LIFE AS A CLICHE

Consider this as a tribute to Martin Amis who died last week, age 73. His book The War Against Cliche was an assault on modern literature’s worst problem but could just as easily be a critique on life itself. Insofar as literature is all about the words and language we use, the lives we lead siphon down to the expressions we tend to favor. But our expressions get so over-used that life becomes mostly an effort to escape them, or more accurately, the predictability they foster. And more than that, the most dreaded effect of all – boredom.

Boredom does one thing. It returns us to the present moment, as if the mind were issuing a red flag warning. It brings us right back to ourselves. And to the extent that this is true, then its avoidance is really about avoiding the present and escaping ourselves. We focus on the future for hope and the past for lessons to take into the future. But soon the past calcifies into fixed memories, which means we freeze the future as well before it even arrives. We anticipate, predict, and “hope” that the unknown won’t scare us. The fear of what lies ahead is so great that we turn the future into scripts and patterns we already know, to minimize and control it. Before we know it, the future is an enormous cliché. It’s already past-tense.

It’s the big enchilada of ironies. Part of us use our creative powers to navigate through the future and not to repeat the past. But at the same time we resort to the same “old” habits of thought to communicate, organize, survive, and evolve. In other words, we want to evolve and grow – but not really. We hold up a lantern to see through the darkness without realizing that it’s the lantern which casts dark shadows. We walk around in tight circles.

I’d wager that, as we “theoretically” pursue a liberating future, ninety percent of everything we use to get there is a variation of some hackneyed theme. We hear ourselves making the same sounds and gestures over and over in hopes that something/someone will break through the barrier of those sounds and gestures. We look for a new vibration and an end to the “noise.” But what I hear are just words thrown around in new ways, tricking us into thinking we’re actually growing.

Amis used literature’s best books and authors (art) to expose the cliché, much more omnipresent than we would have ever thought. If the most creative literature and art are in fact so laden, then what does that say about everything short of art? Do we simply float from one universe of cliches to another? Does art become really nothing more than an escape from another lexicon of cliches? One covers everyday life; the other just rearranges it with feelings, reflections, and occasional insights. Art is of course much more, but do we really allow it full reign? Is nothing not a cliché in the end?

Amis’s take on Joyce and Ulysses: It’s “his own Book of the Dead. We watch him crystallizing.” “Ulysses parodies everything…. {It] feel[s] like a deliberate strain on the reader’s patience…. a nightmare of repetitions, tautologies, double negatives, elegant variations, howlers, danglers…. the tour de force of lugubrious cliché…. ready-made formulations, fossilized metaphors.” On Kafka: “repetition and duplication, of human worthlessness in the face of an indifferent infinity,” “the antic poet of everyday fear,” the bearer of “two nightmares – one claustrophobic, one agoraphobic,” his “novels are attritional – deliberately so.” On Updike: “There is a trundling quality, increasingly indulged: too much trolley-car nostalgia and baseball mit Americana, too much ancestor worship, too much piety.” And so on.

It touches on a deeper psychology. One that tells us that we already know what has been said a million times over. Nothing surprises, though consciously we think it does. Bubba Ram Dass once observed that though he was “playing the role” of teacher, he noticed that whenever he said something insightful, the audience would automatically shake their heads as if they already knew what he was saying before he said it. So, he asked, “How do you know if you didn’t already know?!” It confirmed that all he was doing was re-minding them, reawakening them to “what they didn’t know they knew.” From that standpoint it made his job rather boring – and cliched. Especially when all he saw were heads bobbing up and down, as if saying “yeah, yeah, we know all that.” His response: “We’re both just playing roles here, students and teacher.”

It touches on two more cliches – free will (or not). If it’s all predestined, then we’re locked in time again, pasts and futures. Do we read our scripts over and over until something appears/sounds/feels different? Deja-Vu is a common enough theory, just as Vuja-De (we might say) is “the feeling of not having been anywhere” – but having “not been anywhere” over and over again. One gets lost in the karmic shuffle of ideas which again become clichéd theories.

Ennui is another pandemic. What is that about? It’s the virus of selective attention regarding how our lives are played out. Of finding rails to ride on for protection and security but which then deprive us of new scenery. We see the same landscapes over and over to the point of anticipating them. We’re split between wanting new scenery to surprise us but not to befall us. Soon even art fails to surprise, shock, challenge, and even entertain. It’s as if we subconsciously put away what we know and hope for a false sense of surprise. Hence the eternal question: Does art really “create” in the sense of “bringing something new into being?” Or, is Einstein correct when he says “there are no discoveries,” that the best we do is repackage them?

Perhaps literature and Amis himself were the best places to begin and end this little excursion, because it really all comes down to presentations and how to repackage the same scenery. Amis’ close friend Christopher Hitchens (who died of the same cancer) said “there’s nothing worse than using borrowed phrases.” It is “literary and intellectual death,” he said. So, it seems to me that the whole creative process, the task of imaginative conveyance, is to entertain through self-deception, “shadow play” and puppetry, the marionette operas seen by Mozart and Lewis Carroll. We watch ourselves playing roles, forgetting that we’re the ones pulling the strings from above. It’s all theater – keeping entertained and distracted.

