On Conversation

Many years ago I said to my friend, “Have a nice day,” and he responded, “Don’t tell me what to do!” I think that perhaps he spoke in a spirit of jocularity, but I am wondering this morning if there wasn’t perhaps some pique and even some wisdom in his remark. Why do we say “Have a nice day, evening or event”? What command is explicit in the utterance? There exists  variant expression that appears to convert the command into a request: “I hope you have a nice day,” but I think the effect is the same.

These perfunctory phrases are another example of meaningless conversation that serves to avoid real contact. They are not a lubricant to conversation because the response to it is unnecessary and cannot be contradicted: “No, I won’t have a nice day.” I do remember Reginald Perrin’s response to his wife’s wish that he have a nice day at the office: “I won’t,” he responds, but she smiles and closes the front door behind him. Their ritual practice is habit and its meaning can only be known by an understanding of the statement’s context. Little can be understood without an awareness of context and superficial conversation knows little.  The words seem to me both an attempt to assert control—I command that you have a nice day— or an acknowledgement that the world is contingent—I hope you have a nice day but it is possible you won’t probably through no fault of your own. The opposite sentiment of course is always possible: “Have a miserable day, evening or event,” and the related “I hope you have a miserable day, evening or event” but I think that might be a phrase one might not proffer except perhaps sotto voce or behind closed doors.

            I have become suspicious of cursory conversation. Like a balloon it is full of air and like Sally Brown who when asked what her balloon does says it doesn’t do anything. I turn again to Thoreau as comfort and direction. “We meet at very short intervals, not having had time to acquire any new value for each other.” He says, “If we would enjoy the most intimate society with that in each of us which is without, or above, being spoken to, we must not only be silent, but commonly so far apart bodily that we cannot possibly hear each other’s voice in any case.” Too many would avoid such intimacy. Speech, Thoreau avers, is for the convenience of those who are hard of hearing.

Over the years I have often referred to Gregory Bateson’s suggestion in Steps to an Ecology of Mind that most conversation takes place as an attempt to avoid a fight. Actually, what he says is that “Most conversations are only about whether people are angry or something. They are busy telling each other that they are friendly—which is sometimes a lie.” Much conversation, then, avoids honest engagement in the effort to avoid disquiet, embarrassment, or anger. Conversation has the power to cause anxiety and therefore often remains anodyne. It is polite, innocuous, inoffensive, and not meant to communicate very much at all. Conversation enacts a carefully defended presence but often that conversation does not constitute a substance. It is not meant to communicate anything so much as it is designed to alleviate or even avoid personal dis-comfort and social tension. There is much we don’t want to know or say. Thorau declares that there are many fine things we cannot say if we have to shout! We step about in our colloquies with caution and restraint as a means to protect our willed ignorance. Much conversation insists on the answer and eschews the question: whatever interchange occurs is declarative and definitive and spoken in a cool, detached tone. I believe that there may often occur a polite exchange of pleasantries that would serve to maintain the calm though leave little opportunity for empathy—by which I mean a careful listening—or for a caring, which might be known as sympathy. Too much conversation, or what might be referred to as talk, attempts to avoid communication and intimacy. Arguments erupt from conversation when alternative versions of events are presented as fact rather than as vision; or when a movie or book review is offered as conclusive rather than as perspective; or when the fault, dear Brutus, is asserted to be never in ourselves but in our stars. Winnicott reminds me that it is madness to insist on being believed.

In the attempt to avoid the quarrel, many topics are usually avoided. Much of what we say encourages our invisibility. Bateson suggests to me that much conversation becomes defensively perfunctory and too often reveals that sincere interest in self and in other is in short supply. Politics and religion except among those who already agree in these matters is a most dangerous and therefore, much debarred topic, as are issues concerning money, excretion, sex and death. I feel that to enter most conversation is fraught with menace, and I often glide into and out of danger with perfunctory expressions void of substance and empty of meaning. People pass each other daily with a mechanical “How are you?” but remain in constant motion without waiting for reply. In fact, no reply is proffered because none is expected. The response to “How are you?” when it might be forthcoming is often “Good,” but we rarely wait for details, and at a hint that more might be forthcoming we speed away like the White Rabbit: “I’m late, I’m late, for a very important date!” And I have come to wonder, what exactly does good mean, anyway? And if sometimes we hear “Don’t Ask,” in response to our query we farerelieved of responsibility, and we proceed in conversation no further, or competitively we respond in passing, “Ugh, me too!”

Those casual and routine utterances aren’t really conversation. Instead, they serve as replacements for it. I suppose a better offer would be the question “How do you feel about your day, evening or event?” I might ask, “How are you feeling?” and to the response “Good or bad,” continue on I could continue on, “I wonder what you might mean by good or bad?” Or as Arlo Guthrie sang once, I could wonder “Have you thought of anything on down the line?”

