I have always loved summer crowds lounging and frolicking by the beach, bursting with joy at concerts and ballgames, slowly flowing through the Prado at Balboa Park, meandering here and there. One can, in certain moments, glimpse the utopian in the ecstatic energy of a happy, pleasantly anarchic, polyglot crowd that resists anything more perfect than its diversity. It is Whitman’s crowd—that of sex, beauty, vulgarity, and the sublime—full of urge, restless currents, rough collisions and intersections of otherness.
We lose ourselves and find ourselves in the crowd.
In his book of critical essays, In the Land of the Cyclops, Karl Ove Knausgaard observes that “the self—the ‘I’—is actually nothing but the implicit presence of a ‘you’—the self is the embodiment of a reaching out to someone else.” In the crowd, the searching “I’ reaches out to the other in search of itself. It is formed and reformed, shattered, put back together again and remade into something larger, sturdier, and more able to hold the multitudes of other selves that it comes to contain.
It is, I think, a gorgeous monster of spontaneous creation.
But I have friends and other associates who push back against my romanticism and see only the lonely crowd of people isolated together, forever separate and alienated. They are repelled by the forced togetherness of the mass, the way we are manipulated by this or that commercial or political interest into accepting a depthless, false identity that we wear like a bad suit at a wedding we don’t want to attend.
I too see this at the edges of the living, loving crowd, but still hold out for the possibility of some form of collective redemption. A false hope perhaps, but I persist.
My love of the crowd is firmly rooted in the belief that what one sees in it informs what is possible in a democracy.
The celebration of the democratic streets of New York we find in Whitman’s poetry where he speaks of “the living crowd” in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” and catalogues the teaming masses in “Song of Myself” is the cultural heart of American democratic optimism, the soul of the progressive populist impulse. It is also what inspires the love of “the people” in the socialist upsurge of the early 20th century, and the working-class solidarity of the American labor movement at its best, exemplified by the spirit of the thirties’ CIO and the great strikes of the mid-20th century.
Historically, those who have hated the crowd have been anti-democratic in inclination, starting with Edgar Allan Poe and Gustave Le Bon, who saw only darkness in the collective, the “we” that was emerging in the industrial era, whether that be the Paris of the reactionary Le Bon or the seedy London of Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd.”
In the following century, along with the solidarity that came with the New Deal era, there was also the threat of fascism, and a collective self that sought to murder the other and submerge individual difference under a totalitarian oneness rooted in extreme nationalism.
This is the cautionary tale of the modern era: what happens when the yearning for something larger than oneself coincides with the annihilation of the other and perhaps even personal identity itself. As Knausgaard ponders:
[I]s the we of today radically different, after the coming of the scientific age, after industrialization, after globalization? Has our almost insanely ballooning population over the past hundreds of years, and the mass production of all things, made the we into its opposite, something in which we no longer find our identity, but in which our identity vanishes, the we having transformed comfort into threat.
I think so, though not without reservation, for we are nothing without the other, and so it will be always, but in our time we may be no one together with the others, and quite without resistance, and this no one, with no personal responsibility, can, as we know from the two great wars of the past century, be a dangerous creature indeed.
I wonder this myself at present as I stroll through summer crowds of various sorts that are now frequently sprinkled with people wearing hats or t-shirts with crossed semi-automatic weapons and other threatening images of skulls mingled with American flags signifying a “we” that can only exist in pure form if people like me and others who don’t fit a certain mold of Americanness are simply eliminated. If I continue to insist on my refusal to join an imagined community full of innocence, idiocy, and violent rage rooted in fear of losing their founding myth, itself a transparent illusion, perhaps my existence cannot be tolerated.
The collective rage on the part of many of our neighbors defines this historic moment and whether it can coexist with a version of the “we” that does not share a deep longing for an unspeakable, impossible selfhood is the question of our moment. Will a new kind of self be born after we lose ourselves in the summer crowd, or will we emerge battered, beaten, and utterly lost, fundamentally unrecognizable?
With nothing but hope to guide us, we grope towards an uncertain future.
Note on the Summer Chronicles:
A decade ago, during my time writing for the OB Rag and SD Free Press, I penned a series of pieces over the summer that moved beyond the blog/column form to something a little looser and more open to improvisation and the poetic turn. Last summer, a health crisis intervened, but I made it through to the other side of that and here I am again, writing, word by word, breath by breath.
Below is the original preface for the first series of chronicles:
In the summer of 1967, the great Brazilian writer, Clarice Lispector, began a seven year stint as a writer for Jornal de Brasil [The Brazilian News ] not as a reporter but as a writer of "chronicles," a genre peculiar to Brazil. As Giovanni Pontiero puts it in the preface to Selected Chrônicas, a chronicle, "allows poets and writers to address a wider readership on a vast range of topics and themes. The general tone is one of greater freedom and intimacy than one finds in comparable articles or columns in the European or U.S. Press."
What Lispector left us with is an eccentric collection of "aphorisms, diary entries, reminiscences, travel notes, interviews, serialized stories, essays, loosely defined as chronicles." As a novelist, Pontiero tells us, Lispector was anxious about her relationship with the genre, apprehensive of writing too much and too often, of, as she put it, "contaminating the word." It was a genre alien to her introspective nature and one that challenged her to adapt.
More than forty years later, in Southern California—in San Diego no less—I look to Lispector with sufficient humility and irony from my place on the far margins of literary history with three novels and a few other books largely set in our minor league corner of the universe. Along with this weekly column, it's not much compared to the gravitas of someone like Lispector. So, as Allen Ginsberg once said of Whitman, "I touch your book and feel absurd."
Nonetheless the urge to narrate persists. Along with Lispector, I am cursed with it—for better or worse. So for a few lazy weeks of summer, I will try my hand at the form.