Hey John, John said: You display your intelligence, coolness and so forth by producing something new on the scene, in the academic world. But here in the heartland, we just want to raise our babies and find some hope for our lives and those of our children. So hooking into hallmark platitudes might not be cool in the circles you move in, but here in the real world, it's what we need.
Matt: I think that's a pretty good counter-display of common sense. In academia, we're graded--if you will--by our ability to distinguish ourselves by a combination of newness and betterness. There's a certain sense in which this process of new generations of academics replacing old ones in this manner might risk imploding, but I'm still not sure there's a better way to do it. However, you don't need to be an academic to feel like cliche is a bane on your personal existence. An entire movement of people, the one's Pirsig called "the antisystem people," people of whom we might say are attached to the word "authenticity," grew out of the Romantic movement at the beginning of the 19th century and gradually seeped into the culture at large, in America through Emerson and Thoreau most of all. These people have, we also might say, a "touch of the poet," and do not just turn up their noses at cliche like snobs (though a lot of these types are just snobs), but sometimes genuinely fear that cliche doesn't cut it to express the real emotions they feel. Some just disdain Hallmark; some genuinely feel anxious about expressing themselves. I don't go in for authenticity-talk for the sake of authenticity-talk. I don't think there's anything wrong with well-worn phrases in the expression department. If "rock" is fine for us, why not "love"? It's frustrating, to be sure, to see the commodification of anything, but I doubt we should let that, by itself, make us turn our backs on expressing love, coming up with theories about it, or anything else. I come from southern Wisconsin. My newly minted wife comes from central Minnesota. We're both over-educated snobs with too much irony to not giggle at the platitudes. Yet, express ourselves we must, and I indeed tried my hand at genuine expression through letter and poem. And I wrote the whole script used at our wedding. And two weeks ago, one of my closest friends asked me to be the only speaker at her secular wedding. What did all these occasions have in common? To purge myself of the anxiety of cliche, I always begin by making fun of the cliche, then noting the impossibility of doing anything else, and then trying to make up a few new ones myself. The trick, I think, is to be self-conscious without derisive. Especially in front of people who have their own codes and proprieties for expressing their love to each other, you don't want to invalidate them by saying they are full of shit. Everyone knows cliches are cliches. But you can tease them without falsifying them. The wedding I spoke at consisted of more heartlanders, a much bigger group than at my own small wedding (100+ compared to 30), and hardly any of them knew who I was. I was just a friend of a niece or step-niece, or step-niece of a friend, getting up to speak. (Oddly enough, all from the same areas, too: southern Wisconsin and central Minnesota.) A very tough crowd to successfully speak in front of, and I made it harder on myself by choosing to read a sonnet by Shakespeare before saying "a few more words about love, since clearly we haven't heard enough yet," as I put it in the moment. (The officiant had already trotted out wheelbarrows full of cliches ahead of me, which I had not expected.) When all was said and done, it was the only time the bride almost cried (my friend is a particularly difficult nut to crack: she despises cliche so much that, when she intoned her lines in the ceremony--unlike her soon-to-be husband who inflected soft care and adoration into his lines--she sounded like a robot with a shotgun pressed against the small of her back) and a surprising number of strangers walked up to me to congratulate, or thank, or tell me that it was just what they thought. The cherry, however, is that amidst these regular heartland folks was my friend's aunt who is an English professor. I heard through the grapevine that she, too, had been impressed, and I'm guessing by a slightly different sense than the others. I don't mean to toot my own horn (and what kind of horn it, anyways?), but I do mean to suggest that these kinds of things are possible. We can, if we so choose, reach higher than platitudinous cliche without invalidating those who are comfortable with well-worn proprieties of expression. We can please the heartland and the authentics. We can say something a little new that wraps up together the old, and seems to tap into what everybody thinks already, even if they didn't know it at the time. I believe this in theory, and I think I occasionally succeed in practice (though how new? who knows). As Emerson said well ahead of me: "the artist must employ the symbols in use in his day and nation to convey his enlarged sense to his fellow-men. Thus the new in art is always formed out of the old." It's not easy, but what is? Matt Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html
