The Art of Subtly Not Giving A F*ck

On Artistic Outrage and Poetic Profanity

Things Getting Written

• My updated novel outline is now the length of a novelette by itself. Maybe a few more days of re-reading, rewriting and tweaking, and I’ll be ready to start drafting chapters again.

• Again for the academically inclined, I’m working on a review of “this need to dance / this need to kneel”: Denise Levertov and the Poetics of Faith for the American Academy of Religion. This collection gathers together talks on one of my favorite poets from a conference I attended back in 2015. This collection has some hidden gems that speak to the craft of poetry, and that’s what I’m trying to focus on in my review.

• I was on a podcast! Come check me out on Victory Or Death!, where I joined my friends Elijah and Abby for a three-episode series on professional writing, career development, and my transition out of academia.

• I finally published my favorite thing I wrote last year—which, you know, takes a top spot for being about a video game. You can go read my analysis of Blasphemous and its unique take on Spanish Catholic art over at CXPC.

… In fact, I want to unpack some thoughts from that article in more detail here this week.

Life Getting Lived

I’m writing this from a profoundly exhausted place, as Rowan doesn’t feel good and doesn’t want to sleep without being held.

It’s funny, the impact an ornery child has on your priorities. I had some pretty grand ambitions for how I’d use my time while my mother was in town, but it didn’t take long for me to drop all that once things got hectic. Normally this would drive me insane, and I’d be ruthlessly grabbing for time to myself to keep my goals on track. But when a baby is sick, personal goals and schedule and timing and even my diet just stop mattering so much.

I won’t say I wasn’t resigned or resentful. We all need sacred spaces; we need things and times we set apart and keep to ourselves, safe from encroaching reality. For me, that’s usually my morning writing time—the time that’s currently being eaten up by a confused and gassy infant. Time I can’t reclaim because work and fatigue have me locked into a pattern not conducive to creativity.

I’m not sure I could let go the way I need to right now if I wasn’t committed to finding my way back to those spaces. But those times will never be sacred to me again; I will forever know that no time is ever successfully set apart from the demands of reality, so special that I will never have to give it or my rhythms up to anything ever again.

Children have a way of profaning our sacred spaces. It’s one of the best and worst things they’ll ever do.

What is “Profanity”, Anyway?

We all have a couple things in mind when we hear the word “profanity”. Usually, it’s swearwords. Occasionally someone will use the word to refer to something they find visually or emotionally obscene, especially in a sexual sense. There’s usually some kind of religious commitment involved; “profanity” goes against a divinely ethical or natural standard of human living. It’s a universally negative thing.

This is, in a way, how “profanity” shows up in my article on Blasphemous. The game approaches religious art with a critical rather than a reverent eye, displacing sacred scenes into more violent and horrific contexts like the below case in point…

Etymologically, though, “profanity” is much less interesting—though it still only makes sense in a religious context. “The profane” refers to literally anything that hasn’t been set aside for special religious use. Profanity is the opposite of sacrality not insofar as it is base or evil but insofar as is normal, quotidian, un-chosen. To “profane” something, then, means to remove it from its sacred contexts and make it “common” once again—like a tool or a toy. Giorgio Agamben has this in mind when he says, in Homo Sacer II, 1: State of Exception,

One day humanity will play with law just as children play with disused objects, not in order to restore them to their canonical use but to free them from it for good… This liberation is the task of study, or of play.

This is, of course, the sense in which Rowan “profanes” my schedule. No matter how I guard myself behind layers of importance, his common, everyday needs always pull my carefully-curated time out from my office. You might say he reminds me of how silly it is to try and make time sacred at all—something I’m entitled to or deserve. Because of this, I must receive every block of uninterrupted time with great gratitude and thankfulness, and use it strategically; but calling that time “sacred” tempts me to resent my son when he steals it from me.

And yet, even our common, everyday lives run on this undefined halo of the “sacred”. René Girard—perhaps the ur-theorist of the phenomenon—says the sacred takes shape throughout human history and culture as “a[n] obligation to be neglected at grave peril,” often in the form of sacrifice. It is a special status we can’t easily explain or justify. Every guided mindfulness meditation on YouTube encourages you to make some “sacred” space for yourself. Even if we don’t attach religious importance to marriage, we might still call the relationship and our faithfulness to it a “sacred” thing. Even our language divides experiences up into “obligations to be neglected at grave peril,” without necessarily explaining why.

