicits the feelings I have on living here.

If body-language could speak, if I could make visible how it feels and what I possibly actually look like to others – I would pick two images that come to mind. The first image is taken from an old Led Zeppelin album of a peasant farmer inured to the burdens of life. He carries it on his back. The second is a painting by the German artist Michael Sowa, entitled Herbert. The human is female, but it doesn’t matter. What does matter are the eyes – all four of them – vigilant, wary, guarded, reticent, observing, withheld, bonded together for survival. It captures the state of mind which is out of step, out of place, with their surroundings. The

look is one of discipline and fear behind cautious forbearance.

Not a good diagnosis if indeed pictures tell a thousand words. Outwardly, I have no idea what I look like or how I carry myself. Perhaps I fool everyone with a lighter countenance, but it doesn’t matter. It’s not something I consciously control anyway. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I just have an intuitive (gut) feeling that the facade I carry may be a familiar one to many others, and we just don’t let on. It’s ironic that so many share the same burdens and fears and still choose not to share that revelation. We’re all afraid of each other in this city. But we smile anyway.

Not all cities are the same. Hence, all garrets are not the same. Some cities fit the experience described by Henry Miller (near the Sacre Coeur basilica in Paris) – streets like “jagged knife wounds,” bars and cabarets running like “incandescent lace and froth of the electrical night,” a “night of the boulevards” looking like a “fretwork of open tombs,” the “soft Paris night … stand[ing] out in all its stinking loveliness.” Hence the visage of Herbert. But others inspire a much lighter impression. What irony it is that the urban environment can invoke such divergent reactions. The garret is stark and barren in most cities, but the adventures inside one’s four walls (recorded line-by-line) detail adventures of unexpected self-examination and learning.

So it is with confidence that I can say my residence here is temporary. How temporary is still an unknown. But if I can somehow make it another 60 miles north of here – to Colorado’s Big Apple, Gotham City of the Rockies, a place I know well and made my domicile for ten years, it just feels as if my “profile” would change dramatically. Denver is twice the size of Colorado Springs, filled with twice the crime, and so forth; but again – another irony, another “law of reversed effort.” Who can explain it? The only problem right now – affordability. We’ll see.

Part of the irony I look forward to in Denver is that in spite of so many people living in such close proximity, it is a much more liberal place, and the collective sense of tolerance, understanding, literacy (all the opposite adjectives which float about in Colorado Springs) all apply there. No killer dogs – (small, friendly dogs on leashes), far fewer military uniforms, fewer guns per capita neighborhood, a “roll-call” of cafes, bistros, and (used) bookstores, smaller vehicles (smaller engines) to fit congested roads and parking spaces, and so on.

Hence, the Denver garret, in my mind, being different as well. One generally gets less space for his dollar, and he can expect his surroundings to be compromised in more “challenging” ways. But it’s the “feeling” here that matters most of all. It’s about unburdening my back with so much debris, and relaxing the eyes. And, fitting right in with Herbert, it would be just as much for my own lapdog (Chihuahua) as it is more moi. Denver is the last “expatriation” from an old world mentality I will probably ever make – the whole of 60 miles. But who knows? It might as well be a thousand.

Despite the reduced size and a probable juxtaposition to various oddities (people and things), the Denver garret would actually contain a lower intensity of focused energy than what I currently occupy. It would be more relaxed, “casual,” and open-ended in a sense, even with less square footage. This is because the creativity needed would be disseminated more outside the garret. There’s the feeling of being safely included, embraced, if not by individuals then by places they patronize. It would reset the burden placed on the garret. It would no longer carry the entire load of daily sustenance. A new series of lines on the wall would begin to show. A new child would appear, showing rapid growth.

What are four walls anyway? They are what they contain. And in this day and age, with so much alienation and estrangement in an environment which almost censors privacy anymore, the hearth becomes a whole new thing. It suddenly takes on a critical significance mentally, physically, and therapeutically. Without one, we are “exposed” in more ways than we can fathom and can usually handle, as demonstrated daily by the homeless. “There but for the grace of god ….” And in that sense, the hearth/garret is, like Balzac’s later apartments, a “reminder” of life without it. One is grateful for four walls and a tiled roof that doesn’t leak.

© 2019 Richard Hiatt

ESCAPING REVISITED

ESCAPING REVISITED

History once again shows its circularity. I wonder if it’s because we never learn from it? Or is it because of memory loss which we will for reasons that override our mistakes? Is there something “in it” for us if we just “rewrite” the past and ignore our stupidity? The winners always write the official narratives anyway. The losers, those who usually the truth bearers, are forgotten. And so what does that say about our appetite for the truth? “Winning” means using anything we can to finish first.

Anyway, I feel that my desire to constantly escape has an historical imprint. In other words, where I sit now is where others “of note” have been in the past. While I may be doing this “solo,” the same anxieties percolated exactly a century ago among a group of artists and writers. And it brings up the question: Is what I experience today a small piece of society’s vetted versions of the truth a hundred years ago? Or weren’t lessons learned at all which made them “prologue” from then onward, and still today? I’m inclined to think it’s the latter, since nothing has ever attempted to arrest those mistakes in and around 1920 – which, among other things, inspired mass-expatriation.

Consider the world then and now: First, mass-industrialization which forced millions into the urban environment. This was the most obvious shift – which continues today. Back then what the “lost generation” hated so about America was the rapid extinction of its regional richness, it’s multicultural diversity in languages, customs, rituals, and belief systems. By the start of the 1880s and into the 20^th century the country was rapidly conforming to the factory workweek and cramped living conditions. This was the first hint of “discouragement” among American artists – the erosion of a strong rural heritage. This never slowed down and describes America today.

The second hint was with the new physical layout of communities – “rectangular” street grids made to avoid cultural interaction (every street became a thoroughfare through enclaves of ethnic richness). The third discouragement was the breakup of family structures as people moved en masse (siblings/aunts/uncles/parents/cousins losing touch while pursuing jobs). Suddenly money and individual survival trumped the family institution. This is an entrenched norm today.

Maybe the biggest discouragement for artists, Hemingway among them, was how schools were beginning to be taught. American students were led away from traditional learning and forced into a standardized, sanitized, government-approved curriculum. It was like “the taste of chlorinated water.” They read Shakespeare, Twain, Melville, Irving, Longfellow, Greek myths, English poems, and even Bible stories. Along with this came the effort to destroy all traces of local pronunciations and idioms for the sake of “correct speech.” – There was always Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Dickinson, and Twain. But interestingly, what made those writers great were their accounts of rural life in America. “The city” in literature arrived in America with Upton Sinclair (The Jungle, 1906).

