Are happy people boring?

[william kent]

But still alcohol is better for sitting around moping and writing than ecstasy I think. Never heard of anyone claiming the latter as part of their creative process - musicians yeah, not writers - although I'm sure there is someone.

Maybe Tao Lin.

 

[shiels]

I think what shiels was saying about trauma is part of this. Each work representing a breaking down and reconfiguring of the self

Yes It’s definitely one of the compulsions: rewriting yourself, the need to understand by externalising, transmuting pain, and the need to connect

That talk of the demon or muse, the thing that acts through you, could be seen as an unknowable part of yourself, you don’t have the words for it and try to articulate through art

It’s not always this grandiose obviously, there's showing off, peacocking, love songs, taking the piss

But the desire for fame, the need to be the best MC etc, these are partly attempts to meet emotional needs of which we’re not fully aware or don’t fully understand

The confession Camus is on about doesn’t have to be something bad you’ve done. It can be something bad that’s been done to you

And so contented people are bores

 

[Simon silverdollarcircle]

Gardeners often seem very contented. I know a few people who work at places like Kew and they have this beatific calm about them. It's kinda beguiling. They also seem creative in a very real way- creating new life, new places.

So I wouldn't say they're boring but they can be so contented it's otherworldly and a bit disconcerting

 

[craner]

Frank O'Hara. He had a blast.

 

[baboon2004]

Gardeners often seem very contented. I know a few people who work at places like Kew and they have this beatific calm about them. It's kinda beguiling. They also seem creative in a very real way- creating new life, new places.

So I wouldn't say they're boring but they can be so contented it's otherworldly and a bit disconcerting

They're doing work with a social purpose in the open air that's also physical and meditative, and as you say, creative. And presumably the levels of bureaucracy and idiocy they have to deal with are relatively low. Makes perfect sense.

The opposite of boring

 

[shiels]

Fuck gardeners!

 

[craner]

The opposite of boring

Nah, not buying that.

 

[luka]

Who could have foreseen the militantly anti-gardener turn this thread has taken?

 

[entertainment]

i oscillate daily between escapism and realism, between a need to isolate myself from the all-pervasive forces of the world and a drive to apprehend them

 

[luka]

Frank O'Hara. He had a blast.

PRYNNE

O’Hara loved fun, and he was exceptionally, ironically, estranged from the idea of simple and unquestionable enjoyment. Enjoyment was a kind of task for Frank. He was an extremely moral poet. Very burdened with a sense of obligation and of self-question with regard to the liveliness of life. He was very jocular, and jostled with the possibilities of making fun, and making fun of, being full of satirical wit. And underneath this satirical wit, there was a constant, barely perceptible nibble of melancholia, in the sense that the pursuit of fun was a fragile affair. It kept breaking down, your friends kept falling by the wayside. Your sense of the buoyancy of life was constantly at risk. And this risk was something he was tasked to endure. It was the task of the poet to recognise that this risk was real, and he was prepared to throw the possibility of happiness, and fun, into the risk-play of being a poet. “To Hell with It,” for example, one of O’Hara’s wonderful ode poems, is witty, buoyant, flamboyant, but at the same time, gloomily melancholic. Why should O’Hara, confronted with grief, or sorrow, feel that as a poet he has some duty to write an elegy? No, he had a duty to be happy. A duty to himself, to maintain the buoyancy of poetical happiness. But this sense of inward consistency was always at risk. And he accepted this risk. I think he pursued it. That’s why he was so much better than most of the poets around him, who juggled with playfulness of increasingly imitative kinds.

 

[baboon2004]

@craner it's true though

a nation goes brexit, and levels of intolerance go through the roof. even gardeners aren't safe from the vicious contempt of Independent Britain

 

[luka]

If you expand your range beyond the experience of friends and family and the joys of nature, happiness is a very fragile idea. Because the world is so full of misery—so full of disaster and destruction, and violence, and vituperative vindictiveness, of political exploitation, of financial insecurity, of the breakdown of trust, and the whole international crisis world of terror and struggles for justice, that it’s not easy to see how a poet can claim any right to be happy, while all this is going on. To be a poet, and to be there in the thick of an important and powerful language, is to be in direct potential communication with every part of the world’s action, including, without doubt, all its misery.

