The Immunity of the Cool, or, Giving Up On Fariña

After collapsing back into Kerouac’s myth of the rainy American night, after having the chronically misunderstood ur-hipster gently purr the revealed wisdom of his tragic and saintly younger brother Gerard into my already bent ear, I decided to give another (slightly younger, a micro-generation younger) bohemian writer a try and read Richard Fariña’s Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me.

Disastrous. Pynchon’s intro talks about Fariñas voice sounding like a chorus of 200 kazoos announcing…what? The language does move. Fariña is “knowing”. He references things. He’s cool and removed. Too removed. Too cool. That’s his whole game:

I am invisible, he thinks often. And Exempt. Immunity has been granted to me, for I do not lose my cool.

That’s the gist of the book – the cool and sarcastic remove that Kerouac himself railed against. The opposite of the It that Sal Paradise searched for in darkened boxcars and steaming Iowa pies, cultivating kindness and opening his heart wider and wider and wider. No sincere soul or spirit here. Just nihilist college kids playing pranks on tired cashiers and the cheapening of life by flattening every experience into ironic posturing.

I had to put the book down. I see too much if what it represents in people my own age. My generation is rife with cool irony. The last bastion of nihilism. The impenetrable fortifications of banal self-regard. I’ve known so many emotionally crippled bohemian (they’d never call themselves that) children in New York to not take it seriously and to not seriously take note of my own disgust. Disgust and sorrow. The “real self” that so many of them defer the experience of never actually arrives. The posture becomes the person.

Every age throws up its own unique cudgels against what Kerouac might call the tender-eyed yet terrible dove of the spirit. Ours is the joke that defers authenticity. The irony that drowns sincerity. It’d break your heart if you let it.

PHOTO: “Hipster graffiti” – Daniel Lobo – CC BY 2.0