One Man's Frivolity
An anniversary essay and an alchemical transmutation of an accusation into an affirmation.
I started No Homework exactly one year ago, publishing something every week, more or less. Having written a lot of fiction, screenplays and poetry, the essay is a different challenge. It’s asked me to be more ruthlessly clear and more personal than other forms.
For me, it’s an experiment testing a hypothesis: I can be an honest person in this world.
Making a living
Meanwhile, life goes on. I work. I raise my kids. I know all kinds of people. We’re all straining, but under different boots.
I think about my fellow dads. To them what I do - as a writer of works that seem to have perpetually uncertain prospects - is strange. To some, it’s laudable, even noble. To others, it’s incomprehensible. To many, it’s frivolous, perhaps self-indulgent.
That last one stings. I think of their seriousness often, probably because it infects me more with each passing year. It’s the knowledge that old age is coming, that safety and happiness depend on money. So what do I think I’m doing?
Getting serious
Essays are more serious than the other genres I’ve worked in. How much more serious? I created a taxonomy (see “Tones of Voice, Types of Talk,” from March) to give a sense of which forms of written communication are the most and least frivolous.
In that chart, the most serious - the death sentence - allows for very little interpretation, very little time, and entails absolute responsibility by the author. The most frivolous - language poetry - allows for absolutely any interpretation, imagines a reader with boundless free time, and doesn’t ask the author to take much responsibility for the syllables they write.
Grow the hell up
When talking about frivolity, so-called serious people like to pull out the old chestnut “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways.” But I don’t think St. Paul meant it the way a suburban guidance does.
If we were to ask serious people what they’re really after, something funny emerges. They want to sail boats, play games, maybe paint pictures or write stories. If they somehow become incredibly rich, they fantasize such pursuits for their children. If stupendously rich, they might even fantasize such a fate for strangers.
Maybe I’m giving them too much credit. But the final victory of all that thrift, seriousness and focus is the kind of wealth that might permit taking up childish things again.
Defining terms
Frivolous is a judgment I’ve felt most of my life, since eschewing life as a nose tackle to be a poet at 15. But I never much cared about where things fell on the spectrum.
The hard measure of frivolity, however, is all around me. When we accuse ourselves and others of having first-world problems, we’re talking about frivolity, about being out of touch with reality.
But which reality? The reality of cancer? The reality of starvation? The reality of living in a war zone with young children? It’s a tough standard to carry around. And the insistence on carrying it says something about our world and our generally unrealistic hopes for it (see “The Gulf,” this October).
Revenge of austerity
The accusation of frivolity is tempting when you’re having a hard time. I recently had a house fire, and the whole family had to move (see “Belongings,” this November). We’re fine. A few more subscriptions wouldn’t hurt,
but we’re fine.
While going through ten years of smoke-damaged stuff and looking for another apartment, while living in a Best Western with my wife and two kids, I had very little patience for the everyday problems of my peers, the professional frictions, children’s tantrums and artistic frustrations.
These normally reasonable concerns felt, to me, frivolous. Perhaps this was just physical and emotional exhaustion having drained my sympathy. But that says something about frivolous as a judgement.
The other guy
The concerns of the rich appear frivolous to the poor. The concerns of the healthy appear frivolous to the sick. The concerns of the powerful appear frivolous to the helpless. This is all right and good. If only it was so simple.
In the last decade of my own life, I’ve seen another, similar dynamic among parents and childless adults. Parents are under all kinds of emotional and financial stress. They’re harried, sleep-deprived and they have little time to enjoy themselves. As such, they often deride the problems of childless adults as frivolous. I’ve done it.
But who the hell told us we had to have kids? And if that was the case, why did we listen? In a world whose many present and looming crises are accelerated on overpopulation, isn’t parenthood itself frivolous? Aren’t the concerns of parents just a kind of pointless inherited cosplay in the Anthropocene age?
These are the debates that rage when one coworker has to leave early to make a daycare pickup, while a childless colleague is stuck late at the office finishing the big presentation.
Who’s right and who’s frivolous?
