Phthursday Musings: Dissonant, Kompliceret

Usually, I think, when I’m trying to think through how to split the difference between something very serious, and something more pensive, even if I manage to get something down I wind up sitting on it. Tonight I’ll try to thread the needle and if it doesn’t work, well, it doesn’t work. I think it’s important that we all try.

I was in the gym on Wednesday, and the gym was packed. This first full week of January is one of the peak times for finding people at the gym. In part this is because there are still some college students around, in part this is because people are trying to pull “it” back together early in the new year, in part it’s the beginning of the January / February doldrums. Whatever all it might be, the common denominator is an aim at self-improvement.

The thing about being at the gym is that it’s a lot of people all enaged in similar self-improvement in a relatively confined space and not communicating with each other at all. This is not a criticism; I myself invariably have earbuds in and the gym time is not just about the body, it’s also kind of an ironic, strenuous meditation. Ah, but then, for me, the added irony is that, on a given day, the people at the gym might very well be the only human beings in whose presence I am, excluding the people who live in my house. And I’m not interacting with them at all!

So I was in the gym and like a lot of gyms there are a lot of TVs around and half the TVs tend to be on sports channels but some of the TVs are just on the local network channels, which means if you’re there at 5:00 or 6:00 you can see three different weather reports all at once. And I was there at 5:00 or 6:00 and on three different screens I could see ICE AGENT KILLS WOMAN and I was like, oh fuck, what did they do now? And it was impossible to tell from the muted TVs even with the closed captioning on and I couldn’t understand it when I went to look for an article explaining what happened and, well, another terrible day in fascist-riddled America… and we all kept exercising, because what else could we do? And then ten minutes later there was the weather, and I guess after that sports and also some sort of human interest story or two, who knows.

Sometimes in trying to think through it all I try and abstract myself and think about people at other times in other situations and try to understand what it could possibly have felt like and meant for people to simply try to live their lives. How do a mother and father in 1945 make it through day and night knowing their son is off on some gigantic boat in the Pacific? How does that son make it through day and night on that boat? Both scenarios seem impossible, beyond what could possibly make sense for humans to rationalize, but… of course that’s how it was. That’s… how it was.

I’ve got this Master’s degree in history, and one of the things I learned a lot about was the idea of American exceptionalism. I call it “the idea” but I think it’s really a lot of different ideas, some of which are really quite contradictory, all of which in some way have to do with the notion that there is something different about America. Maybe that's something good, maybe that’s something bad, maybe that’s something ambivalent, but I think whatever your angle there’s something of a tendency to understand onesself as an American as being at the center of the action, whatever exactly that means.

A lot of the mythology around American exceptionalism is being thoroughly dismantled these days, and yet at the same time it’s difficult not to think about all that from an exceptionalist mindset, like there’s something exceptional about our being like everybody else. I’d argue that maybe what’s most exceptional about America is the incoherence of the way we think as Americans… that it’s not the city on the hill crap but rather the psychology of how we think about it, the meta-exceptionalism, if you will.

Indeed I think there truly is a very special kind of dissonance to the current American experience, something where I think almost nobody is actually happy with what’s happening, but we’re all so terribly caught up in not just the experience of trying to live our lives but beyond that the experience of trying to live our lives as Americans that even the most self-aware among us can’t help but pigeonhole themselves, can’t help but share in the collective dissonance to some degree.

One thing about all of this… it makes me want to be at the gym. Now, is that because the gym is a sort of meditative space for me? Is it because the rewards of physical exertion are powerful counteracting agents to surrounding dread? Is it because it’s a place where, even if I’m not exactly interacting with them, I am at least surrounded by people? Is it maybe that I’m surrounded by people without also having to interact with them, almost like it’s a perfect nexus there of having humans around but not having to consider their problems too? Or maybe I just like all the TVs?

I tangled with the above for a day or two, wanting to write something, not knowing what exactly I wanted to express. It kind of drowned out any other thing I was thinking. And the thing is that I’ve been very energetic this week and actually have felt weirdly optimistic and I have to say there’s something terrifically exhausting about the collision of optimism and existential dread.

Bizarrely this week I installed WhatsApp (because a group chat is happening there and not anywhere else) and joined a Discord server (because it is there and not anywhere else) and I am not sure how intriguing all of this is but I do feel like if I actually try to keep up with these things too it will tucker me out something most fierce.

Now. A most fierce tuckering out. That’s a special kind of oxymoron, isn’t it? I’m imagining a little girl belligerently yawning.

I’ll level with you all here, I have no idea where to go at this point, so I’m just going to pick a flag randomly and comment on it.

so uh

I went to this webpage: https://codebeautify.org/random-flag-generator

I told it to give me one random flag and it gave me something I have never seen before. And it is…

Yes, the flag of Greenland.

So, sure, this is what would come up, what the hell, we’re here, let’s go.

The Greenlandic flag, as you have no doubt determined, has no green in it. It is commonly known in Greenland as Erfalasorput which, astonishingly, translates as “our flag”. This is because, would you believe, Greenland is a place, which has people living there, most of them Inuit.

It is a simple flag of simple design but also arresting, not unlike a wonderful shirt my father gave me which I never wear because it’s too goddamn nice. This, I think, is what one should aim for in a flag.

It is the only flag of a Nordic country or territory which lacks a Nordic cross (think the offset cross of the Swedish or Norwegian flags). But by being simple white and red, it is using the same colors as the Danish flag. This is because Greenland, being an autonomous territory of quite a unique status on planet Earth, “belongs to” but also does not “belong to” Denmark. It is, as one might say in Nuuk, kompliceret (though that seems more Danish than Greenlandic to me…)

We should also here introduce the Greenlandic coat of arms:

My first thought was that this is clearly a polar bear attempting to catch snowflakes with its tongue.

Then I thought about it and, well, it’s really quite brilliant. It’s like all of those wacky-ass Nordic coats of arms with weird eagle / lion / dragon beasties (griffins, verily) sticking their tongues out, like the Swedish province of Skåne:

Or, as you get north and apparently there are fewer eagle-dragons around but shit-tons of reindeer, also sticking their tongues out, in the Swedish province of Öland:

So of course Greenland would be like, well, probably a polar bear, and then someone was like, but we’ll make a nod to whatever that tongue fetish thing is.

Since I’m off the deep end as is I should note a couple of things here. The two Swedish provincial coats of arms are apparently just renderings by some Wikipedia contributor named Leonid 2. This is because it’s not like there’s a super-official pixel-perfect image codified by local ordinance in Skåne. Rather, I suppose, it’s just some verbal instructions carried down over the years:

Our coat of arms shall be that of a griffin’s head, which, um, that’s just an eagle’s head, but rather a liony-dragony eagle, and he must have a three-pointed crown, and to honor the lingonberries, an exacerbated tongue. It is thus declared by Hrothgar the Even-Tempered of Trelleborg.

As a kid being hauled off to the Stockholm Inn in Rockford, it was always thrilling and confounding to see all of the provincial coats of arms on the wall while we were served our Swedish pancakes. And my favorites were Skåne and of course Ångermanland:

My point, because of course I have a point, is that there’s some kind of logic to all of this, even if we don’t understand it all, and that logic is borne from the idea that humans have been around and done things, and the thought that we could or should just ignore all of that is pretty goddamn stupid.

Anyway. I am tuckered out most fiercely, and tomorrow is intended to be a long gym day, and I’ve somehow managed to share the coat of arms of Ångermanland, so good night. Or as they say in Nuuk, kunaat.