Advice to self
This
is always the temptation, to say: “It’s time to settle down.” “It’s time to
find a groove, a rhythm, or get back into one.” “You can’t flit here there and
everywhere for the rest of your life.” “Here, there, and everywhere” — not geographically but emotionally,
mentally, spiritually —
or emotionally and mentally anyway. Whether or not you have a “spiritually”
remains open to question, doesn’t it – whether your spirit is more or different from a combination of brain and
nerve endings?
The
temptation may be a display of good sense. It may be time to settle down, to
find a groove, a rhythm, a direction, a “you know, whatever.” But today begin
negatively: what this “whatever” is not.
Whatever
is not so often distracted, by, for example, “the news,” which you never get from
your sources anyway, so by “opinion.” You spend an inordinate amount of time,
don’t you, keeping informed of others’ opinions, particularly those others that
aren’t other — keeping informed of the opinions of others whose opinions agree
with yours, and sharing their
self-righteous high-dudgeon? Sharing their presumptuous, pompous priggery, as
they scream in their most reasonable tones: “Look at my anger, first — before you
look past it to see how g--d-- right I am. You can’t miss that, that I’m right;
but positively don’t miss that I’m also very
angry.
Advice to self: stop that! There are reasons, if
only those the heart knows that reason itself does not — reasons to be sad or happy,
frustrated or calm, full of piss and vinegar or completely wrung out, restless
or content; but there is no good reason to be self-righteously angry. There may
be a good reason to fake anger or to be mock-angry, to mock anger; but
self-righteous anger is like envy, that one deadly sin that has in it no compensatory
satisfaction.
 |
| This way, my little sparrow . . . |
This
is what analysis needs to teach us —
not that it’s okay to be angry, but that there’s nothing worth being angry
about. Nothing is that big, at least not where you and Sigmund live, in the
decline of the West. Even life under Stalin, let’s say: It’s worth being bitter
about, frustrated with, hostile toward many things, it’s worth becoming upset, rancorous, even to the edge
of anger; but at the point the edge begins to slip into sanctimonious
tartuffery, (because it will), back off. Pick up your chin, shrug your shoulders, close your eyes and
imagine Uncle Joe salivating by the bed of the perfect Soviet woman — blonde,
buxom, sturdy as reinforced concrete, square as a barn — he is shaking with desire yet his
manhood is shriveling, shrinking, shriveling, dwindling, shriveling, wrinkling
until it turns into a raisin, which falls to the floor . . . and rolls under
the bed; he goes down on hands and knees to find it. You, find a cartoonist to draw
a flipbook for you. He can be angry
if he needs to be. (Let him be angry. Let him be angry for you.)[1]
In
lesser circumstances —
in your own middle-class bed —
practice antic politics. You’re not going to change minds – you can’t even
change your own. So, change the subject. Paul Ryan and Ayn Rand become Ru-Paul
and Rand McNally, heads together drawing maps of the land of Transvestia. John
McCain and Joe Lieberman become the new, hot boy band, Hurry Cain with Justin
Bieberman.
Actually, you may be able to change
your mind by changing the subject (by changing the words). One might say, “from
the sublime to the ridiculous,” if there were a sublime. But if there isn’t: at least “from
the mundane to the absurd.”
[1] Think about Swift here but you
are not Dean Swift, stomping around his study, kicking at chair legs, pushing
books off his desk onto the floor, you are “Jonathan Swift,” pulling his pen
across the page, making houyhnhnms, these godawful, snotty, pharisaical equine fart-figments,
pretending reason where they are only rage. Think not about the man but the
satirist, the cartoonist, drawing his anger.
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