In short, in order to understand this conservative mentality, you need to imagine a permanent state of siege . . .
AMONG THE ARTISTIC PASSIONS brandished as marks of distinction, pride of place is owned by the visual arts and music, rather than literature—and why is that? If I were the set designer assigned to reproduce an interior of the high bourgeoisie in the seventies, I’d know exactly what artworks to deck the walls with. Certainly, the visual arts lend themselves as a way to yoke together the aesthetic function with its economic counterpart; while on the opposite slope, music is the ideal art because through it one can attain the ambition of placing the greatest distance between oneself and material obligations. The tension toward the pure artistic form and the disinterested enjoyment of it, then, would be nothing more than a reflection of a social inclination: to put at the farthest possible reach the world of need, redeem oneself from the principle of utility, opposing it with form, soul, and beauty. Obtaining the maximum profit from the uselessness of Beethoven. Which just goes to show that pure disinterest doesn’t exist, and never can.
REASONINGS, reasonings, reasonings . . . what good are they?
Having worked our way through all the various reasonings, nothing remains but the prophecy, much as, having eliminated out of pride or idealism or laziness the various paths of the professions and businesses, a well-to-do young man is left with no options but to become an artist—actor, writer, or musician. Since he does not know how to produce, he’ll just have to create; with no talent for measurable quantities, he finds himself obliged to pursue the infinite and the boundless. I know of some young men who had all the paths to wealth and honor spread before them, if only they’d been willing, with a crumb of humility, to learn how to handle basic arithmetic, like honest greengrocers who tot up the prices with a pencil on graphpaper notebooks; but no, instead they turned up their noses at this straightforward option, they passed up the prospect of working with the tangible, the material, with all the prose of those petty numerical concerns—and in their arrogant purity they went on to write film reviews for newspapers where they could have and should have risen to become treasurers or trustees, on whose boards they might easily have been sitting by now if they hadn’t been possessed by a foolish intellectual frenzy. Too full of themselves to command, they chose instead to submit and, from below, criticize.
REALISM WAS THE BITTER MEDICINE that the bourgeois spirit had the courage and the impertinence to administer to the world in order to cure it. The world wasn’t cured by that vaccination, but the problem is that even the bourgeoisie was unable to swallow that bitter dose without making faces. The acid taste of reasoning in the maxims of everyone from Machiavelli to Karl Kraus thrills those who wade through them, it’s a slashing razor, an ice-cold spray in the pestilential air of fairy tales, but over the long run it too can become depressing, suffocating. Radical realism certainly has many merits but relatively little appeal, and it can be hard to take, it entails a certain existential monotony, an implacable fixity of thought, so that even the most disenchanted spirit at a certain point would like to fill his head with clouds and dreams, just for a change, abandoning for a moment the fine-honed gaze that the falcon trains on this world, flying off elsewhere freely in his thoughts. Anywhere else, as long as it’s outside of reality. What’s more, the pitiless knowledge of one’s limitations can be a prod to excel as much as a source of frustration, it can encourage wise and manly behavior as much as it can drive one to abandon himself to despair. Someone who fires a bullet into his head is, in a way, a realist; in many aspects, suicide is the most realistic act that a person can commit—it is, in contrast, staying alive that is an illusion, a deception. And so, if we were all realists . . .
WE WIND UP being afraid not only of the future, but even of the past. If fear is born of uncertainty, at some point in life it is legitimate to nurture doubts about what has already happened, about the meaning we should assign to what we have already done, perhaps even more than to what has yet to take place. We fear the past as if it could sneak up behind us, shoot us in the back, defraud us. As if within the purple cavities of a dream, concealed truths lie in the past, truths capable of shaking us and devastating us. In any case, in the course of these meditations pregnant with feelings that agitate the heart and disturb the surface of the river that ought by rights to flow quietly between its well-established banks, the present is never taken into consideration, the present, that is, the only time that we are in fact living and which is therefore, curiously, overlooked. There is nothing more mysterious than the present, and there is no graver blindness than that which comes over us in the presence of the things that lie right before our eyes. We turn our gaze away from the wound of the present.
