Poor Tom 's Philosophy 2 -- The Irony of Irony

-- By Tom Phillips 

Poor Tom

Kierkegaard says irony is like a dwarf wearing a hat that makes him invisible.  But Poor Tom has discovered it's not so simple.   It's like a whole bunch of dwarfs -- and every time you look at one of them, they all put on their hats and become invisible.  The most you can perceive is distant laughter, as they chuckle among themselves at your vain pursuit. For irony takes many forms, none of them with any substance.

Thirty years ago, Tom took a shot at identifying the clumsiest of the dwarfs -- the slowest at putting on their hats.  At the time he was skulking along the dirt floor of Academe, disguised as an assistant professor of journalism.  So he set out to define at least the kinds of irony you find in newspapers.  He was able to identify three for his thesis, titled "Irony in Journalism: Teaching the Twisteroo."

• The first type he called "surface irony" -- a clash of appearances, such as the bluenose senator caught in the bus stop restroom... 
• The second was "dramatic irony" -- the reversal of intentions, as in the defendant who sneaked out of court, only to be found not guilty, then charged anew with jumping bail.  Or President Nixon bugging the oval office, creating evidence against himself. 
• The third he dubbed "cosmic irony"-- bizarre or baffling coincidences, outcomes that seem wrong, but actually happen.  A twisteroo: which is more newsworthy, a car crash in which four people are killed, or one where no one is killed?  The standard answer is the fatal crash.  But what if a car carrying four teenagers plunges over a thousand-foot cliff, and they walk away unharmed?  (It happened..)

Today, Tom laughs at "three types of irony."  He knows now that there are as many "types" as there are types of human being -- a number equal to the population of the world.  Irony, we say offhandedly, takes place in the gaps between perception and reality.  But we have no access to unperceived reality.  Irony begins in the gap between perception and perception, person and person.

In 2001, after the 9/11 attacks, the editor of Vanity Fair magazine declared that the "age of irony" was over -- from now on we had to face things head-on, as if we could.  Today the age of irony is back, big-time.   How else to look at a president-elect who regards himself as the greatest man who ever lived -- and is perceived by much of the world as a narcissistic buffoon?  The gap between Trump's view of himself and say, Alec Baldwin's, is YUGE, a yawning entry into a gold mine of humor.  Garry Trudeau has been working it in "Doonesbury" ever since Trump's presidential ambitions surfaced in the 1980s.  But Trump, by his own account, has no clue what this cartoonist is up to.  "It's too bad he's allowed to write this garbage," says the man who will be defending our freedoms.      

Poor Tom's Philosophy

-- By Tom Phillips

Poor Tom's a-cold.  Thus spoke Edgar, the hero of "King Lear," disguised as a naked beggar on the moor, adopted by the homeless King as "my philosopher."  Come in, Tom, and philosophize.


For 50 years, Poor Tom wandered on the moor, trying to understand an idea that others seemed to handle effortlessly.  They call it irony.  Somehow Tom felt irony was the key to his philosophy, but he couldn't quite grasp it.  What is it?

About 30 years ago, the earnest jester Kierkegaard offered a clue -- trying to picture irony, he wrote, is like trying to picture a dwarf wearing a hat that makes him invisible.

Thirty years later, Tom had something like a fever dream in which such a picture appeared, or at least the idea of a picture.  Irony is not something in itself, he dreamed, but the distance or disparity between things.  One can experience a gap without making it into a thing.  The dwarf is invisible because it doesn't exist, but it has outlines, therefore a shape, therefore an effect, because it is bordered by actual phenomena.  He leaped out of bed.  Eureka!

A Little Lear

At age fifty-eight, in the year 2000, I lost my long-time job writing the CBS Evening News.  At first I was confident I could reverse my fortunes and turn failure into success.  But as one scheme after another came up short, I began to feel rejected and depressed.  Then came what seemed like a brilliant idea.  The following is an excerpt from my memoir, "A Beginner's Life," published by Full Court Press
        
It was time for a radical re-think.  I racked my brains for something I’d be good at -- something that suited my talents, but I’d never had time to pursue.  Soon a gem of an answer appeared – Shakespearean acting!  I loved Shakespeare, had read or seen most of the plays, and could speak Elizabethan English fluently, if not accurately.  An actress friend of mine, Nicola Sheara, encouraged me.  She’d been around the New York theater scene for decades, had performed on Broadway, and said, “Sure, go ahead.  In two weeks, you’ll be in King Lear.” 

Two weeks later, I was in King Lear! 

Visions of glory danced in my head as I made my way downtown to begin rehearsals for the role of Gloucester, the king’s loyal friend, father of the hero Edgar and the arch-villain Edmund.  I landed the part at my first audition, which I attended with at least a hundred other hopefuls, at the American Theater of Actors on West 54^th Street. 

