Tuesday, July 12, 2005
3D Emotions/3D Politics
I'm currently reading Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides, and particularly liked this passage:
As a liberal, while the fires of anger still burn inside me, I'm simultaneously feeling a faint whiff of smugness as the various right-wing totems -- the Presidency, the war, the hardcore religious right (not just Christianity, by the way), the Tories in Congress, blowhard voices in the conservative media -- begin to seem ripe for splintering. And there's also a hint (just a hint) of palpable relief -- sort of a "Thank God, I knew the country would come to its senses eventually!" feeling.
Congratulations are way too premature, of course. Common sense and decency are so far from the norm, in our political discourse and in the behavior of our putative representatives in all branches of government, that cynicism and despair aren't even close to leaving the building.
Still, it's always refreshing to have a little whiff of fresh air. Maybe seeing W, Rove, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Ashcroft in black-and-white striped clothing, picking up trash along the roadside (while Howard Dean and the left-wing blogosphere hold them at gunpoint) -- maybe that will always too much to ask for. But I never imagined that this soon after November, 2004, we'd be even this close to seeing it.
Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in "sadness," "joy," or "regret." Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, "the happiness that attends disaster." Or: "the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy." I'd like to show how "intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members" connects with "the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age." I'd like to have a word for "the sadness inspired by failing restaurants" as well as "the excitement of getting a room with a minibar."This reminded me of Howard Rheingold's They Have a Word for It (1988). I don't have my copy with me at the moment, but this is from a review of the book written by Michael Quinion, author/editor of the World Wide Words site:
Among the gems he uncovered are mamihlapinatapei, a word from Tierra del Fuego that he says means “a meaningful look, shared by two people, expressing mutual unstated feelings”; the German word Drachenfutter for “a peace offering to a wife from a guilty husband”; shibui, Japanese for “the beauty of ageing”; and maya, a Sanskrit term for “the mistaken belief that a symbol is the same as the reality it represents”. The Yiddish farpotshket apparently means “something that is all fouled up, especially as the result of an attempt to fix it”; and he says that wistelkiya is the Sioux word for “sexual bashfulness between male and female relatives”.We seem to be at one of those complex, can't-quite-summarize-it moments in the life of the body politic. Each experience at a time like this seems to be packed into its own portmanteau of feeling -- each facet of the experience in a separate compartment, and the experience as a whole incomprehensible unless you consider, and can describe, the contents of each zipper pocket as well as the suitcase proper.
As a liberal, while the fires of anger still burn inside me, I'm simultaneously feeling a faint whiff of smugness as the various right-wing totems -- the Presidency, the war, the hardcore religious right (not just Christianity, by the way), the Tories in Congress, blowhard voices in the conservative media -- begin to seem ripe for splintering. And there's also a hint (just a hint) of palpable relief -- sort of a "Thank God, I knew the country would come to its senses eventually!" feeling.
Congratulations are way too premature, of course. Common sense and decency are so far from the norm, in our political discourse and in the behavior of our putative representatives in all branches of government, that cynicism and despair aren't even close to leaving the building.
Still, it's always refreshing to have a little whiff of fresh air. Maybe seeing W, Rove, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Ashcroft in black-and-white striped clothing, picking up trash along the roadside (while Howard Dean and the left-wing blogosphere hold them at gunpoint) -- maybe that will always too much to ask for. But I never imagined that this soon after November, 2004, we'd be even this close to seeing it.
