6.30.23. - 7.10.23.
Chicago. 6.30.23.
"The historian Marc Raeff sees as 'the characteristic trait of the intelligentsia' its conception of 'its role as one of service to the people.' Less generously, Dostoevsky criticized the intelligentsia for being 'historically alienated from the soil' and for 'raising itself above the people.' While liberals in Russian society saw the intelligentsia as social reformers engaged in enlightened activity, conservatives thought of it as pathological and ultimately harmful. The intelligentsia was not a social class, that is, a group of people of similar social position or engaged in related work; rather it was a group of men and women of different social origins united by vague feelings of alienation from society and dedicated to changing Russian society and politics."
- Ronald Grigor Suny
I can recall an intuitive embarrassment when my mother, shepherding my brothers and I around the Chicago shopping centers adjacent to the Loop, rejoiced that an Intelligentsia coffee shop–which was, at the time, a chic marker of urbanity and newness–had opened up since our last visit. In my childhood, we would visit my grandmother’s well-to-do apartment, replete with American Indian paraphernalia and Italian ceramics, every two or three weeks, making the 2-hour drive up to the city to swim in a cousin’s pool or to play with the dominoes at our grandparents’ home (I can still taste the Costco hotdogs which we would pick up on our drive home, usually between 5 and 7 pm, with mustard and relish and possibly a Sprite; the Costco, in Merrillville, was advantageously located on the road between Chicago and our modest college-town a little ways south; Merrillville itself, whether this was true or not I can’t say, was known for a sizable Klan presence).
My mother’s remarks about the Intelligentsia drew eyes from the sidewalk as we drove by the new storefront; and these eyes, along with my brothers’ simultaneous interpretation of our social and possibly economic niche within the City, constituted my embarrassment. How could I have avoided, as a child in these circumstances, a general sense of embarrassment with this milieu? Not only with the liberal attachment to novelty, but also the value’s familial ‘infection,’ since my genetics and family structure suffocated me with the same affectations of culture. I was surrounded by refinement, taken to the Art Institute each trip up to Chicago, taken to the luthier to gander at the instruments strung up on the wall as my mother, a violist by profession, spoke to the man who ran the enterprise about rehairing her bow. Is it not understandable that I would begin to associate the bad with the good; the branded interest in Intelligentsia with this cultural niche writ large? I was embarrassed with the eyes on the street when my mother expressed her particular cultural affiliation, and I was embarrassed to tell my Midwestern classmates that, despite it all, I even enjoyed these trips to the museum.
The truth of the matter is perhaps even worse: consumptive affiliations are not limited to bougie things. A love for Dunkin Donuts is really no different than the social mores understood from a yuppie girl sporting a New Yorker bag. Nevertheless, there are implied cultural milieus within each affiliation. We interpret Dunkin as a quasi-democratic cultural marker, since its ubiquity prevents us from specific analysis–everyone drinks Dunkin. A New Yorker tote bag, on the other hand, implies to the public that we have ‘bought in’ to the brand and its specific cultural affiliation to some degree–this is the nature of chic capitalism.
Many years ago, brands marketed themselves to demographics who already harbored cultural affiliations. My mother had a stake in the culture of refinement before Intelligentsia had promoted its cultural affiliation to people just like her. Now the tides have reversed (and this was what I picked up on, as a child; what I thought was drawing my mother in): today, we exclusively identify cultural affiliations with consumer trends, purchasing certain coffees and wearing certain clothes in order to identify with the culture we mistakenly believe to exist underneath and independently from those items of consumption. Culture outside of the market has ceased: ceramics and indigenous jewelry still exist, but for most of us it is impossible to think about these things without their ‘branding’ attached. They are coded as authentic or possibly ‘high-class’ (more to the point, as things which are appreciated by people who read the New Yorker).
The market comes first; there is, in fact, no culture. As a child, I was embarrassed because of the particular objects of consumption my mother was attracted to; I was embarrassed because I sensed that only some corners of our marketized world were truly decadent, and that the general culture of refinement you find in museums and concert halls was the culture most prone to the hedonism and the emptying-sensation of strip malls and Scrooge McDuck. Behind the more ‘egalitarian’ consumption I associated with my friends’ parents (Pop Tarts and Iron Man), I assumed I would find a sincere aesthetic impulse or, at the very least, a culture which was not dependent on the product which appealed to it (Marvel appeals to an ‘American Way’ which supposedly exists independent of Marvel). I’m sorry to say that we are all sinking with the ship.
Syntax (not a great attempt, please skip). 7.6.23.
A flaneur in the period of history after history, I’m attracted to the notion of poetry without a message; or rather, an undisclosed message between me and you, or you and the syntax of it all.
Tricolors abandoned on French pavement have slowly made the news in my part of the world. Whether the protestors have abandoned themselves is a question for the beholder (all of us, them too).
The flag has belonged to the white French of yesterday and the non-French alike; a question beyond me, and anyone else required to face the public or waste away the day alone.
Redditters continue to quarrel over the latest Zizek polemic while uninteresting animators with sufficient ennui produce increasingly empty mass media.
