fragilekeys

After returning from a daylong trip to a concentration camp is perhaps the only time I can allow myself to say with all the critical gusto I can muster, and to every one of my friends: there is nothing to celebrate in today’s crisis regime. Let me confess my disappointment, my frustration, that I feel almost constantly and that I have never known how to clearly express, that I come across again and again in habits of disrespect and laughter, my disgust with the “celebration-culture” that we live in. It stretches much further than celebrations properly defined, and goes deep into the daily relaxation techniques and modes of small-talking, all the magazine ads and cheap games of backslapping and opinion sharing, the art of congratulating-ourselves-for-nothing that reigns as the norm, the lowering of standards for the sake of not upsetting people, our fear to say the truth as if that had anything to do with love…

Because do we not feel the dead under our feet? Have we forgotten what has happened, are we blind to what is still happening? Are we so content to live with pizzas and video games and bad language and laziness? What are we thinking about, really, when we are celebrating how happy we are, how friendly we are, how good things taste? And who doesn’t feel the anxiety in all these boozed-up rooms, all these dumb-houses of fandom and small-talk, all the worry and strife and anxiety? You see what I’m driving at: who doesn’t know that we are living in a crisis regime, in a kind of concentration camp of fake happiness?

I used to think it was my anxiety, but the anxiety one feels in oneself is something one can work with, something that, if responded to, pushes us through into what we thought was impossible. Whereas the anxiety in celebration culture is often just the unspoken opinion that no one really knows why we are celebrating, why we are gathered this way, why our eyes are glued to the sports match, why we are satisfied with such tiny ways of living. That is surely also our anxiety, a social anxiety that we feel as our own, but we pretend as if it isn’t ours, we pretend as if it isn’t there, as if we didn’t know that its program keeps running even when the most triumphant moments of group-joy seem to break through. What is this if not a will to group-blindness?

I have fought tooth and nail against these anxieties, trying to figure out what is going on ‘underneath the scene’ for so long, and today’s visit solidified my horror. I try not to speak this way, because it is seems so irrational and exaggerated to compare our current time, despite how evil it is, to this radically evil time. But I know, I can’t help but saying it, I feel I know: today it is just the same. “Strange times, that weep with laughter, not with weeping,” wrote Shakespeare. Strange times, when people sit glued to the programming, laughing, when there is nothing there to be laughed at, and the only proper response is to weep.

In Ravensbrück, the SS-Commander’s house sat on top of a hill, such that if he only walked out onto his front porch, he could overlook the massive expanse of the camp, where hundreds of thousands of prisoners toiled away, performed ridiculous, dehumanizing rituals, were ordered around in languages they didn’t understand, starved and died. I always imagine the children of these men riding their first toy bicycle on that porch and down the front walk way. What does the father say when the son first wonders what all those people down there are doing, why they’re all wearing the same stripped clothes and have no hair and look so thin and dirty? And I am horrified by the evasions, the jokes, the non-answers that the father might say to him. And I am even more horrified by the glee he has, how he celebrates, when he thinks about how he works, what he is accomplishing, the society he is running, the community he is “building.” Why did the Germans go along with such a murderous plan? How could they live under this crisis regime? How did they still smile? What did they say when they saw trains full of Jews or Foreigners being shipped to these obscure barracks, out of which the smoke of burning corpses was fuming?

There is nothing to celebrate in a crisis society. I believe today that time is waiting for us to figure this out, to put down the distractions, to give up the cheap smiles, and to think, to weep, to feel the dead underneath our feet, the oppressed dead who are united with the living oppressed, those who are being trampled underneath and are thus already dead. More and more, that is us, that is everyone: trampling each other over with celebrations, wasting time in happiness, failing to acknowledge our anxieties out of fear, and using the excuse of friendship and love to cover over the worst lapses in attention and failures to imagine the world in a different way and thus to act in the world in a different way.

That different way, in response to our dissatisfaction with the accepted way, does not have a mold or a pattern. There is no role and there is no knowledge possible beforehand about what it will be. Furthermore, it can never stay the same way; anxiety always reaches another impossibility, another wall, another petty game to deactivate. It goes as deep as the very last thought of one’s life. It is a constant self-disagreement and a constant skepticism with regard to the happiness of the collective or the soundness of the “whole” or “pair” we supposedly make. It is honest speech–and first of all honest speech with oneself, about what one would really like to be doing, where one would really like to be and with whom. It is an awareness that our answers to these questions are always deceptive and that, for the most part and usually despite all our attention, “inner deception” reigns, inside and out. “Strange times, that weep with laughter, not with weeping.”