 

 

Republicans Unmasked

The United States Constitution begins “We, the people, in order to form a more perfect union . . .” The writers didn’t say “to form a perfect union;” rather they added a questioning and qualifying adjective. They did not mean to aspire to achieve a state of perfection but instead create a government that aspired to yet did not achieve flawlessness. Given the struggle they undertook to create the Constitution and the necessary compromises they had to make to accomplish this task, they must have understood that the document and the nation it produced was far from perfect and would forever be so. They must have surely known that perfection was not and never would be attainable. But they did mean to try: but what did intend by ‘a more perfect union?’ More perfect than what? Certainly, more perfect than the monarchy from which they had most recently achieved independence. More perfect than the monarchies from which they had fled. More perfect than the loose union they had established earlier in the Articles of Confederation Though the preamble to the Constitution announces that We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America, those ideals were never achieved for ourselves and our posterity. The Constitution was from the beginning a flawed document that fashioned a flawed nation and bursting with high ideals that were paradoxically corrupt at their base.

     There were horrible compromises made in the writing the Constitution: I would cite the clause that defined the slave as being only three-fifths human; or the refusal in the document to end slavery and to grant suffrage to all citizens, whatever their race, gender or sexual preference. Slavery, the original sin of these United States, has cast its poison into the nation’s veins for these four hundred years, and the massacre of Native Americans and thefts of their land even yet stains the landscapes of the nation. Perfection might have been an ideal, though to whose idea of perfection we might assign the description ‘ideal’ I can’t say, but I know that the reality was much grimmer.

     But as it has been said, “one man’s ceiling is another man’s floor.” One person’s ideal, or the ideal of any one social group remains specific to that faction and is not necessarily shared by any other group of people. Laws are created to advance toward that faction’s ideal. But, Isaiah Berlin writes, “The law cannot be a tyrant. Rousseau does not mean by liberty the ‘negative’ freedom of the individual not to be interfered with within a defined area, but the possession by all, and not merely by some, of the fully qualified members of a society of a share in the public power which is entitled to interfere with every aspect of every citizen’s life.”      And so I consider at a minimum that the voter suppression enactments that the Republican majority are enforcing throughout the country are simply a usurpation of the rights of citizens to participate in their choice of ideals. But the Republicans, having legitimately lost the Presidency and the majority of both houses of Congress, mean to change the rules so that the people that voted for the other parties and against them will not be able to vote in the next election.  Their actions in the words of Isaiah Berlin say to the rest of us, "Since I know which way to drive the human caravan; and since you are ignorant of what I know, you cannot be allowed to have liberty of choice even within the narrowest of limits, if the goal is to be reached . . . I know what you need, what all men need . . . What choice have we, who have the knowledge, but to be willing to sacrifice them all?” Of course, their knowledge is horribly flawed, and it is founded on flagrant lies and naked prejudices. It seems much less than true that for the Republicans their actions stem from ideals; rather, I believe their actions are exercises of power and a grasping for complete control for the sake of holding power and not to promote the general welfare or secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. Berlin suggests that this quest for perfection rests at the center of the rise of the totalitarian regimes of the 20^th century. I think the Republicans have become no better than the fascists and perhaps have even become them.

 

 

 

Journal of the Plague Year 12

 

The mask mandate has ended in St. Paul and Minneapolis though I suspect that at airports, in planes, and at hospitals masks will still be required. Yesterday I noted that the signs demanding the wearing of masks in order to enter many shopping facilities had been taken off the entry doors; at the supermarket where I shopped the cashiers and baggers were not wearing masks, and neither were many of the customers. I still wore mine and will continue to do so when entering any indoor public premise. Such accoutrement has become habit.

But as the pandemic abates, I begin to wonder what is to be done with the hundred or so masks still stacked in my front closet? For the past sixteen months I have not left my front door without grabbing for a mask to put on. For the whole fifteen months whenever I walked through my front door, I walked masked. In the glove compartment of my car, I had kept a supply of masks for emergency entrances or exits. But my goodness, this whole sixteen months has been one long emergency! And what should I do with the box of plastic gloves that, too, sit on shelves beside the masks at my front door; where shall I store the very large plastic bottle of hand sanitizer that sits now prominently placed on a kitchen counter, and the several containers of hand wipes, what is now to be done with them? I acknowledge that I stopped wearing the disposable gloves months ago, and I did tend to forget to sanitize my hands whenever I returned from food shopping or from my walks, or when I received the latest package from Amazon home delivery; and even though the mask mandate has been removed, the masks remain on the shelves as do the gloves and hand sanitizers. I think that I should decide what must be done with them for the sake of space economy. These accessories are all placed strategically throughout my home and they do take up not an inconsiderable space in a limited environment. And all over my home are masks worn once or twice but not placed for easy access in anticipation of the next outing. But now what is to be done with these surpluses? Stored in anticipation for the next pandemic?

