Serious People
affect as costume
“I love you, but you’re not serious people.”
My friend Tiffany recently said this. It’s a quote from Succession: Logan Roy addressing his striving spawn.
Who are serious people?
Are serious people ambitious? Self-serious? Cutthroat? Cold? Pretentious?
When my young undergrad students are terrified of coming across as “pretentious” I ask them to pretend, just for a semester, that they are artists. This invitation casts a spell that neutralizes the threat of “pretense;” one can’t be accused of making false claims if that’s the assignment.
The idea of pretense is a class issue. Pretentiousness is inherently about performing beyond one’s role as dictated by capitalism. It’s about caring for things outside of exchange value. If so, I’ve made a career of that, despite my own discomfort with it.
If I had allowed myself to be hung up on seeming pretentious I never would have crouched in the aisles of Borders Books and Music, where I worked in high school, reading Structuralism and Post-Structuralism for Dummies. Am I bragging or is this embarrassing? I don’t know. It’s my life. Maybe one day I’ll figure it out.
Mike just walked in and announced that his high school English teacher died. How many of us owe our whole lives to our high school English teachers? When I first dared to admit my aspirations to become an Intellectual it was an answer to a high school English assignment.
This week a professor friend asked my advice about whether to quit teaching. She wanted me to tell her to quit so I did. Then I read a headline about a teacher who’d been shot by a 6 year old student.
Who gets to have a life of ideas? (Let alone a life, period.) Before women could be teachers they were nuns. Later they were nuns who were forced to teach 70 kids to a classroom and, in an effort to control the chaos, humiliated the bad one with beatings in front of the 69 others.
My mom was one of the 69 others, she recently reminisced. A tiny terrified Italian girl, she sat mute with fear watching the daily violence. There was a constant threat of violence and humiliation at home, too; her hyper-vigilance made her an excellent observer. She became a skillful dancer, in more ways than one. Her mother was a teacher. When she was older she gave up dance for a job teaching Philadelphia’s “mentally gifted” kids. The intergenerational choreography of power, of control, dominance and receptivity…
Maybe what I want is to be taken seriously without having to try to be taken seriously. Like a man.
Humility is part of my ambivalence. I cling to my humility like it’s a life raft keeping me floating in the category of “good person.”
In the context of Succession there was never really hope that any of the children, let alone the daughter, could possibly fill the shoes of the father.
Now that I’m a parent I sense that we are all programmed to work out our parents’ unfinished business, which is more karmic than capitalist. I spent a lot of my youth encouraging my mom to be the artist I sensed she was. Later, I took my own advice.
Maybe “serious people” refers to those who act with integrity according to their own self-defined principles, even when, in the case of Logan Roy, those are cutthroat, despicable, and ethically abhorrent. One might say Logan Roy acted with dignity, while his striving children acted with pomposity.
At the end of the day we’re all just actors acting. An occupational hazard when teaching (or doing anything) while being female is that you get cast in roles without your knowing, usually “mother.” But that’s a whole other thing.
Now let me just put the finishing touches on my kid’s Halloween costume…