Clarence Britten said it well: “effaced by our unthinking standardization in every department of life…. those once spontaneous fetes of the plains, the ‘Stampede’ and the ‘Round-Up’ have been made so spurious that the natives abandon them for a moth-eaten Wild West Show made in the East; and in only a year or two even New Orleans’ Mardi Gras will be indistinguishable from its counterfeits in St. Louis and elsewhere.” – How is this any different from today’s saccharin facades and the simulacra of reality reduced to a tipsy relativism, to “texts,” and simulated (fake) “imitations without originals?” Even food is “standardized” today (thanks to Monsanto, GMOs, and agribusiness).

Caught in the currents of progress, this is actually what Americans wanted in 1920. The “old ways” meant the Old World which immigrants desperately wanted to leave. These were mostly poor, working class/blue collar arrivals who simply saw a job and a roof over their heads as special enough. But writers and artists were different. Many were middle-class academics (or so inclined) solvent enough not to have to concern themselves with mere survival. Some hailed from upper middle-class and wealthy environments (cf. The Great Gatsby). They had enough time and space between themselves and economic conditions to see a dehumanization of America taking place, a loss of individuality in the mad rush to survive – even in their own income group to get richer faster. Writing good literature for them required a return to grassroots and the richness of difference.

Hence the great “crossover” in the Atlantic – poor immigrants coming to America while writers left for Europe (Paris primarily) in search of Old World sensibilities. This continues on today: the poor and disenfranchised migrating to America for menial jobs and horrible housing, while the rich leave our shores for foreign investments, recreation, and escape (from taxation among other things). The only difference is that writers today find “Paris” somewhere else.

I personally recall the same deadness of spirit in high school recounted by young writers back then. Humphrey Carpenter (in his Geniuses Together: American Writers in Paris in the 1920s, Houghton Mifflin, 1988) put it this way: “[H]igh school instructors believed in Art and Literature, but they held up these concepts like dead objects in a museum, artefacts of a remote people, which had nothing to do with their pupils’ daily experience. As F. Scott Fitzgerald says in This Side of Paradise (1920), young Americans were coming to consciousness in ‘a culture rich in all the arts and traditions, barren of all ideas.’” – I remember memorizing lots of “stuff” in high school and learning nothing.

Carpenter says this is actually the reason Hemingway went into the newspaper business as a reporter and journalist. “In journalism it was acceptable to write in a plain American style resembling the language that was actually spoken. Yet even here there were severe constrictions on individuality. ‘Tell your whole story in the first paragraph,’ Hemingway was told by the Oak Park High School instructor in journalism. ‘Leave the least important things till the end. The editor may have to cut your stuff.’” – These were hints of what shaped Hemingway’s personal style (with continued “edits” submitted by Gertrude Stein).

It’s the plasticity and jejune nature of everything today, including the effacement of authenticity (including simple honesty) which at first I subconsciously began to resist. Reading Hemingway’s experience of growing up in Oak Park (I grew up not far from there) – tasting the “chlorinated water” of art held up “like dead objects in a museum” – describes in a very large sense what I still find myself fleeing from today. But unlike Hemingway, etal., writers today (myself included) have no place to go except into the imagination. The sense that everything said and done today is computer-generated, simulated, packaged by advertising, marketing, surveillance, propaganda, and social psychology, by indoctrination and acceptable “standards” of normalcy – makes me run for cover. – And this is the point I’m making about the juxtaposition of two different time periods: I wasn’t clear about any of this until I read what life was becoming for writers a century ago. Reading about life then was reading about life today. The “differences” are subtle and almost not worth delineating.

What the “lost generation” had at their disposal was an alternative geography – a real “place” they could go to write and create. Today Paris (and everywhere else) has been taken into the jaws of high-tech plasticity and existential stress (crisis), the loss of orientation and self. The stage we inhabit is existential more than any previous time in history. And speaking of stages, knowing it or not, we’ve taken on the “theory of the fourth wall” conceived by Denis Diderot in the 18^th century – where we (as actors on our own stages) now act as if “the curtain does not rise.” Diderot encouraged actors to “imagine a great wall on the edge of the stage that separates you from the parterre.” His plays thus attempted to help the audience forget they were in a theater, believing they were at home or among family. – Today, it’s forced, not voluntary. Life is a (self-conscious) stage production in our own living rooms, and we’re hardly conscious of it.

Today the audience is an invisible but loud superego. It, along with the director and screenwriter, “look in” on us. They are also the media and the everyday relations and associations we have. The script is meticulously edited according to shifting algorithms, while plots and subplots are steered along by the options (and non-options) given to us daily, from how we shop to what we say in conversation, how we behave, and what we’re allowed to know. The audience also includes those voices we carry home with us at the end of the day and let loose inside our living rooms. “Privacy” has been redefined. It includes the voices we carry with us. It’s a round-table discussion group. Eventually the four walls defining “home” are less and less drywall and wood and more mental-emotional.

“Home” is not just an homogenized global concept, it is a fluid caricature. The living room is “standardized” now, like speech and learning. Since World War II, capitalism has made the world into a global playing field, dictating the very image and behavior of modernity – hence also “progress.” What I find almost humorous (and somehow slightly embarrassing) is the way a typical home belonging to, say, a Muslim family, Native American family, Chinese family, or Inuit family all bear the characteristics of the standard American home designed by the Quakers and Coco Chanel. There’s the sofa and chairs and the neutral colors of 1950s-America, all forming a semi-circle around a large-screen TV and music center. Only the pictures and wall-hangings (perhaps a throw rug, bedspread, the hint of incense, or an exotic herb in the kitchen) gives away an ethnic or racial uniqueness.

It somehow reminds me of when a group of us in college went to Italy years ago wanting to experience “all the things Italian.” In what our hosts assumed to be a kind gesture, they put us up in “The American Hotel” where everything was “like home” (the equivalent of a Holiday Inn). They missed the whole point. Indigenous cultures are ritually sacrificing their very identities and heritages for a lingua franca conformity, international “user-friendly” relations, a universal currency of standards and values.

Gertrude Stein said something interesting in 1920 about America. As a response to why so many Americans were coming to Paris, she said: “The United States is just now the oldest country in the world.” Humphrey Carpenter explains: “It was nonsense to suggest … that the USA was a young nation with growing pains. It had become an urban society long before anyone else, and had now reached the geriatric stage. Europe was only just beginning.” America was artistically arthritic. Europe was just feeling out a new modernist adrenaline. – Alas, that same arteriosclerosis finds itself everywhere today. It has mutated beyond traditional (regional) borders.