When myths and archetypes become too familiar, we edit the script and reduce it to folklore. When folklore gets too familiar and honest, we edit it again and reduce it to a fairy tale at a children’s level. The point is to keep believing we’re being honest with ourselves.

Many talk about how we’re all critics today. Gore Vidal wrote about how nobody’s feelings are more authentic or important than anyone else’s anymore – thanks in large part to affirmative action and “PC.” Not to digress, but with so much attention paid to idleness and “emotional egalitarianism,” the dangers of being too creative are averted. We stay in the “pale glow of illusion,” said Amis, “of admixtures of herd opinions and social anxieties, vanities, touchinesses, and everything else….”

Thus, art/literature, “has never seemed difficult enough.” We always need it to be more difficult and abstruse, almost impossible to attain. We like to think that “all writing is a campaign against cliché. Not just cliches of the pen but cliches of the heart.” But is it really so, or the mind’s perfect imposture, the best sleight-of-hand ever? Cliches talking about cliches trying to transcend cliches?? “When I dispraise, I am usually quoting cliches. When I praise, I am usually quoting the opposed qualities of freshness, energy, and reverberation of voice.” Is anything fresh? Again, anything new?

Maybe we need to define creativity itself differently. Instead of seeking the fresh and new, it’s more about embracing “the old” in a new way. Or about transcending the need to transcend, settling into a place where everything that was and will be — already is. That alone sounds tautological and hackneyed, riding on the edge of another cliché. Maybe we need to wear it down so much that it isn’t the words and their meanings which change but our perspective. The hero eventually stumbles into an epiphany as he pushes his boulder up the hill in Hades.

Becoming conscious, said Camus, is when it turns into tragedy. And tragedy is the lesson we take away from ourselves. When he becomes conscious, Sisyphus becomes “superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock…. The lucidity that was to constitute his torture … crowns his victory.” Maybe this is what we’re to take away from the cliché. We’ll keep pushing it until we break down and see the futility of pushing. We’ll burn through it, find ourselves on the other side of it, leave it behind, and die into what has never been repackaged and resold.

© 2023 Richard Hiatt

WHEN PSYCHOLOGY and DEMOCRACY MEET

“Western” psychology to be specific. And it’s not good. Along with why capitalism and democracy don’t get along, it’s just one more inconsistency which keeps Americans in the dark about what they want and who they are.

Americans pride themselves on hyphenated definitions of themselves. Nothing is just “American.” It doesn’t gain voltage unless made into a hyphenated proper noun (African-American, Native-American, Jewish-American). Part of that linkage involves western psychology, which links itself to individual identities, which links up to pride, which links up with self-esteem, which gives us a sense of purpose. Economically, the emphasis on the self which directs our notions of “rugged individualism,” “entrepreneurialism., and “every man for himself.” All together they “forged a nation” and made it “great.” It’s one long segue which was supposed to be seamless and divinely inspired.

But there has always been a vexing “monkey in the wrench” about this. The first founding principle, as mentioned (capitalism supporting democracy, and visa versa) was only the more obvious problem. Democracy is all about equality and equal opportunity, while capitalism is all about self-advancement at any cost (to other things, living and nonliving) which, as we see today, has culminated in the one-percenters – versus- the rest of the world. Money is invested in order to make more money, and that means inevitable monopolization (power and wealth monopolize more power and wealth). It also attempts to justify a “dog-eat-dog” ethic which absolves one from suffering and damage done to others. This is hardly what democracy was meant to defend.

The second problem is more subtle and vexing, because it gets into the touchy subject of “class.” Class in America, at least inside the so-called middle-class, has always been a sensitive issue. Working class Americans like to think that it doesn’t even exit. It’s been called “America’s forbidden thought.” Those citizens insist on believing that everyone is equal and has a fair chance of being successful. They want to believe in the Constitution, the political system, and the values preached in religious institutions. Because without those, everything would basically “cave.”

Meanwhile, the very rich don’t mind the notion of class because it allows them to stand out. To them class means taste, values, ideas, and style. The poor, surprisingly, are not unlike the rich in this case. They also don’t mind talking about it, but for a very different reason – anger. For them, it translates to money, the fact that they have none, and there’s nothing they can do about it.

It’s the middle-class which contradicts itself (even as it dies before our eyes). It denies class but at the same time carves out subtler class distinctions within itself. People mostly socialize with those of “similar backgrounds.” Well, what does that mean? Backgrounds, jobs, zip codes, races, schools, and so on replace income disparities, since they all more-or-less rest in the same income brackets ($20k to $80k a year). Everyone works. Everyone lives in the same neighborhoods. Everyone puts up with the same slings & arrows of crime, congestion, pollution, noise, traffic, and so on. – There’s is the distinction between “upper”-middle class and “lower”-middle class, but that difference is basically the difference in types of crime, geography, and various conveniences. There’s no comparison between that and the one-percenters and “everyone else.”

