[MD] Love

[Matt Kundert]

Hey John,

John said:
You display your intelligence, coolness and so forth by producing 
something new on the scene, in the academic world.  But here in the 
heartland, we just want to raise our babies and find some hope for 
our lives and those of our children.   So hooking into hallmark 
platitudes might not be cool in the circles you move in, but here in the 
real world, it's what we need.

Matt:
I think that's a pretty good counter-display of common sense.  In 
academia, we're graded--if you will--by our ability to distinguish 
ourselves by a combination of newness and betterness.  There's a 
certain sense in which this process of new generations of academics 
replacing old ones in this manner might risk imploding, but I'm still 
not sure there's a better way to do it.  

However, you don't need to be an academic to feel like cliche is a 
bane on your personal existence.  An entire movement of people, the 
one's Pirsig called "the antisystem people," people of whom we might 
say are attached to the word "authenticity," grew out of the Romantic 
movement at the beginning of the 19th century and gradually seeped 
into the culture at large, in America through Emerson and Thoreau 
most of all.  These people have, we also might say, a "touch of the 
poet," and do not just turn up their noses at cliche like snobs (though 
a lot of these types are just snobs), but sometimes genuinely fear 
that cliche doesn't cut it to express the real emotions they feel.  
Some just disdain Hallmark; some genuinely feel anxious about 
expressing themselves.

I don't go in for authenticity-talk for the sake of authenticity-talk.  I 
don't think there's anything wrong with well-worn phrases in the 
expression department.  If "rock" is fine for us, why not "love"?  It's 
frustrating, to be sure, to see the commodification of anything, but I 
doubt we should let that, by itself, make us turn our backs on 
expressing love, coming up with theories about it, or anything else.

I come from southern Wisconsin.  My newly minted wife comes from 
central Minnesota.  We're both over-educated snobs with too much 
irony to not giggle at the platitudes.  Yet, express ourselves we must, 
and I indeed tried my hand at genuine expression through letter and 
poem.  And I wrote the whole script used at our wedding.  And two 
weeks ago, one of my closest friends asked me to be the only 
speaker at her secular wedding.  What did all these occasions have 
in common?  To purge myself of the anxiety of cliche, I always begin 
by making fun of the cliche, then noting the impossibility of doing 
anything else, and then trying to make up a few new ones myself.  
The trick, I think, is to be self-conscious without derisive.  Especially 
in front of people who have their own codes and proprieties for 
expressing their love to each other, you don't want to invalidate 
them by saying they are full of shit.  Everyone knows cliches are 
cliches.  But you can tease them without falsifying them.

The wedding I spoke at consisted of more heartlanders, a much 
bigger group than at my own small wedding (100+ compared to 30), 
and hardly any of them knew who I was.  I was just a friend of a 
niece or step-niece, or step-niece of a friend, getting up to speak.  
(Oddly enough, all from the same areas, too: southern Wisconsin 
and central Minnesota.)  A very tough crowd to successfully speak in 
front of, and I made it harder on myself by choosing to read a sonnet 
by Shakespeare before saying "a few more words about love, since 
clearly we haven't heard enough yet," as I put it in the moment.  
(The officiant had already trotted out wheelbarrows full of cliches 
ahead of me, which I had not expected.)  When all was said and 
done, it was the only time the bride almost cried (my friend is a 
particularly difficult nut to crack: she despises cliche so much that, 
when she intoned her lines in the ceremony--unlike her soon-to-be 
husband who inflected soft care and adoration into his lines--she 
sounded like a robot with a shotgun pressed against the small of 
her back) and a surprising number of strangers walked up to me 
to congratulate, or thank, or tell me that it was just what they 
thought.  The cherry, however, is that amidst these regular heartland 
folks was my friend's aunt who is an English professor.  I heard 
through the grapevine that she, too, had been impressed, and I'm 
guessing by a slightly different sense than the others.

I don't mean to toot my own horn (and what kind of horn it, 
anyways?), but I do mean to suggest that these kinds of things are 
possible.  We can, if we so choose, reach higher than platitudinous 
cliche without invalidating those who are comfortable with well-worn 
proprieties of expression.  We can please the heartland and the 
authentics.  We can say something a little new that wraps up 
together the old, and seems to tap into what everybody thinks 
already, even if they didn't know it at the time.  I believe this in 
theory, and I think I occasionally succeed in practice (though how 
new? who knows).  As Emerson said well ahead of me: "the artist 
must employ the symbols in use in his day and nation to convey his 
enlarged sense to his fellow-men.  Thus the new in art is always 
formed out of the old."  It's not easy, but what is?

Matt