Quickly (18 January 1956)
The Village Voice, 18 January 1956; transcription provided by Jerry Lucas; proofread against the source 2026-06-01.
A WARNING: The column this week is difficult.
True to my commitment to the Voice, I wrote it quickly.
Because I do not want to lose all my readers at once, I suggest that all but the slowest readers pass me by this time.
If you are not in a mood to think, or if you have no interest in thinking, then let us ignore each other until the next column.
And if you do go on from here, please have the courtesy to concentrate.
The art of careful writing is beginning to disappear before the mental impotence of such lazy audiences as the present one.
Thought, after all, is one of the two prime pleasures available (at least theoretically) in a rational democracy, the other being sensual love, politely called the pursuit of happiness.
Since a newspaper column is supposed to be concerned with communication, it would not be the worst idea to attempt to trace what communication might be.
Thought begins somewhere deep in the unconscious—an unconscious which conceivably is divine—or if finite may still be vast enough in its complexity to bear comparison to an ocean.
Out of each human being’s vast and mighty unconscious, perhaps from the depths of our life itself, up over all the forbiddingly powerful and subterranean mental mountain ranges which forbid expression, rises from the mysterious source of our knowledge, the small self-fertilization of thought, conscious thought.
But for a thought to live (and so give us dignity) before it disappears, unexpressed and perhaps never to be thought again, it must be told to someone else—to one’s mate, to a good friend, or occasionally to a stranger.
It is in the act of telling a thought that the thought—no matter how unlikely—may be convincing to another, and inspiring him or her to some small action.
Needless to say that small action is not likely to be the one we have suggested, but it is an action to which we have been the tangential father.
We have at least, no matter how crudely or ineptly, succeeded in communicating something, and the actions of others, as well as our own, are the result.
In this rigorous sense there is no communication unless action has resulted, be it immediately or in the unknown and indefinite future.
Communication which does not lead to new action is not communication—it is merely the abortive presentation of new social ideas or the monotonous transportation of old ones.
LIES
But an old social idea is a lie. Where it is not sheer premeditated falsity (four-fifths of gossip-columnists’ spew, for example) it is at best a description of something which no longer exists.
Society at any moment is the stubborn retarded expression of mankind’s previous and partially collected experience. Yet our previous experience is the past, it is our knowledge of death, and theologians to the side (for I frankly am all but ignorant of theology) I would argue most seriously that growth is a greater mystery than death.
All of us can understand failure, we all contain failure and death within us, but not even the successful man can begin to describe the impalpable elations and apprehensions of growth.
When we can all agree, including odd dialectical idealists like myself, that history is not foreseeable and the future is unknown, we must also agree that although society is a machine, it does not determine man’s fate, but merely processes nine-tenths of his possibilities on the basis of what society has learned from the past.
Since we are all in the process of changing, since we are already in the privacy of our minds far ahead of the life we see around us (for civilized man has always been outraged by what he sees, or else there would be no civilization)—since we are all advanced in our dreams beyond the practical social possibilities open to our immediate time, that present living time which is all but strangled by the slow mechanical determinations of society, we know and feel that whatever happens to us will happen as the reaction between our urgent desires to express ourselves, to discover the passionate attachment of our lives, and the resistant mechanical network of past social ideas, platitudes, and lies.
POWER
Only it is difficult to express oneself.
The act of writing something (which one expects or hopes will be published) is a social act; it becomes—even at its best—all but a lie.
To communicate socially (as opposed to communicating personally or humanly) means that one must accept the sluggish fictions of society for at least nine-tenths of one’s expression in order to present deceptively the remaining tenth which may be new.
Social communication is the doom of every truly felt thought.
(Naturally, all men who wish to communicate seek social communication nonetheless, for it is the only way to influence great numbers of people in a relatively short time.)
To communicate socially is to communicate by way of the mass-media—movies, radio, television, advertising, newspapers, best-selling novels, etc.—which is to communicate by way of the largest and most debased common denominator—which in turn is equivalent to communicating very little, for procedurally one becomes part of a machine which is antithetical to one’s individual existence.
Antithetical, I say, because this machine attempts to direct the fortunes of men by the obsolete and hence impractical results of the past.
As one writes, one enters an external network of expectations, consequences, fears, cupidities, social fashions: in short, reward or punishment turns the language and alters the thought.
This is true even of the most serious attempts to communicate, by artists let us say, or the occasional creative scholar.
Once one enters the land of massive social communication, of network communication, once one becomes attached to the machine belt of the mass-media—specifically, in our case, the assembly line of the columnist—there is no desire to retain even the father’s ghost of a thought.
There is only power for the sake of power, and it is cowardly power for it masquerades in coy and winsome forms.
On the surface there is only the attempt to entertain in a conventional way.
(Obviously, to entertain and yet say nothing new is quite a difficult game, which is why perhaps columnists, commercial writers, and so forth, are paid so well.)
Therefore, I propose to try something I do not believe I can accomplish.
I will try to write for you (this column to the contrary) as if I were talking in my living room, or in yours.
So my opinions will be half-formed, if not totally inarticulate, but at least they can be awkwardly close to the questions I am really thinking about.
OBSCENITY
Even so, I promise very very little. For example I will be able to use no obscenities, and obscenities communicate a great deal in the living room and indeed in other places as well.
For what are obscenities finally but our poor debased gutturals for the magical parts of the human body, and so they are basic communication, for they awake, no matter how uneasily, many of the questions, riddles, aches, and pleasures which surround the enigma of life.
No, I will not be able to use obscenities—what a pity!—because a little social fact which is too often forgotten is that obscene language which is used at least once in awhile by 95 per cent of the people living in this country would forbid the passage of this newspaper through the mails.
And there are other restrictions, stories I cannot tell about unpleasant people in the daily news, people who are pusillanimous, or archly vicious, or hypocritical, or worse, or simply no good, stories I cannot tell because this paper would be sued for libel.
(Ah, well, perhaps we will find a way yet.)
So these restrictions and all others sadden me, because I would like to express myself properly, and the true communication of soul to soul is speeded on its way, as every soldier and ex-soldier knows, by the foul language God gave our tongues, along with everything else He gave us including malicious stories, women, society, pain, pleasure, lights and darks, and all the other mysterious dualities of our mysterious universe.
Therefore, brethren, let me close this sermon, by asking the grace for us to be aware, if only once in a while, that beyond the mechanical communication of all of society’s obvious and subtle networks, there remains the sense of life, the sense of creative spirit (we are all creative if it is for no less than to create new life itself) and therefore the sense no matter how dimly felt of some expanding and not necessarily ignoble human growth.
With this worthy homiletic come to a close, I promise next week to provide some diversion. Perhaps even a dialogue or two. If I say so myself, I am pretty good at that.