About Comparison

About Comparison.

and

To Keep Thinking Fresh, Keep Language Fresh

The other day I read somewhere that each generation of abusive parent defends themselves against the notion that they are the same as their own abusive parent by not being abusive in the same way or to the same extent. “But I don’t hit my kids,” and so on. Which matters, of course, but also permits the parent to go on abusing without having to confront the self in a way that might incite change. So changing things lets them stay the same.

It hit me hard with respect to my own father. I’d always marveled – even on the spot, even in the moment, as a child – that he didn’t hit me “so hard you’ll fly from here to Timbuktu,” like he always said he would. How did he manage to control his body, his grinding jaw, his shaking hands, during his immense – “towering” is the right cliché – rages? Now I can understand that his check—his limit, preset like an ATM withdrawal – was physical violence, because that allowed him to be abusive without seeing his father in himself, which was the worst possible thing, because his father had made him fly to Timbuktu and a lot of other places too, and he hated his father and repudiated his father in every possible way. Yet there I was, flying to Timbuktu psychologically, every three days, because that was his cycle – his rage/remorse/buildup cycle and the timeline we as a family lived by as strictly as if it were a religious rite and we were all true believers, even though his rigorous atheism was another form of repudiation, and one that I still appreciate.

Comparison seems so ingrained, so automatic, in us that I wonder if it’s built-in. But the animals can’t be doing it, or how would they differentiate between a leaf crackled under the hoof of a gazelle or of a jaguar? No, they must be keenly attuned to specificity and difference.

OK so no animals. But us – we exclaim that Naples is like Vermont and Cairo is like New Jersey and Venice is like Barcelona (I’m choosing deliberately absurd pairs so I don’t get distracted wandering down the narrow streets of thinking about them) –

So, anyway, we do it, and it robs each new experience of some of its freshness while it reassures us and structures us against our fear of the truly new. I got this. This squash tastes like carrots.

This does go back to the fathers, who reassure – if not pride – themselves on not being like their own fathers.

But here again comparison robs us of seeing what is happening. Or rather, just what is. Comparison is a kind of mill that grinds things to the same size – like Cairo and Kansas City – or that keeps them strictly apart, like the two types of fathers: one who beats, one who does not.

And for this reason too I hate comparisons about Trump, Nazis, Jews, Palestine, and so on, because we better not be too relieved and proud that we don’t have concentration camps, because we have other very bad things to not get too relieved and proud about and to not look away from to wander into some fake-compelling labyrinth of more-or-less, of whether-or-not.

So I’m trying with difficulty to pay attention to what is, and I made up a new motto, with an unfriendly acronym, TKTFKLF. To Keep Thinking Fresh Keep Language Fresh.

Thanks here to Viktor Shklovskii, Yuri Lotman, and those Russian semiotics guys, also to Terry Eagleton, who talked about pressing language till it releases its fullest —