Some of these “sacred spaces” are benign enough, but what about in an arena like politics? Rioters at the U.S. Capitol claimed they were defending the “sanctity” of U.S. elections, while critics of the riot shook their heads that a space as “sacred” as the Capitol building could buckle under an invasion. In a nation that has supposedly separated church and state, you don’t need to be among religious people to hear about how the democratic process is “sacred” in our world.

Perhaps even “cancel culture”—that bogeyman haunting contemporary art as well as politics—evinces even more of the sacred. It is ostensibly rooted in the idea that speaking up for the weak and marginalized against the powerful and successful is a public good, “an obligation to be neglected at grave peril”. But as more and more people try and fulfill that obligation, the legitimacy of the targets gets blurrier and blurrier. Suddenly, the “sacred” starts to sound like shorthand for those things we're willing to have a fight about, and not only that but our obligation to have a fight about them.

… So what does “profanity” look like, in this case? And what might it have to do with art?

The Poetry of Neglect

The philosopher John Caputo has a favorite line that God is simply “whatever is getting itself loved underneath the name of God”. By this, Caputo means that we invoke a word or name like “God” as a kind of psychological cue when we want to add additional importance to something else that we really care about. Saying that the United States is a nation “under God” doesn’t mean anything other than that we really care about our nation-state, that we consider it “sacred” and that we’re willing and obligated to fight for its honor, autonomy and sovereignty. On a similar note, the Capitol rioters invoked the “sanctity” of elections in order to justify a fight they already wanted to have, and the rest of us invoke the same sanctity to express our obligation to resist them. The “sacred obligation” on all sides creates a kind of centripetal force that pulls us all in, maintains our attention, and obligates conflict. Recognizing this, Hollis Phelps proposes that intentional “profanity” in a modern, not-so-secular age such as ours looks an awful lot like “ignorance and neglect”.

Before this all becomes burdensomely theoretical, let me try and give it a practical twist: I remember a Reddit post from years back where a new writer said they wanted to write a sci-fi epic about colonialism, from their own perspective as a black person. Their vision stretched to a planetary scale, complete with white and black skinned aliens.

Another writer—also a black author—cautioned against this. In a short and gracious post, this author explained that speculative fiction already has a long history of exploring topics like colonialism, slavery and racism with with far more subtlety than simple black-and-white binaries. But then, they went a step further: the real potential of fantasy and science fiction, they said, lies in imagining otherwise. It lies in constructing worlds that haven't been so painfully shaped as ours. In this author's mind, writers of color show special power through imagining the new, not in restating familiar though urgent problems.

I'm struck by how this attitude differs from the “cancel culture” attitude above. Cancel culture attempts to guard the dignity of the oppressed by shaming the powerful and erasing their influence. While noble, there is also a perpetually vigilant and “sacred” obligation here that can only express itself through constant conflict. Unless we’re always finding something new to “cancel”—or, as the Reddit OP believed, unless our art is constantly addressing the wrongs of the past—we’re not doing our job. Counter to this, the commenting author proposed something that might look downright irresponsible and neglectful: leave the past alone and dream up something new.

Notice what I’m not saying here: I’m not saying that anti-racist efforts in the present do more harm than good. I’m also not saying that artists should profane the sacrality of “political correctness” and write whatever the hell they want. I am, however, suggesting that righteous moral outrage can become its own kind of prison when outrage itself becomes “a sacred obligation that we neglect at our peril”. Outrage can pigeonhole us and our creativity.

On the contrary, when we find ourselves getting sucked into moral conflicts, the profanity of “ignorance and neglect” can become a powerful political statement, a real strategy for living. It may be as simple as deciding that someone isn’t worth arguing with on Twitter; it may be as complicated as writing a fantasy world in which racism is not a determining factor. Done right, this kind of neglect denies the sacred, centripetal force of obligation that keeps our conflicts relevant and alive and allows real innovation to take place.

In this respect, I think the ongoing pursuit of peace will look, to some, like disregard for present concerns. I think this will be an ongoing question, given our fraught political present. But a number of artists give us reason to hope: Nalo Hopkinson, N. K. Jemisen, and Nnedi Okorafor are only three examples of writers whose worlds explore concerns beyond familiar identity politics, and even imagine alternative black experiences unconditioned by Western colonialism. Constance Grady at Vox has curated soundbites on the need to read black literature that’s not just about black struggle. The Black Past project deems it important to curate a page of books by black authors in which blackness is not the predominant theme. Far from being irresponsible, I want to say that these are but a few creative forms of “neglect” that refuse the limitations of front-and-center circumstances: they profane our sacred obligations and promise something more “divinely” poetic to come.