The digital age is one of “pandemic” submission to the forces of surveillance and covert violations while systematically lying about it. The illusion of privacy involves a pernicious mass-conformity. Safety and security is now a phalanx of promises and fake impressions designed to make people “feel” better while guaranteed to vanish when needed most. America (ergo, the entire world) has learned from Wall Street how to be big on promises and short on results – adept at reneging when forced to live up to them. No one is surprised anymore when victimized by fraud and silenced by corporate attorneys and their “fine print.” This was part of the “brave new world” Hemingway, Cummings, MacLeish, dos Passos, and others saw growing all around them a century ago.

The mass-industrialization they observed hasn’t even slowed down in the hundred year interim. It only increased speed and efficiency. And a writer today has no recourse but to follow his own descent “within” into coordinates which no longer follow the old maps. To go “abroad” anymore means finding a compass that points to the richness of diversity and difference, where navigation means uncharted waters. The entire world may inhabit the same living room, and we may all hear the same voices, but we’re still the captains of our imaginations.

The “garret” took on supreme meaning back then, as it still does today. Back then it was a drab, cold, and barren place. No electricity, no running water (except cold, when available), no insulation, no heat, leaky roofs, the furniture belonged to persons unknown, as did the lease (rent often paid to third parties). Even so, hindsight for the renters somehow always managed to preserve a measure of romantic sentiment. As someone said, “It was the theater of my youth.”

Back home during and after the war, Greenwich Village became America’s garret, home to the bohemian life. Everyone was poor. But New York was also the only place where a budding writer could get published, so the writer “martyred it up” and forfeited his bourgeois comforts, if he had any.

And yet soon after the war even The Village had begun to lose its natural allure. It was becoming a diluted version of itself. The bohemian mystique was becoming commercialized and slowly caricatured. Sherwood Anderson again wrote that the psychological fatigue of the postwar years contributed to this. “In Chicago … faces seen on the street … are tired faces. America wants something it cannot find. The old belief in material progress is lost and nothing new has been found” (taken from Carpenter’s book).

Again, it mirrors today. “Tired faces” even among our youth (teenage depression and suicide are escalating) should be instructive. Nothing is real, and when nothing’s real, nothing can be counted on. The very moment something is created in real time, we objectify it, classify it, and analyze it, and it becomes mimicry. Instantly it’s robbed of its “nowness” and reduced to an ersatz “style” or “fad” to which we’re expected to conform, support, and reflect (i.e., “imitate”). Today the world is a big tail wagging the dog.

Two years ago I wrote my first entry on the subject of “escape” and said this: “This ‘symptom’ … has been upgraded to a kind of legitimate survival tool as diversion and fantasy. Not only is there nothing wrong with it, per se, it’s sold on the market as just what it is, either in a game format or as the ‘product of another product’ (alcohol, drugs, real estate, sex, movies, organizations and clubs, athletics, humor, food, language, psychotherapy, literature, transportation, recreational products, anger and violence, war, vacation cruises, religion and politics).” – In other words, instead of addressing escape as a symptom of something, Wall Street turns it into a selling point, a product, an inducement for an island paradise, alcohol, food, and sex – anything promising refuge.

What I fear about markets sniffing out “underground” themes is that they cheapen them; they reduce them to a video game mentality. This has already happened. My own underground of course will always remain private except for what I share here. Nothing commercial will ever “package” what is a highly personal journey. What I can’t control are others’ impressions of that journey. And, alas, impressions all too quickly glaze over into “standardized” scenes and scenarios, as if rubber-stamped by Hollywood producers. We want everything fast and easy, don’t we – even when asking for the deeply abstract and abstruse? Life has become a cliff note. Patience is no longer a social virtue. Past and future have conflated into one “eternal now” which leaves us hostage to an eternal drone of white noise. Hence the need to over-compensate in the other direction by freezing everything into a framed “text” (mimicry, style, fad) which kills it … damned if we do, damned if we don’t.

This was the existential speed-bump from which the “lost generation” hurriedly spared themselves. They simply packed their bags and left it. Garret life was tough, but it was also shared by young ambitious artists who knew they were there to find something – and I envy that. The Paris to which I constantly refer today must follow a “downward” arc into the imagination. At least it gives me a certain (inviolable) advantage: I can invent anything I wish, according to an inner compass steering me along.

Paris “below” is (for me) what it was during the fin de siecle. And I’ll just leave it there – for now. The twists and turns of this ruelle just go deeper and deeper and deeper. – Maybe I’ll see you at the other end. Or perhaps in a small cafe somewhere.

© 2019 Richard Hiatt

UNDERGROUND MAN

UNDERGROUND MAN

I have a new friend. One might say an unavoidable alliance when one “hangs” in one particular place for a long time. In my case, it’s the underground – a loosely defined term indicating all that is subterranean in the broadest sense – low profile, “under the radar,” and psychologically invisible. Declensional meanings (“falling off or away”) can be literal.

My friend and I have several things in common. First, the underground is not a natural choice as a residence. He was forced there, either by himself or by those who could not understand him. Second, he speaks through the grates on which the pedestrian world walks, those lower fissures in the road mostly ignored except when one trips or drops an item of value. Strollers look downward at virtually nothing but refuse, while he look upwards into the faces of those who hear “voices.” He grabs their subconsciousness and brings the repressed out of confinement, parts which always thirst for attention.

And this is the third thing: He is ubiquitous to those above because he speaks to those aspects that are collectively and systematically repressed. He is that subterranean daemon we fear and praise at the same time. He is the Janis Mask and the tragi-comedic visages of Melpomene (muse of tragedy) and Thalia (muse of comedy) worshiping Dionysus.

But don’t be fooled. He himself is not omniscient by any stretch. He stays invisible and “low key” for his own reasons. He has been shamed and invalidated enough times to safely qualify as a “failure” in life, in the sense that most understand failure. He fled not just to escape the unbearable but with highly flammable impressions (and knowledge) about human behavior – both his strength and his curse. By virtue of “knowing thyself” he knows human nature and the human mind better than most. This is why he avoids both as much as possible. He whispers from the dungeonous catacombs below, what you might say is a subtle way of saying that he still shows compassion for those on the world’s surface.

He has no name. He only has a mental-emotional imprint encased in a ghostly persona. He’s been underground for years, some say for ages, though he speaks more loudly today than ever. Proof of his eternal presence through history is shown by those who have listened to his voice and have defended it, perhaps without even knowing it. Such individuals were crucified for their protestations, but rejection did not silence them.

