I’ve been staring at my computer screen on and off for
the past three days, waiting for the wave of mental energy
that traditionally stimulates the production of words. I can
generally catch a good wave and ride it for hours at a time.
But this past week I’ve felt like a surfer in the waters
off Wilmington, Delaware. All I see are a few feeble
gray-brown ripples, and I’m beginning to think I’d
better dogpaddle back to shore. Dogpaddling takes a lot more
work than catching a wave, and it’s not nearly as flashy,
but at least I’ll end up on terra firma when it’s all
over. It beats drowning.
If I were a dentist, it probably wouldn’t matter that
my mind is going dull. I’d still be able to drill a tooth
and adequately stuff your cheeks with cotton. You might find
that your office visits aren’t as amusing as they used to
be when, for example, I’d imitate Nixon or discuss the
influence of Ralph Waldo Emerson on standup comedy as I
hollowed out your lower right bicuspids. But you’d still
walk away with competently filled teeth and a bill to prove
it.
That’s the handy thing about being a dentist, or a
chiropractor, or a gastroenterologist. You can survive the
loss of your wit for decades in those respectable fields, as
long as you’ve memorized a substantial body of
professional lore and continue to practice it without
killing anyone. It doesn’t matter if, like me, you can’t
follow the plot of a James Bond movie you’ve seen six
times before. It doesn’t matter if it takes you ten
minutes to think of three synonyms for "aromatic."
As long as you can still drill those teeth or snap a crooked
spine back into place, your position in society is secure.
I don’t have to worry about killing anyone with my
prose, other than a handful of hypersensitive literary
minimalists. (And good riddance, I say.) But only a
technical writer or a tenured professor of entomology can
get away with dull wordsmithing for long. Those of us who
write to amuse and engage our readers have to keep dancing.
Our minds prance nearly naked on the page or screen, with
all their blotches and knobby prominences on display for
your prolonged scrutiny. When I feel as if my head is filled
with cotton or wool, like a stuffed yak in a natural history
museum, I begin to fret about my future. Sure, I can still
cobble my sentences together with a hammer and nails. But is
it worth the strain on my fading mind? Maybe I should be
compiling almanacs or writing user’s manuals for
toaster-ovens. Or, if I want to make a more comfortable
living, maybe I should operate a pretzel wagon in downtown
Philadelphia.
One of my oldest friends recently observed, during an
online chat, that I seem less eccentric these days -- that
I've lost some of my youthful exuberance and innocence. I
had to confess she had a point. Somehow my mind survived
twenty-five years of deadline-driven day-labor with most of
its quirks and quiddities intact. It was a hard life, a
meat-grinder for the spirit. But the redeeming virtue of
wage-slavery is that you can chuck it out of your
consciousness at five or six o’clock. The rest of the day
is yours to waste or enjoy on your own terms. You can take a
walk, fondle the cat, guzzle a Guinness at the local pub,
read the Tao Te Ching, write an essay on woodchucks
or visit one of those naked celebrity sites on the Web. You
begin to enjoy the illusion of freedom.
But once you’re married and a homeowner, you never
catch a break. The delights of domesticity are considerable,
but you have to weigh them against the responsibilities. The
domestic workday doesn’t end until you start to snore at
night. I’ve been spending my time visiting hardware
stores, planting bulbs, raking leaves, unclogging toilets
with plungers and augers, moving boxes into and out of
storage, rearranging the contents of bookcases, rigging up
audio and video systems, buying groceries for two and
concocting rudimentary gourmet meals for my hardworking
wife. I’ve been working hard myself at helping Anne adjust
to life with a literary cynic and a compulsive collector of
curiosities. (She doesn’t mind my plaster life-masks of
Washington, Lincoln, Beethoven and W. C. Fields, but the
stuffed pheasant over the fireplace taxed her tolerance. It
now resides elsewhere.)
I’ve consulted with masons, plumbers, roofers and
carpenters. Yesterday I called yet another contractor; our
tattered stockade fence has been blowing down in sections
over the past two weeks, and something had to be done before
our German shepherd decided to head for Alaska. Talking with
fence contractors can be an educational experience. Just
today I learned, for example, that pressure-treated CCA
posts resist decay and can last up to twenty years.
All this insistent domesticity is crowding out the former
contents of my mind. While joists and drywall bully their
way into my consciousness, they’re driving the old
occupants into exile the way the Bolsheviks drove out the
old Russian gentry. If you could have taken a tour of my
mind a few years ago, you’d have glimpsed a pastoral
landscape with blue-green hills, picturesque ruins overgrown
with vines, a summer house by a rushing stream. Socrates
would have been strolling across the lawn with the Marx
Brothers at his side. Popeye and Olive Oyl, seated on the
verandah with Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, would have been
laughing over spinach and champagne. You’d have seen
Audubon seated under a spreading willow tree, painting a
dodo from life. Over by the trellis, the Mad Hatter would
have been flirting shamelessly with Carmen Miranda. You’d
have seen Teddy Roosevelt arm-wrestle Zorba the Greek while
Isadora Duncan danced with Laurel and Hardy. As Schubert
played an impromptu in the library, accompanied by Louis
Armstrong on the cornet, you’d have overheard Dr. Johnson
arguing the precise location of the human soul
("directly above the spleen, Sir!"). Meanwhile,
George Bernard Shaw and H. L. Mencken would have crept up
from behind and swiped the old man’s powdered wig. In the
garden by moonlight, you’d have seen the young Katharine
Hepburn frolicking naked with the tipsy medieval poet Li Po.