The middle class thrives on regrets and fears: it sees missed opportunities and shattered traditions behind it, and dark clouds gathering on the horizon ahead of it. Even in times of peace and calm, when nothing dramatic troubles the order of events, it keens its ritual lament, its neurotic complaint, in the twofold form of a declamation of the objective decadence of the current way of life (the world has grown vulgar, the honesty of times gone by lost forever, the children poorly brought up and ignorant, the housekeepers and maids incompetent) twinned with the heralding of impending disasters (recession, squandering of savings, unsatisfactory marriages of one’s heirs, physical and mental degeneration). While fooling itself that it controls life in every slightest aspect and that it can direct to its own profit all inclinations imaginable, whether good or bad, like a sailing ship that can set its sails to gain headway from contrary winds every bit as much as favoring winds to keep its course, the middle class is racked with the shiver of perennial insecurity: when that insecurity isn’t real, then mental, and if not psychological, then actual and effective insecurity, as it is now, in these times of crisis. Insecurity is the pond in which its neurotic vitality pullulates, insecurity is the prod, the painful stimulus, the thorn that forces you to feel alive even when all the primary objectives would seem to have been attained, as well as the secondary ones, and so on down the hierarchy. Without the tremor of fear, there would be no civilizing progress, and perhaps there would be no progress of any kind. The frantic oscillations of the stock market clearly represent this fickle condition: something to trust in, but something one always wishes to protect oneself against. The ritual demand that investors, especially small and medium investors, make of their stockbrokers and advisers assumes a curiously oxymoronic form: please, let me speculate but don’t scare me, bet my savings but don’t cut into them, gamble without gambling, what I’m trying to say is, I want to run risks without running risks, is that clear? It’s like the Holy Church of Christ without Christ in the novel Wise Blood. Ah, a church like that would truly be perfect, without that bothersome man crucified on the wall! The ability to perform the calculations required precisely to prevent disaster derives strictly from some previous disaster, from an initial terror, similar to the original sin of religion. Indeed, you might say that the star of reasonableness under whose enlightening protection the bourgeois has chosen to let his footsteps be guided is nothing more than a residual form of fear, fear sharpened, rarified, and systematized, set to monitor and rein in the dangers and unforeseen twists that threaten his existence. Reason is nothing more than structured panic. Essentially a mechanism of self-defense, it preserves an aggressiveness equal to that of the other feelings, the love or the anger or the thirst for revenge, that inhabit and animate man. He learns to chill the hot burst of terror, transmuting it into the crystalline form of law, but even this cooling is itself an instinct, no different from that of insects that feign death in order to elude predators. It is to forestall all objections concerning its behavior that reason simulates a mechanical, necessary, impersonal, objective state. The common sense that structures its discourses, although at first glance it would seem to be nothing more than a neutral and dispassionate instrument of logical control, actually originates with the inner panic it works so hard to
set aside. Reason, in other words, comes before reason, it too comes from the heart or the belly, from the chest, from the guts, and its thirst for domination overall is nothing other than a residue and clear proof of its physiological character. If reason really were abstract and superior and pure and disinterested, what need would it have to establish itself with such virulence? It develops itself in order to defend itself and, in time, subdue all others. During headlong flight, the ability to calculate the width of a crevasse is no less necessary than the muscular strength required to make the leap. The exactitude of that reckoning may well be a matter of life and death.
And so, common sense itself is a complete myth, which has cultivated the claim that it can present itself as an anti-myth, capable of unmasking the lies behind all other myths, religions, hallucinations, fairy tales, customs, and phantoms of certainties that have coagulated into systems of thought and law. Originating out of insecurity, exactly like the bodies of belief that it claims to suppress, it grows weak and starts to fail just when people start to feel most confident, when it seems as if the certainties are sufficient, in the periods when the danger seems to have retreated, when in fact the middle class luxuriates in ease and comfort and becomes a dissident from itself, abandoning its obedience to the precepts of caution that had long protected it.
The threat of a danger over the long term may prove less harmful than the superficial euphoria caused by its apparent cessation. If the middle class lives in fear, in other words, it lives better, or perhaps it may even live worse but it more closely resembles itself, and even in its state of anguish, whether for good cause or for nothing at all, it will suffer less from issues of identity. When subjected to stress, its qualities of endurance and stamina prove truly outstanding. I could cite numerous examples from my grandmother’s life: she was a bourgeois woman who lived through fascism, pregnancies, war, semipoverty and semiwealth, a husband who went insane and a son who killed himself in a motorcycle crash, never turning a hair through it all, impeccable, never wavering for an instant from her personal style, whose creation and the oath she swore to remain faithful to it forever came at elevated costs, superhuman efforts, floors gleaming like mirrors, face powder, fur coat, black hat, Paglieri perfume, espresso at Il Parnaso and dinner at Il Caminetto. That is where the backbone of the middle class is rooted, its unyielding formalism, its hypocrisy that never falters or subsides, becoming wonderfully unreasonable at the darkest moments: always setting the table with double sets of utensils and two glasses, even when there’s nothing to eat. Hunger, but not proletarian hunger, so melodramatic and heartfelt, no, bourgeois hunger is an admirable spectacle, sterile and strident. Never despair, even when you die. Pretend, obstinately pretend, always pretend.
