On Chatter, Celebrity and Exclusive Deals

Ok so I’ve decided to join the conversation and start a blog. Now you’ll have to check in here every day—well maybe every week—well more or less—if you want to keep up with the latest wittiest most sage commentary and yadayadayada. Anyway, you’ll have to check here I mean as well as the two hundred other voices clamoring for your attention in your inboxes of various sorts all around the clock. I mean, please do. Appearances may still be deceiving out there in reality, but here in the web appearances on web pages have become something people can cash in on.  

I’ve largely held my peace all this time because I considered myself to be doing humanity a service. I was the kid in our large family gatherings who backed into a corner and ate a lot of pretzels. “You don’t say much,” I-don’t-know-how-many people said to me. “Say something!” Talking was friendly; if everybody else was talking you just had to talk a little louder. Withdrawing from all that could lead some people to believe the silent kid thought he was better. It didn’t help that I started replying to those prompts with the saying attributed to Abraham Lincoln: “Better to keep your mouth closed and be thought a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.”  

It’s funny how perceptions of language and of colors change according to the light they stand in. In his day, and when I read it, Lincoln’s comment seemed self-deprecating, modest and humorous. But–did you cringe, just a little, as you visualize that scene? I do–now. Did you identify with the person trying to make a friendly approach? Did you hear, a put-down, put on you by some kid in the family, just because you’re trying to be friendly? Or maybe you identified with the kid. Or maybe you see both: In stories we can slip from one personality into another and back. Offer, rebuff, offerer, rebuffed. In a story well told the reader or hearer can understand each person’s shape and even each person’s soul. The exchanges can be very brief, and the process of one meeting the other can be scattered across a lifetime. Sometimes one only comes to the place the other had been after a journey of many years, and the other is long gone. 

There was one person in the family who tried to argue–reason–the point with me: Aunt Roberta. “My Gawd,” she might have said–she made this approach more than once; it was a multi-staged argument, whose effect was cumulative, and slow penetrating. I put up a lot of resistance. “My Gawd,” she said once, in a private setting. “People are only being sociable.” She could be blunt. I sometimes needed bluntness.

In a larger context, as I became more (larger) adolescent, she told me, “If you want to play in the band you have to toot your own horn.” By that time I had listened to a few more moralists who’d put over an assertion I was a lot more receptive to: If you want to distinguish yourself, let your work (or your informed mind or your reasoned way of talking) speak for you, Actions-louder-than-words kind of thing. Rise above, retire from, the clamor, the promotion, the chatter of television and radio and their irksome advertisements. It’s not hard to be persuaded by the counter-argument: People trying to deal their way up a ladder do weird things. Put on a bizarre wig and rave in front of a camera. Dress up like a radish. Bark like a dog. Bait clicks and harvest cash.

A college classmate groused in class, “This culture is dead.”

Dr. E– vigorously disagreed. “Go down along Route 1,” he said, referring to a hyper commercialized strip, with its blazing neon signs one over the other, the cacophony assaulting eye and ear. “Garish, yes; loud, yes; crass, yes–but oh boy, is it ever alive!”

Alive, alive. Ok, the people who put up those signs are alive, and the people passing inward under them to get a burger, as I still do, or or an hour or two of beer and TV or some conversation with a stranger on the next stool, or a night of rest, are alive.

The calculus of human equivalence is tricky, but somehow individuals do come out weighing pretty much the same. I tried for a long time to describe the differences and likenesses between one group and the other, and then other “types” of people as I encountered them. I felt more and more wrong in trying to say anything categorical about a big group of people. It was better after all for me to squelch my grandiosities and remain silent. That’s how, I thought, I’d best render humanity a service.

I haven’t got the calculus all figured out by any means, which is a reason I’m undertaking this blog. I will take a chance and try to raise a reasonable sound. By retiring into silence and contemplation, I risk judging people I never really encounter. If I don’t want to be a hustler or an attention junkie–what better do I have to offer? Maybe at last I get what people were trying to tell me as I sat there in the corner: We’re not wise wonderful and wizard-like–and we’re stuck with that. What we can do is talk. Emerson said that blue sky is the daily bread of the eyes. I think chat is polenta for a hungering soul.