On my conscience: being Yankee Doodle Dandy

 

Auguste Dupin once traced the course of his companion’s thoughts by a series of inductions that attached to the dumbshow of his companion’s expressions - the microworld of steps, frowns, glances, and furrows that, in the nineteenth century, was being explored with absurd confidence by German physiognomists -- until, interrupting that silent monologue, he made some magically relevant comment. The nineteenth century motif: detective as magician, consciousness as a rather easily demystified magic trick - we love it, we love it! The twentieth century, Freud’s, and even ours, with its faith in the murky business of the neural net, has only a broken faith in the coherence and topical unity of the consciousness – after all, if that unity is a fiction, what are we to say of the unity of the consciousness of the scientists themselves? But the unity is, at best, a horizon, a kind of cognitive optimism. 

Dupin’s observant tactic is worth applying even to oneself, occasionally. Although hark at the difference: for instance, I sometimes glare at myself in the mirror, to see how I am bearing up, what I’m looking like, giving myself a wink of complicity, etc., and often find that, puzzlingly, I am frowning. I don’t even know why I am frowning – lately, in this third year of the Pandemic, when systematic racism and its accompaniment, systematic stoopidism, seems rampant in the “free world”, I have been marvelling at the fact that, turn over my life as I may, mostly I do just what I want to do in this mortal sphere. I am not a dandy, yet, due to the material circumstances that surround my particular being – a loving and lovely wife, a boy I am utterly fascinated with, work that I find compelling, the ability, never to be underestimated, to walk out of the apartment, go to a grocery store, and forage to my heart’s content, and the further possibilities inherent in living in the city of Paris, a lifestyle I have craved since I was in the eighth grade in Clarkston, Georgia – I live a dandyish existence indeed. I am the Yankee Doodle dandy or I am nothing. 

So – the frown. Where does it come from? What deeper terrors have so bent my mouth to this characteristic expression? 

To answer this is surely a task for some modern Dupin,  Freudianly informed and hermeneutically suspicious of his own conclusions. Or mine. It is, I fear, this frown, the accompaniment to my thinker – my little neural amusement park. For though I do what I want, I also have a rather dark view of the history of my time, that little piece of the main,  and of my moment. Dark as in Jeremiah’s view of the destiny of Judah, dark as in Ezekial’s view of the priests of Baal. 

Perhaps the frown is… my conscience?