and a big heavy one for old times' sake

"One might suspect that these family and personal conflicts are put in the foreground in order to cover up the much more fundamental, severe, and painful conflicts between conscience, integrity, authenticity, and self-interest.  Usually these latter conflicts are not even seen as such but are quickly shoved away as irrational, romantic, 'infantile' impulses that need not and should not be pursued any further.  Yet they are the crucial conflicts of everyone's life, much more crucial than divorce or not divorce—which, most of the time, is only the replacement of an older by a new model."

-Fromm, The Art of Being, 59

Earlier in the same book, Fromm quotes the Buddha as saying that a monk should not engage in trivial, "vulgar" talk—and among the subjects identified as trivial and vulgar are "kings...famine and war...eating, drinking, clothing and lodgings...relatives...villages, towns, cities and countries...women and wine...ancestors...the origins of the world and the sea, talk about things being so or otherwise, and similar matters" (21).  Reading this, I was taken aback: war is trivial?  You're not supposed to talk about politics, about the world, about your family, about your personal life—you're not even supposed to talk metaphysics, it looks like!  Most of us would be left with very little to say.

There was this kid I knew in college who didn't seem to be making any sense half the time but was reportedly kind of a genius, and I remember once either he or an acquaintance told me he viewed the world as literature¹—or maybe it was that he analyzed the world the way you'd analyze literature...?  Now, I'm known (I'm told) to reinterpret people's casual comments and to endow them with weighty meaning that was never intended (Bloom might call that a strong misreading...but probably he wouldn't²), but maybe what this crazy kid was getting at—not too entirely different from my shit about the 1:1—was that the "big" things in life, the hugest, most important things, are in a way "really" just a kind of metaphor or symbol for something much deeper and more profound.  I'm thinking Nabokov's otherworld [потусторонность],³ here...

"[Dreams] contain, in a very vague, diluted state, more genuine reality than our vaunted waking life which, in its turn, is semi-sleep, an evil drowsiness into which penetrate in grotesque disguise the sounds and sights of the real world, flowing beyond the periphery of the mind—as when you hear during sleep a dreadful insidious tale because a branch is scraping on a pane, or see yourself sinking into snow because your blanket is sliding off."

(Invitation to a Bedwetting, 92)

...except that there's no need to get mystical in our case (even in a hyper-intellectual Nabokovian sense): maybe the reason we care so much about the "big" things, the reason they matter, is that they affect our humanity, and in more than one important sense our humanity is the main thing that matters...?

(This photo has nothing to do with anything.⁴)

Put it another way: we've all heard the saying (in Kurt Cobain's words) "Just because you're paranoid don't mean they're not after you"; well, it's just as true that just because they're after you don't mean you're not paranoid.  It has occurred to me more than once that the deadly reality of HIV–AIDS (e.g.) only makes that epidemic more intense as a kind of living metaphor or anxiety: I want to use the word theophany, but it's obviously not right...maybe phobophany?  Similarly, it seems to me that our fascination with war, even in peacetime, goes past any kind of practical concern and has a lot to do with what war tells us about ourselves, about our mortality, about our proximity to all that we cannot possibly understand [see Gravity's Rainbow].

And so maybe—probably—American politics and this particular presidential election mean so much to me in part because of their significance in my own personal cosmos.  To put it all another way, maybe there's something to be gained from analyzing the events of the real world as if they were dreams...

¹ Another time he told me that "the world will end in thievery—perhaps some greedy bug" (?).

² And in fact I'm not at all sure that my idea of "strong misreadings" has very much to do with what Bloom meant by it in the first place—e.g.

³ I don't speak Russian.  I've got a friend.

⁴ Or does it??