The Balm of Irony Essay for : Voices on the Threshold of Tomorrow (Quest Books, 1993) John Briggs Photo by JB Desperately our species flails for a means to save itself from a crushing oblivion in the 21st century--oblivion beneath the weight of its own greed. The problem is clear. One doubts that any idealism will save us because there are too many cynics and too many idealists eager to impose their conflicting ideals. One doubts that evolution can save us because the time scales for evolving a new faculty of harmony are too long and our greed is too quick. To save ourselves, one suspects, we will need to expand on a faculty we already possess. My proposal is irony. In "The Second Coming" Yeats says, "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;/Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world." His apocalypse is ironic. What does the phrase "mere anarchy" portend? That something awful and monumental is about to transpire, or something fatuous and small? Polonius advises his son,"and it must follow as the night the day, /Thou canst not then be false to any man," failing to appreciate the irony that Polonius himself is false to everyone. In irony such disparate perspectives as "mere" and "anarchy," or "falseness" and "truthfulness," are brought together in a potent mixture that flushes out the holes in our worldviews, widens the cracks in our knowledge and lets mystery pour through. What do we really know? For example, do I really know that I am less hypocritical than Polonius? In music, painting, poetry and nature, irony is the conjunction of forms that are both harmonious and dissonant. Making and perceiving such forms can free us from bondage. That bondage is our thought, our attempts to escape thought and our thouthlessness. These tie us down and gobble up everything. The drive of mind to digitalize the flux of life into packets of what we know is so great that we have transformed the world into something contrived and hidden like the pixels on a tv screen. Illuminating the dots with the scanning machinery of our imagination, we have made a picture that seems real. In the digitalized dark spaces on this screen even what we don't know (or don't think about) seems to lie. But is it real? Or is it merely one-dimensional and sad. An Ode to Pac-man ENDLESSLY DECEPTIVE SONG:   Thought and nothought, like a feasting dot, engulfs the eyes' nerves, spiraling snowflakes, lips, galaxies - and all the vast complexities of starts and stops   Nothing escapes our swollen famished dot- but a certain deep place of gauzy green sunlight.   I've never been there. No one has. ... Yet the dot of thought-nothought engulfs it.   Against this trend are humankind's old, sacred texts and stories-riddled with irony. There, tricksters abound, and parables turn in on themselves and tangle into mystery. These texts and stories remind us of how big things are and how small our knowledge. From irony: humility. The perception of ironies gives us pause, plunges deep into being. Through the cultivation and practice of irony we may find our common ground. Virginia Woolf said, "If we don't jump to conclusions, if you think, and I think, perhaps one day, thinking differently, we shall think the same." Hearing Woolf one is reminded, in our own era, of the dramatist turned leader of Czechoslavakia, Vaclav Havel. Havel said: "It must seem a paradox: I write mercilessly skeptical, even cruel plays-and yet in other matters I behave almost like a Don Quixote and an eternal dreamer, foolishly struggling for some idea or another." As a politician, Havel continued to cultivate the ironic attitude which apparently bred in him a respect for diversity, a generous humanity, a humility and a hard-headed realism that is visionary. It has also helped him cope with disappointment. Irony is curative, a balm. Yeats called it a "gaiety transfiguring all that dread." But how do we cultivate irony? We might begin simply, with a modest skepticism about our certainties; raise an eyebrow at our platitudes (a platitudinous belief in irony included). As Joseph Conrad advised John Galsworthy: "The fact is you want more skepticism at the very foundation of your work. Skepticism, the tonic of minds, the tonic of life, the agent of truth,-the way of art and salvation." In other words, irony is the fine art of wedding certainties with doubt. Da Vinci wrote that "he who has no doubts will accomplish little." In doubt lurks much; in a doubt-wracked-certainties lurks more. Irony is an attitude of uncovering, honoring and momentarily suspending ourselves in the swarming contraries of existence (or our description of it)-a process that through the ages has shown us Truth (or, anyway, Something). The faculty of irony is already in us. Nothing new is needed. In fact, we are ironic creatures. It is the key to our creativity. Perhaps through exercising and developing our ironic faculty we may discover that our role as a species is to be life's artists. Who knows? Infusing our minds with the cold heat of irony might we melt down our weapons and violence so as to forge them into sculptures. Of course I have no great hope that this will happen. Am I too ironic? Or idealistic? It hardly matters. Or it matters a great deal. Mere irony is loosed upon the world:   REFLECTIONS ON THE DEATH OF LI PO AND OUR ASTRONAUTS LANDING ON THE MOON That night the poet, in a small boat, drifted on the empty lake, accompanied by friends. Across the desolate hills their lyric drunken laughter. Was it more than wine intoxicated thoughful Li? Night was clear and windless. Moon shone sheer as thought upon the silent water. One feels he said, "My venerable friends, I'll fish this frail conceptual pearl for you." Cold still image of the moon held purely, until shattered where he fell... We stroll by a summer lake. Moon that men have landed on (into its dry and desolate seas) floats palely in the vast dark night.... A pearl. I conjure Li, who dreamed and reached, and fell-and disappeared. Moon lies still in the watery universe, is sheer; is clear... Quick, cold moon floats near... as if it were an image of what lies beyond us...