On the other hand, when it suddenly stops making sacrifices, saving, toiling, keeping its lip zipped, wearing the polka-dot tie, buying trays of finger pastries on Sunday, dangling from one finger the hangman’s noose of curly pink ribbon, then its moan of complaint truly becomes intolerable, and the middle class, paradoxically, discovers its seditious and anarchistic vocation. The tranquillity it had always aspired to but never attained is suddenly too tight for comfort. It turns apathetic, lazy, surly, and threatening. It believes itself to be omnipotent and, in the meantime, raves frantically over its own impotence. It demands compensation for wrongs supposedly suffered. It feels ill-used and demands vengeance. It’s sick and tired of self-control and pious dissimulation, which have for so long been the pillars of its way of being, sick and tired of shrewdly administering its household, and of cutting sharp deals, and of filling the freezer with dishes and sauces to be consumed at regular intervals, more or less as if it had freeze-dried its whole life. The middle class rebels against the religion of monotony it invented itself. It feels the urge to go plant bombs on trains, and then it really does go and plant them. In the end, it’s even capable of killing the very same policemen who were once the revered guardians of its vaunted tranquillity. It self-destructs with drugs, skepticism, and unbridled financial exposure. It introduces shapeless baggy workout pants as part of its wardrobe. It is tempted to vote differently from how it has always voted in the past, or even to stop voting entirely. It no longer obeys. No longer obeys whom? Itself. Decorum, the cult of hard work, reputation, restraint—it throws all of it into the briar patch, but then regrets having done so the minute it does, since it cannot replace the suit of clothes it has stripped off with anything that it actually finds persuasive, above and beyond its first burst of superficial curiosity, neither yoga, nor Buddhism, nor volunteering, nor the permissive upbringing of its children, who turn on it, throwing tantrums of episodic severity, belated and ineffective, nor does smoking joints work any better than giving up those same joints, not even Pilates or evening belly-dancing classes. In short, it’s as if they never know why they behave like this. What with this furious process of hearing the hypocrisy of its values denounced and unmasked, along with family and social conventions, empty formalities and insincere attitudes, it finds itself unable to take up new ones that aren’t every bit as fake as the ones it abandoned, if not more so. Because deciding to become an underwater photographer instead of a commercial notary like Papà wanted is by no means a step forward if this decision, exactly like all the ones before it, is made solely as a way to stand out, a way of getting attention. In other words, for the same reasons as ever. If before they believed very little in the things they were doing but clung to them in ritualistic fashion, since repetition of the same acts renders them sacred by the simple fact of performing them regularly, every day, without any need or further addition of faith, now they are forced to believe, to really believe in what they do, something they are sincerely not cut out to do. Faith, a true faith, could be embraced only by giving in to madness, by falling apart, smashed to smithereens like a house abandoned and invaded by the wilderness. The self-control and dissimulation of one’s feelings were undoubtedly a form of hypocrisy, but at least they drove in a specific direction, they had an objective that could be shared above and beyond the personality of a given individual, like a trademark, a class affiliation: remaining consistent with oneself, sheltering behind a frosty shield of reserve, a façade behind which no one was allowed to venture, but so obstinately that in the end the façade eventually comes to coincide with the innermost essence of one’s being; or perhaps one might simply forget entirely that anything exists behind that façade, no longer requiring that any means be hidden behind the attitudes, the poses, the habits, the rules, the barriers. Fully adherent to appearance, sacrifice to it—and thereby saved. Saved from themselves. “Protect me from what I want.”
Desires, like the horns of snails, recoil upon contact with reality; and once retracted, or ten times, or a hundred times, they no longer extend. An order must surface amid the most chaotic of visions, out of the most frightening and tangled phenomena. And yet the little compass of vigilance and reasonableness finds its needle spinning crazily in the opposite direction when it chances to pass by magnetic fields, buried or forgotten deposits of lodestone, and it becomes clear just how easy it is to find deep in one’s soul all the hidden violence, nurtured and lovingly fostered precisely because it has been repressed for so long. The blind nest, the warm litter of unconfessable feelings are all preserved much better than those vulnerable to the daily wear of exposure and display. At this point, once the field shift has been completed, the polarity inverted, the discipline instilled and learned can be applied and implemented unchanged in the opposing field, the values function even if they are marked by a negative instead of a positive sign: bankers and bank robbers both obey, they perform their duties, they’re faithful to a pact. Evil, too, possesses a strict logic all its own and a persuasive code of ethics. Crime is as plausible as an honest life. Its organization, once you choose to apply it, is every bit as perfect. There, too, you can be industrious, laborious, diligent, and dispassionate . . .
Speaking in more general terms, when a dam has been built and the dam sud
denly collapses, the damage caused by the rushing waters is much more grievous than if they had been allowed to flow off gradually. An identity made up of rules is guaranteed as long as possible, and if one is incapable of imposing order upon one’s soul, one seeks it elsewhere, one manifests it beginning with the outer appearance, this was the exchange, the sublime convention of the middle class: if we are to recognize that the soul is none too decorous, at least let the (pressed) trousers and (buffed and polished) shoes be. The rest you can fake—but not the shoes. It was in fact one’s shoes that once presented the chief obsession and concern; as a decisive thought, an element in which one’s fate was eminently focused, how to find a job, get married, be recognized by a community; and “Am I presentable?” was perhaps the most crucial and heartfelt question that one could ask oneself, in all honesty. My grandmother, for example, would ask herself that question in a tone accentuated with pride and a hint of desperation, in her lovely eyes, made up to perfection, especially once she was old and her stroll before the implacable gaze of the ladies of the quarter had become a risky ritual, a bet that was being run increasingly close to the breaking point, veering nearer and nearer to the point of no return, each time might well be the last one, since her reputation as a lovely and elegant woman was day by day endangered by the indecorous threat of looming old age. Horrible, horrible. Until one fine day she decided not to go out again, and she never did, seriously, she never again set foot outside her house. No afternoon coffee in her black hat and fur.
My hands, she would say, are already too ugly, and she’d display and touch her protruding veins.
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