We have heard a lot of heated rhetoric in the course of this election season. Words have soared and people have become impassioned. Now that voting has occurred, we can only hope that our newly elected representatives will make the transition from (in the famous formulation of Mario Cuomo) the poetry of campaigning to the prose of governing. They must move from lightness to weight.
I borrow the lightness/weight contrast from Czech author Milan Kundera, who explores it in his 1984 novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Kundera believes that we can become so drawn to lightness that we fail to enter fully into the weight of living. We in the United States would do well do heed his words since it sometimes appears that we are addicted to lightness. For example, rather than moving to the prose of governing, we have somehow managed to turn governing into a “permanent campaign.”
The phrase was coined in 1980 by journalist Sidney Blumenthal, who argued that political bosses and party organizations were being replaced by polling and media. The trends he foresaw have only intensified since then. Now it appears that we expect all politics to be entertainment. We are impatient with anything that smacks of slow and arduous.
Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush were fairly effective at running their presidencies as permanent campaigns. President Obama, by contrast, has been criticized by sympathizers for not being as effective in selling his policies as he was in selling his candidacy. Some supporters have been disappointed because they aren’t lifted up now as they were then.
It seems that it takes a self-professed nerd like conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks to sing the praises of dull and efficient, whether in politics or in business. For a while Brooks supported Obama and now he is singing the praises of the dull but effective governor of Indiana, Republican Mitch Daniels. Since Brooks is one of those conservative centrists who has found difficulty finding traction in recent years, maybe what he needs is a poetic defense of weight. Kundera provides him with one:
The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man’s body. The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life’s most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become.
Conversely, the absolute absence of a burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into the heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant.
What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?
Parmenides posed this very question in the sixth century before Christ. He saw the world divided into pairs of opposites: light/darkness, fineness/coarseness, warmth/cold, being/nonbeing. One half of the opposition he called positive (light, fineness, warmth, being), the other negative. We might find this division into positive and negative poles childishly simple except for one difficulty: which one is positive, weight or lightness?
Parmenides responded: lightness is positive, weight negative.
Was he correct or not? That is the question. The only certainty is: The lightness/weight opposition is the most mysterious, most ambiguous of all.
Kundera’s novel is an exploration of these ambiguities, of characters who embrace weight and characters who run from it. Tereza and Tomas defect from Communist Czechoslovakia to the West and then, finding it too light, return. Sabina, on the other hand, embraces America. Or rather, the surface of America. Kundera writes.
Sabina continued to receive letters from her sad village correspondent till the end of her life. Many of them would remain unread, because she took less and less interest in her native land.
The old man died, and Sabina moved to California. Farther west, farther away from the country where she had been born.
She had no trouble selling her paintings, and liked America. But only on the surface. Everything beneath the surface was alien to her. Down below, there was no grandpa or uncle. She was afraid of shutting herself into a grave and sinking into American earth.
And so one day she composed a will in which she requested that her dead body be cremated and its ashes thrown to the wind. Tereza and Tomas had died under the sign of weight. She wanted to die under the sign of lightness. She would be lighter than air. As Parmenides would put it, the negative would change into the positive.
As we learn about our new Congress, let us all pray that they will maintain a proper balance of weight and lightness. And let us be wary of those, including ourselves, who want only lightness.
