Mind
If, like me, you think that we must take in all the information, balance the various needs of the sick person and those around him, make dicey judgment calls, and try and live with the messy consequences as best we can - if you think like that, you could feel for those hurt by West and feel for West’s hurt too. But we don’t do complexity in the 21st century. Everyone must be simplistically and permanently all good or all evil.
This is from a long piece by Freddie deBoer sent to me by a friend. It is called “Weird” and I highly recommend it, especially if you have ever thought some version of “What the hell is wrong with me?”
The "West” deBoer is referring to is Kanye, but that does not matter all that much.
What interests me is the “dicey judgment” part.
Because every day for the last few weeks I have been thinking I must really post something here, in this space. That is my promise to readers and myself. It is one I increasingly break and struggle with.
Because there is something wrong with me? Because there is something wrong with the world? Because what f’ing difference does it make?
I think—or like to think—I am interested in dicey judgments or new angles or “deeper truths.” But how do you assess that? How do you know you are not serving up a truth so chopped and diced it may as well be cat food? And then when you try to offer “hard” and “solid” you are just adding weight or pain (more simplicity) to a world in which everyone must be ‘permanently all good or all evil.’
A moderately famous thought about writing comes from Emerson: “Speak what you think to-day in words as hard as cannon balls, and to-morrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day.”
And that is fine except that unlike in Emerson’s day, not only is everyone a writer now, everyone lives with canon balls, with every blast exploding well into tomorrow too. Look at the blast and counterblasts of something like January 6th. It ought to be settled, the ground of it cleared, however ugly. After all, it is on videotape. But now it is either not that bad or an actual qualification for office. How do you dice that? Or cannonball that?
You can write about things that don’t matter. Or matter to a far more circumscribed world. You end up writing mostly about yourself, I guess, which always fascinates me when others do it but feels narcissistic when I do it.
We need love bombs. Who can write those?
We need a kind of linguistic terrorism, words that sneak into the citadel of the mind and loosen the icebox of the heart. I don’t know how to do that, or maybe withhold my attempts too often.
But deBoer has some sense of it or, at least, can describe that citadel in a fashion you might find useful.