I’m going through much the same thing probably so it seems.
but remember antecedents in my past to this set of feelings about the culture:
the most vivid recollection: walking from campus from a philosophy class a beautiful afternoon and seeing an ordinary billboard advertising something even more ordinary
certainly whatever it selling - car, soup, hairspray? - would not inspire the level of sexual enthusiasm in a young vital woman such was what was ostensibly captured in leering flagrancy by the photo accompanying the ad -
Who knows why My brain lashed out immediately with rectitude disgust saying, “well this is the very definition of perversity. woman feigning passion she cannot authentically feel. A vision however OBVIOUSLY wrong nonetheless is designed to infiltrate the imagination and drive the desire to buy. Perversity: to cause, to incite
, to invite the endless enemy: desire! And then my inflamed mind looking up to glee I guess fake winsome poster sized eyes, dripping the lust over a detergent, pantyhose, lightbulb? heavy with the fatal knowledge “this is not right and cannot continue“.
But of course it all DID continue, apace. Like most bad ideas, consumerism doubling as a secular religion went essentially bananas at about this point. This refusnick recollection of mine is 35 years old. I was then a woman reading newspapers, magazines, books, watching movies, having conversations, mostly with people. This activity generally done under the rubric of “Keeping up with What’s Going On”
Under this jurisdiction you find yourself taking on all sorts of unbidden fantasies.
I couldn’t imagine the way it would all come down to Ferguson first, then Nov 8, 2016, (I’d been having such a nice time until Florida was called. (Lindsay had made a fabulous Bouche de Noel that I could barely look at and suddenly had to leave). Then next it was the babies in cages being alright with some, that whole Congressional testimony about whether providing water sanitary conditions for migrating children was in fact legally required under US law sticks out, but really all these set pieces were only to be the opening ceremonies of the Cruelty Olympics which turns out would fetch a much vaster and well heeled audience then the real thing and just as suddenly making all the worst people I’d ever heard of infinitely historically wealthy.
Yes, all this does something to a person and it’s all very hard to sort out. It has something to do with politics but not mostly. It has something to do with art, or the auto reveal of art in a harrowingly decadent age, and wondering how is it we’ve become so much less powerful. It’s quite shocking .
As usual I’ve written much too long on your comments. I have such a strong resonance with all this.
Deeply appreciated Kyra, as ever. I have the sense of being a bit inchoate with this piece - I guess for the good reason that it's a very challenging problem to deal with. What I'm hoping to do is to reframe the conversation a bit - not so much 'are you with the future or not with the future,' which always turns into tech evangelism vs. ludditism, and more 'are you buying into the center or are you willing to live more on the periphery, in a distributive framework.' What that actually looks like is a bit mysterious, but whatever - I'm dealing in pretty broad imaginative frameworks, and I have this belief that it's possible, and healthy, to go through life, do all the things you need to do to get by, but just not to buy into the signal from the center. There's a Brodsky line that "happiness is not knowing the name of your ruler," which is a nice summation of what I'm talking about.
I think one of the reasons I like reading you is that you are “a bit inchoate”. Which reads (to me anyway) like maturity, humility, and even sanity. Yes, it’s a torture to embrace ambiguity as a functional, durable, moment to moment “fact of life” when you’ve been raised in a culture training us on a steady diet of assertiveness, domination and the will to power. Even with all our fancy self-determination and science etc we’re still striving just to cope with modernity
As always thought-provoking, thanks for putting this down. Would be interested in your thoughts about how the U.S. Federalist system of states with considerable powers -- at least compared to any local jurisdictions in England or France or other W. European nations -- allow both our politics and culture to be less heterogenous. While a state like Maryland where I live did lock down, I have a sense that life went on with a lot less Covid disruption in many states, or the lock-downs were only in bubbles like Austin in Texas.
One could argue that the U.S. has (had) only a few points of agreement -- like reverence for the Revolution -- and beyond that local differences are celebrated. Perhaps the liberal bubbles -- which admittedly are a good percent of the country -- are becoming increasingly interchangeable.
Thank you Larry. My thoughts on this aren't all that well-developed. The gist is that a federalist structure is the way to go - in the sense of having at one level local authorities that have genuine power and then an overlay of more national government. That was sort of the core Constitutional vision. In the cultural orbit I'm in, there's an abiding assumption that the founders were being a little overly precious about all of this, that 'states' rights' was from the beginning code for pro-slavery, that state government is in any case corrupt and toothless, and that the 'truth' of the U.S. is in the sort of nationalist vision of people like Lincoln or FDR, which powers over the niceties of locally-driven government. My intuition is that the founders were a little more astute than the NYT op-eds I read, and Covid was actually a nice illustration of why a more distributive model works better. Simply put, different models worked better in different places, and in the midst of (for many reasons) incoherent national policy, distribution turned out to be a better way than people might have assumed to handle a crisis.
As we trudge on trying to make sense of the too often senseless, I’m struck by the way a Samuel Beckett quote has entered the vernacular. Here it is: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” From _Worstward Ho_ by Samuel Beckett.
I must admit that I do take hope form this quote, but also want to comment that in this short prose piece that this master wrote in 1983 his subject, as in much of his other work, appears to me to be how we go on without hope and in the face of death.
Do go on and Write it! like disaster (from "One Art" by Elizabeth Bishop) … as you do so well.
Thank you Mary! And thanks to you I dropped sending posts by e-mail - you're right that this is a better system. Yeah, that Beckett line is really, really good - and kind of sums up how the creative process works (it's very hard to come up with a better idea of it). And you may be absolutely right that people tend to use that line to talk about creativity or like work ethic but it's really about something much more difficult and trenchant than that.