My mind was a lush and improbable meeting ground, with all
eras of history and fiction thoroughly intermingled.
Today my mental landscape looks a little more suburban,
and the guests have mostly fled. I still read widely but not
as deeply, and without the spirit of possession that used to
grip me in the past. I still watch antique films and listen
to even older music, but they don’t burn their way into my
innards the way they used to. My mind has had to accommodate
all those fence-posts and insurance policies, the locations
of wall studs, the relative virtues of various mulches. How
can we continue to harbor words like "lachrymose"
and "lugubrious" in our reservoirs of vocabulary
when we have to think about laying cement slabs? Is it a
case of Gresham’s Law, the bad driving out the good? No,
it’s more that the practical drives out the whimsical.
So my mind is growing flat and mundane in my middle age.
So sue me. Isn’t it self-indulgent to cultivate one’s
mind in isolation, like a bed of antique roses? Isn’t it
better to plant oneself deeply in the communal soil of real
life? What’s so terrible about turning into our parents,
as long as our parents weren’t terrible? Aren’t we
precious snobs for hooting at dullards? Isn’t there an
optimum level of sophistication beyond which we become
ridiculous, like meticulously clipped miniature poodles? Am
I just being defensive about my slide into dullness?
But here’s another question for you to consider: Would
you rather be brilliant and wildly unstable like Van Gogh or
dull and eminently sane like George Bush the Elder? We tend
to covet Van Gogh’s genius and reputation while
conveniently overlooking how terrifying it must have felt to
be trapped inside his sweltering mind. On the other hand, it’s
easy for us cynics to dismiss old President Bush without
considering the deep satisfactions of a successful
conventional life lived with modesty and grace.
It takes a certain amount of maturity, even courage, for
an intelligent person to accept dullness as the price of
stability. Brilliant college students do it all the time
when they opt for careers in law, government, banking and
corporate boardrooms. Those witty and erudite denizens of
Yale and Harvard, most of them with nobler talents than
mine, sacrifice their youthful spunk and originality so that
they might raise sound families in leafy green enclaves of
privilege. There are no eccentrics in the suburbs. As they
fade into country-club complacency, the aging collegians can
look back upon their starchy but distinguished careers with
no regrets. While they nod and nap in their leather chairs,
they might wonder, during a few seconds of lapsing
consciousness, what they lost by turning their backs on
Rabelais or stuffing their unfinished poetry into a file
drawer. But then they regain their consciousness and their
senses, and they rarely wonder again.
To be dull and successful is a station in life to be
envied, especially if you compare it with being dull and
unsuccessful. (You have to remember that not every starving
artist is a Van Gogh; you haven’t heard about all the
tepid, unsuccessful artists because, well, you haven’t
heard of them.) The ideal, of course, is to be brilliant,
sane and successful, like Voltaire or Camille Paglia. But
the fact is that, successful or not, the majority of us end
up as dullards eventually. We grow bored with our lives,
then bored with ourselves.
Some of us run out of things to say, but we keep saying
them anyway. We begin to repeat our ideas, like a
watercolorist who belabors his brushstrokes until all
spontaneity is successfully expunged. Wordsworth, the
formidable Romantic poet, outlived his genius by several
decades and ended up writing mostly claptrap in his
doddering years. Sinclair Lewis’s first two novels were
his best, and they deteriorated from there like descending
notes on the scale. What brilliant tomes have hotshot
authors like Fran Lebowitz and Bret Easton Ellis been
cooking up lately? Where are the bestsellers of yesteryear?
Let it be a warning to all you young artists, webmasters and
intellectual mischief-makers: do your deeds now, while the
hormones run high and the heat of brilliance courses through
your supple arteries. You’ll be rusting away soon enough.
There’s something to be said for going dull around the
edges. It might be nature’s way of preparing us for our
eventual extermination. If we really succeed at being dull,
it will hardly make a difference when we finally expire.
(Dead? How can they tell?) Dullness also keeps us from
feeling the stings and incivilities of contemporary life as
keenly as we might. So what if overpraised stars make $25
million per film, while honest secretaries get by on
one-thousandth of that amount for a full year’s work? Who
cares if a handful of corporate honchos have flim-flammed
their investors and employees? Does it matter if the entire
Islamic world has declared a jihad against the U.S.? Don’t
ask me, good friend. I’m just a dullard now, and I have a
tumbling fence that needs to be replaced.
