on courage
“I guess he wasn’t a painter at all. He had no courage and I believe that to create one’s own world in any of the arts takes courage.” — Georgia O’Keefe
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in the opening pages of “the white album”, joan didion speaks to one’s connection with a narrative and the effect that the losing of that narrative can have on the person expecting its permanence. the time frame she’s writing of coincides with a period of physical and psychological challenges for didion that leave her wondering if there is an illness or specific neurosis underlying her experience. or is it that she’s rationally responding to a disoriented world? how can one truly grapple with writing of the essence of murder and massive civil unrest without feeling disoriented in the self?
didion wrestled with big thoughts and big ideas with style and without an agenda or even always a clear takeaway. with the ideas of feminism or the ideas of equality or the ideas of NEWS. the style itself was the message. the way she held the edges at her fingertips without fear. it seems now we are more and more obsessed with the punchline: with the idea that the abstract at the start of the paper will adequately define its lesson. we’re convinced that there should be perfect answers to everything and we want to be pointed towards them. we dislike a story if we’re unsure how to wrap it up and take it elsewhere.
what we don’t want is someone to jump into the fray and convey to us just how fray-y it all is. oh no. not that. we would rather they report to us how it is a symptom of something simultaneously larger but that we can pin down and project our other beliefs and fears into. that’s what we prefer. we want it to tell us how our “way of life” or our “beliefs” are being threatened. we want to know that we have a “thing” to defend.
vonnegut in lectures spoke of our misguided belief in narrative and the terrible misfortune that humans never truly can identify what is really good news or bad news or when to feel fortunate (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOGru_4z1Vc). bukowski in “roll the dice” laid out the case for the courage to dance with uncertainty on the edges. the same could be said for hunter s. thompson’s “midnight on the coast highway.” didion had the courage to speak of her own flirtations with psychosis while playing with the heaviness of the human experience in its most extreme forms. all these brilliant people in different words suggesting to us that that which is truly divine is found in the undefined. and that is the point.
courage in the modern cultural sense seems most broadly defined in the courage of one’s convictions. we want to believe that courage is the ability to draw a line and stand on that line, which certainly IS one form of courage. john lewis courageously walked across that bridge and only a fool would deny that. but our singular focus on this kind of courage has forced upon us the delusion of its backwater cousin being also inherently courageous: we’ve become convinced that courage can be displayed simply through the vocalizing of one’s convictions. which is important to do. to signal a desired direction of the culture. but this also distracts us from a deeper, less tangible sense of the word courage that we tend to not fully appreciate.
courage in the arts or in the art of living can often be about walking to the edges and attempting to convey what it feels like out there. a qualitative experience. sometimes this act results in what we will call a failure if it doesn’t manifest a tightly constructed message or moral. but the lack of definition sometimes proves the point of the frontier. it’s the courage of embracing there may be a lack of definition. it’s the courage of knowing one may end up crucified on the cross of their own project: that the seeking is itself rapt in awe and can counterpunch like a motherfucker. the seeking is treacherous. i submit that we’ve lost the patience for this kind of courage and thus we’ve mostly snuffed out the pursuit of it. where’s the opportunity for lessons if those lessons have to be grappled with and worked for? how is that “efficient”, the golden word to my generation and the antithesis of true, wandering, emotional seeking. the masses only want what can be quantified and monetized and tangibly connected to a simpler sense of fulfillment.
we are religious about our seeking of answers and of quantification and punchlines and we are a people mostly void of the appreciation of the unknown because the unknown provokes all sorts of little insecurities and anxieties that lay dormant that we’d rather not walk up to until we NEED to. and when we need to, if we’ve never walked up to the edges before, they will more easily become overwhelming. a people afraid to admit that there’s such a thing as the darkness could become overwhelmed when it’s time to face rapid change or heartbreak or loss or any other of the edges. the courage of those seeking and dancing at the edges is the courage of doubt and ambiguity and big fancy questions of the unknown. it is the courage to look while knowing that the looking will not find an answer that is permanent.
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i think a lot about how my favorite writers would handle today’s america and i conclude flatly that most of them just wouldn’t. these people had force of soul. we have no soul. we’re a pack of degenerate cowards with big ears and big mouths and sometimes big brains but tiny little futile hearts. bukowski couldn’t exist today.
bukowski wouldn’t have even gotten to “factotum” (’75) because some mob would have sent his ass to château d’if for 10% of what he said in “post office” (‘71). the woke douche bags and the self-righteous evangelicals would have found unity in hating the degenerate. cultural purification has many homes in today’s landscape, and people simply are uncomfortable with hookers and alcoholism and derangement. unless it’s their pastors on the hook (see jerry falwell jr., amongst others).
maybe he would have drank himself to oblivion no matter what era he lived in. but that’s not really the point. the point is nearly every segment of our society would be uninterested, compared to fifty years ago, in someone like him. and that sucks not because of any specific connection but because of what it says about the kind of people we are. we don’t embrace a mess. we’d want him sterilized and snipped at the nards. anything but write books for us. we’d give him a fancy label from the dsm and twice daily horse pills. zap the genius right out of him. all the self-righteous cunts driving around the suburbs are too busy reading self help books and becoming evermore obsessed with becoming super efficient total bores. a nation of pompous, hyper clean stiffs. no appreciation for coloring outside the lines or for that matter much color of any kind.
our people don’t want art so we don’t deserve it and we will continue to condemn ourselves to receiving less and less of it. we want smooth corners. we want a fresh truck and a ticky tacky home. we want ambien and enough SHOWS that will occupy our stupid brains until the lights go out. we want comfort.
what we don’t want is writers who write about shit stains and fucking prostitutes and homelessness or flat narratives without a hero. we’d rather not think about the fact that people possess a lot of ugliness and empty space. we don’t acknowledge that maybe there’s something to be learned from those that get to the edge, and we don’t have any value for those who go over the edge because we’re all too chicken shit to even walk to the railing and we tend to be frightened of that which isn’t like ourselves.