I’m going through much the same thing probably so it seems.
but remember antecedents in my past to this set of feelings about the culture:
the most vivid recollection: walking from campus from a philosophy class a beautiful afternoon and seeing an ordinary billboard advertising something even more ordinary
certainly whatever it selling - car, soup, hairspray? - would not inspire the level of sexual enthusiasm in a young vital woman such was what was ostensibly captured in leering flagrancy by the photo accompanying the ad -
Who knows why My brain lashed out immediately with rectitude disgust saying, “well this is the very definition of perversity. woman feigning passion she cannot authentically feel. A vision however OBVIOUSLY wrong nonetheless is designed to infiltrate the imagination and drive the desire to buy. Perversity: to cause, to incite
, to invite the endless enemy: desire! And then my inflamed mind looking up to glee I guess fake winsome poster sized eyes, dripping the lust over a detergent, pantyhose, lightbulb? heavy with the fatal knowledge “this is not right and cannot continue“.
But of course it all DID continue, apace. Like most bad ideas, consumerism doubling as a secular religion went essentially bananas at about this point. This refusnick recollection of mine is 35 years old. I was then a woman reading newspapers, magazines, books, watching movies, having conversations, mostly with people. This activity generally done under the rubric of “Keeping up with What’s Going On”
Under this jurisdiction you find yourself taking on all sorts of unbidden fantasies.
I couldn’t imagine the way it would all come down to Ferguson first, then Nov 8, 2016, (I’d been having such a nice time until Florida was called. (Lindsay had made a fabulous Bouche de Noel that I could barely look at and suddenly had to leave). Then next it was the babies in cages being alright with some, that whole Congressional testimony about whether providing water sanitary conditions for migrating children was in fact legally required under US law sticks out, but really all these set pieces were only to be the opening ceremonies of the Cruelty Olympics which turns out would fetch a much vaster and well heeled audience then the real thing and just as suddenly making all the worst people I’d ever heard of infinitely historically wealthy.
Yes, all this does something to a person and it’s all very hard to sort out. It has something to do with politics but not mostly. It has something to do with art, or the auto reveal of art in a harrowingly decadent age, and wondering how is it we’ve become so much less powerful. It’s quite shocking .
As usual I’ve written much too long on your comments. I have such a strong resonance with all this.
Deeply appreciated Kyra, as ever. I have the sense of being a bit inchoate with this piece - I guess for the good reason that it's a very challenging problem to deal with. What I'm hoping to do is to reframe the conversation a bit - not so much 'are you with the future or not with the future,' which always turns into tech evangelism vs. ludditism, and more 'are you buying into the center or are you willing to live more on the periphery, in a distributive framework.' What that actually looks like is a bit mysterious, but whatever - I'm dealing in pretty broad imaginative frameworks, and I have this belief that it's possible, and healthy, to go through life, do all the things you need to do to get by, but just not to buy into the signal from the center. There's a Brodsky line that "happiness is not knowing the name of your ruler," which is a nice summation of what I'm talking about.
I think one of the reasons I like reading you is that you are “a bit inchoate”. Which reads (to me anyway) like maturity, humility, and even sanity. Yes, it’s a torture to embrace ambiguity as a functional, durable, moment to moment “fact of life” when you’ve been raised in a culture training us on a steady diet of assertiveness, domination and the will to power. Even with all our fancy self-determination and science etc we’re still striving just to cope with modernity
Kyra, you rule.
As always thought-provoking, thanks for putting this down. Would be interested in your thoughts about how the U.S. Federalist system of states with considerable powers -- at least compared to any local jurisdictions in England or France or other W. European nations -- allow both our politics and culture to be less heterogenous. While a state like Maryland where I live did lock down, I have a sense that life went on with a lot less Covid disruption in many states, or the lock-downs were only in bubbles like Austin in Texas.
One could argue that the U.S. has (had) only a few points of agreement -- like reverence for the Revolution -- and beyond that local differences are celebrated. Perhaps the liberal bubbles -- which admittedly are a good percent of the country -- are becoming increasingly interchangeable.
Thank you Larry. My thoughts on this aren't all that well-developed. The gist is that a federalist structure is the way to go - in the sense of having at one level local authorities that have genuine power and then an overlay of more national government. That was sort of the core Constitutional vision. In the cultural orbit I'm in, there's an abiding assumption that the founders were being a little overly precious about all of this, that 'states' rights' was from the beginning code for pro-slavery, that state government is in any case corrupt and toothless, and that the 'truth' of the U.S. is in the sort of nationalist vision of people like Lincoln or FDR, which powers over the niceties of locally-driven government. My intuition is that the founders were a little more astute than the NYT op-eds I read, and Covid was actually a nice illustration of why a more distributive model works better. Simply put, different models worked better in different places, and in the midst of (for many reasons) incoherent national policy, distribution turned out to be a better way than people might have assumed to handle a crisis.
- Sam
As we trudge on trying to make sense of the too often senseless, I’m struck by the way a Samuel Beckett quote has entered the vernacular. Here it is: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” From _Worstward Ho_ by Samuel Beckett.
I must admit that I do take hope form this quote, but also want to comment that in this short prose piece that this master wrote in 1983 his subject, as in much of his other work, appears to me to be how we go on without hope and in the face of death.
Do go on and Write it! like disaster (from "One Art" by Elizabeth Bishop) … as you do so well.
Thank you Mary! And thanks to you I dropped sending posts by e-mail - you're right that this is a better system. Yeah, that Beckett line is really, really good - and kind of sums up how the creative process works (it's very hard to come up with a better idea of it). And you may be absolutely right that people tend to use that line to talk about creativity or like work ethic but it's really about something much more difficult and trenchant than that.