I'm not doing well

I'm not doing well. But what does that mean?

A few weeks ago, on an episode of What Rough Beast, I found myself making a impromptu confession to the journalist Miriam Elder: “I’m not doing well.”

This admission surprised even me, and it stayed in my mind. I wasn’t sure what I meant. Not doing well? Yeah, there’s a physical component—pain behind my eyes, burrs in the back of my throat. There are emotions like sorrow and fury.

And then I have an ever-refining, self-editing, eternally-deleting, always-rewriting description of what’s going on in our country. This includes fact: People are being fired from the civil service, newborns we pledged to help are dying because our country betrayed them, our formerly democratic government is no longer responsive to the people.

And then there’s a more abstract or dramatic description: decency is dead, liberalism is dead, democracy is dead, a fascist government has seized power, violence is sure to follow.

But to be “not doing well,” for me, is not one of these elements of experience. It’s for all the elements not to speak to each other. To be not doing well, for me, is not to be sad or scared or sleepless; it’s to be confused.

It’s as though we Americans are kids, who have no real context for thinking of tragedy. Something unspeakable and taboo is going on in our house. Something like incest or torture. (In a democracy, fascism is taboo, sickening.) But we have to go to school, go to soccer practice, do homework. Depending on circumstances, and gumption, we might tell a counselor I feel really depressed. On a day when we’re full of courage, we might tell the police: There is a crime being committed in my house.

We might also tell our friends: I hope I do well on the PSATs, make varsity.

And all of that might be true to life. But then there’s the internal experience—the dissonance of the inexpressible badness of the lived experience of a violent taboo violation; the formal crime one might report; the emotional language one might use with a therapist; and finally the acknowledgement that there are other things in life, even happy things, beside the deep well of badness.

Everyone intuits that if you talk about the badness, it’ll be all you ever talk about, and you’ll miss the soccer games and the sunshine and friends. You won’t be honest or whole or “doing well” because you will be blinding yourself to everyday love; you won’t be doing life justice.

But if you don’t talk about the anguish and subjugation all the time, or even really mention it at all—which is more likely, since the pressure not to mention a civilization-breaking horror right in front of you is enormous, as if we might be very, very quiet and hold our breath and it’ll pass us by—you’re left with a skull full of static and screams.

So I guess that’s what “not doing well” means.

The pragmatic philosopher Richard Rorty—who, in addition to David Graeber, inspires much of the worldview of this newsletter and What Rough Beast—wrote as much about language as he did about politics.

He thought a word’s meaning was its use, and while scientific descriptions of the world have predictive power, poetry and political descriptions are what jointly shape an individual identity—and, potentially, a new humanity. They are aimed at reducing cruelty, building solidarity, creating a humane and just world.

There’s much more to say about Rorty—and I highly recommend his book Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity to see how he gets at these subjects—but for today I’m just consulting the part of his work that speaks to my particular problem: how to live honestly with myself in this particular time and place.

Rorty thought that a person seeking to do this often finds herself between a rock and a hard place: between banal, conformist self-description on the one hand—and, on the other, howling eccentricity, howling madness.

In the current context, if I say, “I’m sick of politics! This is surreal! Elon Musk is crazy!” or any other ebullient cliché, I can fit in with my friends. The day will be smoother, my relationships easier. But of course I risk conformity, complicity, banality. I even risk a form of collaborationism—the kind that comes from calling a situation surreal and crazy when in fact it’s dangerous or violent. When it’s an emergency, not a curiosity.

But then: the howling madness. This is when the static and the scream are in the skull and you don’t have words at all. It feels like the slowed-down process of being in a terrible car wreck where no jokes or observations are possible, nothing but screaming or silence. This response is not banality, but it is isolating. And if the choice is between isolation and conformity, a kind of strandedness and complicity—I can’t tell you, and I can’t tell myself, which to choose.

I can tell you, following Rorty, that this is a life’s work. To create your own idiosyncratic language—filled with both beautiful surprising ironies and intelligible bids for connection, solidarity, and care—and use it to make your private life beautiful and your public life humane.

So I’ll keep at the self-invention part, while continuing to share with you here and on What Rough Beast various efforts to make the world less cruel, freer, more gracious, more humane.

Rorty admitted to the German philosopher Jurgen Habermas (of all people) that his greatest hope was for our distant descendants to live in a world where “the only law is love. “That seems worth holding onto.

One more thing: Please watch The Pitt on HBO. I don’t want to say too much about it, but it’s the one about the crowded emergency room in Pittsburgh. It’s one of those beautiful and subversive works that comes together right when it’s needed. It has a kind of parable structure, and offers another way of organizing society—one that is both egalitarian and then suddenly as organized and hierarchical as a ship or a commercial kitchen.

It also shows, in these days of sadism, a response to pain that is neither to inflict it nor to endure it. But to treat it. To cool off the infections, open up the airways, split the bone, ease the suffering, and pitch in to heal the person right in front of you.