Poseur

I'm schizophrenic; part-ironic and part-earnest. Really, it's as much a struggle for me as anything else.

It seems to me that there are two types of ironic poses. The first is the sort of persistent irony which undercuts and ridicules any assertion of meaning in practically any context. It's a smirking nihilism. That's not me, obviously. [ironic understatement] I'm inclined to think nihilism is incompatible with the Cross. But that's just me. [/ironic understatement] The second form is more situational, more directed to particular instances in which something is held up as laudable or worthy of cultural devotion, but the object of praise strikes me as empty or useless or insipid (or, believe it or not, incompatible with the Cross). When I'm being ironic, I reassure myself, it's because I'm rejecting something that's being mistakenly praised, and the most efficacious way to subvert it is by mocking it. Mockery, Lewis said, awakens the reason. (Or did he say"argument"? I am getting old and can't remember these things.)

And so these distinctions form the cognitive rationale for why I'll sometimes have-- at certain intervals-- some song playing in my head that either the artist or I intend to be an ironic subversion of a misplaced value. Being resolutely unhip, the song has lately either been "Sabotage" or Joy Division's "Love Will Tear Us Apart" (lots of laughs there). And so as I'm walking out the marble lobby toward the revolving door where the rest of the bright and shining world awaits, one of these anthems is playing and I am walking in time to it. I'm animated by it. I'm the one person too detached to take any of this seriously.

Then I go through the lobby doors and with geometric precision my path intersects with that of a woman around forty. She might work in a store or an office, and she might be on her lunch break. She's crying as she's walking. A long stream falls from her eye to her jaw and she's making no effort to wipe it away or hide her unhappiness. She's past me in the time it takes for me to gape at her. She's not asking for help, and it doesn't register to me to ask her if I can do anything to help her. I'm too stunned simply in the act of waking from my ironic stupor to fashion a response to this. The soundtrack, of course, has stopped. Now I just feel childish, and my cleverness is so inadequate.