Lost Generation?

It's a funny thing, about my family. (In all likelihood, it's true of all families, so I should say, It's a funny thing about families.) There's a certain very specific thing that we share which colors everything about how we look at and interact with the world, but we spend so much time concentrating on the weirdnesses and the tensions and the history and the conflicts and the silences and the differences that we never notice how hugely that one common thing infects everything, tying us together in a most fundamental way.

In my family, that one thing, the one common thread, is a certain type of intellectual cast. None of us (except technically my dad, and by identification, me) are actually intellectuals, but it doesn't matter. It's a way we look at the world. In terms of constructs expressing concretes, or language revealing links. The small being the face of the large. It's a weird habit, and I think I'm the only person (save maybe one) that I know outside of the family who thinks it's normal.

This is why I am thinking about this: Today we had a family birthday event. We have group birthdays, because the parents hate birthdays, and today was the spring birthday. Historically these things have been rife with built-up tension, bit-back differences of opinion or life choices, and governed by the silences that result. Today, Dad and I talked about statistics, my sister's boyfriend and my step-aunt and my kid brother talked about all manner of things, my sister and my stepmother talked about art and clothes and business. And then we sat down and ate a fine meal and had a wide-ranging conversation about generations. It was a conversation only we could have had, spattered with short-hand references to family commonalities that shepherded us to the same conclusions before we stated them, or made it pointless to try to come to the same conclusion at all. Like we'd in some ways already had the conversation before we had it.

The conversation started from two things: My kid brother, J, feels that his generation has nothing left to define itself by. My stepmother, L, recently saw a parent my age let her young child wander into Manhattan traffic and then walked into a coffeeshop. We linked these two things and talked about how my generation is a mess (which we had trouble defining, partly because it's hard to properly deal with a cultural construct overlaid on a sociological construct) and how the flow of culture to J's generation leaves him in a very different place than my parents' generation. There could be no Vietnam today, not just because it's been done already within the cultural memory and therefore represents no renewal/unique identity/generational possibilities, but also because the public or perceived context in which politics happen is so un-straightforward. JFK's election was just as complex and corrupt as the last one we saw, but the public's understanding of it can be assumed to be radically different.

All the abolute idealist activism of my parents' generation has helped make us thirtysomethings broadly uninvolved (in a host of ways that we as a family alluded to but did not unpack), ironic, and prejudiced towards futility. My sister points out that NPR and other sources have been doing stories lately about how parents in my generation push responsibility for their children on neighbors, grandparents, schools, police and anyone else who can be picked on. Which to my stepmother leaves J and his cohorts in a sea of pointlessness, without our protective irony or Generation Y's protective cocoon of...willful blindness? My step-aunt reminded J that he's not like other kids, which led my sister to bring up how poorly the average guy does without a fixed context. Which led me to some of the ideas a couple of posts ago, about how interdependence saves energy for those who are suited to it, and how poorly they do when their ideologies are not functioning. Which brought my step-aunt and stepmother back to how ideologies cohere and how J's generation has not yet progressed to ripening. All in good time, you see. (J shows a certain apocalyptic tendency that should suit him well till he turns 18. It worked for me. I think we like to indulge it even as we argue against it.)

I got lost in all this fun and never managed to get my point across: That in some ways it is possible to see my generation (whatever "generation" means, seeing as how most people actually use the word for kids in a 10-year period, which is a cohort not a generation, and how no one can get together and agree what ages are included in what generation, and how definitions on the generations and their characteristics are invariably even looser and messier than statistics in uneducated hands would produce) -

In some ways it is possible to see my generation - Gen X, the Busters, Goonies - as a Lost Generation, just like Hemingway's generation. My step-aunt reminded us all that Hemingway shot himself.

And the interesting thing to me is that even though I never actually managed to lay this thing out on the table for discussion, dissection and extension, I know that it's ticking away in the minds of my sister and my stepmother and my step-aunt and my kid brother and my dad, waiting to grow legs and put out runners and come to the next dinner as a grown-up idea. Even though we never really discussed it. Even if it doesn't come up again, sometime years down the road someone is sure to refer to some conclusion drawn from it as a fait accompli that we are all familiar with.

Ain't family cool?

Oubliette

Somehow I really like having this tiny undiscovered corner of the Internet all to myself. Nobody knows I'm here. A fine and private place....a reflection of the secret mind. (If I ever actually posted anything.) Devi-Lilith stuff, I suppose.

My friend Proppy has an East Village photoblog, and he's tickled anytime someone discovers him. (I'd link to his blog, because it's awesome, but then he would know I'm here.) A way of making his mark? Validation? "This is who I am - I am not lost" (spoken by a college friend)? Dunno. I'm bemused by the difference.

Agh

Stuck at work with nothing to do. God, I'm bored. This is not the job I took a year and a half ago. Perhaps I should begin unlearning the efficiencies that I built up to get things done faster.