Hence, my friend does not age. He is a vaporous silhouette. And while I remain mostly quiet when underground, he is the logorrhea of complaint and protest. He is tormented by what he sees above and attempts to warn and divert human conflict. Throughout history it seems there have always been two types of individuals when facing the “tragi-comedic” adventures above: one stays in the fray alongside others and fights evil; the other vanishes, knowing that fundamentally nothing ever changes. At the highest levels are the avatars versus the bodhisattvas; at the lowest social rungs the philistines versus the pariahs – the social outcasts and common criminals. In between those two are the rest of us, the vast majority who fit wide variations of both “high and low,” the best and worst in human nature.

It’s impossible to measure where any one individual fits on that spectrum, and far be it for me to even guess about my friend (or myself). We simply see each other in the same cellar with its barred windows facing the light of day and acknowledge that we both have our respective issues with the world. We are literally hiding together, like refugees in a war-torn village. His look is desperate and strained. Mine hopefully is not, though we passionately share the same impressions. I do however embrace the fact that we both wear the soot and grime of the urban environment. We are fugitives from memories and events we never want to experience again. We are confederates and strangers at the same time, like dark siblings who know (and never will know) each other.

Dostoevsky’s underground alter-ego (in his Notes From Underground) says outright, “I am a sick man… I am a wicked man. An unattractive man.” Through the cracks in floorboards he takes on the task of voicing man’s most glaring instabilities, the “dialectic” of man’s isolated consciousness. This first-person narrative is the sound of “sensations … ceaselessly boiling up inside of me.” The narrator is crude in his manner and speaks from the laboring class – long diatribes, loosely structured, defiant, harsh, and self-condemning. But at the same time he cannot escape the literary influences which were Dostoevsky’s own – Rousseau, Schiller, Kant, Hugo, and others. Hence, his diatribes are infused with a “heightened consciousness” which society typically sends underground as well, unable to handle it. His is an effort to give light to it from the only place where it’s possible to do so – in the dark.

One of Notes’ themes is that of the crystal palace. The palace is a real place – a glass and iron exhibition hall built for the Great Exhibition in London,1851. For Dostoevsky it stands as a monument to industrial capitalism, the evils of rugged individualism and entrepreneurialism without regard for the poor and disenfranchised. Today, the palace would be (or was) the World Trade Center. For him it stands for fake unity and failed social contracts. The crystal palace appears to him as a terrifying structure – as did the Trade Center to terrorists (for different reasons). – No! Dostoevsky was not a terrorist.

Dostoevsky’s anti-hero takes on the “hero” of the typical capitalist in the 1860s – “rational egoism” and “enlightened self-interest” – the Ayn Rand of the 19^th century who (as spoken through the protagonist of a fellow writer, revolutionary and free-thinker – Nikolai Chernyshevsky): “Yes, I will always do what I want. I will never sacrifice anything, not even a whim, for the sake of something I do not desire….Can you hear that, you, in your underground hole?”

Throughout the book one can see the natural inclination to head “below ground.” And by the time we reach the final pages we hear a rather martyrish refrain: “Excuse me, gentlemen, but I am not justifying myself with this allishness [the notion of “all of us”]. As far as I myself am concerned, I have merely carried to an extreme in my life what you have not dared to carry even half way, and, what’s more,.you’ve taken your cowardice for good sense, and found comfort in thus deceiving yourselves.”

Here the narrator almost becomes the same voice which emanates from my friend. As translator Richard Pevear says about Notes: [T]he narrator cries out from the past into the future: ‘and never, never will I recall this moment with indifference.’ It is a fleeting moment, but it has determined the narrator’s life and gives the edge of passion to his attack, his outburst, after all his years ‘underground.’”

My friend is a dark sibling to the superego, the anti-hero, protagonist, narrator, and confessor of an anti-novel – an intervention forced upon the bourgeois mind still in hiding from itself. He is the dark side to the pillars of righteousness and purity. Even the martyr fails to elude him.

The hallmark of any martyr is his exceptionalism. He stands out with a unique drive, conviction, and stubborn determinism towards a cause. But why do they attract us? What is so spellbinding about them? According to Lacy Baldwin Smith (his book Fools, Martyrs, Traitors: The Story of Martyrdom in the Western World) it is because we “secretly” understand them. That is, something brews beneath the facades of selflessness. Fused within is an undying “pride” (which always falls). “Martyrs are obsessed with securing a place in heaven or with maintaining their reputations on earth…. In this sense martyrs die not so much for a cause as for themselves. T.S. Eliot confronted this issue head-on when he asked whether Thomas Becket had done ‘the right deed for the wrong reason.’ To phrase the problem slightly differently, is there such a thing as a totally disinterested martyr?”

So much for selflessness and the heroes who are supposed to “stand above” the rest. Whether Smith and Eliot are correct or not, my shadowy friend lurks relentlessly behind all those who try to feign an otherwise sanitized, milquetoast, Hollywood image of perfection and virtue. Magically, he does so while simply looking at us through “the grates.” He’s the great spoiler. But ironically it also makes him the great teacher no one wants. He is a kind of spiritual death (thanatos). And death is something he knows well. He has been thrown in front of the auto da fe, persecuted, prosecuted, and executed many times. One might say here stands the real (and only) exemplar of human selflessness. We wears the scars of attrition to prove it.

Being humbled and humiliation merge to form humility. Shame has beaten him down. But he somehow survives and still uses what’s left of himself to warn those walking “over” him. Is this not selflessness?? He expects nothing back because he wants nothing back. He avoids the dramatis personae above and their melodramas with all his energy. He himself doesn’t know why he’s still so engaged with a world which has made him persona non grata. What does he get out of that? Is there something? Is it confirmation of something? One day we will sit down with a coffee and a smoke and discuss it.

Meanwhile I only catch a glimpse of my friend when I enter the underworld . He’s always there. He stays at the grates while I adventure into deeper places – for fun, intrigue, escape, and perhaps, if lucky, to pick up a crumb of wisdom along the way. We don’t say much verbally to each other, because we don’t have to. His energy is channeled upward while mine is downward. I rarely even see his face, just a black overcoat which must be intensely hot to wear. But he is aware of me, as much as I am of him. And our intuitively shared mutual knowing renews the bond of our eternal friendship.

© 2019 Richard Hiatt

LAPSUS LINGUAE

LAPSUS LINGUAE

Recently I ran into a piece of graffiti, a kind of “note to self,” reading “The ability to remain sober and gracious is, indeed, a form of mild insanity.” Walking along I had to ponder this awhile, because it didn’t make much sense. But inside the span of the next hundred yards I managed to figure it out.