In A Journal of the Plague Year, Defoe’s narrator, HF, describes the end of the plague occurrence in London in 1665. “It was now . . . the people had cast off all Apprehensions, and that too fast; indeed, we were no more afraid now to pass by a Man with a white Cap upon his head, or with a Cloth wrapt round his Neck, or with his Leg limping, occasion’d by the Sores in his Groyn, all which were frightful to the last Degree, but the week before.” For us, the end of the mask mandate suggest to too many that the plague is gone and no longer a threat. But unmasked everyone remains a potential threat: no one at the doors to the supermarket checks to see who has been vaccinated; and besides, even vaccinated a person might still possess the virus that can be passed on through the air. HF is not at peace with the seemingly sudden casting off of caution and is not comfortable with the ease with which people have returned to their former lives as if nothing had occurred. He writes, “[B]ut I must own, that for the Generality of the People it might too justly be said of them, as was said of the children of Israel, after their being delivered from the Host of Pharaoh, when they passed the Red-Sea, and look’d back, and saw the Egyptians overwhelmed in the water, viz. That they sound his Praise, but they soon forgot his Works.” Forgetting has become the order of the day. 

Journal of the Plague Year 11

My friend informs me that now he has become more uncomfortable going out for psychological reasons than for health reasons. “This thing ruined me,” he sighs. I think to what he refers is that his experiences during the pandemic—the daily news reports of the growing incidence and deaths from the coronavirus, the mandate to wear masks everywhere, to maintain social distancing, the periodic and continual lock-downs, the complete and social isolation and seclusion for the past fifteen months established in him a level of caution, even paranoia, regarding the outside world that has not lessened now that the pandemic has begun to wane. He remains indoors and sequestered averse to venture out of his doors; he moves into the outside nervously and with trepidatious caution.

I do appreciate my friend’s concerns. Despite the news reporting the decline in pandemic cases and deaths, I am yet comfortable to remain secure in my home and continue to feel wary to venture out into the public world. I remain safe in here, I believe. Fully vaccinated, I do take my walks without my mask, but I still move away from anyone moving towards me from the opposite direction whether they are masked or not; I avoid public spaces and I will not yet go into a restaurant or movie theater though I sorely miss the latter and have sadly learned that three of my favorite theaters have permanently closed! I think I should purchase a large screen television but I don’t have a wall to place it against. I have avoided most enclosed spaces. Oh, indeed, the world has shrunk.

But I think it is more than the world that has shrunk. We have shrunk; our expectations have shrunk. How will we begin to know the psychological effects/damage we have suffered as a result of the experience of this recent pandemic? I was born just after the last serious polio epidemic and was part of the test cases for the Salk Polio Vaccine. I must have been seven years old in 1954 and in the first or second grade. Perhaps my parents were brave to enter me in the trials, or else they were very ill informed. We subsequently learned that I had received the dose of actual serum and not the placebo. The polio epidemic in the United States was at an end. But I was seven and I have no recollection of the threat at all, and my knowledge of the epidemic comes wholly from Philip Roth’s final novel Nemesis. But of course, the failure of details is no indication that I do not remember: Jeanette Winterson remarks that our neurotic states remember, our bodies remember. But we don’t remember! Deep in my psyche suspicion might still rest.

Today as the threat of the coronavirus wanes the world attempts to return to the way things existed before the current pandemic. And too many people behave as if the past fifteen months have not occurred. Or so it would seem. Restaurants are serving food and drinks indoors to unmasked and supposedly vaccinated customers; when the weather permits people sit outdoors unmasked drinking and eating; movie theaters are opening; and stores begin to admit unmasked but fully vaccinatedcustomers. The latter is based on the honor system, and since 74,000,000 people voted for Donald Trump and 63% of the Republicans still believe The Big Lie that the election was stolen, I have very, very little expectation that the people in the stores are without threat. Airlines have stopped serving on-board liquor as a result of violence to the flight attendants from passengers who refuse the mask mandate. My sense of distrust and fear continues to deepen.

There are children who have not been outside without a mask for the past fifteen months. What will be the effect on them of this practice? For fifteen months these children have been isolated from their peers; not been to school but constrained to be educated via computer at home; not been away from their parents for fifteen months! How might this ever-presence have affected their relationships to their parents, to siblings and peers? And, indeed, what about the parents who have not had relief away from their children for the whole fifteen months. How have their lives been dramatically and permanently changed by the experience of the pandemic.

I have grown up with concerns of smog, air pollution, climate change. The air I have breathed I saw to be visibly despoiled. But now that same air carries an unseeable threat and every Other has become a potential danger. In The Plague Tarrou says “I have realized that we all have plague, and I have lost my peace . . . What’s natural is the microbe. All the rest—health, integrity, purity (if you like)—is a product of the human will, of a vigilance that must never falter.” There is no end to the pandemic, really, and no return to an older normal. I think we must learn anew how to live with this understanding and then how to live.