The point is this: What all classes have in common is that they’re based on a psychological raison d’etre; that is, to stand out, be an individual, to earn distinction and respect. It’s something taught in the earliest grades and even our religious institutions. The pressure is to grow up and “be somebody.” If you fail, you become the opposite – a “nobody,” which is the worst thing an American’s can be. People commit suicide over “nobody” feelings.

Interestingly, this doesn’t exist in socialist countries, and for good reason. There’s no pressure or expectation to stand out. One never loses sight of “who he is” while devoting himself to a “collective” ideology, finding meaning as part of a larger community or cause. It’s an entirely different mindset. It explains why products in socialist countries are consistently superior to American products. Workers find pride in the products they make communally without each person having to stand out as “special.”

Americans immediately attack this ideological thinking, siting the absence of workers rights (“slave labor”), loss of freedom, etc. But those problems simply don’t exist in the industrialized “socialist” world. They enjoy free healthcare, maternity leave, month-long vacations, and so on. Whereas, on the American side, workers “bitch” constantly about “rights.” They agree to apply themselves to their work only when their rights are met – because “they” come first, not the product. This is exactly why Detroit cars, for example, are consistently inferior to foreign cars. And to prove America’s resistance to simply work harder, a short history of American automakers bears this out.

In the 1960s the word was getting out about foreign cars. But instead of inviting that competition in (adopting new methods and being willing to learn), Detroit decided to take the easy way out, to “save costs.” They went to Washington and asked that an embargo be placed on foreign cars entering the US. That would allow them keep the old technology (same assembly lines) and save money while forcing consumers to buy only their products. Controlling the market was the American Way. – How very noble in a country claiming to champion competition. If you’re losing and don’t like it, just change the rules!

Alas, for Detroit, word was already out about Japanese and German cars. By the late 1960s and early 70s consumers were learning what (not) to buy, and the jig was up. The demand for foreign cars was strong and would soon be overwhelming – leaving Detroit no alternative but to completely overhaul its “PR,” its advertising, and most of all its assembly-line technology. – Today, it’s still not equal to foreign competition. America still thinks in the short-term (getting rich fast), while Europe and Asia think “twenty years down the road.” Thinking “short-term” consistently handicaps all efforts to maintain quality production.

But this is a digression. The whole point here is, again, a problem of worker attitude – a problem of defending one’s individuality. Life in the West is all about earning respect as an individual and defending one’s pride and self-esteem. Here is where it plays hob not just with business and manufacturing but even with democracy.

In 1835 Alexis de Tocqueville said, “Nowhere do citizens appear so insignificant as in a democratic nation.” He was one of the first to notice a great discrepancy between an ideal and a principle. The Irish poet Thomas Moore described the American predicament as “Born to be slaves, and struggling to be lords.” Walt Whitman was another who saw this, a constant struggle between the principle of uniformity among citizens and the struggle for being special (for social approval and status) at the same time. “Respect from others” is what Americans want most. We buy things attached to ads that allow us to “demand respect.” We hear “You’re neighbors will envy you and will want one too.”

And here’s where we get trapped. To remember and believe in the principle of equality (democracy) is to slacken on one’s “staying ahead of the Joneses.” But when we slack off, we lose to the Joneses, and we feel a hazardous downside to losing – (class) envy, disillusion, bitterness, despair. We face the prospect of being a “nobody.”

Then we end up with what’s been called “revenge egalitarianism” – the biggest oxymoron of our time! Half the population forges ahead with “self-respect” (Ram Dass called it “somebody training”), while the rest listens to the principle of “equality for all” and living modestly. Alas, the latter grows bitter at the former, and someone with a new car finds his windshield smashed, or garbage dumped on his lawn. Neighbors mount negative stereotypes and begin shunning the rich as “elitist” and “outsiders.” — The have nots call the haves “unAmerican,” while the haves call the have nots “socialists and atheists.”

No matter how hard we consciously adhere to the idea of political and judicial equality, everything is realistically arranged “vertically,” especially in a market economy. If you buy “this,” you will get “that.” Hence you will be better than he who is without it. It’s a constant struggle to stand out, to demand more respect and attention, because “who we are” depends on it.

Society as a whole is not unlike the great middle-class and its denial of classes. We contradict ourselves daily. We brought forth a government without royal titles, ranks, or rights of nobility (primogenitor and entail) and claim to take pride in that. But then we invent our own classes to make up for what aristocracies enjoyed. When Hamilton championed the establishment of a new aristocracy in American, the new republicans said no. But not really. It’s been a hornet’s nest ever since. Capitalism (self-acquisition) and democracy have always been each other’s darkest twin.

As Roger Price said in 1970s, author of The Great Roob Revolution, “Democracy demands that all of its citizens begin the race even. Egalitarianism insists that they all finish even.” Pit that against those who run the government (the very rich who love class divisions, who love being envied), and the forces of polarization begin to rip us apart. – The psychology is all wrong, while the principle of democracy is always right.