I stopped walking and said to myself I wasn’t one to argue. It just reminded me of all those secret corners of my mind which are anything but “sober and gracious,” those neatly tucked away corridors and cracks of the subconscious, always holding the truth captive. Like an overflowing prison population, they’re like faces of the soul seeking release from confinement, eager to betray appearances. Alas, recidivism is high, forced back into hiding due to shows of “mild insanity.”

Language as always is the means of escape, the crowbar and flashlight, and the pathway out, the dark alley unseen by the palace guards. Language is the measure of all things corralled into an orbit of law and order, socialization skills, and mental normalcy. It is the first indicator between two people that rules of perception and behavior are obeyed – or not obeyed. This includes “body” language.

All of which just remind me of what in our consciousness constantly attempts to free itself by means of language, opportunities in communication taken when we’re not paying attention. The guards fall asleep and the lights are accidentally turned off. Words almost deliberately and freely cross themselves, break the rules of grammar and locution, and come out almost comically. The message is dressed up like the harlequin and garbled like the jester speaking through his hat. Not only do words get transposed, the sounds of each word are switched – all in “one swell foop.”

For this reason alone I knew from a very early age that I’d never make it as a public speaker or member of a debate team. My best efforts to meet the standards of consistency would be through the written word only. That way the loss of pronunciation and syntax were not lost to chance – unless it was French or Latin, in which case I’d suffer the same syntactic hangups I still do today.

But then I also realize that the lapsus linguae (and lapsus calami) actually have something real to say. They tap into efforts to communicate which go back to ancient times. Many early languages used words which had double meanings. They saved the person the labor of having to say things in specific ways to convey specific meanings. It says to me that consciousness back then was very different in terms of how one perceived his world. Things were integrated and all-inclusive, deliberately “fused and confused,” which did not confuse but protected clarity.

For example, through my readings I found these derivations: The Latin word for “high” (altus) also means “”deep.” The word for “sacred” (sacer) also means “accursed.” We have the complete antithesis of meaning without any alteration made in the word itself. Where there are alterations, they are slight: “Dry” turns to “juicy” when siccus becomes succus. Outward “crying” turns to “secretly” when clamare turns to clam. In German boden (even today) still means the highest and the lowest thing in a house. Bos (bad) also means bass (good). The same applies in Old Saxon where bat (bad) also means good. The German kleben (to stick) is most compared to the English “to cleave” (or to un-stick) – and so forth.

Then also in ancient languages, like Egyptian, Aryan and Semitic languages, words reverse meanings along with reversed sounds. If a word (in German) like gut means “good,” it not only means “bad” but also gets pronounced tug. Sticking with Germanic languages alone, topf is a pot; boat is a tub; to wait means to tarry (tauwen); hurry (ruhe) means to rest; a beam is a log (balken to klobe); capere in Latin (take) is packen in German (to seize); folium (in Latin) means leaf in English, and so forth. Spellings are either reversed or their meanings are.

In the end, as Freud said, “perhaps even the much derided derivation lucus a non lucendo” (that which is absurd, illogical, paradoxical, or non sequitur) “would have some sense in it.”

Suddenly, I no longer feel embarrassed when I commit the verbal gaffes associated with “tied tongues,” dyslexic responses, antitheses (reversed meanings), and words turned inside-out and backwards (metatheses – reversed sounds). The brain-to-tongue connection harbors thieves within the walls of my subconscious who simply remind me of wholistic meanings to which I’m still neurologically wired. That there is really nothing wrong with me (not crazy after all) , that it was only with the invention of modern languages that such “liberties” became taboo, became a kind of Damascus moment. Freud again: “We remember in this connection how fond children are of playing at reversing the sound of words and how frequently the dream-work makes use of a reversal of the representational material for various purposes.”

I then remind myself that the ordinary slip of the tongue, the frequent malapropism and palindrome, could be (probably are) messages being sent (via mental courier) up to my conscious mind (illicitly, secretly) from the dream-world, from my youth, and from memories of times long past. Though it’s nonsense to the casual listener today (and quite humorous), it makes perfect sense to the thief-prisoner locked away in the crevasses of the past. It’s he to whom I look for a deeper wisdom and intelligence.

But the thirsty brigand doesn’t stop there. He reminds me constantly of the linear and rigid constraints of “more words pointing to less and less,” to the dilution of meaning altogether. Today we say that normal words and phrases point to clarity and freedom from ambiguity. We praise ourselves for verbal honesty. But look around and you see the opposite. What has taken the place of the looseness of meaning is a parade of deceit and self-deception.

How can this be? How did it happen? Perhaps because the more words we’ve been forced to invent for more and more subtle and partial meanings, the more abstruse, convoluted and abstract they became – to the point of words having almost no meaning at all. Rather than allowing language to cover a broad paradigmatic range of realities recorded by the senses, and “relaxing into it” as it were, we use it to fuel a neurosis of control which can’t be controlled. Every subtlety and nuance needs a specific taxonomy and definition. Today, more means less – more than ever.

Two things have happened with modern communication skills. First, our senses have developed giving us more detailed data of the outside world. The second thing is that the information we receive in the mind gets distorted and biased according to our “chosen” perceptions – by how we wish to see the world. We must lie to others to keep up appearances. But in order to lie to others we must first lie to ourselves. We hide the details of our deception to ourselves and selectively recall information which validates what we want to know. This covers the whole gamut of human interaction – parenting and childhood, group dynamics, academics, the arts, history, public relations and government, sexual relations, and religion. Nothing escapes the politics of self-deception – false internal narratives which lead to false theories and self-inflation.

All of which begin to disintegrate again once the control factor is set aside and the mind is allowed to free associate and imagine “actively.” An entirely new and strange process of associative meaning begins. The world deconstructs from a categorically deductive, Euclidean one to a non-categorically inductive one. The world continues to expand (just as science says it does according to its method) but in a diametrically opposite direction. Taxonomy is set aside and things are allowed to once again become “fused and confused.”

This is what the thief in the night steals deep in the recesses of human neurology and memory. He hides in those crevasses and deliberately slips us their “lapses” of sound like banana peels preparing us for our most embarrassing pratfalls. We’re belly-up and prostrate on the ground, and when we sit up we somehow get reoriented back to a primordial belonging. – What’s also interesting is that when I manage to succeed at this in even the smallest way, animals (wild and domestic) respond to me. It’s as if they’re saying “welcome back.”

