The Great Abstraction

Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.

...the 8-hour workday is too profitable for big business, not because of the amount of work people get done in eight hours (the average office worker gets less than three hours of actual work done in 8 hours) but because it makes for such a purchase-happy public. Keeping free time scarce means people pay a lot more for convenience, gratification, and any other relief they can buy. It keeps them watching television, and its commercials. It keeps them unambitious outside of work. We’ve been led into a culture that has been engineered to leave us tired, hungry for indulgence, willing to pay a lot for convenience and entertainment, and most importantly, vaguely dissatisfied with our lives so that we continue wanting things we don’t have. We buy so much because it always seems like something is still missing. Western economies, particularly that of the United States, have been built in a very calculated manner on gratification, addiction, and unnecessary spending. We spend to cheer ourselves up, to reward ourselves, to celebrate, to fix problems, to elevate our status, and to alleviate boredom. Can you imagine what would happen if all of America stopped buying so much unnecessary fluff that doesn’t add a lot of lasting value to our lives? The economy would collapse and never recover. All of America’s well-publicized problems, including obesity, depression, pollution and corruption are what it costs to create and sustain a trillion-dollar economy. For the economy to be “healthy”, America has to remain unhealthy. Healthy, happy people don’t feel like they need much they don’t already have, and that means they don’t buy a lot of junk, don’t need to be entertained as much, and they don’t end up watching a lot of commercials. The culture of the eight-hour workday is big business’ most powerful tool for keeping people in this same dissatisfied state where the answer to every problem is to buy something.

Fear, being anticipatory, is always without knowledge. It is a mental calculation based on the future unknown. And yet the experience of fear is the experience of being in the grip of a sensation that seems to possess an unassailable conviction in itself. To be afraid that the plane will crash is, in a sense, to assume that the plane will crash. And yet even if we could scrape away the many forms our fear takes and get to the underlying source-our mortality, our division from the infinite — we would still discover that our fear is not based on actual knowledge, unlike the part of us that chooses to be free. Bravery is always more intelligent than fear, since it is built on the foundation of what one knows about oneself: the knowledge of one’s strength and capacity, of one’s passion.

In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and nothing was true… The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.

Is there anything more dangerous than dissatisfied and irresponsible gods who don't know what they want?

Coming home is terrible whether the dogs lick your face or not whether you have a wife or just a wife-shaped loneliness waiting for you coming home is terribly lonely so that you will think of the oppressive barometric pressure back where you’ve just come from with fondness because everything’s worse once you’re home You think of the vermin clinging to the grass stalks long hours on the road roadside assistance and ice creams and the peculiar shapes of certain clouds and silences with longing because you did not want to return coming home is just awful And the homestyle silences and clouds contribute to nothing but the general malaise clouds, such as they are, are in fact suspect and made from a different material than those you left behind You yourself are cut from a different cloudy cloth returned remaindered ill-met by moonlight unhappy to be back slack in all the wrong spots seamy suit of clothes dishrag-ratty, worn You return home moon-landed, foreign. The earth’s gravitational pull, an effort now redoubled dragging your shoelaces loose and your shoulders etching deeper the stanza of worry on your forehead you return home depended a parched well linked to tomorrow by a frail strand of… anyway You sigh into the onslaught of identical days one might as well, at a time. Well, anyway, you’re back. The sun goes up and down like a tired whore, the weather immobile like a broken limb you just keep getting older. Nothing moves but the shifting tides of salt in your body. Your vision blears, you carry your weather with you; the big, blue whale; a skeletal darkness. You come back with X-ray vision your eyes have become a hunger. You come home with your mutant gifts to a house of bone. Everything you see now, all of it… bone.

When we feed and support our own happiness, we are nourishing our ability to love. That’s why to love means to learn the art of nourishing our happiness. Understanding someone’s suffering is the best gift you can give another person. 'Understanding' is love’s other name. If you don’t understand, you can’t love.

Unhealthy peace can be as threatening to human connection as unhealthy conflict.