A Tragedian Unmasked

Life lessons come fast and hard on the Road to Dotage.   Last month I defined my fundamental problem as a Tragic Flaw:  “an irrational craving for life that picks me up out of bed every morning and propels me out the door to explore the known and unknown world, that fills my head with music and makes me want to dance.”  This flaw, I supposed, was the force behind my latest dancing injury, which turned out to be a herniated disc, requiring surgery.  “The dancer will dance, the actor will act, the lover will love, the tyrant will oppress and the courtier will curry favor until they expire,” I wisely wrote.   

My thesis was that even thought this flaw had got me into big trouble and would eventually kill me, it was simply a fact of life, in the DNA, unalterable, a categorical imperative.    

Cool facts about a Tragic Flaw: 
1.  Since it is unalterable, you don’t need to work on it.  You’re off the hook.
2.  It puts you in a class with Kings!  Remember the college definition of tragedy – a great man undone by a flaw in his nature.  A tragic flaw confers nothing less than greatness on its bearer.   

Lest you all run out and look for one, let me offer this urgent update.  At some point a doubt may appear in the tragic hero’s aura of self-satisfied suffering.  Could it be that his flaw is something less than the curse of greatness?  Suppose, just suppose that it were no more than a stupid, babyish arrogance that should have been shed long ago, and in fact could still be shucked off.  Ever since I wrote about my Tragic Flaw I’d been thinking:  Do I really need this?   

As fate would have it, I was presented with a test.  Two weeks ago when my herniated disc was hurting out of control and I still didn’t know what it was, I had reduced my daily outing to a 50-yard walk, to the corner of my block, where I could stand in the sun for ten minutes and watch a parade of Upper West Siders go by.  It was my last direct contact with the great world outside, and I didn’t want to give it up.  One day, the pain was especially intense and unpredictable, but the sun was shining and the world beckoned.  I grabbed my crutches, unsteadily, and told my wife I was going out for my little walk.   

She eyed me.  “Are you sure you want to do this?”   

“Yes,” I said in a defiant tone.  And off I went.  I wobbled to the corner and stood in the sun, but it made me feel sick and dizzy.  A few people wandered by, but I got no kick out of them.  I decided to walk back.  Turning for home, I dropped one crutch and had to stand holding an iron fence until a woman came and picked it up for me. 

I made it back to the front stoop and mounted the ramp, but felt too weak to open the heavy front door of the building.  So I leaned against the wall, waiting for a neighbor to come along.  The next thing I knew, two guys were hauling me into a sitting position on the ramp.  I had passed out, grazing my head on the iron railing as I fell, and was bleeding slightly from the scalp.   

For the next three minutes, I had to fight my rescuers and talk them out of calling an ambulance, which would carry me to a squalid emergency room where I would be held for hours, checked for a concussion, stuffed into an MRI machine, and held up for inflated fees.  “Just buzz my wife,” I begged, and she rescued me.

The test itself came two weeks later.  Feeling a little better, I craved some afternoon sun on a beautiful October day.  The day was getting late, but I begged my wife to walk with me to the corner.  When we got outside, we could see that the sun had already sunk behind the buildings opposite ours, and had crossed Amsterdam Avenue, where it still shone on the sculpture garden at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.   

It was about 75 yards to the garden.   

I could make it, I was sure, and told Debra so.   

“Yes, but will you make it back?”   

I couldn’t swear to it, but I thought so.  Besides, she was with me.   

“If you fall down, I’m gonna call an ambulance,” she warned. 

That put me in a pickle.  I couldn’t afford another collapse and a trip to the ER.  But my Tragic Flaw craved the sun and the city.  To deny its wishes would be to abandon my own beloved irresponsibility, my own cherished greatness.   

I caved.  All right, I said sheepishly.  I would wait and go out the next morning when the sun was on the stoop.   

Thus my tragic flaw began to come undone.  As I had secretly suspected, there was nothing noble about it.  It was no more than a babyish arrogance, a flight from reason toward objects of desire, however passing and trivial.  I could still compare myself with King Lear, but I had to look past his royal robes and see him too for what he was:  a foolish old man who knew himself only slenderly, a poor decision maker, deluded by flattery that had turned into grandiosity. 

A few years ago, in my Shakespearean acting period, I wrote on a futile audition form:  “King Lear, c’est moi.”   

* BLONG *

A very dear friend of mine describes herself as a “ridiculous person,” and she means it.  Irrationally neurotic, compulsive and fearful, she is nevertheless probably happier than I, because she is at home in her ridiculousness. She doesn’t try to justify or glorify it, it is what it is, and so is she. 

But could I, at this age, make the leap from pseudo-tragic to authentically ridiculous? 

Some would say I’m already there. 

-- Copyright 2013 by Tom Phillips