John Keats wrote that if something is not beautiful, it is probably not true. I celebrate that hypothesis in my book Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings. I further propose that the universe is inherently friendly to human beings; that all of creation is set up to liberate us from our suffering and teach us how to love intelligently; and that life always gives us exactly what we need, exactly when we need it (though not necessarily what we want). Dogmatic cynics are often so mad about my books title that they cant bring themselves to explore the inside. Why bother to actually read about such a preposterous idea? They accuse me of intellectual dishonesty, disingenuous Pollyannaism, or New Age delusion. If they do manage to read even a few pages, they find that the blessings I reference in the title are not materialistic fetishes like luxurious vacation homes, high status, and a perfect physique. Im more interested in fascinating surprises, dizzying adventures, challenging gifts we hardly know what to do with, and conundrums that compel us to get smarter and wilder and kinder and trickier. I also enjoy exposing secret miracles, like the way the sun continually detonates nuclear explosions in order to convert its own body into heat, light, and energy for our personal use. But I dont take the cynics fury personally. When I suggest that life is a sublime mystery designed to grow us all into strong, supple messiahs, I understand thats the equivalent, for them, of denying the Holocaust. Theyre addicted to a formulation thats the opposite of Keats: If something is not ugly, it is probably not true. Modern storytellers are at the vanguard of promoting this doctrine, which I refer to as pop nihilism. A majority of journalists, filmmakers, novelists, critics, talk-show hosts, musicians, and pundits act as if breakdown is far more common and far more interesting than breakthrough; that painful twists outnumber redemptive transformations by a wide margin, and are profoundly more entertaining as well. Earlier in my life, I too worshiped the religion of pop nihilism. In the 1980s, for example, I launched a crusade against what I called the global genocide of the imagination. I railed against the entertainment criminals who barrage us with floods of fake information and inane ugliness, decimating and paralyzing our image-making faculties. For years, much of my creative work was stoked by my rage against the machine for its soulless crimes of injustice and greed and rapaciousness and cruelty. But as the crazy wisdom of pronoia overtook me in the 1990s, I gradually weaned myself from the gratuitous gratification that wrath offered. Against the grain, I experimented with strategies for motivating myself through crafty joy and purified desire and the longing for freedom. I played with ideas that helped me shed the habit of seeing the worst in everything and everyone. In its place I built a new habit of looking for the best. But I never formally renounced my affiliation with the religion of cynicism. I didnt become a fundamentalist apostate preaching the doctrine of fanatical optimism. In the back of my wild heart, I knew I couldnt thrive without at least a tincture of the ferocity and outrage that had driven so much of my earlier self-expression. Even at the height of my infatuation with the beautiful truths that swarmed into me while writing Pronoia, I nurtured a relationship with the awful truths. And I didnt hide that from my readers. Yes, I did purposely go overboard in championing the cause of liberation and pleasure and ingenuity and integrity and renewal and harmony and love. The books destiny was, after all, to serve as a counterbalance to the trendy predominance of bad news and paranoid attitudes. It was meant to be an antidote for the pandemic of snark. But I made sure that Pronoia also contained numerous Homeopathic Medicine Spells, talismans that cram long lists of the worlds evils inside ritually consecrated mandalas. These spells diffuse the hypnotizing lure of doom and gloom by acknowledging the horror with a sardonic wink. Pronoia also has many variations on a theme captured in William Vollmans testimony: The most important and enjoyable thing in life is doing something that’s a complicated, tricky problem that you don’t know how to solve. Furthermore, the book stops far short of calling for the totalitarian imposition of good cheer. I say I can tolerate the news media filling up half their pages and airwaves and bandwidths with poker-faced accounts of decline and degeneration, misery and destruction. All I seek is equal time for stories that inspire us to adore life instead of fearing it. And Id gladly accept 25 percent. Even 10 percent. So Pronoia hints at a paradoxical philosophy more complex than a naive quest for beauty and benevolence. It welcomes in a taste of darkness, acknowledging the shadows in the big picture . . . . TO READ THE REST OF THIS ESSAY, GO HERE: bit.ly/HoneyVinegar + Image: Aboriginal Art, Wally Caruana, tinyurl/ne67kf7
Posted on: Tue, 01 Apr 2014 23:08:41 +0000
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