"Your U.S.A. word for fanatic, 'fanatic,' do they teach you it comes from the Latin for 'temple'? It is meaning, literally, 'worshipper at the temple.'"
"Oh Jesus now here we go again," Steeply said. (Infinite Jest 106–7)
Fanatic, just as DFW's Québecois wheelchair terrorist tells us, does come from the Latin fanum [with a line over the a]—but you can also go back to the Indo–European root, dhes- [with a line over the e], which in its suffixed zero-grade form [??] gives us fanum and fanatic (and, interestingly, profane) but also teaches us that fanatic is a distant cousin to words like feast, festal, and all the theo words (polytheism, atheism, theocracy, pantheon...apotheosis? wow, really? enthusiasm?).
All of which goes to say that when we talk about fans, we are talking about fanatics—and that fanaticism has a built-in sense of religious fanaticism—such that if we were to say, "We're big fans of Ke Huy Quan" (and who isn't?), we'd effectively be announcing that we worship Ke Huy Quan as a god (and, again, honestly, who doesn't?).
This is on my mind because of the tendency of our opinions to grow absolute. It would often seem that uncomfortably few of our opinions are completely free of outside influence—particularly when we factor in our reactions against outside influence. If we like something and someone else hates it, it is extremely difficult for us to be unaffected: we either like the thing a little less or a little more, no?—or at least the way we like it, the kind of feelings we have about it, takes on a different...what, tenor?—which explains why the most hated books, bands, and movies surely are not the very worst, but rather the ones that invite a kind of reaction rather than a simple evaluation. More specifically, aren't some of our most hated writers, musicians, filmmakers, and so forth the ones whom we perceive to be incorrectly adored?
So when the Strokes first came to America, I had missed all the initial hype and asked a much more informed friend whose taste I trust, and he said, "You really want them to be terrible, but unfortunately they're great." And I didn't know enough about them to want them to be terrible, but I agreed that they were great, agreed and agree, at least about that first album; and I found myself in that kind of backlash-to-the-backlash-to-the-backlash position where you're like, "I like these guys even though they've gotten too mainstream as the result of their being excitingly different from the mainstream by drawing from exciting music largely forgotten by the mainstream that itself became fairly mainstream by swimming against the mainstream..." And then you get into these pretzel-contortions: is it cool to like Justin Timberlake because you're "above" worrying about what's popular and what's not and you just pay attention to what's "good," or is that itself a kind of pretentiousness, or is worrying about what's cool and pretentious itself uncool and pretentious, or is the pretzel-contortion itself the very least cool, or is it cool again to think about what's cool, or...? Which is why culture will eat itself.
But none of this is really my point. My point is that the tendency of our opinions to get more extreme than they'd be in an impossible cultural vacuum is—or it might be useful for us to focus now and again on the ways in which it is—a carryover from the days of religion...or rather that it shares a common cause or ancestor, just as the words that describe the two share an etymological common cause or ancestor.
I'm not just talking about æsthetic taste or judgments, here; I'm talking politics, philosophy, sexual orientation—the works, you name it. Favorite ice-cream flavor. If we perceive some sort of cultural pressure, deliberate or incidental, it affects our stance, just as we adjust our position when we're wading in the surf and the current changes. And why does public opinion or society affect us like the ocean (which, side note, can drag you out to well past wading-friendly depth and, let's not tiptoe around it, fucking drown you to shit)?
Because opinions are important to us, because we live in a world either actively or call it genetically disposed to treat every decision as profoundly meaningful. Because of GOD.
For real!
Buber: "The act that Judaism has always considered the essence and foundation of all religiosity is the act of decision...The great decision is the supreme moment in the life of man, indeed, in the life of the entire world..."
But then maybe what ties us down in this case isn't religion but junk religion, and the way out is the correction of our attitude toward the relationship to the divine, whether literally or as part of a way of perceiving reality (metaphorically, abstractly, whatever). As Buber says, "The meaning of the act of decision in Judaism is falsified if it is viewed as merely an ethical act. It is a religious act, or, rather, it is the religious act; for it is God's realization through man."
So your decisions and opinions are important, but you don't have to answer to anybody. Have your opinions, yours, have confidence in them as essentially valid in themselves, separate from right and wrong [beyond good and evil?], and then maybe you'll slip free of the endless idiotic back-and-forth, the oscillation, the cultural entrapment, the problem of what I'm coming more and more to see as a kind of essential collaborationism...
[This post should have been called dhes-nuts. HAW!!]
0 comments:
Post a Comment