Gods, Babies, Devils, and the Sincerity of Expression

There is something fresh and liberating in the desire for sincerity, for me particularly: a person who has struggled long and with much difficulty to mean what he says and say what he means. For me and for those who inhabit these rhetorical modes, irony, and sarcasm, and humor all are basically hiding places, safety zones where committment and true intention and a sincere statemetns can be avoided.

This all came about, or became an issue from visiting my friends Ian and Rachel (and now with their fresh new baby son Eli Grey), as we discussed how different people seem in North Carolina than they do in in my birthplace California, not just the people themselves but namely how these people communicate. What is so remarkable is when meeting and talking to new people in NC, and even the most casual stranger in a store, they all seem to speak directly, without ulterior motive; in other words, when they say something, it seems like they mean it, as if there were no double entendre, no hidden ironic joke, no smug word play or allusions - they simply speak, ask questions, listen, and expect the same from you. Perhaps beter stated: I feel no need to keep my intellectual guard up to combat smugness or pseudo-witty word play and coolness competitions.

This may be regional, given that I (and Ian and Rachel) have lived in California all my life, and so I am very much used to a type of faux sophisticated word play, or joke style, and lack of genuine kindess or interest when dealing with either the general public or when meeting new people. It's a particularly dislikable kind of witty banter, a smart alecky quick witted style or repartee. Or maybe it's just a lack of interest or general sulleness or lack of caring. It's a form of humor wherein a person must be on guard for fear of rejection or criticism, or merely a stance and means to prove oneself superior from the start of any conversation.

But In NC I feel that if people ask if I am OK, or offer to help me in a store, or ask what I do at a party, and they genuinely seem interested and want to know. They mean their statements, and they want to know the answers to a question they ask about you. I'm not used to this. I'm not sute what to do or say or how to react when there is no hidden joke full of critique or criticism. They look you in the eye and they listen. It's very disarming but quite refreshing.

What's worth studying, delving into, digging around in excavating, extracting what has been for so long my modus of communicating, my own severe anarchic sarcasm and ironic sensibility, the forms it has taken and the underlying horror and fear of meaninglesness that ever so slightly covers, barely hiding, what I suspect is a deep fear of meaning - or, stated another way, what I call this deep fear of meaning is actually a desparate desire to have meaning, to really have the faith required to trust and beleve in life, God, the universe, all there is.

But in the midst of all writing and thinking and making and trying to create, the spectre of death creeps into the periphery, lurking like the nasty inevitable that it is, smug and confident, full or high sentence and not a bit obtuse, accountable to neither God nor the devil, beyond all sutblties of communication and thought, waiting like a painting in a museum, still generating all its power whether someone is there to look at it or not. (All the while baby Eli cries every 4 hours to be fed, nothing insincere or ambiguous about his special little wail.)