It’s just one more thing a public observer (like myself) sees when watching shoppers at malls. Sometimes the dilemma gets so brazenly obvious that it becomes humorous. Joe Six-Pack sits in his yard, waves his flag about freedom and the “melting pot” of equality while doing his very best to be “more equal” than his neighbor. It’s the old joke about the basketball coach who tells his players that he’s racially color-blind. As far as he’s concerned, everyone is “green.” Then he says, “all light greens here, dark greens over there.”

It’s like a never-ending fight between (in Freudian terms) ego and super-ego. One needs to distinguish itself to exist (L. exsistere – “to stand out”), while the other is a “self-critical conscience” reflecting social standards. We claim to be living with both peacefully, but they’ll never find themselves at the same table.

© 2023 Richard Hiatt

LIFE AS A STORY

Do you ever get the sense that life is a narrative wrapped around a protagonist endowed with all the peccadillos, habits, and flaws which just happen to be yours? So then you find yourself slipping into the role of that character. Then you see yourself following a script which leads to stories the total sum of which become you and your life.

And if it’s a story, then it requires an outline or a plan. A plan requires a plot, continuity, character development, other players, subplots, denouements, and climaxes. It’s interesting that with each chapter there’s a story to be told within the story. And telling it requires that we package it as a story, with beginnings, middles, and ends.

Most of us place serious emphasis on our roles. We not only relate but seriously identify with them. We are them. Because who/what else would we be? All other identifiers are just too incorporeal. We compare ourselves to others and imitate them, but we can never be them. Still others endeavor to dis-identify with their roles as a way out of an earthly dilemma. At the same time, to the extent that they are here, mystics tell us to “honor” it, learn from it – “take the curriculum” as one put it. To play our roles “as if” they really mattered.

We might say it all begins with character development, which means the persona. What is a persona? Chosen images/traits representing different needs. Some personas take on starring roles built around achieving high ambitions. We name them and dress them up to lend them special meaning. Then we look for patterns to make them more colorful, give them more character and personality. We invent them, then we task ourselves to live up to them. As author of The Inmates Are Running the Asylum Alan Cooper said, “Personas, like all power tools, can be grasped in an instant but can take months or years to master.” So much energy put into an illusion.

We create our own plans, and plans become stories. The story begins with a “moment” where for the first time we realize we exist – “I am here.” You might draw an analogy to consciousness itself and when it begins. — I once used this argument as a reasonable modus vivendi between “pro-abortion” and “pro-life groups (life starting when we realize we exist). Alas, it went over like a tooth ache. Neither side would hear it. I was actually hated by both sides simultaneously, each not allowing a scintilla of compromise. I could only imagine that both feared an unthinkable slippery slope which meant loss of political ground. It told me a resolution to this vexing dilemma will never happen as long as it’s led by shut-off reactionary spokespeople on both sides. But I digress.

Nonetheless, a moment awakens us to ourselves, and infancy/childhood is all about that journey where we begin to plan ourselves. We recruit a supporting cast and an almost equal number of antagonists. Plots thicken, and it almost feels like scripts have been prewritten, even as events continue to surprise us. It becomes a playbook for creative action, windows of opportunity to either repeat certain scenes or improvise new ones. Then we sit back and wonder if even risking new actions was part of the same script anyway. And life becomes a conundrum.

The script seems to go through three stages, not unlike history itself in the Common Era (as everything seems to happen in “threes”). The first were the Dark Ages, filled with ignorance and reckless chance-taking. The second was the “Age of Reason” where intelligence was measured analytically. The third was/is that stage where “intelligence” finds itself in differing guises. One is “emotional” intelligence. Another is “spiritual.” Still another is “aesthetic.” In the finals acts we realize that we know more but less at the same time. Knowledge is just borrowed information, whereas wisdom is about what we do with our information.

Emotion is temporal experience. Even though it’s felt “here & now,” it actually drags us out of the present moment and keeps us in time – past & future. It may excite us in moments of ecstasy, but it really pulls us away from it because it puts us back into a reflective mode, thus back in time. It takes us down paths of uncertainty and revelation, memory and anticipation. It distracts us from true mindfulness, but it also celebrates our humanness. In other words, it creates the structure of storytelling, with beginnings, middles, and ends. Every emotion is a story in three acts.

The emotional experience is, according to some, a three-part act. The first part is instinctive (a physical-emotional reaction); the second is behavioral (eliciting a mind-body response); and the third is reflective (a calling to mind, remembrance). Emotions therefore affect the direction of things, sometimes even reasoning – how we embody reasoning.

Some years ago I wrote a book titled The Art of Perception. I said this:

The simple act of perceiving is so evanescent and fleeting it hardly seems worth bothering with. The dictionary refers to a ‘mental image,’ a ‘sensation,’ ‘intuitive cognition,’ with which mental judgments are made about external events. Perceptions are collected to maintain a sense of order in our lives. Yet we lend them the same kind of involuntary shrug we grant extraneous noises and hallucinations….

But for some it has much deeper implications: It involves a deeper process of self and other, an active participation between both….

