On Cultivating an Elegant Enthusiasm
We are trying to live smart from within a painful history that in spite of all the information at our fingertips, or maybe because of the vast abundance of it, it’s impossible to know the best path to take at any juncture. The whole idea of “best path” is tricky; it’s fraught. Does my best path infringe upon your best path?
As usual I’m reading and returning to several books at once. Am I looking for answers? Consolation? Escape? All of the above? We writers have sometimes steered ourselves by asking, “how to live?” But I’m rethinking that tack, too.
This morning I began my reading with Hélène Cixous’s First Days of the Year. I was once deeply obsessed with this book but forced myself to put it on the bottom of the pile for a few years because it was losing its magic. But there was a passage I wanted about a geranium, since the overwintered one on my kitchen sill had just gloriously emerged. Alas, the geranium in the book was actually a hibiscus! So the memory works imperfectly. But here is that passage:
“I rested. I went to contemplate my hibiscus. I feel tied to hibiscus by an illegible message. Hibiscus are animated by sequence. One flower stretches toward victory. First one sees the soul swell the petals, folded so as to exhale. Next: exclamation of red. Now the flower is going to redescend……This is the announcement. She’s going to shout she’s going to fall. I set out again.”
We begin by resting. We begin in contemplation. This is good. There is an announcement! Brilliance! And of course the fall.
How do I want to proceed? How do I want to blossom and flourish? Like the exuberance of my geranium’s exclamation of pink? The words that pop into my head this week coach me to be “elegant” and to retain my “enthusiasm.” I feel a bit like the geranium in my kitchen that looked fairly worn out most of the winter but is now emerging, NBD, flowering, NBD.
So yes, I’m all for cultivating an elegant enthusiasm for the task at hand. Which doesn’t mean adopting a naive dopey optimism. One can be elegant, and enthusiastic, for the good small bits of the everyday and for the beautiful, without losing one’s clearheadedness for what’s going on around us. It’s as much a reaction to the hatred and cruelty and unfairnesses of the world, as anger might be. I’ve been reading again Lauren Berlant and Cruel Optimism. In it they say that “optimism might not feel optimistic.” I feel as though now is the time to interrogate so many of our everyday interactions and ordinary affects, and Berlant has us look again at the “conventional good-life fantasies” and our idea of what the “moral-intimate-economic thing called “the good life”” even is.
We were brought up, in my generation, to cultivate an “optimism for democratic access to the good life” but as they say, “the fantasies that are fraying include, particularly, upward mobility, job security, political and social equality…”
Berlant talks about an “impasse after the dramatic event of a forced loss, such as after a broken heart, a sudden death, or a social catastrophe, when one no longer knows what to do or how to live and yet, while unknowing, must adjust.” And though this was written, pre-pandemic, it feels quite now. We live in a state of unknowing, but must adjust. And keep on adjusting and adjusting. It’s exhausting! No wonder, though, right? We are trying to “survive within history.”
There is a passage from the Berlant book that I think is very interesting. It’s about the word “smart” and how as an intellectual referent, it “derives from its root in physical pain. Smartness is what hurts, or to say that something smarts is to say that it hurts — it’s sharp, it stings, and it’s ruthless. It is as though to be smart is to pose a threat of impending acuteness.”
The book Cruel Optimism, is very theoretical and much of it is no doubt beyond me. But asking ourselves what is a better good life, and how we can get there without “reproduc[ing] all of the conventional collateral damage” seems important. We need to be smart, however painful. I can’t help but think we can also be enthusiastic at the same time. If I’m going to survive from within this particular history, I guess I’m going to do so from the stance of elegant enthusiasm, or at least trying for that.
As I was writing this, someone posted this poem by Jennifer Chang which is amazing, and includes the line:
“I flower and don’t apologize.”
And maybe that’s also the energy that is required right now.