It’s difficult not to be overwhelmed by the sense that language joins you up to the powers of lamentation. At the same time, that’s where the dialectical aspect frequently has its task to perform. Contradiction and oppositional thinking, ironical thinking, has to find a way to juggle up these terms, so that the mood quality, and the emotional, and moral tonalities involved, maintain their power without becoming oppressively single-minded. Single-mindedness is no good to a poet.

 

[luka]

INTERVIEWER

What did O’Hara do for your work?



PRYNNE

He was a great fountainhead of energy. He was a great originator of metrical and prosodic experiment. His poems had terrific brio, and they moved about the page and galvanised the page space. Sometimes he would nearly stop, and then not stop. He was extremely skilled at playing this notion of his own continuity in writing a piece. He wasn’t really writing projective verse in an Olsonian manner, because the Olson manner has a personality projection. Although O’Hara allows a kind of poetic personality to be at stake on the page, it’s a kind of rhetorical projection. We know it’s a plaything, and he’s toying it around with great skill and some degree of abandonment. It doesn’t matter to him if it gets damaged, because he’s got others up his sleeve. “In Memory of My Feelings” has got a whole series of alternative personalities, and when one gets damaged, or lost on the way, he’ll mobilise another. It’s exceptionally virtuosic.

 

[luka]

@craner it's true though

Calm when gardening perhaps. Not necessarily outside of that.

 

[Simon silverdollarcircle]

Who could have foreseen the militantly anti-gardener turn this thread has taken?

It's been bubbling under the surface for years

 

[craner]

If you ask me, the gardeners only have themselves to blame.

 

[shiels]

It's a relief to finally say it

 

[entertainment]

If you expand your range beyond the experience of friends and family and the joys of nature, happiness is a very fragile idea. Because the world is so full of misery—so full of disaster and destruction, and violence, and vituperative vindictiveness, of political exploitation, of financial insecurity, of the breakdown of trust, and the whole international crisis world of terror and struggles for justice, that it’s not easy to see how a poet can claim any right to be happy, while all this is going on. To be a poet, and to be there in the thick of an important and powerful language, is to be in direct potential communication with every part of the world’s action, including, without doubt, all its misery.

It’s difficult not to be overwhelmed by the sense that language joins you up to the powers of lamentation. At the same time, that’s where the dialectical aspect frequently has its task to perform. Contradiction and oppositional thinking, ironical thinking, has to find a way to juggle up these terms, so that the mood quality, and the emotional, and moral tonalities involved, maintain their power without becoming oppressively single-minded. Single-mindedness is no good to a poet.

This is what the torture is about perhaps. The burden of opening your eyes to an absurd, incoherent reality end holding on to a sense of beauty in a world that can't live up to it.

 

[luka]

The sensible, grown up thing, would be to have looked at John Eden's first post in the thread and gone, "yeah, I know that's true really. You can't go around as if you are the only bright spark in a universe full of dull people. It's delusional, and no one will like you, and you won't like them either, cos you've decided they're boring. Some people are getting married and settling down. In ten years time they'll be divorced, and by then, maybe you'll own a cat and call her snuggles. Stay in and watch TV, laugh at the funny adverts.

But.... then we don't get a thread and no one gets to vent their adolescent spleen, social anxiety, mingled feelings of superiority and inferiority, snobbishness and inverted snobbishness, delusions of grandeur....

 

[luka]

This is what the torture is about perhaps. The burden of opening your eyes to an absurd, incoherent reality end holding on to a sense of beauty in a world that can't live up to it.

That's Prynne btw from the Paris Review interview