When this happened to me I suddenly felt like I had disappeared, been erased, left with the feeling that perception was more than just mental information interpreted by the Department of Mental Health. It was not a “doing” (no one was doing anything) but a Being. Normally I could delineate between what was real and what was not. I could sense “me” against the backdrop of what wasn’t me. But now I was no longer an isolated player enjoying the objectivity predicated on isolation. I was ensconced in an indescribable field between who “I thought” I was and what surrounded me. Outlines were now inlines.

Perception is more than something we create. It is something we are, not something that simply happens to us. – But short of taking it to the lengths of Being, it’s also very much like making a movie. The eyes scan left & right, collecting data about everything, and like film-making, our cameras register motion and depth. Everything sensory is recorded. What will happen in future frames is based on previous frames. If we watch something get larger and larger, we anticipate it getting even larger. This is called “film sequencing.” Past and future are inextricably linked.

Based on that, we also see what we are looking for. We engage “selectively” and print it out. We choose our own camera angles which are paired with sound, smell, touch, weight, location, and so on. And, as I mentioned in a previous entry (“Branded” – 5/4/23), objects simply aren’t objects anymore. They’re feelings and symbols.

[I]t has what Marx called “exchange value.” It can be exchanged for the symbolism it enjoys with other symbols…. A car is no longer a car. It is “coolness,” “thriftiness,” “toughness,” and “sophistication.” A diamond is no longer a diamond. It’s “eternal love,” “commitment,” and “financial solvency.” The car and the diamond now live in a universe of their own, together. We now replace the sign for what it signifies, the thing for the feeling.

Finnish architect Alvar Aalto made the same observation. He didn’t see buildings as mere buildings but interconnected physical “encounters.” A door wasn’t simply a door, but an “invitation to action,” an opportunity (to enter). Every building transcended its physical form (brick, steel, glass). It becomes an idea, fantasy, invitation, and opportunity. – It too becomes a story – an entrance, a plot, and an outcome. One enters and leaves as he does a movie theater.

And like a movie theater, the marquee guides and directs. We move according to where the velvet ropes take us and those little white tarmac lights outlining the carpet we walk on in the dark. We’re on a path. Pathways imply time, direction, and place. There are no places without paths, no paths without places. They promote flow, connectivity, and further movement (as the “eye” of the camera keeps panning). Again, we carve it into a three-act play.

What do we take away from all this? That the relation between what we see and what we know is never satisfied. The seeing motivates us to validate what we know, but it never does. What we know is never enough to validate what we see. So we keep “going to the movies” and creating our own reality. Seeing comes before words, but words define what we see. They assemble and organize the storybook which is ours to write. And the chapters never end because we never know enough. There are always more rooms, more celluloid, more plots, more screens, more optics.

It’s almost mindful of John Dunne (again): “All mankind is one volume. When one man dies, once chapter is torn out of the book and translated into a better language. And every chapter must be so translated. God employs several translators…. God’s hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to another.”

I would think that once we see ourselves as a storybook, planned out and designed according to roles, scripts, narratives, and continuity, we’d be able to somehow critique ourselves from a slightly “better” vantage point. But there’s no separation from the role, even when it’s about trying to extricate from it. And then we’re caught in that old dilemma: We can’t solve problems by using the same thinking used to create them. That too is part of my personal story – the futility of trying to separate from myself.

In the end, all that’s left is consciousness (knowing that we know) – the gift of remembering, recollecting, recalling, reminding ourselves as we play our respective roles. There is no getting out of the human condition as long as we’re human. So we might as well read the script, “take the curriculum,” play the part, and follow the tarmac.

© 2023 Richard Hiatt

L’ESPRIT DE L’ESCALIER

What happens in the time between an experience and one’s response to it? And what does it mean if that response time is short or protracted? If I didn’t know better, it would seem that the difference ranges from “no time” to thousands of years. It reveals the full extent of our knowledge and wisdom (and ignorance) in the face of that moment. It feels like everything is on the line, because it is.

How many times have I found myself absolutely lost, without words, when facing an unexpected moment? Only to hastily collect thoughts and feelings later when it was too late? Or even worse, “react” (versus to “respond”) with words and gestures in order to disguise confusion, embarrassment, or humiliation? Then, to collect thoughts/feelings still later on to somehow lessen the embarrassment.

The gap in time is an eternity. And it measures an entire culture’s evolution as well, because there is a collective reaction-time too. Tragically, that gap is even larger, and even when responses are instant they’re not always intelligent ones. Something horrible happens when intelligent people agree to submit to a group mentality. IQs take a dive, and seemingly smart people find themselves doing stupid things. It reaches rock-bottom when, as George Carlin once said, they end up wearing “funny little hats and uniforms.” Moments have groups too frequently either reacting too soon, too late, or not at all, and in ways they usually regret in the end.

Groups aside, a person’s experience with life is measured in T.S. Eliot-like “spoonfuls” of time, measures of what it takes to deal with situations large and small. Those measures are then measured by everyone else’s response to our responses. “He knows what he’s doing!” – or – “He’s lost.” We know this so well that we do our very best to make a fine art out of concealing the truth. The ready-made cliche, platitude, slogan, and soundbite are invented precisely to dodge our gaffe and embarrassments. Those in public office know this more than anyone. But the truth is never hidden for long, and human ineptitude is always found out. – The interesting thing about this is that those with the most integrity and moral fiber are too smart to run for public office anyway. The poseurs and fakes are what’s left who spend their careers trying to “con the con” and “fool the fool.”

