SADNESS
3/17/2003
by Leo Kottke
(reprinted)
When Dartmouth asked Joseph Brodsky for a commencement speech, June '89, he showed up at the podium and warned everybody of boredom, and its virtues. Pronouncing boredom, after Dartmouth, the most enduring stone they'd face in their lives--"At best, Dartmouth may acquaint you with the sensation by incurring it"--Brodsky appears to have been talking more to himself than to the graduates; Dartmouth may have wondered, but his speech was not boring--not to read, at least.
My address will be on sadness, when Dartmouth asks; not the sadness that follows the death of something, or the premonition of the death of something, but the sadness of nothing, the sadness that sends us to bed early with no big struggle. Not boredom...simple sadness. Empty quiet. Not melancholy, or blueness, only sadness. The first chill in the air, or the first warmth.
I'm sad now. I'm sad because I'm writing this. Brodsky was not bored when he wrote his commencement address. Sadness, though wispy, can be persistent and catching. Boredom is too human to last for long, especially if you're not completely nuts; work can erase it, for example...but work won't eliminate sadness. Sadness will spoil your work. It's global. Sadness will keep you, as my father might say, from getting outside and getting a little fresh air.
When I was a child in Wyoming and my father thought I was becoming a nerd from reading too much, he told me to go outside. He didn't tell me to stop reading, he told me to go outside and get some air. So I floated Huckleberry Finn to a vacant lot in Cheyenne, smoked a pipe Kent Ekloff and I'd stolen from a work train on the air force base, and got sick. I think I was ten years old. I remember the milkweed in the vacant lot, the raft, and the nausea. It's a great book. And I still read... but right now, I'm sad. And I'm sad for the guy whose pipe I stole.
On a record called Great Big Boy, I mentioned jumping in a lake when I was a child:
"My earliest memory is of water. I was submerged in it. I had stepped off a dock into Clark Lake. Before my Aunt Rui jumped in after me, I had time to hit bottom- about three feet down- and look around. A bubble formed around my head and I could breathe in it. I was two and a half. I learned this much: adults couldn't breathe underwater, but a child could do anything. About four years later I held a paper bag above my head and jumped off a roof. I reached full speed and slammed into the ground. I learned this much: adulthood begins at six."
But what I was was sad. Later I was a Sad Sack. Now, grown up, I am sometimes, like now, simply sad. This is not the tragic view, not acknowledgement of the human condition, it's just sadness.
One access to sadness is to be too literary for one's own good, to suffer with Moby Dick in an ocean of Calvinism. You could cheer up, maybe, with Henry James: Take a dilletante's interest in melancholy and recline on someboy else's croquet lawn. Or you could go trout fishing with Hemingway, and sadness could become style: A clean, well-lighted place. Or sadness could become habit--and us mammals (or the tragic view)...smaller.
If the tragic view continues to shrink--and, with it, the strange, sad chance it offers to cheer up--there are worse things than the too literary: there is boredom, there is the total avoidance of the literary, or the dismissal entire of the "tragic view"...and the ensuing headlong, or headless, rush into kitzch: refrigerator magnets, un-founded optimism, soul-less-ness, blunted faith, religiosity. This is worse than sadness. (No, let's just say it's different.) It's still nothingness, though. It's being a reindeer, and reminding rooms full of people that there's something to be said for free-floating gloom. It's being ribbons on a poodle, fake flowers on pencil erasers, a bumper sticker...not fate, but flaw.
All of which makes me sad. Angry, even. It may be self-loathing that makes a thug, but it's a numb smile that pisses him off.
But we can be happy. We can swim with the mammals, maybe. If kitzch is the denial of shit (just to be literary and quote Milan Kundera) reality is the tragic view--Maybe Dick, to quote Bullwinkle. We are pinned by choice...because we're too damn sad, or stupid, to make up our minds.
Maybe I am only talking about myself.
The exhaust fan above a stove looks like a giant Flo-Bee. It's possible to make a potato cannon out of PVC tubing and hair spray. We can tune a yapping dog by snipping its vocal chords, from yip to woof in an hour. By reversing a clothes pin we can shoot flaming kitchen matches at our potato cannon. We can make a gun out of a bicycle spoke. Run a garden hose six feet up to the surface of the lake we're swimming under, try to breathe and drown.
Ingenuities, misunderstandings. We can be born dumb, but we have to make ourselves stupid. We can live our lives just fine with twenty nouns or two thousand, but if we don't learn to say "ouch" we'll never live at all. It's possible to fall asleep with our eyes open--I've done it twice on freeways, especially the one through Pennsylvania, the one that never ends. Pennsylvania never ends. I've never figured that out.
Are we still talking about sadness? I don't think so. Maybe this is about something else, about Hertzian poodles. About being asleep. About Gore Vidal? Not really. William F. Buckley?, too many nouns. George Will?... doesn't like "The Catcher in the Rye"... a tin ear, he has. The kitzch of Fox, the spout of Snopes?
Are we talking about politics? No. Maybe Dick?
Perhaps sadness is an organizing principle. Maybe without it, as I am now, the random sparks of imagination can drag us off, sputter like Teddy Roosevelts of yesteryear, shove us into the engram jungle, and suggest we get along with nothing but an idea to fondle. Without sadness, in less words, we would be having too "good" a time. We might be asleep, and making unintelligible noises. Or: If sadness is only a drag, tragedy is only a mistake.
The virtue tragedy teaches, if it teaches anything, is compassion. If there is a lesson in sadness, it is in its impermanence--one of the values Brodsky finds in boredom. And if imagination can show us how to tune another species or how to make a weapon out of a potato, it cannot show us how to end a note whose only organization was a now vanished cloud.
Good-bye. (I gotta go get some air.)
Copyright © 2003 Leo Kottke