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.”

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