I'm interested in this because if I made a simple pro-con list about my job it might be time to quit. There's no work. I sit around bored. There's nothing to do. Often when there is something to do it is something I don't want to do. The stuff I got hired for has thinned to a trickle.

Thing is, in spite of the fact that the lack of anything to do has me depressed and broody, and the doing of things I don't want to do makes me anxious and moody, I have no real thought of leaving. Why?

It could be loyalties. I do love my boss, and my default tendency is to stay put if I can manage it. If so it's kind of cool that I would value loyalty to such a degree. On the other hand, there was a decade when I was so sensitive to boredom I would leave at the drop of a hat, or just work temp so I never had to deal with it. It could be a sympathy of character - I like the values and the attitudes of the company and the people I work with - but my only real friend here is my boss. It could be habit, but I've not been much of a creature of habit till lately, so wouldn't I be squirming more about it? I could also be operating under different priorities - job is (relatively) fine, so worry about something else....don't know. Bears thought.

Pluralism

James Caroll writes, "Are we condemned to a mindless pluralism that is ready to equate the shallow with the profound, the stupid with the wise, the cruel with the kind, all to avoid the monotony of the 'one voice', the tyranny of the univocal? Does subjectivity condemn the person to the tyranny of the self? Does subjectivity condemn the community to, in David Tracy's phrase, 'the void of sheer fascination at our pluralistic possibilities'?"

Fourteen years ago, I wondered the same thing. The answer I came up with (as many absolutes as there are people, or some similar youthful garbage) is not the answer he likes - Tracy's "analogical imagination" - but it intrigues me to find it meandering around in the ideosphere. Not the first time some old thought of mine pops up as some new thought of someone else's, of course, and yet I still find myself running around blowing minds with toss-offs, yadda yadda. That old counterpoint is not what I find intriguing. I think it's that I never expected to find pluralism to be a public problem. And I should have, given the old theories of sociological/societal change I was tossing around way back when.

It goes something like this, if I can remember clearly - liberally and loudly cribbed from Hesse's Steppenwolf, Kuhn's scientific paradigms and a couple other places I can't remember stealing from anymore. A society develops ideas and assumptions that are supposed to make the world make more sense. For a while they work, they extend themselves into all sorts of implications and applications, and allow us to act on the world around us in effective ways. It even gives us a set of assumptions we can embrace but deny - a forum for acceptable rebellion. But if you push an idea far enough, in enough directions, it will eventually and inevitably develop contradictory implications. Acting on it will create situations that the idea itself can't deal with. The idea will spread itself so broadly in order to contain all its effects that it will begin to lose meaning. And then the society that depends on the idea suddenly has nothing to lean on anymore. Eventually the institutions and values that the idea supported begin to disintegrate, or solve all the solveable problems and are left with the unsolveable ones, making it ineffectual. The belief system that runs the society falls in on itself and implodes.

Your typical freak comes in two flavors: The rebellious freak and the honest-to-God, really out there freak. The rebellious freak can either do well or badly in a situation where a society's belief system implodes. See, a rebel is still defining himself against that which he is nominally setting himself. Sometimes it's nice to see your enemy crumble into dust, but if you're really wedded to defining yourself against the Other, it can be very problematic to lose your Enemy. The really out there freak is screwed anyway - at least in terms of making his way in society.

Your average guy is not going to do well in this situation. All the work he's saved himself by being interdependent doesn't mean anything anymore. None of the expected returns materialize.

Those funny inbetweeny people, who aren't really loners but don't quite fit in? The ones on the fringes of several groups at once? Those are the people who do well when a society is in between belief systems. They are the life artists - as Emerson said, "We live amid surfaces and the true art of life is to skate well on them." They are adaptable, suited for seeing things from many perspectives at once and used to doing the work.

All those life artists are independent and going their own way by their natures - but leave them alone for long enough and, since they are all reacting to the same environment, they will begin to come up with some of the same answers. Their actions will pull together a new sort of idea, a nascent belief system will coalesce. The average guys will hew to it because it makes more sense, it explains more, than the imploded old bankrupt idea. And the freaks will continue to do their thing. Eventually a new set of societal assumptions creeps out of the shell of the old. As my dad points out, it's a stochastic process.

I never thought of it before (though I clearly should have), but pluralism is a natural part of the process, just as repression and reactionary thinking are. Too bad things are going to get worse before they get better. I'd rather live in a pluralistic society than the one I expect to develop over the next thirty years. Maybe Carroll, in the midst of all his outrage and criticism of his beloved fellow Catholics, is really an optimist at bottom after all.

Well, Here I Am

Never thought it'd come to this. I have no idea what I'll do with this space, if anything.

I ended up with this blog because I found something I desperately wanted to comment on (which will come as no surprise to those who know me) - you can see Nina Paley's awesomely delightful retelling of episodes from the Ramayana at www.ninapaley.com.