Because if we go on just laughing, nothing really gets easier. What seems to lighten the mood kills the true one. Better to do the difficult thing first: to disappoint everyone, slowly to shock, by refusing to go along with the game as usual. I’m begging you, with all the tears shed in Ravensbrück, yesterday and today, refuse, refuse to play the game as usual, disappoint people, don’t say what you should say, don’t try to make people comfortable, don’t prioritize happiness, don’t be chummy, don’t be afraid of dark walls–because behind them lies something impossible, when we have the courage to go there: an ever different way of being that can never once repeat itself, that will never see anyone in the mirror again, but only the angst associated with breaking through it–only a name to cross out, a trajectory to halt, an easiness, a happiness, a going-along-with it to refuse–that is for nothing, prepares us for nothing, comes to nothing, and therefore, perhaps, is actually something other: the desperate self-explosion of hopeless poetry.

The Stranger Day Letter
1.28.15

If today were Stranger Day, I would thank you all, from the bottom of my heart, for being strangers. I would even dare to say that you all are “my” strangers, who I am proud to know and love–if the very notion of stranger, the reality of your strangeness to me, didn’t undermine beforehand the possibility of my knowing you, and of your belonging to me. Unless to be my stranger was to be my friend…

So, today–let’s call it Happy Stranger Day!–I thank you, stranger, for being (a) stranger, for being stranger than I or you could have thought strange. I thank you for being my friend.

And you, of course, better than anyone, know how strange this is, how strange I am to you. You have no idea what I am saying or what I am doing! And I have no clue about you. Could it get any better than this?

Well, it isn’t entirely true. You know a few things about me, probably more than I know. And if you know at least one thing, it’s that I spend a lot of time writing. Strange. Couldn’t you say the same thing? What we do on these computers all day is nothing if not strange and “spooky”: reading and writing, communicating and connecting televersally, telekinetically, telepoetically, quasi-mechanically, in digicoded aching feeling, at the border of the virtual and the real–with heart, which is ever more possible–with pictures, text, music, event, updates, groups, you name it! Which is also strange, given how far away we are. Stranger still, because how close! (Like right there, but right away away: but wasn’t it always…?)

But I have some confessions to make: I wanted to create Stranger Day because of a few strangers in my life who “really are” strangers. Who I had in mind were those of you who I have never met, as we still insist on saying, “in person.” I was thinking of Jacob, Aishwarya, Alex, just those freshest in my memory (there’s so many others, and others yet to come, perhaps they’re already waiting to speak up). But as I thought about them today–a lucky one if there ever was one–, “stranger” quickly became stranger, by coming closer. “Stranger” started to encompass, first, all of you who I’ve met so infrequently, and in such relatively “non-intimate” spaces that I would be hard pressed to say we’d “shared real space together” in the normal sense (which again is only the most classical sense of togetherness, and that more than ever needs to be challenged and displaced, today); those with whom my entire relationship–and however slight it is, it is precious–grew up in a virtual, i.e., written, space (a category I would call, for the sake of saving time and to acknowledge a real virtual ally and friend, Jordan). But once I made this step, it was as if everyone slipped away.

Because what about a colleague from Iowa, who I’ve only met in person a handful of times, years ago now it seems, but who regularly saves me from despair and self-loathing through “like-support” and chat (call him Tyler, but I barely know his name)? And then what about all of you who I’ve loved so deeply, who I’ve spent countless hours with and with whom I’ve tried to share everything? You who are with me in my dreams, but haven’t written me in a while or, lets be honest, don’t have time to read everything or write back? All of a sudden it was a landscape of ghosts, of irrecoverable memories. A bookshelf, a wall of letters for the future. A sum of strangers, goners, absentees and abandoners, all of you up to the end unreachable, and thus mourned interminably, from the beginning.

I sat there, alone, heart beating, fingers near spasm, with all of you with me, and yet without all of you forever. Strange, too, as there was so much to read.

