PicoBlog

This silence is my companion now

I ask: of what did my soul die?

and the silence answers

if your soul died, whose life

are you living and

when did you become that person?

– Louise Glück, “Echoes”

Watching the long-awaited Tár was an unfortunately immersive experience. In the film, Lydia Tár is plagued or haunted by noises—drones, rattles, clicks, chimes, ticks and tocks, whispers, tolls, even screams. For her, the vibes are literally off, her world bloated with unwanted frequencies. Well, in the little suburban theater where I experienced this film for the first time, I perhaps over identified with Blachett’s Tár: it began with whispers and escalated to muttering; a cellphone kept vibrating faraway to my left; someone faraway to my right kept getting text messages; the couple in front of me kept saying “Who is that?” until I suggested that they leave (surprisingly, they did); and, when it was over, another of the mutterers, who’d be dead seven times over if dirty looks could kill, came up to me and asked if I had trouble following that movie. “Was she a perpetrator or not?” she wanted to know, as if it were a crossword clue.

That a screening of the best film in years (sure) can drown in mediocrity the way Mahler (e.g.) can get swallowed by contemporary music—most of which sounds like auto-tuned Porky Pig on a downbeat in a minor key—isn’t a surprise to me in the ice swamp where I live. At best I look around and think, Who cares? Because almost nobody does, not really. Every restaurant is so “fun” that it’s necessary to shout. One cyclist out of three wears a bluetooth speaker like a necklace. On the bus this week, a grown human male was watching cartoons with no headphones—a somehow even-more-chaotic ante up from the daily “listening to music” without headphones. Two cars out of three have broken mufflers; one out of four insists on burning a little rubber after every stop. Most media—especially persons who’ve mistaken themselves for media—seem to have decided that “silence is violence” must mean noise is politics.

Today’s letter was supposed to be about banality. I was going to start with a joke at my expense: that if the Adam Levine news had happened in 2019, I’d have written 5,000 words about screenshots, the dasein of flirting, and the banality of wanting to cum. This joke would have opened the door to one of life’s greatest banalities: grief. In October, our best bud of 20 years got very sick and we had to take him in and say goodbye. (To be clear, I’m talking about a cat.) But the thing about the banal is that it’s lonely. It’s the “who cares” of experiences, and oftentimes the exceptional talent and patience required to transcend it, to render it, can feel more like public surgery than whatever it is that writing—for free!—is supposed to be.

As ever, the temptation is silence. Literal? Metaphorical? Terminal? Almost everywhere feels like the party in Pierrot le Fou where guests quote commercials at one another. This too is banal: who cares if most people have been turned into living advertisements for consumerist schlock when the planet etc., when the government etc., when women’s bodies and queer lives etc. What’s the point, Laura Miller wants to know, of writing a novel without any hope? (Perhaps Lydia Tár would remind her that hope dies last.) Though it’s not as if the mainstream, much-esteemed literary novel—tediously repeating “look at everything art can’t do anymore” in one familiar, spare fugue after another—demonstrates much hope. Or even interest, for that matter. If the zeitgeist is to revel in one’s own powerlessness—an ethos brought about, perhaps, by a consumerist cooptation of social critique and a simplistic elevation of “the victim” as the supreme arbiter of authority (cf. the sharp turn in conservative rhetoric toward their own “victimization”)—most contemporary literary works haunt their age politely. And please don’t ask: I’m too broke to criticize those who sit on juries and editorial boards.

This morning, I thought I should save 140 people from receiving another email to delete. Who cares? But I guess I care. It matters to me that a film like Tár can exist despite theatergoers who might have been more at home seeing episode 307 of Marvel, or sitting through another eight seasons of Rape, Torture, and Dragons. It matters to me, at the bookstore where I work, that people are buying Dhalgren, Unforgiving Years, Averno, David Graeber’s Debt, Geography III, Thomas Grattan’s The Recent East, Leslie Silko’s Ceremony, Lost Children Archive, and other wonderful, willful books simply because I wrote some nice words underneath each of them. It matters that I can wander into the back, pick up an ARC by an author I know nothing about, and want to celebrate their book once it comes out. I care that there are people out there doing exceptional work—work that, in ways I rarely understand, augments my life. In fact it makes life itself larger. Whereas most of what one encounters tries to shrink or reduce life, to push in upon it, there are books and paintings and movies and albums and symphonies out there which push the other way. They open: and what more could a person ask?

It’s banal, sure, but the craving to be exceptional is silence’s counterweight, the path away from its temptation. The craving to be a body in the age rather than a spirit of it. Cringe to want, I know—to dream, to hope, to plan, to aspire, to write, to live—but what style, if you pull it off.

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