Hence, the mystery (and history) of that eternal moment known as l’esprit de l’escalier, or the “wisdom of the staircase.” The phrase could have only been invented by someone who experienced it firsthand, took it home, thought about his embarrassment (saying too little, too late), and decided to give it it’s own special domain. It was something which earned a rock-solid legitimacy of its own and needed fanfare, since no one has ever escaped its clutches.

The person was Denis Diderot. The occasion was a dinner party where someone made a remark about a sensitive issue which required a witty response. He was caught off-guard and unprepared . He was visually frozen and confused, and his frazzled countenance just made it worse. He saw what the on-looking crowd saw, but instead of offering empathy, they used it as an opportunity for self-satisfaction. His reputation was hence “on the line” – an entire career riding on a single response, which was non-forthcoming. For them the moment passed and quickly faded, but for Diderot it was a total stoppage of time. He was trapped in a bubble of self-consciousness which wouldn’t set him free until he found a witty, tailor-made response to finally diffuse the remark.

The most agonizing piece to this was that he knew what he wanted to say. He just couldn’t summon what it was or the words to convey it. The guests moved on to other topics, satisfied enough. But he sat alone, peering into his wine glass, looking just as he felt. Everyone could sense his lingering embarrassment which just added to their pleasure.

By evening’s end, he was descending the staircase to go home, and when he reached the lowest step it finally dawned on him what he wanted to say. But it was too late. To even bring it up would have only exposed his self-loathing even more. So, he said nothing and went home, crestfallen and defeated.

That was the moment when he became fully aware of where he was when the evening came crashing down – the “bottom of the stairs.” The symbolism was overwhelming, since (architecturally speaking) the floors of buildings in 18^th century France held special significance, especially to the haut monde. Reception rooms and dining halls were typically on the first floors of private homes and townhouses, one floor above ground-level. Lingering at ground level meant you failed to make the grade and were “on your way out.” Elevation was everything.

The symbolism might have seemed trivial even then, but Diderot’s phrase stuck in the public-mind throughout 18^th and 19^th century Europe, proving just how familiar those moments truly were. The English ended up calling it “escalator wit,” while certain Jewish groups called it “staircase words,” and the Germans the “stairway joke.” It had no difficulty finding a place in “high” circles most of all, where human pride and ego were constantly balanced on the edges of swords.

But, in my view, it goes even deeper, even today, than a parlor game for the rich and arrogant. The time it takes for someone to respond to an unexpected situation/moment does one of two things: He saves himself temporarily, or he’s forced into a deeply private space (at a bottom landing) where everything disappears, except for a “heart-to-heart” with himself. It’s so private that he’s oblivious to everything and everyone from that point on, maybe for days. He’s obsessed, bound to figure out what it will take to regain what was violently torn out of him. He searches his soul until he finds an adequately compromising anodyne, an emollient soothing enough to allow him to at least temporarily move on. Exhaustion pushes him forward.

It’s a pivotal point where one is either aware enough to realize what’s at stake, or not. There’s an old adage which says that every decision made “right now” is the culmination of all the lifetime decisions ever made. Everything “past” is on the line “now.” Each moment reveals “who we are” and what we’re made of. It’s about integrity and dignity. This is why, for most of us anyway, a few seconds of uncertainty feels like an eternity. It is an eternity. Unconsciously, we’re probing every corner, every crevasse of every experience we’ve ever had for perfect responses. And when we come up empty, it’s an intensely private and public confession of what we’re (not) made of. It lays us exposed to the world.

Unconsciously, the onlooker knows this, since we are also the onlookers to others suffering these moments. The onlooker is simply lucky (for that moment). He gets away with avoiding the same embarrassment by simply dodging the situation. He preserves what dignity he has and feels relief. He succeeds in voyeuring but never risking, which then also presents the pleasures of schadenfreude, watching the other man “take the fall.” He mumbles “there but for the grace of God.” It’s a form of “one-downmanship” or “endarkenment” where we feel charged by the other’s misfortune, lighter by contrast to his darkness. It speaks to a general absence of dignity within us all.

To be clear, the “Diderot moment” need not be so public or high society. It hits us at every level of public intercourse and conversation. We’re constantly defining ourselves by virtue of mirroring off what others think about us, how they respond to us. We say something, they respond. We respond back. We contrast & compare at every turn. At the same time we’re touching base with everything we know about ourselves, archived away in our psychic vaults. Which means that who we are is constantly “on the line,” even when it’s nothing more than light banter. It may feel like nothing significant, but it is absolutely essential that we compare and contrast everyday. We absolutely must compare and reconfirm who we are not. This is why the person trapped alone on a desert island goes mad. There’s no one to mirror off of and select those subtle (and not so subtle) traits which define us.