What does it mean, today, to meet in person? Aren’t we “in fact” doing it right here? What does it mean, today, to stay in touch? To be in each other’s lives, to be a part of our thinking processes and our hopes? Nothing is more uncertain than the old concepts of proximity and distance, “in the flesh” and “at a distance,” the priority given to nearness and “being in the same physical space.” Of course, it will remain fashionable–and perhaps for good reason, but for what good reason, exactly?–to insist on the importance of meeting “in person,” body-to-body, “in real life,” and so on. But for today, on Stranger Day, humor me a bit and imagine it otherwise. Humor me and think upon the proximity of the absent and the absence of those most nearest. Think of the dead inside you, whose eyes never waver as yours do.

This landscape of ghosts is not as strange as you might think–even if “in reality” it is much stranger.

Because me and my strangers have a different story: ours is a story of writing and reading. Which is to say, of loss and precious traces. Of unknowable periodicity. Ours is a story of “will probably never meet.” Ours is a story of “could not ever meet.” Ours is a story without a shred of contact continuing–save these. To use a tough phrase I’d like to salvage for a different usage, “we are dead to each other.” Strange! As if in this world of reading and writing, it had to be that way, was always that way, will always be that way. As if it were that way for all.

Well, I’ve run over this story before with you, in public(?) and in private(?), repeating myself so many times over that you decided long ago I was obsessed with transience or death or disappearing or what have you. True, and it’s proof that you read me. But isn’t it also proof that I read you? Isn’t it also proof that we were implicated in each other’s speech from the first? That even “in person,” touching body to body, speaking voice to voice, this was a community of vanishers? Of those who belonged to each other without belonging, without lasting together? Without sharing anything, perhaps, but the illegibility of some traces we could never once and for all assign to anyone? The expressions of exposed faces, heads turning? Without sighting anything other but the other’s strangeness, one’s own?

Which is how Stranger Day became everyone’s. I ask again: what does it mean to keep in touch? You’ll think me unique if I say: you have to write me, I have to write you, we have to write each other. But isn’t just me. It’s father and son, sister and daughter. Writing slips into a call, the call slips into a meeting, the meeting slips into an embrace, the embrace slips into life “together,” and that life slips into, was from the get-go… love: dying (with) each other.

Strange, because that’s writing! That’s writing right now too, and I’m suggesting, today, that that’s all we ever do. Writing is a reach outward that never comes true, that never gets back to you. Or if ever it does, you’re not you, but stranger. Writing reaches out to strangers as absolutely strange as you. You, absolutely strange to yourself. Writing: a mourning brawl among ghost-friends. “Life”…

Or perhaps death. And perhaps enemies. You know by now how important it is to keep our distances. Perhaps you’re getting that feeling even now (he’s sickening, he’s killing us, he’s lost tone balance). But my strangers and I knew this from the get-go, without knowing it, and only reading. This respect let us approach each other from the distance of writing (the distance of life and time, no?), which is no doubt the most respectful distance possible, the one from which we all away from each other constantly stood. If, on Stranger Day, I ask you to write me back, or to write a stranger, to spill your guts, I don’t imply that it’s time to do it today. What can I say? It takes a lot of strangeness, and a lot of strangers, to write this way. Which is to say, it takes time, and trust. Stranger Day is a day to honor the time needed and taken, but it isn’t nearly long enough to take it. Perhaps it’s not even long enough to trust. Perhaps it will take years for you to say anything.

But don’t worry, I don’t blame you, I forgive everything, and as you forgave me, for I too am still waiting for something to–be it meaningless babble, signs of the unconditional, manifestations of a promise to write further, to pass on stranger, to survive in each other. And in saying this, I wait for you. Wait, at the end, to wait for you.

So. Stranger/friend, met/never-met, touched/never-touched, touched-deeper-than-touching-without-touching: here we are, or rather there you are, over there away from me, like a stranger, respectfully spooky. It’s better that way, because it’s the only one. We write to where we can’t go, from where we’ve never been, to who we can’t know. That’s the danger of it, the risk. And that’s the love.

With thanks for all of it and for you,
On this holiday of my own light fabrication,
Strangerly yours,
Tim

P.S. Go stranger.