At that moment I understand the virtues of losing my mind. I also think of Dostoevsky”s Underground Man, that hidden voice no one ever sees but only hears through the cracks of floorboards. A voice which has heard it all and knows “us” better than we know ourselves. He gives voice to the “dialectic” of isolated consciousness. He is nameless “because ‘I’ is all of us.” Through the cracks he says:

“Man is really stupid, phenomenally stupid…. [H]e’s so ungrateful that it would be hard to find the likes of him…. [W]hat is offensive is that he’s sure to find followers; that’s how man is arranged. And all this for the emptiest of reasons, which would seem not even worth mentioning: namely, that man, whoever he might be, has always and everywhere liked to act as he wants, and not at all as reason and profit dictate; and one can want even against one’s own profit…. One’s own free and voluntary wanting, one’s own caprice, however wild, one’s own fancy, though chafed sometimes to the point of madness – all this is that same most profitable profit, the omitted one, which does not fit into any classification, and because of which all systems and theories are constantly blown to the devil.”

I also recall the very last words in a now obscure and almost forgotten little essay by R,D. Laing, published in 1967, entitled The Politics of Experience:

“There is really nothing more to say when we come back to that beginning of all beginnings that is nothing at all. Only when you begin to lose that Alpha or Omega do you want to start to talk and to write, and then there is no end to it, words, words, words….

If I could turn you on, if I could drive you out of your wretched mind, if I could tell you, I would let you know.”

Now I understand that graffiti I read on the wall that day. Words and meanings trying to break through (and out) of preassigned words and meanings. It turns “mild insanity” on its ear and the inquisitor into the accused. J’Accuse! – It’s high time this happened.

© 2019 Richard Hiatt

ENTR’ACTE

ENTR’ACTE

“I’ll believe in anything provided that it’s incredible. That is why I’m a Catholic, though I could never live as one” (Oscar Wilde). And in a confessional way, he added, “give a man a mask and he’ll tell you the truth.”

Life can’t help but become a riddle tied to a conundrum in such a manner, after so many years of living life. Every straight line becomes opaque and refracted even when we’re on the straight & narrow. The hard and indurate go soft and pliant, and “tangerine trees and marmalade skies” (Lennon) go black and cold. Life “in repose” becomes one of measured movements and slowly shifting detentes.

It’s almost as if we enter a waiting room, an anti-chamber or foyer, between middle-age and infirmity. It’s the bridge between things held on to and that which lets everything go – left and right hands clinging to forward and rear rungs while we precariously swing. Is there no “sideways” swinging to preoccupy us, slow time down, to feign possible detours?

It feels like a kind of interlude when life’s hard labor fades along with physical strength, and thought engages us more in what lies ahead (while we deal with past contritions). Some people relish the extension of hard work as it becomes an excuse to avoid the future. But others see this space as almost an intermission between acts, a time to stretch our legs, find refreshment, co-mingle, and adjust our seating. We find those most like us to share, kibitz, and learn from with regard to the play – the theater of life under its cosmic proscenium. “How is it for you?” “Are you enjoying the performance?” “Are you witnessing the same themes and characters I am and in the same way?” Personally, I think too much of it is redundant and poorly written. Who wrote this thing anyway?

Are heroes really heroes? Is the truth really truthful, or there just truths? Is the real just klieg lights doing tricks on us, set at clever angles? Are the most impressive among us just gifted with masks, as Mr. Wilde said? Are we any different from them? Isn’t our purpose in life, in the final act, to give up those masks?” Have we been here before? Do we already know the denouement before it arrives? Why is the final message always unexpected and new to us? Is it new, really?

But we’re going too fast. Let’s just look at our protagonists for a moment. I mean, I go through the list of my own heroes and anti-heroes and I see different sides which simply reduce them to the most ordinary (and flawed) mortals imaginable (warning: don’t ever live with a rock star or an actor). Though he was a socialist, it’s been said that Orwell churned out propaganda for the government and “sold out” other writers. Hemingway allegedly joined the KGB and did espionage work for Russia (code name: “Argo”). Salinger picked up young girls. Jack London was a racist (calling whites the race “of mastery and achievement”). Hunter Thompson was a redneck and an owner-defender of guns. Kerouac aided and abetted in helping a friend dispose of a murder weapon. Gertrude Stein (it was rumored) supported a fascist puppet government… and on and on.

That’s just a small list. When you look at the broad brushstroke of “heroism,”we find the whole concept relative to time and circumstance. Just as the best “humor” is really just the combination of “tragedy plus time” (“Mrs. Lincoln, did you enjoy the play?”), the most convincing heroes are those who fortuitously fall in some cracks between sheer luck and circumstance, both of which manage to conceal fear and confusion. The moment is totally out of their control and keeps them almost pathetically blind to the moment. But then we romance the outcome and inexplicably convert fear and bewilderment into images of Herculean steel and nobility. The truth is subordinated for a greater need to create a narrative designed to inspire. As Elvis said, “it’s impossible to constantly live up to an image.”

I think of what Martha Ghelhorn said: “We are not entirely guiltless, we the allies. Because it took us twelve years to open the gates of Dachau. We were blind, and unbelieving and slow, and that can never be again. And if ever again we tolerate such cruelty, we have no right to peace.” These words put a sobering pall on any notions of national heroism.

So much for the actors. How about the backdrop to Scene One? Did you notice it? Did it move you at all? I saw only a smearing of warm colors and drawings from childhood. I also saw a tall wooden ship which I’ve has been stuck in my subconscious since I was a child. It still transfixes me. Everything stops. – But what about you? Were the painted scenes vibrant and real, soft and friendly? Dark and foreboding? Did they force you to see Act One through at a particular angle, through a different lens? Is the seat you’re in one you’ve chosen, or was it assigned? Do you like it there?

Act Two for me had little-to-no background texture or context. I guess this would be “middle age.” I was too wrapped up in the lines and characters all of which are still too fresh. These are dramas still too much in the present tense. I say the words and feel the feelings still now, in this interlude. I can only try to avoid taking that script into some final act. Will Act Three officially arrive only when Act Two crystallizes enough to see it clearly? To make it “past tense” does it have to be remote enough to recall with felt retrospection?

Is the last act fore-ordained, predetermined? Is Calvin to be hailed even if he believed in the “depravity of mankind?” What kind of hero is that?! Personally, I think we write our own scripts between acts. They become their own scenes, proving that free will IS predestined (because it happened). One is the other – thus putting the two Reformation “heroes” finally to bed (with each other) – another conundrum to fill the moment.

Is the Third Act now? Are we in it now? Another riddle? Faulkner said the past “isn’t even past.” Well, is the future mine to create (a la Luther) at this moment? Are we missing it as we speak? Or does it begin the instant we give up ‘now” and relegate it to the dead and gone? — Somehow this intermission is losing its purpose. Remember the stretch and fresh air? But how can we not reflect and respond to the scenes already behind us? We need each other now.

