meditations on style part one: an attack on the nature of reality
I write. You read. That's it.
The other day, I stumbled across this quote by Norman Mailer from a 2007 issue of The Paris Review:
“One of my basic notions for a long, long time is that there is this mysterious mountain out there called reality. We novelists are always trying to climb it. We are mountaineers, and the question is, ‘Which face do you attack?’ Different faces call for different approaches, and some demand a knotty and convoluted interior style. Others demand great simplicity. The point is that style is an attack on the nature of reality.”
Disclaimer: I’ve never read a single book by Norman Mailer. Don’t really know a thing about the guy other than some vague impression that he seemed like a cantankerous grouch.
And yet the quote sticks with me. Replace the word ‘novelist’ with another creative expression — music, fashion, painting, sculpture, poet, whatever — and the quote remains meaningful. It’s one of those lines that seems tossed off, but that Mailer probably spent many an hour pondering, either directly or indirectly.
What Mailer’s getting at of course is the frayed, fickle nature of ‘reality’ as we experience it and the slippery task of climbing it, capturing it, displaying it. Humans are obsessed with cultivating order, creating logic where there is not otherwise any logic whatsoever.
Art is but one variation of manufactured order. Religion is another. Politics, likewise.
When we go to the movies, the curtain rises, the projector whirs to life, images flash on the screen, and we yield to a collective fantasy that exists on more than one level: the fantasy that unfolds on screen and the fantasy that life neatly unfolds in three acts.
We’ve all had the experience of leaving the theater with completely diverging opinions from those around us on what we’ve seen. Here we engage in yet another collective fantasy: the fantasy of communication, the fantasy that the gulf my understanding of the film has to travel and the gulf your understanding has to travel can meet in the middle or make it to the other side.
When we tell people how we feel, we are externalizing an internal sense of order — of understanding — pushing it beyond ourselves with stops, starts, stutters, and swallows. “This is how I see it…” When someone responds in kind — “well this is how I see it…” — we are jointly mapping those feelings out onto the world around us, hoping they align. This is how our physical locations can become, and so often are, littered and loaded with meaning, but that’s a subject for another time.
Style — in Mailer’s terms — is not the act of scaling the mountain of reality itself, but how you scale it. I like this answer, but, as per usual, I’ll analogize something obscure and outdated to make my point.
Stealing a phrase from Jimmie Lunceford’s swing gem: “'Tain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it.” That’s style.
Style is the how, the way — the process, not the product. It’s the way that you do it. Stop and think about that for a second. You can be anything or nothing in the world. Do anything or nothing in the world. Have as little or as much in the world. And you can have style. Because what matters is how you do or don’t do those things. It’s remarkably democratic in principle. But it’s damned hard to achieve in practice (as I’ll get into below).
Process vs. product, how vs. act, what vs. way — all seem like a slight difference, a nitpick, and perhaps it is. But it’s a nitpick I find myself returning to again and again.
style as both defense and offense
Wearing the latest and greatest in fashions, eating at all the chic restaurants, hanging out with the coolest people ever, knowing all the hip hotspots — all this and more are simply vapor. They give the illusion of style, but really they just empty your wallet. Because the latest and greatest changes, the chic restaurants close, the coolest people ever commit an unpardonable sin (either etiquette or ethical), and the hip hotspot goes cold.
How we move within the world, the way we go about our lives. That’s what lasts. This intangible ingredient gets tricky because it will look different on different people. What seems right for one person reads as inauthentic for another.
And this is where we get into the tricky terrain of ‘authenticity’. A loaded word if there ever was one, especially these days where ownership is both fraught and highly sought after. We all strive to be the originator, the founder, the incubator. We are all selling a vision of authenticity. This is me, this is who I am.
I have a lot to say about authenticity and I will dive deeper into the subject at a later date. Suffice to say that more often than not what people typically mistake for ‘authenticity’ is actually just a kind of branding. Advertising yourself as this kind of person or that kind of person is not the same as actually being that person — as Rachel Dolezal ought to know, but clearly hasn’t learned.
For now, I’ll use the far less controversial term of ‘genuine’ or ‘genuineness’.
Being genuinely yourself — whatever that means to you in a given context — is part of the how or the way. Genuineness is thus often tied to comfortability, especially as it pertains to clothing. We are comfortable when our internal sense of ourselves and the world is aligned with the external — when our cultivated order corresponds in some way with the mysteries of reality (to return back to the top of this piece).
For example: someone says ‘you look so comfortable in those jeans.’ What they’re really saying: ‘you look like yourself in those jeans,’ or ‘you look like you belong in those jeans.’
If you’re wearing a suit that doesn’t feel like a genuine expression or extension of yourself no quality of fabric or cut or expense will make it so. You will feel at odds with the clothes on your back. Which is to say: you will feel at odds with the one piece of environmental adornment you can take with you wherever you go, the piece of the outside world closest to your skin.
When we step outside, clothing becomes both armor and language — defense and offense. Style is defense and offense — security and strafe. Each item simultaneously a fig leaf pressed against our vulnerable parts and a phrase carefully or casually deployed to passerby. Why dress yourself in rust and rags or a grammatically nonsensical sentence?
This is where process comes into play and another word for process is practice. Sometimes — very often in fact — one of my habits with new clothes is to ‘practice’ with them. I try them on with different elements, especially elements I am more sure of.
More importantly, I wear these clothes out on inane, low pressure, low stakes excursions — like walks. This practice is training my mind and body — really my sense of self-comfort — to accept an article as self-genuine. Then in a higher stakes environment I can wear the garment easily and it will seem much more like an extension of me.
But the same is true not just of clothing but of other concepts as well. I think it’s important to ‘practice’ your ideas, to ‘practice’ your anecdotes, to ‘practice’ yourself, so to speak. It doesn’t have to be rigorous or rote or routine — you don’t need or want it to feel like homework. Exactly the opposite in fact. It should feel like fun, because it is fun.
So much of the how or the way of style is lining up our internal sense of self and external sense of place to the degree that we can. It’s about both committing to being fully ourselves and forgoing any hope that that’s remotely attainable. In essence, it’s a catwalk on a tightrope.
And so begins my loose and inconsistent meditation on style: what it is, what it isn’t, who has it, and why it matters, if it matters at all.