The more one thinks about l’esprit being a unique and powerful phenomenon, so subtle yet so consequential, the more he respects the “wisdom of the staircase.” The bottom step is a classroom unto itself. It’s the space of humility, self-exposure, and naked truths. We are completely exposed to ourselves. Diderot knew it, calling himself “a sensitive man… overwhelmed by the argument leveled against him.” Others react. Still others don’t react at all. – Is it that they haven’t experienced the bottom step yet? Or have they been there so many times to have made peace with it? If it’s the latter, do they consciously know it, or does it simply roll off their backs without knowing it? I’ve known people who simply do not let words bother them. And I always wonder where they stand in the grander scheme of “the staircase.”

And so, here’s to that notorious landing. And here’s to that “pregnant pause” which addresses one of the most awkward and difficult moments in our lives. As long as we interact and depend on each other for validation, it will never go away. The first floor will always be part of us, and the ground floor, and what happens to us when the party’s over.

© 2023 Richard Hiatt

BRANDED

Have you ever noticed that we’re always expected to be something other than who we are? The media says to be “exactly” who you are, true to yourself, but then they bombard us with messages about needing “this” and “that,” waving roll models and bigger-than-life characters before us. They say they’re to “improve” our true selves, but it’s really about marketing anxiety and never being satisfied.

No one has ever seriously looked at this except Karl Marx and generations of Marxists after him. And no one really does today. But it’s finally taking its toll. Coupled with this (if you’ve noticed) is the constant bombardment of videos and news stories that say “Look at this,” “Watch what happens when,” “See this man get killed,” “Witness this encounter” — as if catering to our lowest instincts, lowest IQs, lowest voyeuring impulses. Mostly for ratings and market shares. No substance. Just huge helpings of schadenfreude. In other words, the media tells us not just who/what to be, but who/what not to be at the same time. — Then, we wonder why we’ve become a society of mindless, impulse-buying zombies with no moral compass or perspective about anything. Perspective is what the media says it is.

Just last week Jerry Springer, the host of a show that catered to the lowest denominator in primal behavior, died. He was the ringmaster of a “daily circus” which encouraged “guilty pleasures” and base-brain behavior on the air – people defending personas and needs handed to them. If we ever say to ourselves “I can’t believe I’m doing this,” it’s because we’re questioning the validity of those personas. “Is this really me?”

Springer showcased people reduced to the lowest levels of human dignity while discouraging forbearance and reason. It was the end product of citizens already so blinded by a smorgasbord of social pressures that resorting to fist fights on live television was a “reasonable” last resort – and paying them only made it easier. A lusting, voyeuring audience saw themselves on stage which only made it more sexually charged. Springer knew how to tap into this wellspring, and the show was a resounding goldmine for the network. He knew the lucrative repercussions of being fake, of defending that fakery to the point of public humiliation.

At first we were people who handled products and markets. Now we are those products and markets. We’re datums in computers, picture IDs, usernames, receipt warranties, ticket numbers, and security codes. We’re packaged and sold. But more than that, we’re walking billboards, dawning the faces and images of our favorite products. We do the promotion work for them. In the advertising business it’s called “branding” – where products take on whole identities. We assume those identities through buying the product. We want to believe in them since we bought them, so we allow ourselves to assume the look and feel of a satisfied consumer.

The product industry has everyone divided into categories according to the products we consume. We are controlled by what the products tell us about ourselves. In an Orwellian sense we’re moved along like cattle, herded like cattle, grouped and separated like cattle into separate corrals (markets). Wall Street grades us by categories as well, from “lucrative” to “unprofitable.” We’re led to believe we’re free and independent beings. So do cows as they’re led into holding pens, which leads into narrower gates, where “stunning pens” knock them off one-by-one.

From there it’s no longer Orwellian but Huxleyian. We smile and think all is well, that we’re in control of our lives, as we’re led into those gates, where parts of us are repackaged, other parts tossed away. The “freedoms” we hold so dear to ourselves (in a wonderful democracy) are “vote or don’t vote, window seat or isle seat, paper or plastic, cash or charge, premium gas or regular, go to the mall or stay home.”

Again, we are the ad, what the ad says we are. We listen and watch intently, everyday and night, for changes about everything. When we don’t, it sinks into the collective subconscious anyway (subliminally) because ads are omnipresent 24/7. Unconsciously, we think like the ad, talk and behave like the ad, because there’s nothing else to guide us along. We need to know what to wear, what to consume, where/what to drive, how to entertain, what to read, where to live, who to marry, and on and on. Ads convey meaning through the vehicle of inanimate “things” packaged and labeled. The meanings may change, but the mechanisms which dictate our thoughts and feelings never do.

The funny thing is, we know we’re being exploited. We’ve read enough of these warnings not to be fooled any longer. Which shows just how powerful and clever the media is, because the solution out of it hails from the media itself. We use the media to elude the media. So there’s no getting away from it. It’s no different than an addict using heroin to escape cocaine. In other words, we’re hooked.

The need to belong (psycho-socially) defines who we are (psychologically). We set up rules for order and consistency, then surrender ourselves completely to those rules. It’s like inventing a corn-god out of nothing (except fear and superstition). Then over time we forget, and over even more time we decide that it’s omnipotent and omniscient. In simple terms, the need to be led out of the darkness inspires totems and icons endowed it with god-like “parental” powers. Advertising simply borrowed from this neurosis and expanded on it.

