One particularly wet and windy, dark winter day in Seattle, I went to the Moore Theatre to see a Beckett play.
It was called: Waiting for Godot.
Now when I overhear people’s idle conversations around this city, I often recall one of the play’s recurring lines.
“Blathering on about nothing in particular.”
Yes.
I’ve been thinking closely about what it is this means. Is it the fact that we, as humans, don’t really use our full brain potential because we’re too distracted with useless chatter? Stuff that’s inconsequential in meaning and shallow in depth.
Everyone knows we do this.
We call it “smalltalk.”
Here’s the chorus in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot:
–Let’s go.
–We can’t.
–Why not?
–We’re waiting for Godot.
–Ah, yes.
But then, maybe this kind of back-and-forth banter we do with other human beings is requisite. Pubs and cafes are good places for it. Then there’s Friendster and that sort of thing.
Maybe we need chatter to bridge the void created by otherwise wordless worlds.
Isn’t connection what women and men seek? Surely, miniature dialogues, which the conversants readily admit are silly, help.
Maybe it’s miniature dialogues we need to keep the fabric of social relations intact. Clever witticisms to weave us in common understanding. Fabric. Weaving. Yeah, I like that.
Our conclusion here is not for the faint of heart!:
Ladies and gentlemen, man has invented smalltalk for the sake of putting something on the loom of human culture!
And why? Because we’re bored!
I give you old time existential philosophy guy Martin Heidegger:
That in the malaise of anxiety we often try to shatter the vacant stillness with compulsive talk only proves the presence of nothing. –Martin Heidegger, “What is Metaphysics?” in Basic Writings.
Nothingness. Absence. Lack. Apathy. Pointlessness, and its antithesis: meaning.
About the things that matter, then.
What about those?
What about conversations that are not idle, but meaty and ripe with seeds of original and enlightening thought? I’m talking about inspiration here.
I’m talking about real stuff. The best of human thought that drives the rest of us to make, think, draw, and write.
Can’t help but think about all those cool philosophers, artists and poet types who got together for the Bauhaus and Beat and other art movements to hang around and meet up and talk shop. All the time.
Dude. Where do the creatives congregate for inspiration and Jameson in 2007 Seattle?
Beam me up.
D ~ Yes. Excellent question. My porch, next Friday, come over! No, really though, I find that people are readily congressional once the wheel’s been greased with alcohol … but since I’m not much of a drinker, I keep trying to do this sober, and it’s HARD! Sometimes I’m shy or not open, sometimes they’re shy or not open. Sometimes people just want to get laid, but I don’t think that’s the kind of congress you’re talking about, and neither am I. There are a lot of things to distract us from real stuff: money, dry cleaning, fear of the unknown. I’ve been cutting out so much distraction this year, and I keep running into the existential dilemmas, daily. Who am I? What do I want and need in this moment? Do I choose distraction or raw/wonderful/scary reality? Will I step toward this person, or no? I’m not knocking chit-chat, because it’s a way to enter, but staying there incessantly feels tortuous to me. As does intellectualizing. But being oneself, known and mysterious, fully, unapologetically … that takes chutzpah, and such connection with others seems to be organic and surprising, at least for me. I dunno. “Family” can mean/feel like/look like a lot of things.
Your posts are diving, fantastically so! And I can’t believe you quoted Heidegger; I heard that dude’s name EVERY DAY in doctoral school, and I still can’t quote him. Good on you.
Thanks, Mara! I have to admit I wasn’t a big drinker before expatriating to Ireland from 2000-2004. The last thing I heard before jetsetting from JFK was “hanging chad.” [Many a pubgoer thereafter asked what was it with us Americans and ballot-counting, to which I still have no reply.]
But anyway, I got to know whisky, or “uisce beatha,” if you’re speaking Gaelic. Nothing like a coupla rounds of “water of life” to butter up the conversation.
The Irish spell it “whiskey” (to be different, I guess, from the Americans and Scottish). Not to be pedantic about it, but they are particular about that point (as Scotts and Irish both claim to have “invented” the drink)…
Ah, but there’s a story there. In Glasgow I made a promise to some lads with sawdust on their shoes that I’d never, ever spell whisky with an “e.” Doing so would be English. Bad idea.