And too much of nothing
/Can make a man a liar /It can 'cause one man to sleep on nails
/It can 'cause others to eat fire
/Everybody's doin' somethin'
/I heard it in a dream
/But when there's too much of nothing
/It just makes a fella mean/Say hello to Valerie,/Say hello to Karine/ send them all my salary on the waters of oblivion.
– Too Much of Nothing, Bob Dylan (Peter, Paul & Mary)
Marion Lévy’s Training performance piece doesn’t have enough monologue to be stand up but is physical enough for comedy; it’s in the lineage of silent film, Charlie Chaplin tossing and twirling that globe or Buster Keaton putting up that Sears Roebuck house – when the body had to tell a story as well as act as a foil for emotions other than desire.
I went walking with Karine last Sunday – Beelzebub, can she promenade! Last Sunday alone, arm-in-arm under more than occasional douches of freezing rain, from the Eiffel Tower rive gauche to the Institut du Monde Arabe then from Pont Marie rive droite to the Eiffel Tower.
AlI along the route we took, we clung to each other; I clung to Karine. Sometimes, Karine laid her head on my shoulder. The cloud of her hair was delicious. She has recently changed it from silver blonde to jet black; it is brittler than ever: little shards of it mixed in the needle-sharp freezing spray pissing into my face from the grey grey cap of boiling cloud above.
When I forced myself to look up, used my eyes, took the glacial rain in my face, I saw that cracks and fissures on high tore out a thin ragged line of horizon back lit in neon-white.
When I finally could, I told Karine that when I saw that pale light once before long ago, I decided to stay here forever. Karine replied that she wants to live forever, though she added that it isn’t very likely. I put my arm around her waste and pulled her as close as I could.
This vigorous, almost mad, walk provoked thoughts of my upbringing.
I was shaped a Panglossian Positivist. A Panglossian forces him- or herself to believe – and righteously forces others to believe – that everything is going for the best in the best of all possible worlds, that there is nothing behind the curtain and that, if some impetuous little dog proves the contrary, the humbug that puffs and stiffens the great and powerful Oz is meant only for my good.
Contrary to what you might think, Panglossianism is tough-minded and unforgiving in proportion as everything must be just fine. Panglossism denies that almost everything is a process begun in the middle of some other process. Life is a heavy thing to be seen and experienced in a particular, uncarping, way.
I really don’t believe, until I saw Marion Lévy’s Training that I had ever seen anyone mock at Panglossism, so I was amazed but rather delighted at her piece. I have missed a lot in my misspent life, so maybe I’ve just missed the criticism. But, as I say, I had never personally been able to respond to it farther than by clinging on to some woman or another and an inarticulate snarl. And, I think, nobody much thinks that Panglossism, such an optimistic-sounding approach to an apparently troubled world, also pressed and pursued by solid and progressive American ladies such as my Mother as well as every talent or reality-TV show in the world, could possibly ever be meant to break the spirit of mortal children. So, I think nobody much has dared to take the risk of mocking it.
Until Marion Lévy, whose piece just assumes that Pangloss has got under our skin because, I think, since I was brought up, everyone has learned to speak Panglossism and construct an aggressively unanswerable rhetoric of success and excellence out of it. An especially obvious symptom of Panglossian triumph are people who could be enjoying their lives more than ever who are working harder than ever for less money than ever. And this is the true genius of Panglossism: these overworked and underpaid consenting adults blame nobody and nothing but themselves and their own supposed shortcomings.
Panglossism is as attractive, as hard for me to answer, as my Mother always was – “Where does all this negativity come from?” she might say, as follow on to some anodyne remark of mine, countenance amazed. It was of course the amazement that wounded.
Although it is obvious that in a world of process and evolution, “goals” and “challenges” have to be invented, Panglossism depicts them as natural occurrences, not deus-ex-machinas. Marion Lévy’s shtick, as I told Karine, shows how the pursuit of “excellence” indeed, the very belief in one’s “excellence” – think Rhianna’s “Diamonds in the Sky” – is actually a belief in some sort of external “success”, that is, the mastery of some externally contrived “challenge” or “goal”. Since, as noted, everything is a process begun in the middle of some other process, “goals” and “challenges” have to be invented, either by the people set above you or, in a desperate effort to beat those above you to the punch and prove a hollow “independence” – by your deluded self.
I expect, I told Karine, that that’s why Marion Levy’s Training begins at the gym, where she shows how calisthenics, an activity that meets you on your own terms if ever there was one, has become a “training” for “excellence”. It is comic because the pursuit of an “excellence” that exists only in a Panglossed imagination renders the protagonist’s efforts absurd. What sane person would do such a thing? Indeed, it’s amusing to see the poor thing scamper around in narcissistic desperation when she could simply enjoy the effort of doing well and for herself. And so Training goes.
Marion Lévy has perhaps invented a new comic commonplace. Twirl that ball, feckless dictator! Bung up that love nest, new husband! Pursue that excellence, Pangloss! I hope so, because, Panglossism will kill us more surely than the ungainly truths it always seeks to deny. And, Karine, I said, although the younger people around me laughed at Lévy’s riffs, physical and linguistic, it’s not funny.
