preface to a triviality

Paul Klee, The Beginnings of a Smile (1921)

"Authenticity," if the expression is to have any meaning at all, is experienced by us...in love and sexual intoxication, in irony and laughter, creativity and responsibility, meditation and ecstasy.
     —Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason (1983)

I wanted to write something, something that would amuse me to read back to myself later on, something lightweight, something that wouldn't make me grind my teeth with exertion or require much abstract speculation. So I did another writeup about another comic book. I'll post it soon.

In the last post I said a few words about cultural schizophrenia: the discordant relationship between what we claim to value and what our habits show to be truly important to us. And here I am: pondering the perverse Skinner Box society of mass culture on one day, and writing uncritically about my favorite pieces of commercial ephemera the next.

Is this something I ought to be ashamed of? Am I a hypocrite?

After all, I live in the world given over to me by a history over which I had no control. I am a product of a confused and unstable culture riven with contradictions. Naturally, I contradict myself. Obviously I shouldn't be expected to live like an ascetic in a proverbial city built on pleasure and distraction.

In my self-recriminating moods, this sounds to me like a load of excuses. And excuses are like assholes, you know...

Proceeding through a gradual conversion from a pop culture addict and enthusiast to somebody who's skeptical (if not baldly distrusting) of the culture industry and its contribution toward making the world insane at best and unlivable at worst, while yet continuing to blithely watch cartoons and YouTube crack, read clickbait, keep up with Twitter, browsing Magic: The Gathering spoilers, falling into Wikia rabbit holes, buying the new X-Men comics every Wednesday, and occasionally bingeing on video games—it's like a vocal opponent of factory farming and animal cruelty continuing to swallow meat every day of the week. She and I each have our beliefs, we talk about what people ought to do and how things ought to be, but somehow our speech fails to interfere with our own settled habits—for which we are secretly grateful, if we have the honesty to acknowledge the facts.

As I get older, I seem to care less and less about being in the loop, about being able to converse about those shows or movies that each launch a thousand thinkpieces, about playing the latest candidate for Game of the Year or Game of the Decade, about how many retweets I get, about knowing what the fuck the kids are talking about when they talk about pop culture. I know these things are not Life. They are too often a redirection from Life—the "authentic" life at which Sloterdijk hints above—and yet I'm seldom unhappy to follow the detour onto the cul-de-sac of the death drive.

Maybe unplugging wouldn't necessarily entail that I am or must become a grim and joyless canker who has no patience for what isn't Very Serious. I know people who have pushed the gibberish out of their lives—though all of them have been religious, which gives them an advantage over a godless wanderer in ambiguity like myself concerning efforts at discovering freedom through prohibitions—and they still crack me up whenever we trade emails or occasionally meet up for coffee or beer. None of them are what the young people would consider savvy, but they're very sharp. Knowledgeable in what is important to them, and they suffer little animosity between their reason and their habits. They seem to lead good lives.

I feel like Saint Augustine: "Lord, make me chaste—but not yet."

Lord, give me the resolve to stop spending too many idle hours of my days soaking up schlock and then committing myself to adding another superfluous pebble to the evanescent mountain of internet content about content—but not yet.

I don't know. Maybe I'm overthinking this. November can make me morose and introspective in the worst kind of way.

Anyway, in a couple of days we'll be looking at a forgotten (and with good reason) comic book from the early 1990s. It will be more fun than this.