And who is my neighbor? With whom do we witness history? And do we actually agree to this seating arrangement? Who arranged it in the first place? To the left and right of me stand shadowy forms in this very large dark room. Overhead lighting is strangely absent. We stumble between seats, coats, and our own awkwardness afoot. Best to stand still and not try for an exit. I seem to be midway in my own row, equidistant from the isles. Doors marked “Exit” are so far away that they look like starry beacons in the smokey air.

I look in front of me, then behind me, and the only things greeting me are tall, cold shoulders. No one looks at me. Conversation is a low drone of muddled sound interspersed with laughter and the flint from cigarette lighters igniting constellations of light. With whom do I choose to share my critique? Who wishes to share with me? At this moment my eyes find those of a woman seven rows in front of me. We’re both locked in silence, forcefully muted by ambient noise, as well as being tied to the seats which were apparently preassigned to us. It seems we will never know if what we share is actually “shared.”

Just then a man to my left taps me on the shoulder. We engage in conversation and we discover a common interest in the play. But somehow it feels saccharin and empty compared to what seems “predetermined” between myself and the woman in front of me – seven dimensions, seven worlds, seven fathoms, seven floors, and seven hundred lifetimes away. Her visage might as well be one of those a thousand miles away floating towards the exit signs.

I manage to turn and face the man. He inquires about the auditorium. “What are four walls anyway, he asks? “They are what they contain.” I respond, “How true that is.” And the room presently enveloping us is being defined not as a place per se, but as a moment in time. It has no geography, no compass bearing, no fixed architecture or form. It simply floats in darkness in an ebbing drone of human sound. The announcement is made that the Third Act will begin shortly. We are to once again take our seats.

But before I do I look upwards at the ceiling. Filigreed tin plates, and Gothic Revival themes align faintly recognizable corners that have been there forever. Somehow I wax nostalgic and feel at home with a firmament, a vault of heaven never appreciated enough. In those designs I lodge the cracks and crevasses of my consciousness, places where memory hides and sometimes gets crushed by the noise of mass- existence below. Just then the house lights turn on, just long enough for people to reclaim their seats. And briefly, just before sitting down, I see before me the woman seven leagues ahead of me. She’s transfixed as well by the Gothic designs above. She looks back at me and delivers a faint smile. Instantly she’s consumed by the darkness and disappears.

The lights go dim and everyone sits. The room is swallowed in complete silence. Act Three begins. And what is Act Three to become? Is the intermission over? Are we still here? And where is here? Does the curtain open to an audience somehow looking back at itself? What is this proscenium arch between us, and where is the stage? Which of us are the actors? A moment of great discomfort fills the room, one audience waiting for the other to initiate a sound, a movement, to indicate a semblance of direction. Everyone looks downward at their programs as if to query who it is directing this play. Does anyone know? They scroll down the credits with the names of all contributing personnel. When they get to “Directed By,” the space is blank. Are we looking for (anti-)heroes again? Those we wish to deify and demonize?

The room remains dark. There is no sound. In fact the room itself disappears along with everyone in it. There’s just myself in a seat looking straight ahead at this Three Act play. Is the fantasy I see on the stage facing me, or is it about myself watching myself watching a play? Suddenly I look down and see my name next to “Directed By.” Act Three, Scene One is a curtain now rising. Act Two is quickly moving into the backdrop of my consciousness. It is now three dimensional. It has color and texture. Eureka! I can now “recall” Act Two with some clarity – an undeniable prelude to Act Three.

Will there be another intermission when Act Three is over? Is that a question one asks while in the middle of an Act? I’m watching myself as I move along this labyrinth of corridors and rooms preparing their own scenes. There are no heroes here, no anti-heroes or cowards. There is just the play, the players, the narrative, and plot-line. I’m given no lines, no script, and it feels like Act Three is being written in real time, free-formed, while the surrounding props are ready-made, but also intangible. I feel empty and light, as if floating in space.

This is the darkness of the “future-perfect” Act. The discomfort is a prelude and warning of approaching unknowns. Am I still who I am, who I was a minute ago? Or am I someone in the making, a becoming, but someone already well known to the audience? My chair now rests center stage in front of thousands. I peer out into the night and begin imagining worlds of my own creation. Worlds to be shared with eyes looking straight at me. Act Three has begun. I look down one last time at the program notes. I finally discover the title of this play: SAPERE AUDE – “Dare to Know.”

© 2019 Richard Hiatt

A HUNDRED YEARS, FIVE GENERATIONS: SOME PERSPECTIVE

A HUNDRED YEARS, FIVE GENERATIONS: SOME PERSPECTIVE

The world certainly does move in circles. There’s an existential climate today mirroring the experience the world’s writers had after the Great War in Europe. There was a huge void in creativity and meaning as veterans and cultures invested so heavily in healing. Paris was literally empty of male souls sacrificed on the battlefield. Artists mirrored a tremendous desperation to rekindle a sense of grounding and direction. As Archibald MacLeish said, art was there to “bear witness.”

Citizens felt remote from their own lives. Eliot’s The Waste Land was precisely about life after the war and surviving its aftermath . A “lost generation” failing to find meaning in America waltzed right into that scene naively hoping to find creative inspiration of another kind. But they also had the good fortune of finding artists converging from elsewhere at the same time, all looking for the same thing. There was an almost intuitive search for a new kind of free expression and honesty. Ezra Pound mirrored this by translating poems from as many languages as he could manage to learn. Paris was a baptismal font that transformed modern art.

Where the analogy with today’s “remoteness from self” ends is in the absence of any such Parisian baptisms or collaborative and unifying efforts to inspire and heal. We suffer the same after-effects of war, terrorism, graft, political corruption, wandering migrants, and even religious/spiritual alienation. Yet the only show of resistance to it all is simply (ironically) more of the same – suffering here masking the suffering there. A more fitting analogy would be that of consuming alcohol to stop a hangover.

Americans have become bored hedonists. We seek out alternative worlds in our private lives in anything and everything left inside a mega-mall and/or a multiplex theater – fast food and junk we can’t afford and don’t need. Being has come to be defined as having (or losing, as in body weight and all the contraptions and synthetic food associated with it). Hedonism has become the new answer to “free expression” found in Paris a hundred years ago.

In the la-la land of empty and meaningless soundbites and photo-ops, it almost feels like popular fiction (Hollywood) has gotten too popular. Though its creators know they’ve become the nation’s most important pastime (and its moral compass), they’ve actually become bored. They rehash worn-out themes and characters. They know painfully little about history and make up for it with alternative worlds. Larger than life monsters, naked girls, priapic themes, and super-human leaps of physical prowess are so cliched now that, not unlike “alcohol,” they attempt to erase writer’s blockage with simply more of it. (In psychology it’s called a “complex”). All that differentiates one story from the next are soap opera plot-lines about infidelity, double standards, winners and losers, chauvinism, bigger-than-life personalities, and good conquering evil. Is there nothing else? Americans keep going to the movies (for meaning and direction), but collectively there’s an emptiness and tired anticipation of old story-lines just piled higher and deeper.

