New York Times, December 1980
It was a peculiar incident because young people aren’t supposed to be shy anymore. The meeting , which concerned politics, had resolved into small groups of lingering talkers. A young man stood by himself, apparently waiting for the woman he’d arrived with. Another woman wanted to kiss him goodnight. He submitted, rather stiffly, and recoiled slightly after the taxing kiss. She laughed, of course, and kissed him again; he looked quite miserable.
He was right, even if over-serious. Much of the talk had centered on inflation (they were conservatives), and the usual things were said. But not the important thing: Inflation isn’t only an economic problem; it symbolizes o our time.
The spirit of our time consists of hot air, and it inflates all our means of communicating.
We know, too well, that money inflation occurs when dollars multiply faster than what economists are pleased to call goods and services. This makes each dollar mean only a fraction of what previous ones did, although each says the same thing: ONE DOLLAR.
Words, too, have inflated, and in the same way. I’m not thinking of propaganda, political or commercial (lying does not inflate; lying counterfeits and counterfeiters depend on the worth of the currency they imitate). I’m thinking of the proliferation of words, of our suspicion that we are told more but hear less that’s worth listening to. Magazines and books clog the supermarket, radios chatter, and television sets flicker in the night. They tell us of the world, which does and thinks more or less what it has always done and thought, but now with more accompanying verbiage. The changed ratio between what expresses meaning (which grows) and what’s meant (which stays the same, even as it changes) makes each meaning-unit–each word–worth less, mean less.
The young man who endured those perfunctory kisses may have sensed that inflation afflicts our gestures as well. Some 40 years ago, Americans could still believe the credo of sentimentalism: that a kiss is still a kiss, a smile is still a smile, and fundamental things don’t change, as time goes by. Like those who imagined that dollars had intrinsic worth, that words had inherent meaning, they mistook a medium of exchange, of communication , for value itself. They were innocent of TV `personalities’ and their relentless grins, of Hugh Hefner’s glossy mass-produced porn. Embraces and kisses, smiles and caresses–they’ve multiplied exponentially since Casablanca. But the sum of human affection that makes such gestures meaningful surely has not.
Some economists say that inflation results from fulfilled demands for higher pay, without increased production, which force the government to print more money. Others say government needs no forcing, that it prints extra, devalued money, to pays its debts. No serious quarrel here. While some explain that we would get more for less, the others explain that we would pay less for more.
Word inflation also has greed behind it. Prolixity pays, as a thousand hacks can testify. And just as otherwise moderate worker feel compelled to act greedily once inflation begins, word-makers hold forth ever more loudly and longer. As the babbling intensifies, the religious part of humanity long for the Word that will stop the words, rather as this-worldly monetary economists yearn for a President who will stop the money-pressure.
The inflation of gesture partly depends on the liberation of another greed, the greed for sex. This generates those laughable worshippers of their own afflatus, whose ancestor, Orgoglio, Edmund Spenser described in his poem The Faerie Queene. Appetite replaces affection, debauching our gestures as surely as it does our other currencies.
Yet not all affection dies from affection’s crowding, and not all gestures communicate appetite. Affection survives, forlornly, in a world that fails to hold much of a place for it. Does affection’s forlornness account for the proliferation of unfeeling, unfelt gestures. For the discomfiting kisses suffered by that young man had no appetite behind them. Perhaps we imagine that if we increase our use of the forms of affection, we can somehow conjure it.
What pumps air into this balloonage of dubious money, glib talk, and spurious intimacy?
Distraction I think: the separation of our minds from the feelings and thoughts that make them distinctively human. Distraction lets us try to appear as more than we are while making u less than we were. We have inflation because we want its precondition, having almost forgotten anything else to want. The young man’s sadness and the woman’s unintended comicality mark the limits of a world that tries to expel reason, tragedy, and love, without quite succeeding.
Recent Comments