My children like to play an age-old game with me called, “Why?” I’ll tell them, for instance, that I need them to finish breakfast, and they’ll say why, and I’ll say so that you receive adequate nutrition and hydration, and they’ll say why, and I’ll say because as your parent I feel obligated to protect your health, and they’ll say why, and I’ll say partly because I love you and partly because of evolutionary imperatives baked into my biology, and they’ll say why, and I’ll say because the species wants to go on, and they’ll say why, and I’ll pause for a long time before saying, “I don’t know. I guess I believe in spite of it all the human enterprise has value.” And then there will be a silence. A blessed and beautiful silence will spread across the breakfast table. I might even see a kid pick up a fork. And then, just as the silence seems ready to take off its coat and stay awhile, one of my kids will say, 'Why?' My brain likes to play a somewhat similar game. That game is called, 'What’s even the point?' There’s an Edna St. Vincent Millay poem I’ve quoted in two of my novels and will now quote again, because I’ve never come across anything that describes my depressive blizzards so perfectly. 'The chill is in the air,' the poem begins, 'which the wise know well and have even learned to bear. This joy, I know, will soon be under snow.' I’m in an airport when suddenly I feel the chill in the air. What’s even the point? I’m about to fly to Milwaukee on a Tuesday afternoon, about to herd with other moderately intelligent apes into a tube that will spew a truly astonishing amount of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in order to transport us from one population center to a different one. Nothing that anyone has to do in Milwaukee really matters, because nothing really matters. There’s no point to the human endeavor in the largest sense. We will leave no permanent legacy in this impermanent universe, and our central lasting contribution to Earth will be that we were the first species to grow powerful enough to muck up the planet. When my mind starts playing What’s Even the Point, I can’t find a point to making art—which is just using the finite resources of our planet to decorate, and I can’t find a point to planting gardens, which is just inefficiently creating food that will sustain our useless vessels for a little while longer, and I can’t find a point to falling in love—which is just a desperate attempt to stave off the loneliness that you can never really solve for, because you are always alone in what Robert Penn Warren called, 'the darkness, which is you.' Except it’s not really a darkness. It’s much worse than that. The writer Jacqueline Woodson has said that we need to consider carefully what we construct as dark, and she’s right. When my brain plays What’s Even the Point, what really descends upon me is a blizzard of blinding, frozen white light. Being in the dark doesn’t hurt, but this does, like staring at the sun. That Millay poem refers to 'the eye’s bright trouble.' It seems to me that bright trouble is the light you see the first time you open your eyes after birth, the light that makes you cry your first tears, the light that is your first and greatest fear. What’s even the point? All this trial and travail for what will become nothing, and soon. Sitting in this airport, I’m disgusted by my excesses, my failures, my pathetic attempts to forge some meaning or hope from the materials of this meaningless world. I’ve been tricking myself, thinking there was some reason for all of it, thinking that consciousness was a miracle when it’s really a burden, thinking that to be alive was wondrous when it’s really a terror. The plain fact, my brain tells me when it plays this game, is that the universe doesn’t care if I’m here. Night falls fast, Millay wrote. Today is in the past. The thing about this game is that once my brain starts playing it, I can’t seem to find a way to stop. Any defense I try to mount is destroyed instantaneously by the blinding light. It feels like the only way to survive life is to cultivate an ironic detachment from it. If I can’t be happy, I at least want to be cool. When my brain is playing What’s Even the Point, hope feels so flimsy and naïve—especially in the face of the endless outrages and horrors of human life. What kind of mouth-breathing jackass looks at the state of human experience and responds with anything other than nihilistic despair? But of course the problem with despair is that it isn’t very productive. Like a replicating virus, all despair makes is more of itself. If playing What’s Even the Point made me a more committed advocate for justice or environmental protection, I’d be all for it. But the white light of despair instead renders me inert and apathetic. I struggle to do anything. I often can’t find a reason to get out of bed in the morning. Philosophical questions—what’s the point of being alive, what should we seek from life, how can we know what we know, how and where should we seek meaning—are often dismissed as pointless. What’s the difference between a philosophy degree and a pepperoni pizza? The pepperoni pizza can feed a family of four. And so on. But I think those questions are genuinely important, because I need to be able to survive my mind playing What’s Even the Point. I don’t want to give it to despair; I don’t want to take refuge in detached ridicule of unironized emotion. I don’t want to be cool if cool means being cold to or distant from the reality of experience. I want to feel what there is to feel while I am here. You don’t choose when your kids play the Why game, and you don’t choose when your brain plays What’s Even the Point. It’s exhausting. It gets old so fast, listening to the elaborate prose of your brain tell you that you’re an idiot for even trying. When the game is being played, it feels like it will never end, like you will be in active combat with your brain for what remains of your wretched life. But no. No. Now always feels infinite and never is. You keep going. You go to therapy. You try a different medication. You meditate, even though you dislike meditation. You exercise. You wait. Your mind keeps playing What’s Even the Point, and you keep refusing to give in to it, battling it with philosophy and self-help books and religion and whatever else that works. And then one day, the air is a bit warmer, and the sky is not so blindingly bright. It’s overcast, and you’re walking through a forested park with your children. Your nine-year-old points out two squirrels racing up an immense American Sycamore tree, its white bark peeling in patches, its leaves bigger than dinner plates. You think, my God that’s a beautiful tree. It must be a hundred years old, maybe more. Later, you’ll go home and read up on sycamores and learn that there are sycamore trees alive today that date back more than three hundred years, trees that are older than your nation. You’ll learn that George Washington once measured a sycamore tree that was over thirteen meters in circumference. You’ll read that Herodotus wrote 2,400 years ago that the Persian emperor Xerxes was marching his army through a grove of sycamore trees when he came across one of 'such beauty that he was moved to decorate it with golden ornaments and to leave behind one of his soldiers to guard it.' But for now you’re just looking up at that tree, thinking about how it turned dirt and water and sunshine into wood and bark and leaves, how it turned nothing into a place where squirrels play, and you realize you are in the vast dark shade of this giant tree, and that’s the point.