The conditions creating the creator class keep the petty gentry in its grip, our only entertainment being the ego of the creator: trauma, jargon, and anxiety self-reproduce as empathy lays to waste. No one can get out of their own head. Post-Mass Politics politics searches for the possibility of connection with another, but a flat conception of solidarity can’t cure us of ourselves. We are left with more jargon of justice as we try to fill the vacuum.
I am left with syntax–moments and friends, sensations and deep breaths. The perfect subject in the grand game, I often worry, my Baudrillardian acceptance of things-as-they-are lets me relish in the muck, and only because my muck is so clean next to most others’ (ah, here I am, basking in myself again like the uninspired creators with MFA’s). But syntax is not consumption, I am also sure; and when I’m truly at peace with the world, how could I describe the sensation as anything other than a general non-participation? Abstention from that order brings me closer to others, at least for now.
July. 7.10.23.
This morning, an elderly woman’s voicemail played in my boss’s office, just across from mine. Her brother was given a few months to live. The siblings, both 60-somethings, had recently donated a few objects belonging to their mother with the understanding that we would display them in our modest museum. She choked up as she listed her number at the end of the message; it wasn’t clear if she would be able to say the final four digits through the tears. And when she had finally finished, another woman, monotone and clear, gave a series of prompts about deleting or saving the message. “Deleted.” The next voicemail was a rather professional voice inquiring about a Gospel Book in our collection from the 1200’s, succinct and polite. “Saved.” My boss did eventually call the first woman back to tell her that his brother, even younger than her own, was also in the hospital. “Come to the museum anytime.” Mine is a difficult position, the only one in the office besides my boss today, who is on most occasions quite difficult to empathize with–a boss. And yet, I am affected and confused by the glassiness in his eyes paired with his general unwillingness to discuss the subject with myself or anyone else in the workplace for the last few days (for once, he is acting ‘professionally’). Death and sickness linger over the whole place: another coworker, a former Director-turned-part-timer upon his halfway retirement, told me a story with harrowing nonchalance last week: His golf-buddy, who he has seen every day for several years at his country club, suffered from heat stroke last Wednesday. After showing up to work with a “green” face on Thursday, his boss turned him away and told him to go to the hospital–he was diagnosed with blood cancer the same day. On Friday morning, my coworker received a text from the country club that his friend was dead. “But he was an asshole. I rode in the golf cart with him though, since no one else wanted to. I’m good at getting along with difficult people–as you know from our boss! Ha!” Nevertheless, he began the story with an air of solemnity, clearly needing to share the sequence of events with someone. His two weeks of vacation began after work that day.
Though I am deliberately avoiding the impulse to produce for the sake of producing; to produce and to analyze that product when I really have nothing to say; to produce a milquetoast plea for help as I describe my psychological wandering so generic among young writers like me–despite all this, I am still forced to muse over death. Because while I have nothing to add to the subject, perhaps I can bring myself to comment over its form: It is this time of year–summer, not winter–which circles back to death. The Jewish Day of Atonement comes in another month or two, but its explicit focus on mortality–not unlike the dead vegetation I see in the winter months–is too direct. I cannot contemplate bereavement when I am depressed. July is a ritualized post-mortem, which begins on the 4th, a holiday whose civic aspect is treated ironically by most and is therefore celebrated with a dual decadence; and ends on the 30th with my own birthday. Since my days in the semester-system, I’ve associated the month with the conclusion of summer–not because it was actually ending, but because it no longer seemed endless the way it did before July 4th came around. The sensation of surplus and listlessness which produced a creative freedom internal to myself, dissipated the moment that School (rebirth) entered the horizon. July represented the final days of surplus, and so it was no longer surplus; August, worse, was the time when my mother would take me to Walmart to buy folders and pencils for the coming year. And finally, death.
Well, it’s July again. Work has flattened the feeling of surplus into smaller denominations (an hour or two after work on Friday) so that the quickened pace of rebirth has turned the sight of sun-kissed forearms into recollections of my father’s leathery skin–what lies for me ahead? The cycle’s acceleration has also altered my reading: death surrounds me even now, why should I spend my time intellectualizing? My workday consists of true boredom–that is, structured boredom–and procrastination. And so during the restricted leisure allotted to me, I would prefer to feel in the deepest sense of the word: to spend my time in the company of those who mean much to me. I still occasionally feel the need to speak with others about art and this-or-that theory but, on the whole, these searchings are already implicitly contained within these relationships. Simply sharing a meal with a loved one will satisfy me, so much so that I am beginning to understand the overly content majority of this world I had rejected and condemned during the height of my politicized years in university. I am, however, still saddened that this writing goes unattended. It longs for company as its author is satiated at the dinner table. I’ve found a formula for peace, imperfect as any must be, but I’m not ready to leave behind the act of writing, which is, fundamentally, the search for questions, the search for things I already know but am unwilling to.
Not unlike the Rotenburg Cannibal, I feel it is my task to leave art behind via artistic production: to reach a truce with death and aging.