The Heart of Direct Action

 the slow-burning fuel of cool …

NEW YORK — Not long ago, Americans knew cool.
Cool was rebellious and harmonious. It was timeless and new. It was individual and universal.
Everyone bought into being cool. Cool was something nobody could buy. It was only something people could be.
It was hard to be cool. Cool was art and art was cool.
But then Americans forgot cool.
Someone said that if we became consumers, we could ask a lot less of our characters and get a lot more for our appearances.
Someone said that if we would fret less about life and liberty and focus more on the pursuit of happiness we could trade brand awareness for self-awareness.
Or maybe we didn't need someone to tell us what we had already decided. Either way, off we went with the corporations, leaving cool behind in the pursuit of comfort.
We don't need anyone to tell us that there is no peace in comfort, or that there is no purpose in possessions, or that there is no meaning in money. There is restlessness, meaninglessness and despair. We know this. But we are mired too deep in materialism to exit the same easy way that we arrived. Not only are fewer and fewer Americans cool, but fewer and fewer Americans want to be cool.
The Princeton philosopher Cornel West in a recent published interview speaks of our market driven society being obsessed with buying and selling and power and pleasure and property. He observes that there is virtually no non-market values that we have anymore and virtually no non-market activity that we do. As a result, he says, love and justice are pushed to the margin. He calls it spiritual malnutrition tied to a moral constipation
Occupy Wall Street was a cool demonstration.
But if we want more from our culture and more for our country we have to ask more of ourselves like we did when we knew cool. We need to end this charade. We need to stop degrading ourselves as customers and conformists and start thinking of ourselves as creators and custodians of cool.
We need to avoid the tourist traps of culture where art has melted into that mass of homogenized product that the 2011 IAM Conference called "predictable pleasure in commodified form."
Instead we need to find the edges of society and the corners of culture where things are cool. It is in the sacrifices of culture and in the wounds of culture where we find the slow burning fuel of cool that can right society's wrongs and renew people's spirits and ignite cultural awakening.
For such a renaissance it will take a revolution. And before revolution can begin, people need to revive the sense of who they really are.
There is no one way to do this, of course, but one way to do this is to read serious literary fiction. Serious doesn't mean stiff or stuffy. It means kick-ass. Literary doesn't mean elitist or intellectual. It means heavy-duty art.
Literature that is concerned with revelation and transformation and outlasting fashion is the most profitable kind of reading we can do, because it is committed to an end that endures suffering and death. Literary fiction does not sell out by filling life's cracks with wax or by sugar-coating intractable problems with the fraud of formulas.
Formulas are great when they work in medicine or technology but in art, the uniform application of rules falls as flat as it does in the spiritual life.
There is nothing wrong with reading commercial fiction for entertainment. But if we are hungry, pop fiction won't feed us. Pop feeds on itself. If we are sick and tired and bored, fashion fiction won't renew us. Fashion is not passion.
Our connection to the culture and our purpose in the family and our duty to society and our value as individuals has nothing to do with brand names or prime time laugh tracks or disposable products or mass markets.
Yet we reinforce these superficial attachments each time we look for art in the market.
The best way to change our world is to change ourselves. And one of the most direct ways to change ourselves is to read enduring literature.
The heart of direct action is art.