I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time—when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness... The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.

It’s also equally ludicrous to believe that – at the very least – this mass distraction and manipulation is not convenient for the people who are in charge. People are starving. They may not know it because they’re being fed mass produced garbage. The packaging is colourful and loud, but it’s produced in the same factories that make Pop Tarts and iPads, by people sitting around thinking, ‘What can we do to get people to buy more of these?’ And they’re very good at their jobs. But that’s what it is you’re getting, because that’s what they’re making. They’re selling you something. And the world is built on this now. Politics and government are built on this, corporations are built on this. Interpersonal relationships are built on this. And we’re starving, all of us, and we’re killing each other, and we’re hating each other, and we’re calling each other liars and evil because it’s all become marketing and we want to win because we’re lonely and empty and scared and we’re led to believe winning will change all that. But there is no winning. What can be done? Say who you are, really say it in your life and in your work. Tell someone out there who is lost, someone not yet born, someone who won’t be born for 500 years. Your writing will be a record of your time. It can’t help but be that. But more importantly, if you’re honest about who you are, you’ll help that person be less lonely in their world because that person will recognize him or herself in you and that will give them hope. It’s done so for me and I have to keep rediscovering it. It has profound importance in my life. Give that to the world, rather than selling something to the world. Don’t allow yourself to be tricked into thinking that the way things are is the way the world must work and that in the end selling is what everyone must do. Try not to.

Failure is a badge of honor. It means you risked failure.

Our culture is marketing. What is marketing? Trying to get people to do what you want them to. It’s what drives our consumer culture. It’s what drives our politics; it’s what drives our art. Music, movies, books, fine arts, it’s part of every research grant proposal. I don’t want to participate. I don’t want to tell you how to sell a screenplay or tell you how to write a hit, or tell you how to fit into the existing system. I want to tell you that I have a hope that there’s another way to be in this world, and that I believe with courage, vulnerability and honesty that the stuff we put into the world can serve a better purpose. The way movies work now, and I’m talking about mainstream industry, the only goal is to get you to buy a product. The only goal. The only goal. The only goal. The only goal. And this intention creates the movies that we sit through, and the movies that we sit through create us. In government we’ve been reduced to the same game. Through trickery, obfuscation, bullying and fear mongering, the goal of marketing a candidate is achieved. I don’t understand many things, I don’t know as much as I’d like about anything, but I’m a human being and I won’t be in competition for the right to be treated decently. I won’t play that game. Nor should anybody have to. In turn, I will try not to use whatever access I have to the public’s fear to sell things, including myself. The world is very scary now. It always has been. But something grotesque and specific to our time is blanketing us. We need to see that it is not reality; it is a choice we are making or allowing other people to make for us. You are born into a body, into a family, into a situation, into a brain chemistry, into a gender, into a culture, into a time – as am I. At times I can feel the massive gravitation pulling of all these various things, pulling me in different directions, creating me. I watch the reactions I have, that are as much my father’s as they are mine. I know they are inherited through genes and situation, just as they have been for my father. And I feel immense loneliness in this prison, coupled with a great shame because I can see that this prison has an open door. But I can’t get through it. How weak I am. How can I not be a saner person? A healthier person? A more generous person? My sneaker company tells me that I can, and that it’s up to me. It is a sign of great weakness if I don’t ‘Just Do It’. And these are the priests of our culture, the therapists, the Dad with a firm hand but your best interests at heart. A sneaker company that runs sweatshops in Third World countries. This is our Dad.  And I don’t know about you but I can be moved to tears by these commercials that these people put out. And I think it’s despicable.

The plain truth is we are going to die. Here I am, a teeny spec surrounded by boundless space and time, arguing with the whole of creation, shaking my fist, sputtering, growing even eloquent at times, and then-poof! I am gone. Swept off once and for all. I think that is very, very funny.

If I believe in anything, it is in the dark night of the soul. Awe is my religion, and mystery is its church.

Total control can be the death of a work.

We either make ourselves miserable or we make ourselves strong. The amount of work is the same.