Image: John Lurie, “You have the right to the pursuit of happiness. Good luck with that.” Accessed 1.26.15 at: http://johnlurieart.com/

What, dost thou weep? Come nearer. Then I love thee
Because thou art a woman, and disclaim’st
Flinty mankind, whose eyes do never give
But thorough lust and laughter. Pity’s sleeping.
Strange times, that weep with laughing, not with weeping!
               –William Shakespeare, Timon of Athens

And if levity (“lust and laughter”) were the cause of–our excuse for–our irresponsibility? If the injunction to have fun and “meet” was side-tracking everyone from what they ought to be doing?… All the goofy videos that go viral, the flashy apps that sap our attention on commutes, the ecstatic moments of drunken connection, the knowledge that comes from constant study… What if this veil of conviviality had, since time immemorial, prevented our perception of all the deeper pains? From the old aristocrat to the modern consumerist, all would be united on this front: the possibility of “happiness,” of the orgiastic enjoyment of things, will have blocked out the possibility of responsibility–of disquietude. Those obsessed with such pursuits, with status, sex, money, fame, or comfort–who follow, in a slave-like way, Oscar Wilde’s maxim, “Pleasure is the object, duty and the goal of all rational creatures,” even though Wilde eventually rejected his pleasure-seeking aims and wrote a most ponderous meditation on suffering, in a quasi-Christian conversion that couldn’t be further from the current forms of complacent Catholicism and Christian Hedonism–sit back, attend parties and church services and political meetings as if that guaranteed moral righteousness, love and reproduce as if the family were the ultimate form of community, act  out in the world as if the point here was to make a name for oneself… “Strange times, that weep with laughing, not with weeping!”

I can’t imagine sounding this refrain often enough: “Strange times, that weep with laughing, not with weeping!” Who could still feel innocent in this world? Who could go to sleep with a good conscience? Who could face the everyday without ever-deepening guilt? Who could be dull enough to believe in the goodness of their own position? Those who smile and are proud to be on earth and to be human… Those who fancy themselves just, to be doing the right thing, to be helping the world… Well, I do not cast doubt on it, I do not judge or reckon; I can only judge myself, and I extend myself no benefit. I’ve tried to track it farther, to cut myself less and less slack, but ultimately one only feels more wretched, more selfish, more indefensibly calm and cool in a world of ruins and injustice–more guilty, more indebted. For the best of us have all done much less than the very worst, much less than we know we could have done. This is the only way to respond to a world running dry with laughter: to aggravate our own guilt and hyperbolize the call; to expose ourselves without shelter to a disquietude without respite or relief.

Many exalt failure and obscurity, but do so only to hide away; whereas they ought to say: we have failed ourselves, obscured our own true challenge. We have centered our acts too often on economic exchanges, we have looked for compensation, we have sought approval by others instead of cultivating our disapproval with ourselves. The secret of responsibility lies in this disapproval, in a responsibility that deepens the more you try to respond to it. And such a secret is only possible where one takes oneself to be nothing, where one has given oneself death, the impossible: to know oneself nobody. Degree zero of desire’s exhaustion: to have pity for desire itself, for one’s desires and for all desires, for the confusion and myopia it causes, for all the “laughter and lust” of the self-conception, this inescapable and inexpiable selfishness that haunts even the most selfless act. But it is better–though it counts for nothing–to be haunted by one’s own limitless wrongness and unforgivability for being, than it is to feel “at home” in oneself, comfortable in one’s life choices and the things one has made. You can find your oceanic feeling, your euphoria, your union with nature or with consciousness. Your art, your music, your lifestyle will bring you pleasure, it won’t be surprising. But isn’t that the big farce? That the point is to be satisfied, relaxed, and to find peace? To survive and grow for oneself? “Strange times, that weep with laughing, not with weeping!” Strange times, that fancy it good to be at ease!

“In being as such, there cannot be meaning. Mortality renders meaningless the care that the me takes of its destiny. To posit oneself as ‘me’ persevering in its being, when death awaits, resembles an evasion within a world without exit. Nothing is more comical than the care that a being takes of its being when destruction is certain” (Levinas), but “…I am not going to admit to a fault, I am going to avow a shame without apparent fault, the shame of being ashamed of shame, ad infinitum, the potential fault that consists in being ashamed of a fault about which I’ll never know if it was one” (Derrida): ashamed of these traces you associate with me; ashamed of being unable to erase myself; ashamed of not laughing; ashamed for weeping, for apologizing, for the potentially limitless fault of being; ashamed that we were never quite anxious, never quite responsible, enough; ashamed for having kept to ourselves what should have burst: our life, our experience, our self.