Baking Banality

This is a familiar Slog theme: The deepest epiphanies can be deflated into banal cliché. It's maddening, and might easily lead one to conclude that there's no reason to ever try to figure anything out because there's nothing new under the sun.

Whoops, I just did it! Thirty-four thought-provoking words, laid waste by six concluding words of sheer quivering Velveeta. You see how it goes?

But it's a two-way street. It's not just that the profound can compress into banality. The banal also expands into profundity. The first is obvious, but let's examine the second part.

One of the more thoughtful trollings I've ever received was in response to this story (posted here):

I met a bass player who I hadn't seen for 25 years, and asked how things were. He recounted a horrific tale of hardship, betrayal, and loss. When he was done, he stared into the distance, his face a knot of aggrieved suffering. I felt badly for him; I really did!

But while he was certain his life had been ruined (because he'd undergone the sorts of things one is taught to deem ruinous), I noticed that standing next to him in 2013 felt a lot like standing next to him in 1988 (he wasn't exactly brimming with joy back then, either!).

"But, Phil," I urged, "after all that stuff....here you still are! Still the same guy! Here we both are, still us, same as ever!" Phil was startled out of his dream. He realized, viscerally, that the story isn't real. Reality's what's really happening right here, right now. The rest is just a story.

A troll wished me to understand that "Here we are!" didn't strike him as a particularly stirring or inspiring statement. And by telling the story as if I'd conjured up some sort of magic, I'd revealed my profound need for psychiatric assistance.

On one level, he was, of course, absolutely right. There's nothing remarkable about that statement. Nothing at all! However, it's all about the context. The moment. The delivery. The vibe. This is why we need to bake fresh (another frequent Slog theme). Baking fresh is how banality expands into profundity.

If you ever manage to move someone, you might, quite understandably, try to repeat the trick. You'll add it to your toolbelt, whipping it out whenever you want to be helpful. But, nyuh-uh. You'll be chagrined to discover that the words lose their potency very rapidly. They dry up, growing staler and staler, until, sooner than you'd have imagined, they revert, à la Cinderella's chariot at midnight, back to their humdrum constituents. I've never understood the process. But I can't deny that 1. it worked at the time, and 2. looking back years later, "Here we are!" is just some dumb phrase.

If you make a practice of baking fresh with caring commitment, every once in a while something emerges from your mouth (or keyboard) with the power to help some certain person reframe and be transformed by it.

It happened in this instance (as the bass player would be the first to admit). And yet the troll was right. The words seem worthless. But that's now, and then was then – the right moment for those words, and the right words for that moment. When I recounted the story here, a few days later, it was still semi-fresh, so perhaps the words offered some light spritz of juju. A zingy aftertaste. But the troll was, understandably, unreceptive to subtleties. It's impossible to move someone whose perspective is staunchly frozen, and even less so via mere fumes and after-tremors.

On my best days, I'm capable of constructing an articulate, poetic, emotionally resonant turn of phrase, having written professionally for nearly 35 years. But that lofty stuff is mostly for impressing people with my skills, which strikes me as a flimsy goal. A finely-tuned banality, however, can get under people's skin, perhaps eliciting a tectonic pivot. Reframing is enticed by sotto voce intimation. The Buddha holds up a white flower. From seemingly thin soup, perspective can broaden in chain reaction.

I've just connected two long-running Slog themes: 1. the need to bake fresh (while giving it all you've got), and 2. the oddly inescapable intertwinement of profundity and banality. Now let's connect a third, courtesy of my troll!

I've written before that when editors propose changes which make things worse (which is what most editors do most of the time) the trick is to decline to get mad. Don't steel yourself for a fight. Don't buy a firearm. Instead: find the problem they're feebly attempting to fix. There's always a genuine problem! And while proposed solutions usually suck, you've been shown a kindness. Light has been shone on a problem you missed. So ignore the proposed solution and fix the problem yourself. And exult in the improvement!

My troll found a genuine problem, which I've been turning over in my mind ever since, finally spitting out this posting which gets me a notch closer to fully comprehending a trippy, mysterious creative landscape.

He offered a possible solution – that I'm a deranged idiot who needs professional help – but I looked past that to the strange truth that banality and profundity are a yin/yang, producing the insight that banality can transform – if (and only if) it's baked fresh and delivered with impeccable timing and finesse.


Though you really can't contrive the timing or finesse. All you can do is spontaneously ride the wave of a sincere helpful impulse, without disrupting it to try to flaunt your helpfulness (my friend registered me as making an off-the-cuff jolly remark; he had no idea how invested I was, and I prefer it that way, because real helpers don't put on a show, or take bows).

So thanks, troll! But this applies well beyond trolls and editors. It applies to anyone offering notes on anything. Any sort of criticism ever. Framed per above, feedback becomes a reframing prod, not a skull-crushing cudgel!

Humans, for the most part, are maddeningly poor at problem solving (there are very few genuinely creative people). But they're geniuses at problem finding. So pay attention to the critics and trolls and clueless authorities. Ignore their fixes, but don't stop mulling stuff until you deeply grok the problem they've kindly (or not so kindly) pointed out.

Lagniappe: My discussion with ChatGPT about titling this posting quickly detoured into me begging for mercy in the coming AI apocalypse. Read the PDF