In some strange inexplicable way it feels like fortressing up for “something” while blindly indulging ourselves. In other words, behind the orgy there’s tremendous fear. On the surface it makes perfect sense to any honest observer. But look a little deeper and there’s something else: no humor beneath forced smiles, less and less sincerity behind public shows of mutual beneficence, clichés and empty catchphrases replacing honest communication and which act more like analgesics and sedatives. Pabulum and cacophony fill in where substance continually fails to surface. The retail industry has a good metaphor for it – “retail blindness.” When you see so many products (and promises) on so many shelves everyday, you end up seeing nothing. Television commercials all meld into a blur of white noise. And so, what do we do about it? Again, we simply produce more “stuff” with even higher intensity. It’s the way of the addict.

“Life as cliche” follows from language (and PC) which has become slack and neutral (or neutered). What is considered true is simply that which nobody has the courage to deny. The comfort of conformity (which includes the boasting of difference) fuels the perception of absolute credibility. As long as we say and believe that we’re different and creative, then we are. We even say this is self-evident, and when it’s self-evident here it’s easy to assume self-evidence there, on other levels.

Add to this the absurdity and abuse of society by religion. Talk about spectral hallucinations guiding the addicted and clueless?! There’s more hysteria today than ever before, even in the courts. It’s fueled by morbid and superstitious minds. And when it then infiltrates politics like a virus, science is the first to be sacrificed along with plain common sense. “Evil” pounds at our border walls, and difference in every stripe and color becomes suspect. “Walls” becomes the catchphrase of the month, a metaphor- turned-sanctum for those fearing life itself, who stamp all things “unknown” as Satan’s handiwork.

With this comes a deep cynicism and misanthropy underneath pretexts to philanthropy and shows of altruism. We “trust and have faith,” but once we find an antagonist’s lowest motive for doing something we assume to have found his most honest motive. Our search for motives are instinctively fatalist while not admitting or showing it. It may not be true among those we know, like family, but even family is suspect at times, perhaps because of knowing ourselves too well.

Heroes (for me) today are more “fallen” than “anti-.” Though perhaps the two become synonymous when showing up more and more as phonies and mimics – in name only, by association only, by membership only, in appearance only. “Wear a uniform and be a hero!!” – just add water. Heroes have actually become subjects for experiment, to market, and sell by association. They’re packaged and sold like products (buy this idea, wave this flag, vote “yes” on that issue, own guns, get “saved” by Jesus – and you’re in like Flynn). And there’s no shortage of volunteers. No pseudoscience, martyrdom, or romanced superstition is beyond their compass. Christopher Hitchens said it well: “[H]eroes are like cushions that bear the impression of whoever last sat upon them.”

But the worst tragedy of this is that they lack tragedy. Minus all the mistakes and losses that derive from real experience, only farce and embarrassment are left, the circuses of caricature and bad comedy. It’s become an industry of its own, an acquisition of non-heroes in an effort to, quoting Hitchens, “get things not just wrong, but exactly wrong.” We’ve gone from insight and experience to the opinions of professional amateurs and fakes and to “a collection of ready-made cliches for the use of the conformist or the unimaginative” … [and a, quoting Proust] “’billow of stock expressions.’” This is the emptiness of today’s world, one inhabited and run by an “X generation” still oblivious to who they are.

Flaubert pieced together a Dictionary of Received Ideas, as a followup to his Catalogue of Fashionable Ideas. It would almost be worth the effort if someone resumed this project and updated our “ideas” in the clutch of modern America. It would seem not to be that arduous given that ideas themselves have become reused and redundant. Not to mention that the vocabulary of the average high school student today is 5,000 words (in 1941 it was 10,000 words). Also the fact that in our fictional-comic book-fantasy-escapist world we’ve lost the richness of language, the importance of humor, the devices of irony, and the ability to invent (versus escape). Hence we remain eternally reactive and defensive. Science is the only sector remaining in society which actually invents, but again, in resistance to religion and superstition which now owns our politics.

This is what intrigues me more and more about this new generation which now apparently governs our world. On one level they symbolize (as the saying goes) hope for our species, hope for the future. But on another they’re like the Americans rolling into Paris is 1920, fleeing from one thing, encountering the unexpected, and being painfully unprepared for it. At least the first “lost generation” had each other’s back, and Paris had their back in terms of a purpose and direction. Today it’s about moorings that were never there and thrusting out into un-navigated waters without the proverbial rudder and no sense of inner direction. They are, again, remote from their own lives. How far can imagination lead without the corroborations of intuition and guidance?

Our new “leaders” all hail from what was the “X-generation” sandwiched somewhere in the 1970s and 1980s, a moment when reality was “textual,” deeply postmodern and post-structuralist. So is it far-fetched to ask if their reality is actually “real” in the same sense that we know it? Are they rooted to anything of substance? Or, do they take if for granted (and subconsciously) that all things are loosely bound, conditional and spectral anyway? And is this a good thing?

Spiritually and philosophically yes, but only in a much different sense (when it’s conscious and deliberative, not as a symptom of confusion and rootlessness). As leaders does this mindset help them lead, or does it keep them remote and disengaged in the very same manner that ivory towers keep the rich remote from the urban streets? One is the product of breakthrough, the other breakdown.

Of course, every generation throws that moral indictment back at its predecessor and says it’s the “old guard” which is always “lost” and without moorings. We did that to our parents back in the ’60s. Perhaps there’s some credence to this. On the other hand, I have to say with all candor and honesty, despite technology and all its wizardry, despite all the apparent multicultural breakthroughs going on, multiracial alliances, sexual liberation, and new creative inroads on so many levels, the world does not appear to be improving.

Is this just a “humbug” from a survivor of an ancien regime of long hair and flower power? Somehow I don’t think so. I just don’t see it. But then what does this relic, mostly invisible and irrelevant, barely holding on at the fringes of this small dusty galaxy, really know about anything? I’ll be the first to say not much. “Whereof one cannot speak, therefore one must be silent” (Wittgenstein). The loud, gregarious, and charismatic, the kibitzers, dealers, lecturers, preachers, and flashy performers – they know everything. Who am I to “strip the veils of habit” (Proust)?

Mortui Vivos Docent – “the dead teach the living.”

© 2019 Richard Hiatt