And so here we are, drifting in an existential void, lost in space. Products have created their own independent reality, a superstructure with complete autonomy. When the product becomes a commodity, it then has (what Marx called) an “exchange value.” It can be exchanged for the symbolism it enjoys with other symbols on the market. In other words, the product has a “double existence.” The ad world then separates from the normal world altogether. – A car is no longer a car. It is “coolness,” “thriftiness,” “toughness,” and “sophistication.” A diamond is no longer a diamond. It’s “eternal love,” “commitment,” and “financial solvency.” The car and the diamond now live in a universe of their own, together. We now replace the sign for what it signifies, the thing for the feeling.

And again, we’re attracted because there’s really nothing else. We like to think of ourselves as conscious agents acting freely to what our egos want. And the ego feasts on anything that will make it look and feel powerful. The ad says “Ask and ye shall receive.”

There’s only one way to break free of this, and that is to “undo” it. That is, to go backwards, as if back-stepping out of the narrow corridor that brought us here – to “deconstruct” in other words. But that’s another subject, for another time. For now, I’m simply stressing the point that it’s almost impossible to know who we are anymore. To look in the mirror each morning, we think we’re looking at ourselves without colored glasses, as free agents. But the freedom we have prefers the illusion/fantasy/dream/mask pulled over us. The hair gets combed and the makeup goes on, and we’re fitted to the dictates of Revlon, Nike, Toyota, Domino’s Pizza, LL Bean, Capital One, the perfect body, and Bud Lite.

Little needs to be said on how advertising became a major tool for the “public relations” industry during World War I. Our culture and government discovered that the use of ads could mold how citizens thought and what they valued. Meanwhile, the government filled the remaining cracks with information (news) also carefully filtered. “Public Relations” was/is a polite euphemism for an enormous American propaganda industry.

One might ask, what happens when/if we decide not to listen to the “indoctrination” process. When we refuse to listen/watch the mechanisms which bring it into our homes? And/Or if forced to listen, if we can still remain fully aware of what’s going on? In that case, I submit myself as a usable “datum.” The result isn’t nearly as much visual as it is mental. I realize I have no choice in buying what’s available or living in the consumer culture, though I’m wary of what I consume. I’ve completely dropped out otherwise. That is, I have no clue about fashions or trends. I have no idea about the latest musical sounds and artists, I don’t read or watch what is popular, I watch the news with great skepticism, I drive a 23 year-old car, my wardrobe consists mostly of thrift store “second-hands” and sweat-clothes, I eat “vegan,” I’m told that I’m in constant “need” of a haircut, and the “mute” button on my TV is the most used feature on my remote. Most importantly, I stay fully aware of what the media is doing every single moment of the day – and of what we do to each other.

From that vantage point, a certain distance has been created between myself and others and the general public. It’s not unlike being vegan, which allows me to see what beef and pork do to people’s bodies – or a non-smoker to see what smoking does to smokers. Being a “non-player” (at least a reluctant one) affords me a certain clarity of what’s happening.

With “eyes unclouded by longing” as the Buddhists say, this is what I see. Walking/breathing billboards, promoting/being the products we select. “I AM what I’m wearing, driving, eating, drinking, where I live, socialize, and what I think.” Seeing people staring into their smart-phones only confirms this even more. The message just gets louder and louder as it teases out any lingering memories we might have once had about who we really are. We might as well look like sports cars which advertise all the brand names plastered on their chassis. We’re brands wearing brands and “exchange values,” constantly comparing and reevaluating ourselves.

The need to stand out is universal. The native chief prides himself by wearing a mirror he found in the forest. He proudly places it around his neck. He also sports a tattoo on his chest, a photo of a total stranger in his hat, the most feathers and the brightest gems. He lives in the biggest straw house. But in this case, everything is reversed. The symbols do not define him. They merely amplify who he knows he is. They bring attention and status, but nothing more. His pride and ego are powerful, but he never loses touch with his soul. He stays grounded to the earth, connected to what’s real. Things are status-makers, but they’re just decoration.

The prospect of reversing something like this is, at best, remote. The addiction and brainwashing is too far along and too deep. The entire world runs itself this way now. It clings to false gods and superstitions as its only way out of the labyrinth. Even religions take on a certain imagery and “exchange value.” Bubba Ram Dass called it “mantric warfare.” The problem is the state of mind itself, mistaking the thing (the object – mirror, photo, grass hut, icon, decoration) for reality. And then trading on that, to see whose is more powerful, more righteous, more impressive. As for deities and icons, organized religion is no less a victim. There would be no Christian God without a Muslim God or a Jewish God. They need each other to exist, and they trade on their differences. “My God is better than your God.”

All one can do is extricate from the whole scene as much as he can. To remain conscious and wary, while existing in the world as we must. We are where we are. It’s a matter of how we think and what we remember – as we hear the words “Be who you are” from a monster which has already told us (who we are).

© 2023 Richard Hiatt

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