How Friends Cope
A friend and I went to a museum of Austrian art to escape the shitshow and encountered this.
HOBOKEN, MARCH 22. Even when friends and I don’t talk about the shitshow, we talk about it. We talk about how to cope with it, or we do something to forget it. Three examples:
KAREN. Karen, a writer, scrapes shit from a horse’s stall as I vent over the phone. Abby, my former student, lost her job doing public outreach for an environmental institute at Columbia. My Stevens colleague Phil, who does climate-related research, fears he’ll lose his job soon. So does my niece Elizabeth, a public defender.
Karen says her spiritual path—she’s a longtime practitioner of meditation and yoga—helps her keep the shitshow in perspective. She sees Trump as a manifestation of Shiva, the Hindu goddess of destruction. Being mad at Trump, blaming him for what’s happening, is like blaming the wind, the waves, the seasons.
Rationally, I get that suffering as well as joy is transient, all things must pass during our descent toward heat death. But I don’t want to be enlightened if it means floating so far above the hurly burly that you don’t see people grimace, hear them groan. Karen’s mystical perspective is too fatalistic and cold for my taste. So I tell her.
Karen replies that, far from being cold, her view comes from a passionate love for everything that exists, the so-called good and the so-called bad. Even the shit. There is no good or bad, she says, no should or should not be, there is only what is.
TYLER. I meet Tyler at Washington Square Park. It’s a chill, gray day, but the park is packed with humans engaged in non-utilitarian activities. One guy blows bubbles, another plays a piano (how did he get it here?). A dad and son kick a soccer ball around the waterless fountain. Two girls mug for each other’s phones.
Washington Square Park consoles me. As long as people are goofing off, things can’t be too bad, right? I also like hearing about Tyler’s latest book project, which he lays out for me over lunch at a nearby Greek restaurant.
Tyler, who is a kind of global biologist, a big-picture guy, is obsessed with how patterns recur in different systems at different scales, from quarks to culture, as one of his books puts it. Now he’s delving into the diverse ways in which we define, label, conceptualize nature.
Palm trees, robins, planets are the same, in that they’re all made of atoms, but they’re different, too. How can we capture the sameness, the difference? And how do brains and birds and other real things differ from the abstractions to which we reduce them? Are the abstractions real too, in some sense?
Over the past four years, Tyler has filled 40 notebooks, each 80 pages long, with musings, drawings, diagrams on these questions. He has tumbled down the wormholes of set theory, category theory, Wittgenstein’s notions on “family resemblances.”
I ask Tyler if his project is a refuge from the shitshow, and he says yeah, sort of, but not entirely. He hopes he can publish something that can “help folks think in new ways.”
I envy Tyler’s absorption in an ambitious project. Starting in the spring of 2020, I spent two years studying quantum mechanics. Focusing on matrices and complex numbers helped me navigate through the pandemic panic, Black Lives Matter, the Presidential election.
Since my quantum experiment ended, I’ve felt adrift, buffeted this way and that by private and public vicissitudes. I’ve toyed with the idea of tackling general relativity, maybe entropy, but the math daunts me, my heart isn’t in it. Study Chinese? Learn guitar? Every potential project seems arbitrary, escapist.
VICKI. Vicki, a pastry chef, texts me dispatches from the shitshow: Did you hear the FBI is threatening environmental groups with criminal charges!!?? But Vicki still wants to have fun. We should visit the Neue Galerie in Manhattan to look at paintings by an Austrian artist she loves, Gustav Klimt. Yes, what better way to escape the shitshow than art? Beauty?
After a tour group gets out of our way, Vicki and I contemplate Klimt’s Woman in Gold. The gold is three-D, topographical, molded into mounds and mesas, which reflect, embody, the mood of the woman, whose lips are slightly parted, eyes yearning, cheeks flushed, she’s savoring or anticipating an orgasm. Oh, this masterpiece gives my eyeballs an erotic massage!
This beauty redeems the world. Or does it?
Yes, beauty, art, sensual pleasure redeem the world, or at least make it bearable. But as soon as that thought pops up, I squash it. Klimt’s intermingling of beauty and opulence makes me squirm. I had this reaction upon entering the Sistine Chapel years ago, I was simultaneously awestruck and aghast, remembering that the church erected this testament to God’s glory with money extracted from the poor.
Another painting at the Neue Galerie, Eclipse of the Sun, captures my sour mood, it’s almost too on the nose. A leering red-cheeked monster in martial finery, a general, no, demonic warlord, presides over a table encircled by headless suits. A top-hatted fat cat whispers in the warlord’s ear.
The blindered donkey standing on the table (Wikipedia informs me later) represents the hapless German people. Eclipse, which George Grosz painted in the mid-1920s, bashes capitalism and militarism in Weimar Germany, but like all great art Eclipse transcends its original context.
The warlord is Trump, the fat cat hissing in his ear is Musk, the headless suits are their Republican flunkies. The painting’s dead-on currency makes me fear Karen is right, we’re trapped in an eternal cycle of creation and destruction, in which the bad in us endlessly undermines the good.
Maybe my faith in moral progress is foolish, we lurch from shitshow to shitshow. But I’m still trapped in the realm of moral judgements. Trump and Musk are assholes, they’re hurting people, they must be denounced and resisted. By Congress, courts, media. And what should I do? What is my responsibility?
After we leave the Neue Galerie, Vicki and I cross Fifth Avenue and stroll into Central Park, where crocuses and forsythia are sprouting. Hooray for spring!
Further Reading:
I Am One of Those Evil Woke Professors
The Election and the Problem of Evil
Costa Rica and the Problem of Beauty