~by David Aiken~
There are any number of connotations and denotations for the word ‘insouciance’. In a gentler summertime of the world, the word meant to be without ‘souci’, to have no cares, like Calvin and Hobbes at the beginning of summer vacation.
Insouciance is a fine sounding word, because it harks back to French origins. But in this world become modern its meaning is generally to be found on the negative side of the connotation tally. Per the folks in the wiki-world, insouciance means any and all of a variety of things: carefreeness, carefree attitude, carelessness, recklessness, aloofness, apathy, callousness, disdain, disinterest, dispassion, disregard, heedlessness, immunity, impassiveness, inattention, inertia, insensitivity, lethargy, listlessness, negligence, neutrality, nonchalance, noninterference, torpor, unconcern, unimportance, unmindfulness, inconsequentiality, insignificancy, inattention.
With all this in mind, an insouciant attitude seems an odd response for folks to have in the face of a worldwide pandemic. Refusal to wear masks, as if the wearing of masks to protect the health of those more vulnerable who surround us, were somehow a violation of one’s own personal liberties. Refusal to keep a discrete distance from others, as if, all of the sudden, absolute physical proximate between humans were the most important virtue, and legal right, of the body life of the human animal. Strange times, these COVID days.
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| Rackham_Poe's Mask of the Red Death |
“No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its Avatar and its seal—the redness and the horror of blood.” The otherworldly protagonist of Edgar Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death, is even right now, yet once again, mowing down human fields, in living colors instead of stylistic flourishes from a poet’s hand, as it wends its way along the world’s highways and byways, boulevards and alleys. Familiarity rings out in every word of this tale, first published by the American poet in 1842….
“But the Prince Prospero was happy and dauntless and sagacious. When his dominions were half depopulated, he summoned to his presence a thousand hale and light-hearted friends […], and with these retired to the deep seclusion of one of his castellated abbeys. […] They resolved to leave means neither of ingress nor egress to the sudden impulses of despair or of frenzy from within. […] The external world could take care of itself. In the meantime, it was folly to grieve, or to think. The prince had provided all the appliances of pleasure…
In the meantime, it was folly … to think.
The insouciant life belongs to the passive mind, to the mind that believes it is folly to think; to the mind that has taught itself, or at least has learned, to receive passively stimuli from the world. Of course, this passivity is not to be confused with any form of philosophical Stoicism, which is an active discipline of the mind and emotions. Rather, in this passive variation of the insouciant mind, the confines of World correspond to the edges of the human body (physis). The passive existence, presence ?, of such minds as this can never be truly appraised by any measure other than their simple physical presence in a Darwinian frame of reference; because their life has been simply conceived, and interpreted, as ashes to ashes, dust to dust. And nothing remains once the dust has settled.
The philosophical life, on the other hand, belongs to the active mind, which may also have been school-educated, as well, and therefore has also learned passively as a young twig—the educational institution qua social factory oblige. But the active mind eventually transcends mere receptivity, actively remodeling what has been passively received in order to create a personal interior décor for itself, to discover its own voice of authenticity in this plastic external environment we call World. This is an original meaning for the Greek concept of kosmos. And ultimately, the one who strives for this life of mental activity will appraise himself according to the cosmic “projects” that he creates and constructs over the course of a life. Which means that at the end of that creative life, when the body has ceased to be anything but ashes and dust, what yet remains in the world will be whatever fruit was grown and nurtured though the various projects of an existence of authentic and personal activity. This is life that is more than life. It is life as art.
Poe paints for us, unforgettably, in deep, sodden billows of scarlet hue, those who respond to the various dramatic situations that Life showers upon us through a framework of hysterical insouciance. The descriptions of an equally thoughtless world, equally sans-souci, echo in present-day media depictions of a pandemic world:
“It’s like mass gaslighting,” says Martha Lincoln, a medical anthropologist at San Francisco State University. “We were put in a situation where better solutions were closed off but a lot of people had that fact sneak up on them. In the absence of a robust federal response, we’re all left washing our hands and hoping for the best, which makes us more susceptible to magical thinking and individual-level fixes.” And if those fixes never come, “I think people are going to harden into a fatalistic sense that we have to accept whatever the risks are to continue with our everyday lives.”
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| Mask of Red Death_1919 |
The current thinking about COVID-19, world-wide, puts the Crude Mortality Ratio (CMR) at 2-3% after only 8 months of spreading infection, which, for total number of deaths, puts this pandemic on a par with the Spanish Flu of 1918, which had a CMR of 2.7%. But that disaster wreaked havoc for about two years by most estimates, from 1917 to 1918; and guesses concerning the world population at that time suggest that the total number of global dead was approximately 50 million human lives. So, our young COVID-19 has another 17 months to play catch-up in the global numbers game.
The magical minds are moved by the desire to avoid the world, to banish it from their society; by the will not to know. By the hysterical drive to forget.
In his (very) short 1883-84 introduction to Au soleil, 19th century author Guy de Maupassant describes a primally disheartened, existential state of mind in the face of World, which is perhaps the phenomenological equivalent of the mental and emotional world-weariness that the Germans refer to as Lebensmüde:
Quand on est las, las à pleurer du matin au soir, las à ne plus avoir la force de se lever pour boire un verre d’eau, las des visages amis vus trop souvent et devenus irritants, des odieux et placides voisins, des choses familières et monotones, de sa maison, de sa rue, […] las de son chien trop fidèle, des taches immuables des tentures, de la régularité des repas, du sommeil dans le même lit, de chaque action répétée chaque jour, las de soi-même, de sa propre voix, des choses qu’on répète sans cesse, du cercle étroit de ses idées, las de sa figure vue dans la glace…
The passive mind is tracked through its own mental darkness by a relentless terror of everything that is World. Or at the very least, such are the powerful emotional descriptions that are evoked, and flood through us, when we read our various lebensmüde authors.
Happily, however, activities like Philosophy can hold out the promise of a fuller and richer life, a life of the active mind, a contemplative attitude toward World that enlightens and instructs us on our journey through the darker corners of World. A philosopher of this sort of activity is Epictetus who, in the face of the mystery that is Life, invites us to be guided always by a calm philosophical thoughtfulness as we journey through the highways and byways of the world that is our world.
§ 2 “Ench”, 1.11.1.1
TRANSLATION (AIKEN)—You ought never say about anything: “I lost this”; (2) but rather: “I returned this thing.” Has the child died? It is returned. Has the wife died? She has been returned. Have your home and property been taken from you? Well, are these not returned as well? “But,” you might say, (5) “the person who took them away is bad!” And yet what difference does it make to you how you lost these things? Or by which means the Giver takes these things away? (6) [Your ‘use’ of things extends] only for as long as the Giver bestows—so, engage with every ‘thing’ as though it belongs to someone else, (7) in the way that travelers do their hotel accommodations.
References and Further Readings:
New Epictetus Translations in Phrontisterion:
· http://nonimprimatur.blogspot.com/p/epictetus-handbooklinks.html
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