You are right. The other guy is frivolous. Even when we preface our plight as a first-world problem, it’s so we can carry on talking about it, maybe ad nauseum. But it’s someone else’s nauseum.
Frivolity is usually a word used to accuse others, and to affirm some secret sense that we’ve had it as hard as anyone, or that we’ve done more than anyone ever could, given the circumstances.
Arcana and the incredible muck
Artistic, ethical, religious and aesthetic debates can appear frivolous.
Christian factions in the Roman Empire slaughtered each other left and right over the exact configuration of the trinity, while widespread slavery and an operation of worldwide plunder continued unquestioned. Marcel Duchamp stepped up and argued that a signed urinal could be high art, even as what we thought of as Western Civilization was ripping itself to shreds in World War I. Stalin was orchestrating Trotsky’s murder in Mexico while Nazi Panzers crept up to Russia’s western front.
That would all seem to qualify as frivolous behavior. But is it?
There’s another logic at work here. To think a thought is hard. A lot argues against it. You have to rise up out of a lot of muck. You have to be born, to eat, probably read. You have to see things, to learn what others make of the situation. You have to make sense of your own place in the world. You have to articulate your own feelings. You have to watch for the exact thing that’s wrong and identify it. You have to be able to articulate it. You have to find people who understand. This is a very fucking simplified version of what it takes to have an idea.
If after so strenuous and distant a trek, someone gets the idea slightly wrong, how could you dare let them get away with it? How could you not go the final mile? The final inch? What cost would be too high?
The logic of these esoteric but all-consuming debates amid ongoing depredation and misery is nothing new. And the preeminence of the debate over everyday suffering has its roots in the giddy, messianic sense of history in the New Testament, when Jesus says, “The poor you will always have with you, but you will not always have me.”
No breaks and no brakes
Frivolity swings both ways. It judges against an unseen standard of an absence - not-having, or not-being. But that standard can also be nonexistence, in which case all of life is frivolous.
The parts of life that make it life at all certainly are frivolous. For human beings, frivolity is anything but frivolous. Frivolity is a joke in the trenches. It’s mustard on a sandwich. It’s forgiveness.
One way to look at frivolity is the book of Ecclesiastes. It’s, to me, the voice of the least frivolity. Check it out. However many thousands of years later, it’s not wrong. But it’s not fun. It’s a hard pill to swallow.
Strange victories
We’re all chasing different rabbits. But the commonly imagined reward for our hustle is a kind of repose, in which we’ll have all the time in the world.
Even if the conditions of this fantasy were to be real - enough money, a comfortable home, a satisfactory personal and professional life - having all the time in the world would necessarily be imaginary.
So why not imagine ourselves into such a place right now?
Social taxes
My own rabbit is eccentricity. For me, it's the way, and it's the reward. The pain I feel most often in my own life is when I am forced to gather and murmur with the concentric.
UFOs and fences
Jacques Vallee is a guy I really like. He’s been studying UFOs for around fifty years and has somehow not made a fool of himself. Like many people who inquire into the phenomenon, he’s troubled with how much we see them - just enough to never quite forget them, but never enough to gain much insight into what they are, or even if they really do exist.
It feels almost stage managed. It’s enough to make people wonder if the earth is a kind of prison. Jacques himself wonders the same, wonders if he’s really investigating phenomena in an open system, or if he’s just another rube audience member in a closed system. His answer: “I conduct my life as if it was an open system.”
Similarly, this expanding collection of public essays is an experiment. I’ve decided to act as if I’m a free citizen of a free country - fake-it-til-you-make-it America.
Art and frivolity
If art is for something, what is it for? This is a personal question. Is it an investigation of a wild, wide-open universe, or is it a hobby, a controlled diversion between work and sleep?
A last word on ambition
And for an artist, what would success feel like? What would success allow? For most artists, success would allow them to continue to work on what matters most to them.
That’s very nearly my answer. And if that’s I do, then I haven’t failed. As for the obscurity - the pay ain’t great, but consider the fringe benefits!
Selected bibliography
Gibbon’s Decline and Fall