Gotham Diary:
The App
25 June 2014

In the middle of lunch, the other day, a passing observation snagged my attention.

In this way, [Walter] Benjamin viewed the seventeenth-century drama as opening a prospect onto a very modern sense of spiritual emptiness and confusion.

I put The New York Review of Books down and gazed out the window. Spiritual emptiness and confusion. I have been hearing about these things all my life, yet I have never felt anything like them. Half the time, I have felt stupid, as if I weren’t getting a joke. The other day, it occurred to me that I had never experienced the loss implied by spiritual emptiness because I had never possessed, or thought I possessed, whatever it is that conduces to its opposite.

And what would that be?

At the time — at lunch — I thought that it might be a sense of entitlement. Jesus loves me, that I know. Really? As I saw it — and now, the time that I am talking about is childhood — Jesus was far more likely to scold, or at least to admonish me, than he was to love me. He asked me to love my neighbor as myself. These were all good things, I knew: we all ought to be and to do better, not out of duty but in order to put the world right. Even a child can understand that. But I did not see Jesus as a prop, as a support — as an insurance policy? — for my adventure in life. I had no such prop.

The curious thing is that I learned this from official Catholic catechism. Item one in The Baltimore Catechism, as I recall, was this Q & A:

Why did God make you?

God made me to know, love, and serve him.

The propping was all the other way. Thinking about this long-memorized text on my way to the market after lunch, I was shocked to see that it represented God as a spoiled child in search of a new and better doll. It seemed — I felt slightly faint — was the Church was blaspheming, big time. What kind of God was this? Anyway, I never felt that God was there for me, but only that I was there for God, which is probably why I lost interest in him almost as soon as I was old enough to think.

An interesting curlicue, and, typically, all about me. Today, revisiting the passage, which appears in Adam Kirsch’s review of a new biography of Benjamin, I put spiritual emptiness and confusion in a more appropriate perspective, the history of the modern West. It is generally conceded that a widespread loss meaning overcame the West in the wake of the Great War. It seems clear to me that this loss was actually one of confidence, not meaning. The preceding age, a century or more of revolution, social turmoil, industrial upheaval, and population explosion, was nevertheless marked by an almost mindless confidence. “Progress” was the capacious, almost palpable magic carpet that would carry civilization across the ruins of the old and the dislocations of the new to a paradise of leisure. Slavery was abolished, women were on the way to political equality with men; armed with bundles of progressive ideas, cheerful civilians walked right into something they could hardly believe still existed: unreconstructed empires and their imperial armies.

Even today, people are still asking, how did that happen?

The confidence, it seems, was — merely confidence. Confidence is very different from optimism. Optimism is the hope that things will turn out for the better, inspired not by confidence but by an awareness that expecting things to get worse is corrosive. Whatever happens tomorrow, you’re better off being an optimist today. Just don’t count on anything.

Confidence is a bluff; it anticipates, no less materially than heirs used to “anticipate” their fortunes, tomorrow’s happiness. Given tomorrow’s happiness, today’s decisions become a little less crucial. Because things are going to work out, right?

Confidence leads, inevitably, it seems, to ruin and despair. And, despite all the reasons against it, we are once again in a confident time. The modern West — significantly, its youngest cohorts, the ones who are going to spend their entire lives thrashing with the consequences — believes in The App. The App, when it’s discovered, will Fix Everything. Meanwhile, we ignore the reality around us as smugly as the prosperous bourgeoisie of the Nineteenth Century ignored poverty, human and environmental degradation, and smoldering social resentment. Why should we try to fix anything, when The App will do a better job? If and when.

Our faith in The App is, like the old faith in Progress, largely unconscious. It’s built into the new and rude virtual network of devices operated by pedestrians on collision courses with material reality. You cannot listen to mainstream television for ten minutes without hearing the peals of confidence exuded by self-assured men and savvy-sounding women. We’ve got it taken care of: just buy us! When the media is the message, you don’t have to be Plato to start thinking about leaving the global village — the cave, I mean.

***

For two days, I’ve been sorting through desk drawers, and also through the nice-looking boxes — I can never remember what they’re made of, but it’s not what I call it, rattan — which also serve as annexes to the desks. This has to be done every now and then, but the need was pressing because I could not overlook the fact that, during the past year, I rarely opened most of the drawers and never opened any of the boxes. I can no longer bear the idea that my house is a storage unit. Everything not in some kind of use must go!

And a lot of it did.

One type of item that always surfaces in these sortings is the notebook. I know that many people are far more seriously afflicted, but I have something of a notebook fetish. I have many notebooks, a few small, a few large, and a lot medium. Most of them are bound. There are Japanese notebooks with retro print on pale green covers. There are Field Notes. There’s a Moleskine knock-off. I have only recently lost sticky fingers for notebooks, which for years I acquired as women pile up lipsticks. I would imagine a kind of literary porn: there I am, scribbling a deathless thought, presumably against a scenic backdrop.

The reality — falls short. Many notebooks are abandoned after several pages of scribbling. The few that are full are not regularly comprehensible. I don’t think that my notes would make sense to anyone else, and a lot of them make no sense to me. Thinking about this, it occurred to me that I don’t make a lot of sense when I am the only person in the room. “Talking to myself” — transcribing flights of insight — I am something of a lunatic. I know what I’m talking about, and isn’t that all that matters? But, like a lunatic, I almost immediately forget the context from which the brainwave emerged. The next day, the “I” who reads the notebook, that “I” has no idea what I was talking about.

The sad truth is, I never learned how to take good notes. I realized this early enough to make a habit of never writing in books, but the notebook habit persisted, as fetishes will. What I did learn was to write coherent letters to friends, and it’s out of that that my skills as a blogger developed. The only context for what I say here is here, on this page. There are no “understood” special meanings. I assume that you, the reader, are a reasonably educated person who might nevertheless quite understandably never have heard of something I take for granted — which means that there is little, beyond a handful of stylistic conventions, that I can take for granted. And when I re-read old entries (as I’m doing now, in connection with a larger project), I am only very rarely puzzled by an elusive thought.

The question is, then, what to do with the notebooks. Should I just throw them all away unread? With every passing hour, this looks more like the right thing to do. Assuming that I go through them first, how should I go through them? I thought of scanning them, but while that solves the purely spatial problem, it doesn’t address the notebooks ontologically, as it were. Should I look for nuggets of eloquence and type them into Evernote?

Probably the worst thing that I can say about the notebooks that I have leafed through is that they don’t divulge personal or private material that I should prefer others not to see. They’re not even that useful.

Daily Blague news update: Performance Art.